Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-4839682-20131003142941/@comment-22525977-20131008051653

Regarding Snow:

1: I meant they were sleepy and tired-looking and only half-heartedly shouting along with Snow's supposedly impassioned speech (and then Regina made her presence known and they scattered in terror). I've seen more energy in high school debate teams.

2. I'm really unhappy about how the map went down, and if it turns out it's not Pan just trying to break Emma's spirit and I'm going to be even angrier. My original real-time notes on the matter read as follows:

""sometimes we think we know ourselves, but we silly wimmins need a man to show the way. barring men, bio mothers will do in a pinch" <-you're not really going to stoop this low, show. please.

Emma honey

NO. NO. NO.

DO NOT MAKE EMMA WRONG FOR NOT WANTING TO BE BABIED AND CONDESCENDED.

so what emma truly is is "a lost little orphan girl?!" SHE'S A GROWN, STRONG, INDEPENDENT WOMAN

stop infantilizing her!"

All of which is to say, Emma is completely entitled to feel like shit and lonely and hurt and abandoned, completely entitled to everything she expressed in that beautifully acted speech, but the whole point of the map was that it was supposed to force Emma to stop being in denial about herself.

But Emma's always been surprisingly open about her time in foster care and how miserable she was and how she struggles with loneliness even into adulthood. It comes up as early as the pilot episode (to Henry and later, to a lesser extent, Regina) and remains a recurring theme throughout one and two. She's gotten teary on the subject before this, but none of the previous instances ignored the fact that Emma is everything she said she was when they were trying with the map earlier—i.e. the strong independent person I mentioned—and Pan's got the map thing set up specifically to make her think of herself only in terms of being the titular "Lost Girl."

Which is horrible. I'm really, really hoping that it'll turn out to be all part of Pan's overarching scheme, and Emma's arc will be learning that, yes, she's a lonely orphan but she's also the kind of person to, quote, "punch back and say, 'no, this is who I am,'" and that the former is a part of her but the latter is a much more accurate summation of Emma's person. Considering all the weird parental vibes we've seen in three so far, though, I'm not actually sure that's going to happen.

3. The point is not that, according to the way royal inheretence goes, Snow is indeed the legal ruler of the kingdom, but that Snow here is expressing very strongly that she does not want to do this, has no desire to be a leader, etc., and instead of opting for open and clear communication, Charming first goes to Rumpel (AGAIN—WHEN WILL THESE PEOPLE LEARN?!) for the magical cure-all du jour [and, sidenote: how dare they get up on their high horses about Regina and magic when they rely on it just as much and get it from Rumpelstiltskin, of all sources] and then, when that fails, constructs a flimsy lie to convince Snow that she has some kind of divine right to rule—making her do what he thinks she should through magic and deceit, basically, and then trying to sell it as romantic. It isn't. And Charming may not outright say he knows best because he's a man, but that's how he's acting and that's how the dwarves are acting and ajdklfa this episode was frustratingly sexist even for OUaT.

Regina:

1. Regina isn't a loose canon—she's the kind of person who sees that results are not working and tries something new. We see this all the time in flashbacks—huntsman didn't do what he told her he would? fine, new strategy. Sleeping curse fell through? Offer Snow a treaty of sorts. She doesn't do the same thing over and over and expect it to work this time.

That's what she did in the premiere: arguing was clearly doing nothing to convince the mermaid to call off the storm and she did the thing that seemed most likely to fix the problem at the time. That's what happened in "Lost Girl": the rest of the group are sitting around doing things that are clearly not working and, from the way they've arranged themselves, have been doing so for longer than a few seconds. So she tries something else and it works. They find Pan. They get more information about how he functions. They come out of the battle, as far as they know, completely unscathed (because David is an IDIOT who isn't telling about his POTENTIALLY LETHALLY POISONED SWORD WOUND).

Regina is the active character here. She's the one driving the plot forward by stopping the rest from just fruitlessly trying to figure the map out. And, at the end of the day, what have they gotten for her actions? More information about Pan and the Lost Boys, another piece of Pan's puzzle and a working map.

She took a risk and that risk paid off HUGELY. No, she couldn't have predicted that it would do anything but let them find Pan, certainly not that her actions would indirectly lead to Emma figuring the map out, but that isn't the point. The point is that if it were up to, say, Mary Margaret, they'd still be in that clearing trying out variations on "Emma is the savior" and "Emma is the product of True Love" and so on.

(Quick thought experiment: What if Emma, and not Regina, had been the one to decide, "screw Pan's mind games, we're putting a tracking spell on this parchment." Would you be saying the same things of Emma in this scenario—incompetent because impulsive, breaking rules [why would you want to follow rules laid down by a psychopathic immortal child], no thought to the repercussions, etc. If so, why?)