Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6175354-20130930170041/@comment-22525977-20131001214148

Rafadeq wrote:

I am very much aware of what the diagnosis is for ASPD, thank you very much. I brought that up because a staggering number of people seem to think that asshole = sociopath, which isn't by any means correct. (For example: BBC's version of Sherlock)

The difference between the way I read Snow's heinous actions as sociopathic versus the way I read Regina's as not has a lot to do with their backstories.

Snow grew up happy and well taken care of, and while her mother clearly tried her best to lead Snow down a path of goodness—the entirety of the FTR plot "The Queen is Dead" was amazing—it's equally clear that, following Eva's death, Leopold spoiled the hell out of his daughter—to the point of marrying a random girl just because he thought Snow would benefit from having a substitute mother. This combined with adult!Snow's general attitude that the world owes her her happy ending because she's just so pure of heart leads me to believe that Leopold inadvertently snuffed out whatever genuine empathy Snow might have had as a young girl by showering her with everything she even remotely wanted.

Even were she not an outright sociopath, Snow is absolutely an awful person and I would not want her anywhere near me in real life. The fact that she seems completely oblivious to this is what got me thinking along the lines of ASPD in the first place; one of the defining traits is that they absolutely feel entitled to do whatever they want to because they are fundamentally better than you.

For her entire life, Snow had everything handed to her on a silver platter, and we know from "The Queen is Dead" that Eva did her best to instill a strong sense of governmental responsibility and, you know, being a decent human being in her daughter—the message got across to young!Snow. It did not stick as she grew into adulthood—we even got heavy-handed parallels with the way the candle madness went down in present-day Storybrooke: "I wouldn't even use this to save my mother," remember.

And Snow completely believes that she always has the moral high ground. From the pilot: "You're going to lose. I know that now. Good will always win." (emphasis mine). She repeatedly, consistently refers to herself as good and Regina as evil, sometimes irredeemably so. For an explanation of how this gets twisted into rationalizations for, for example, breaking the law, I direct you to this gem from "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree:"

''Sidney: You want to go by the book? Let’s get a warrant.''

''Emma: And what judge are we going to find that she doesn’t own? We’re screwed.''

Sidney: Or, there’s my way.

Emma: I want to do this right, Sidney.

''Sidney: Well, what’s right is exposing her. Sometimes, doing a bad thing for a good reason is okay, right?''

''MMB: Yeah. I mean, maybe you’re doing something wrong, but if it’s what’s meant to be – if it’s what’s right – does that really make you a bad person?''

Regina, on the other hand, had Cora for a mother. She grew up incredibly isolated from everyone but the servants, her useless doormat of a father, and, it's worth repeating, Cora. She was belittled and threatened at every turn, and her mother had zero compunction about using magic as a means of keeping control.

For the first eighteen years of her life, she was told over and over again that love is weakness, power is strength, and that strength leads to freedom and freedom is happiness. She was abused, mentally, emotionally, and physically, and until Daniel appeared in her life she very likely did not have anyone she could turn to.

Then she rescued Snow, and Leopold forced her into a position where she had a choice: Defy her mother and run away with the person she loved, or enter into what was, at the very, very least, a loveless and unhappy marriage. Regina, quite bravely given that it went against everything she'd been taught for eighteen years, chose to elope with Daniel.

And as a direct result of her choosing love over power, her lover and sole supporter was brutally murdered before her eyes and she was forced into the marriage she didn't want anyway.

Her whole life has been exactly that: Regina tries, and tries, and tries to get the happy ending she needs, and no matter what she does, it ends up blowing up in her face. When she does the right thing, her life gets worse immediately and stays that way. When she does the wrong thing, she sees short-term success followed by long-term failure.

This is basic psychology: People are not wired to do the same things if they don't get good results. If you ran an experiment where you put people in situations to choose whether or not to do a good thing—let's say the examiner "drops" a wad of twenty dollar bills and the subject then chooses to steal it or give it back—and then the examiner goes off on a tirade at the subjects who try to return the money. Run the experiment again, and maybe the results will be mostly the same—but do it ten times? I guarantee you, people will stop returning the money.

The same thing happens to Regina, but on a much, much larger scale. Can't get the huntsman to do what she wants and what he agreed to do in the first place? Take his heart, problem solved. (In no way am I actually condoning taking people's hearts, I'm just trying to point out why Regina behaves the way she does)

She's not doing these things for funsies—she's doing them because the nicer strategies she tries first aren't working. Regina is the ultimate pragmatist. So o f course Regina backslides into behaving like the Evil Queen. It's all she's known for—what, how old is she? Early fifties if you factor in the 28-year-long-curse? But barring manipulation from her mother, she makes incremental progress: every forward step is longer than the backward one. She's genuinely  trying  and it  shows, especially in how she recovers much faster from Cora Part Two than she did Cora Part One.

