Board Thread:Show-Related Questions and Answers/@comment-1758442-20130915084147/@comment-22525977-20130923045209

I don't think it's an out of the blue thing to wonder about. When I was watching "Stable Boy" my immediate reaction was one of horror because in my mind, forced marriage correlates really easily to marital rape: he didn't respect her very obvious desire to not marry him, why should he respect her lack of consent for sex? Plus, marriage has very specific connotations of having a sexual element and, if Leopold truly just wanted a mother for his daughter, he could have hired Regina to be a governess.

Regina makes it very, very clear that she does not want to marry him and the only reason she does so is she has no choice. Recall that Regina never accepts Leopold's proposal: her father nods and Cora is the one who says yes. So as far as I'm concerned, Regina's marriage to Leopold was not consensual on her part. That does not, by itself, mean that the marriage itself was abusive, although the fact that Leopold must have known that Regina didn't want to marry him (just look at her face when he asks her!) and married her anyway is a HUGE red flag.

But we also see how their marriage works in "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree." We see Snow's birthday party, during which Regina is completely ignored by everyone, even the servants. Literally the only person who notices or cares when Regina leaves the party is the genie. As far as the entirety of Leopold's household is concerned, she's a nonentity. Then we see Leopold snooping through her diary—something she does regularly enough that Regina knows to plant "evidence" there—and then responding to the discovery that she's in love with someone else by locking her up and refusing to let her talk to even her own father.

There is no way to read the situation as not being abusive on Leopold's part. Either he's mad because Regina is his wife and therefore his property and she has no right to fall in love with someone else even though he doesn't love her, or he is, as Applegirl suggested, afraid of causing a scandal and not in the least bit concerned with Regina's motivations, or he thinks that because he made her a Queen she owes him fidelity (and that last has all kinds of rape-y "I gave you all this, therefore I can do whatever I like with you" vibes, too).

I agree that Leopold is trying to do what he felt was best for Snow. The problem is he did that by trampling over the rights of another person with no regard for how she felt about the situation. By the same token, he may well have felt betrayed by Regina's unfaithfulness, but that is not an excuse for treating her the way he did in that episode anymore than the fact that Regina is a victim of child abuse excuses her slaughtering of entire villages.