Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-4839682-20131003142941/@comment-22525977-20131009084431

The reason I am not steadily re-watching one and two, in order, as I would like to do is that I'm in class and kicking into rehearsals for a production of Me, Myself & I  which I am directing sans stage manager or production team (budgetless college shows are the best, no?). I do not have time to sit down for a good OUaT marathon, although it is near the top of my list of things to do once I have actual free time.

However, I did watch "Heart is a Lonely Hunter" tonight, with notes and paying special attention to the scenes we've been discussing.

Some thoughts, in chronological order according to my notes:

1. The first shot of Queengina really echoes what we see of Cora later—the pose, the composition of the dress, the way she has her hair up. Enough to make me think it's almost certainly intentional, which is interesting because this is the episode that focuses most on Regina and heart-ripping. Foreshadowing?

2. "I loved him so much" echoes "I love you so much" when Eva is dying. Also foreshadowing—even manages to be in the exact same tone even though the actors are different. Continuity! I would probably feel worse for Snow if I didn't hate Leopold. A lot. Actual hate, not the "oh I'd really like you if you weren't a dirty hypocrite" kind I feel for Snow.

3. Regina in this scene is genuinely distressed, but not the kind of heart-wrenching sorrow/agony we see when it's Henry hurting her or someone she loves dying. Also, crying and hugging and general mournful face.

4. Then when she's Evil Queen'ing her voice drops significantly and loses a lot of inflection—not quite a flat affect but close, so the sounds are sharper and less varied than in her normal voice. (It's a lot like Azkadellia—I wonder if Lana is familiar with/took inspiration from Tin Man? [that is not a knock, by the way—it's totally legitimate to take inspiration from extant work]) I think in a lot of ways the Evil Queen is a defense mechanism for the more human moments we see of Queengina when she's alone with her apple tree, hence the extreme vocal change—easier to take on a persona if your voice changes hugely to do it—and lower emotional range (flat, snarky, and enraged). And of course the Evil Queen is exactly what Cora wanted Regina to become—powerful etc.—so there's that aspect, too.

(can we take a minute to say Lana Parrilla is a phenomenal actor?)

5. Genie comes off as a lot more invested in this conversation. He's pushing vocally and he keeps bringing it back around to getting rid of Snow. Queengina wants Snow gone, but she's also content to say "this must be handled with care" and then stride purposefully away without nailing down anything concrete (that wasn't pace-y walking, that was "I'm leaving this room now" walking) and she only stops because genie goes after her to offer new suggestions. Trying to give shape to her vague goals, I guess? Reinforced by how she moves and he follows her, and then the plan forms when he gets her to stop moving. David M. Barrett is good at this blocking stuff.

6. Presumably this is after the events of "The Doctor"—why can't Regina just make her own heartless killer? Pick a random peasant, sneakily take heart, boom, it's an unpredictable assassination from a complete nobody. She can even teleport into someone's home, rip out their heart, and teleport back before anyone knows she's gone—we see in "Welcome to Storybrooke" that she can give orders by just speaking to the heart.

7. Mary Margaret is REALLY sex-negative and it makes me uncomfortable.

8. Why does everyone keep saying that Emma has these crazy emotional walls? Even in the pilot (which I did watch a week and a half ago, so it's fresh in my mind) she talked about her past and her present feelings to relative strangers without prompting. So...? (I remember the first time I saw this episode, I was confused because the Gremma and MM/Graham friendship seemed so shoehorned in just for plot. I will have to wait until the time for watching the past six episodes to see if I just missed stuff the first time around) But I bring it up because MM was being sanctimonious about it and walls that Emma is not actually shown to have, and it was annoying.

9. Queengina sets the scene so well for the huntsman. The pose, the candles, the setup of the room—all beautifully staged. Then she keeps it up with being uberseductive. It's so obviously manipulative. (Would it have worked if the huntsman didn't identify as a wolf instead of human?)