This is different from being sociopathic and not understanding the right/wrong distinction. Regina knows that what she does as the Evil Queen is abhorrent, but as far as she's concerned, she has no other choice.

It's really well illustrated in the first season. At first, Regina is relatively civil towards Emma—she invites her in for a drink after she brings Henry back, holds a very polite conversation with her, snaps at her when Emma insinuates that she might try to take Henry back at the end of the pilot*—wouldn't you, if someone was trying to steal your kid?—but on the whole comes off as reasonable-but-uptight. As the curse weakens further and further, though, Regina gets increasingly desperate and the desperation she feels correlates directly to how nasty she is. She's being backed into a corner and that makes people really, really dangerous—except, amusingly enough, sociopaths, who very often lack the forethought necessary to be afraid in that way and don't respond like a neurotypical human being in high-stress situations.

*Which I don't think is what Emma intended at all, but that's how it came off to Regina and so that's how I'm describing it here.

Regarding Snow's lack of empathy: I don't expect for empathetic characters to completely understand where everyone is coming from all the time. That's not how real life works. What I DO expect is for characters who are meant to be decent human beings are able to (a) notice when someone is as visibly upset as Emma was in "Heart of the Truest Believer" and (b) respond to that not by saying "You just need to listen to our wisdom" but with an understanding that that person is upset for valid reasons. Snow does the former; she's treating Emma like a child, is completely patronizing and dismisses Emma's feelings as unimportant because Emma isn't listening to Snow. Even if that doesn't stem out of a lack of empathy? Still a shitty thing to do.

(Put another way: Alice is rooming with Barbara. It's early the first semester, so they still don't know each other that well. One day Alice comes home and finds Barbara crying and obviously upset; it turns out that Barbara's beloved cat just died. Alice hates cats and thinks they should all be euthanized. Which is the better option: For Alice to say "you shouldn't be upset, all cats are evil" [i.e. an appeal for Barbara to stop being upset because Alice's worldview says she shouldn't be] or for Alice to say "oh, I'm so sorry" and try to do what she can to help Barbara through the mourning process [i.e. expressing sympathy and not being an asshole]?)

As far as me wanting Regina to pull the "you killed my mother" card? That's in response to Snow saying "we're not killers" specifically, because yes, they ARE killers. Regina has killed people. David has killed people. Snow has killed people—not just Cora. Hook is a pirate; of course he's killed people. Aboard that ship, the only person who hasn't killed someone is Emma. The only person who has a right to say "I am not a killer" on that ship is Emma.

And that is why I don't believe that Snow truly felt remorseful for killing Cora. If she had, she would not be saying "We're not killers." She'd be saying, "We can be better than this." A person who is truly remorseful does not erase their past crimes: they admit to them (even if it's only admitted to themselves) and try to be better. Does that make sense?

I say Regina is an empathetic person because she is very, very good at picking up on what people are feeling without having to be told (again: Belle), which requires empathy. And she doesn't do this in broad strokes—it is completely possible to be a masterful manipulator by going off of broad generalizations about what people want and using that to get them to tell you outright what they want in specifics (this is what Rumpel does). Regina, on the other hand, is on her top form when she's getting cues from individuals and working off of that; when she tries to do broad strokes, it fails miserably (Hansel and Gretel). (See also: young!Regina gains Snow's affection and trust effortlessly and without prior calculation, not for any personal gain, but because she's a genuinely nice person and she relates to Snow very well.)

You can be an empathetic person and use that against people. You just have to burn out the part of empathy that makes you not want to do that—which is exactly. what. Cora. did.

I think Snow and Regina are equally horrible people; the difference is that Snow refuses to admit to this and insists that she's good, whereas Regina is at the point of saying "I screwed up everything, and now I'm going to try my hardest to get better."

My sympathy for Regina and my disgust for Snow come not from their past actions, but their present attitudes.

About abuse/unhealthy relationships: No. No, people do not instantly get out of relationships that are unhealthy and they DO often love the people who are hurting them. Look at Belle. Look at how much Regina loves Cora in spite of everything Cora put her through.

And Snow, unlike Rumpel and Cora, isn't outright nasty to David. She just has him completely wrapped around her little finger and he cares about her as a person a lot more than she cares about him as a person. It's telling, don't you think, that after Snow eradicated her ability to love in "Heart of Darkness," the thing that got her to love Charming again was not the development of a relationship, but the fact that he jumped in front of an arrow to save her life. It's all about what he can do for her and not who he is.