Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25926288-20161128015930/@comment-5106672-20161129142308

Fragile Daydreamer wrote: When the Black Fairy said, "That's impossible!":

(a) did the Black Fairy not expect her child to survive? or

(b) was the fact that her son ended up being the Dark One so impossible?

I think it's interesting how she was so convinced that she'd never meet her son again, much less under the circumstances that Rumple created. I think there's something to explore there. We see her momentarily disturbed when Rumple asked her his question. Did she really choose power over love, or was that a defense mechanism? Did she start kidnapping babies before or after she abandoned rumple? Was her abandoning rumple the cause of the darkening of her heart?

If she was forced to "abandon" rumple (for yet unknown circumstances), it's possible that this started the darkening of her heart, leading her to kidnap babies in an effort to fill a hole in it. But this brings us to the question of WHY, which as the Black Fairy herself has said, "... you'll just have to keep wondering..." for the moment. I think the "impossible" line may be explained by two factors:

a) Under normal circumstances, she wouldn't expect her child to be still alive after a couple of centuries (wait until she learns about her darling ex, lol).

b) Under Dark One circumstances… neither, I guess. The (imo poorly thought out) timeline of Camelot we saw in S5A implies that all the Dark Ones before Rumple got whacked pretty quickly and he's THE exception for getting to hold on to power for centuries.

So yeah, I think she was surprised that her couple-of-centuries-old child a) was still alive at all, and b) managed to survive as a Dark One for that long.

As for her abandoning Rumple, I SWEAR, I don't want to make a villain out of the Blue Fairy at all costs, but it's reasonable to think Black was basically faced with a choice: keep her child and lose her wings, or keep her wings and give up her child, as per Fairy rules. She may have opted for the second option, and then darkened her heart stealing children to make up for her loss (it is interesting they threw a line of dialogue about the Evil Queen's "hole in the heart" which she desperately tried to fill which, while unrelated, made its first appearance in seasons just in this episode, so it may be thematically relevant).

Side note, going softer on Blue: perharps her very bitchy attitude towards Nova may have been because she was still scarred for what happened to the Black Fairy. Like, after how nastily it turned out with her, she implemented very strict rules to prevent Fairies from even falling in love with other beings to prevent a second Black Fairy incident.