10. Is MM Christian? The "do you believe in other lives?" "like heaven?" exchange sounds like it's implying that she is. Would make a lot of sense considering the rest of her character, but religion isn't one of those things the show is interested in exploring—the most we know is FTR=polytheistic because they say gods instead of god, and also Queengina mentions clerics at one point ("Skin Deep," I think)

11. "without fail every one of my father's men has offered their condolences" there is so much entitlement in that line, I don't even—just the idea that every single knight has personally offered her a word or two of comfort and she expects them to. Why not just say she knows all of her father's men personally (which she does—she recognizes the huntsman as not having given her condolences, ergo she knows all the other guards at least by face) and that she knows the huntsman isn't one? Why condolences specifically?

I think this was a case of sacrificing character for a snappy line.

12. I want to know who all those other hearts belong to. With Cora, we see her ripping out hearts left and right and then saving them for later use (season two zombies, the attempt at Emma, Johanna by Regina proxy) whereas with the exception of Graham and coached-by-Cora Johanna, Regina has so far used heart-ripping exclusively to kill. So... who's in the vault and why are they there? Are all Queengina's guards heartless—could she make, say, Claude into a zombie if she were so inclined?

13. Queengina's reaction to the letter was really interesting. There's the fact that it's read in Snow's voice (a common enough convention, but the tight focus on Regina makes it seem like it's happening in her head), and how the Evil Queen mask visibly slips towards the end and she catches herself right away and turns any emotional wavering into rage—and then she's so furious after the letter concludes to the point of flinging it into the fireplace. Then the raw pain and disgust and anger in "don't tell me you're becoming a sheep?!"—that's not directed at the huntsman, not completely, it's pointing inwards as well. It sounds so much like something Cora would say, doesn't it? Makes the Cora-esque framing of Queengina's introductory shot in this episode even more powerful.

14. Why didn't the huntsman just kill another human for their heart? It seems to be implying that it's not that it isn't Snow's heart, but that it isn't a human heart that makes the vault magic fail. And it's not like he had any compunction about killing humans at random.

15. Henry Sr.'s tomb is guarding all of the secrets in Regina's vault. Nothing will convince me that that isn't an intentional stealth pun on the proverbial family skeletons, etc.

16. Regina cages the huntsman the way Leopold caged her.

On Snow's death, Regina's hand in it, and planning: Wanting something to happen is not the same as having a plan. Regina wanted Snow dead. She had no plan. Nothing I saw in the episode contradicted this.

Also, suggesting that Regina is thinking as analytically about her own emotions as we are talking about them is frankly absurd. Emotions are messy, especially when they're contradictory.

Having Snow killed in her own room, in private, with no witnesses, would be an even worse plan than having Snow killed in the woods with no witnesses was. Plausible deniability is the key—Regina has almost none in the canon scenario and even less in the one you suggested. The last thing she wants is for there to be doubt—that's why I keep suggesting using heartless pawns to assassinate people in public view, especially if no one knows that Regina can do the heart-ripping thing yet (which I assume they don't, since they haven't yet turned on her).

Waiting a bit would also be good. Two assassinations in so little time is also suspicious.

May I remind you that Scar had a zero percent approval rating and only stayed in power because hyenas are terrifying and have jaws powerful enough to bite through steel?

Now, if Regina had been saying "shut up, mirror, you're an idiot—we have to handle Snow's demise delicately and we're going to do that by waiting for the mourning period to end and then a bit longer and then, tragically, a sleeper agent from Agrabah will assassinate her because Agrabah has a secret agenda against our kingdom, and we can use that to whip the peasants into a fervor and deflect attention from the fact that there's no longer a threat to my rule," I would not be arguing at all that she didn't have a plan. If she outlined a plan at all without prompting from the genie, I would not be arguing that she didn't have a plan. But what she did have was an ill-defined desire to get Snow out of her life and the genie pushed for her to get it over with asap. Yeah?

Snow was speaking honestly about her memories of Regina when she saved Wilma, but honesty and politicking are not mutually exclusive and Snow, as a born royal, would know how to present herself and her goals in the best possible light. I don't understand why you're so adamant that one means the other is impossible or that a degree of emotional honesty cannot coexist with the basic political savviness required to rule a country?

(Again: My problem with Snow is her hypocrisy and refusal on the narrative's part to stop portraying her as the most moral person on the show, not that she can be devious, duplicitous, and occasionally deranged. You will note that Regina is all of those things, too.)

