Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-4839682-20131003142941/@comment-5106672-20131007152927

Well, I guess the events in the Lost Girl flashbacks make it pretty clear that the Evil Queen wasn't really so desperate to kill Snow White as she claimed. She clearly went on an "okay, screy you all as long as you get out of my way" path after her attempt to curse Snow White failed, as long as they did not take away her power (I will elaborate on that point later), so despite all the efforts she took (I assume to convince herself) killing her was not her priority all along.

Beside that, the sleeping curse itself reinforces this idea. She took a few attempts at killing her, but when she was given the real chance, when she faced Snow White herself, she decided to opt for a reversible curse rather than snapping her neck with her bare hands as she said to Rumple once. She knew dead cannot be undone, a lesson she learned at a very high price, yet she chose ways of revenge that could be undone. And honestly, she could have just summoned Charming back to the palace and kill him after the Huntsman let him go, rather than sending him to the Infinite Forest. She clearly lacked the motivation to go on and pursue her revenge to the bitter end.

At this point, we know for certain that her attitude changed somewhere between Lost Girl and The Cricket Game, where she actively tried to murder Snow once and for all. So precisely after the whole Sleeping Curse ordeal was over. And the explaination for that once again lies in her thraumatic childhood and adolescence rather than in her hatred for Snow White, be it sociopathy or not.

Regina lost her True Love to her mother's schemes to have her become queen. She lost her own mother in an attempt to find a freedom from it that she didn't find. She spent years as a neglected wife in a place she didn't belong to. Then finally, when she became queen, her subjects sistematically defied her for the person who inadvertitely caused her to lose her love. All she was left with was her political power, namely what her mother destroyed her whole life to make her have. It is quite understandable why she freaked out and truly became murderous when Snow and Charming tried to seize it from her: not only would she truly lose everything, but all of her suffering would be in vain. That's why at last she resorted to stabbing Snow White after trying everything to convince herself she was all murderous and hateful while not taking a concrete action.

As for the FTL personas vs Storybrooke personas, I remember the crew itself (I don't recall who, but it was either Ginnifer or Josh) during Playfesr 2012 being asked about how they played two characters at once, and they did say that the characters were indeed the same, just developed differently because of different situations the curse made them live as opposed to what they experienced in TFL.