As for the triangle: Okay. Let me see if I can reiterate what you're getting at here, because I think the problem we're having stems from the fact that we're coming at it from completely different angles—please, please correct me if I'm wrong.

You think:

In the event that a woman has an affair with a married man and advocates that the truth should come out, it is antifeminist and misogynistic for the option of the woman telling the wife to be on the table, because it's the woman doing the husband's "dirty work" for him—the husband should step up to the plate and own to what he did wrong.

I think:

The woman is advocating that the truth should come out and the husband is not. It is antifeminist and misogynistic to deny her the option of telling the wife herself because to do so would prioritize the husband's comfort over the woman's convictions that what they are doing is wrong and the only way to correct it is honesty—the woman should have the agency to tell the wife if she chooses to do so.

If the two parties visiting and exchanging a letter believe wholeheartedly that they are so deeply in love that the breaking-off of the relationship necessitates a complete memory wipe on the part of one side and a desperate quest on the other, yes, I would constitute that an affair.

The impression I got regarding the anti-love potion is that Snow took it because she could not handle the pain of permanently separating herself from Grumpy. Her rationale did not seem to be "I have to forget this guy because he's marrying another woman and this potion is the fast way to do it" so much as "I cannot bear this pain, so I must forget," and Grumpy's attempts to convince her otherwise worked along similar lines ("I need my pain. It makes me Grumpy.")

In "Welcome to Storybrooke," we see that everyone in Storybrooke except Regina and (?) Gold are unknowingly trapped in a 24-hour-long time loop, and in the pilot it is confirmed that time in Storybrooke was indeed frozen for everyone except Henry for the duration of the curse. It follows that people are not acting the way they do because the curse forces them to do the same things every day, but because, from their perspective, only one day has passed. Regina can, for example, change things to an extent by changing the way she interacts with people.

I submit that the reason David didn't want to change post-curse is that David and Charming are the same person, different cultural contexts, so trying to change back to "just" Charming would be a fruitless endeavor.

I don't actually have a problem with "love gives people incredible power" themes. Many of my favorite fandoms explore this; off the top of my head: Tin Man: DG defeats the witch solely because her love for her sister (and vice versa) is more powerful than the witch's dark magic; Alice: Alice's father's brainwashing is overcome because of his love for his daughter; Wildhorn's Wonderland: Alice's love for her daughter enables her to learn to accept herself again; Anyone Can Whistle: Fay lets go of her control and order to accept her love for Hapgood and triggers a literal miracle; hell, even cynical-as-hell things like Company have Bobby choosing the messy and frightening complexities of love over the safety of his hitherto lonely and unsatisfying life. And even Once has its shining moments of love having power: Red saves Snow, choosing unconditional love over the conditional love offered by her mother; Regina strives to do the right thing for Henry; the love between Mulan, Aurora, and Phillip is so strong that they managed to do the nigh impossible and restore Phillip's soul (this is regardless of whether you read it as romantic or platonic love—the basic idea is the same).

The problem with Once's overall portrayal of love, especially romantic love, is that a lot of what they show us is actually really unhealthy and twisted. Snow and Charming are severely codependent and get worse as time passes, and on top of that they can't communicate effectively and don't trust each other very much (David refusing to tell MM "hey I have a big cut that may or may not be poisoned" is the latest example of this. I will happily offer more if you want). Rumpel treats Belle like shit and, in the latest episode, chokes her only for her to turn right around and reassure him that he's a good man, deep down—and the whole point of her character is as a redeeming force for Rumpel, it's a classic "but I can change him, mama!" scenario; MM refuses to give Emma the time and space that she desperately needs and outright asks for; Neal and Emma have, apparently, not managed to move on from each other after ten years and a bad break-up for the ages; Leopold dotes on his daughter so much that he forces an eighteen-year-old girl into a marriage she very obviously does not want. These relationships are unhealthy and they're being held up as ideals—THAT is what is insulting about love in OUaT, not specifically that they're saying "love gives people the motivation to do amazing things!"

Another, smaller thing that bugs me about OUaT True Love is that it seems to be an outside force, rather than something that comes from within—by which I mean, in the other fandoms I listed above, love prevails because the characters who love take big risks and are proactive as a result of that love, whereas in Once, True Love is talked about it as if it's a tangible thing that can be found.

The original fairytales weren't about love overcoming anything or, indeed, meant to be romantic at all. They were warnings and cautionary tales about sexuality, puberty, menarche, teen pregnancy, rape, necrophilia, etc., etc., etc., and they're all really disturbing. I have a great big compilation of Grimm's fairytales in my bookshelf that I thumb through whenever I need inspiration for the eldritch abomination's latest torment in the novel that I'm writing.

For my part, I watch OUaT because urban fantasy is awesome, fractured fairytales are awesome, a lot of the characters are really great (Regina, Emma, Ruby, Rumpel [evil bastard though he may be], Cora, Hook, Archie, Whale, Tamara and Greg [plot devices though they may have been], Jefferson, Graham, Aurora, Mulan, Kathryn, etc.), and it's excellent story and discussion fodder (just look at us now!). Granted, when I started watching the show I was CONVINCED for most of the first season that Regina was being set up as the true protagonist alongside Emma and that Snow and David were just decoys and that it was going to be a lot more like Into the Woods in tone, but eh. It's got enough good things going for it that I keep watching in spite of the problems I have with it.

Snow knew David was a former peasant, as did the dwarves and presumably the rest of the inner circle, but did the general peasantry? It doesn't count as not living a lie if it wasn't general knowledge. (Hard to say, of course, since we don't actually SEE the general peasantry at all.)

The Charming/David distinction goes back to cultural differences, I think; the point was that both times, he didn't initiate the conversation—Abigail had to literally track him down after he ran away before he told the truth. Someone committed to honesty as a way of life does not, generally, wait for people to come ask about things as important as "I don't want to marry you because I'm in love with someone else." That's lying by omission.

I say MM is unhappy based first on her classroom speech in the pilot (and then again in "Welcome to Storybrooke, because time loop and all), to the effect of "if you care for birds and treat them with respect, they will love you and be your friends." Her tone of voice, the melancholy underscoring, etc. give the impression that she's quite lonely—birds are her only real friends. Then, she gives Emma that spiel about having hope, and she's very fervent and part of that comes from concern for Henry, but when it's overlaid on top of MM's earlier behavior, it comes off like she's talking about herself, too. She also does not appear to have any real friends (acquaintances with whom she is friendly are not the same as friends that she can confide in and have emotional connections with) until Emma comes along.

Misery comes in a lot of forms, and when I use it as it relates to MM, I mean it in the humdrum everyday sense of feeling generally adrift, the kind of state of being that the dictionary of obscure sorrows calls monachopsis, not so much the abject despair in which Regina lived.

After Emma shows up and the curse weakens, things obviously get better.

My point re: bullying is that saying MM couldn't remember being bullied because all the adults in Storybrooke are nice people is specious because it ignores simple facts like personalities are not static and children tend to be a lot nastier than the adults they grow into as a result of having had less experience with which to learn not to be nasty to people.

On the one hand we have the FTR, which isn't actually a whole lot more progressive than our world, but where Snow is royalty and beloved by her subjects. On the other we have our world, where MM is just an average middle-class woman.

In the FTR, Snow can mostly get around her world's sexism by relying on the privileges she gets from being a popular monarch. In Storybrooke, MM has exactly the same tools as any other average middle-class woman. She still has a lot of privilege in Storybrooke: she's white, comfortable financially, well-educated, straight or at least passing for straight, etc. However, she does not have the huge and numerous additional benefits of being a princess and later queen of a feudal society, and that, I think, is the primary reason MM is so much more outwardly insecure than Snow.

I fail to see how pointing out that MM being a regular citizen and Snow being a monarch means that MM has fewer privileges and therefore her character is different than Snow's means that I'm saying women are always going to feel inferior to men. I'm saying that, had Snow been, say, a merchant, I think she would have been a lot more similar character-wise to MM. Because both of them are terrible at dealing with setbacks and emotional pain, as I have already discussed.

Further, how does knowing that one lives in a society that is antifeminist and heterosexist equate to feeling inferior to people with more privileges than you? I am an asexual, aromantic (possibly grey-homoromantic?*) woman and I know very well that this makes me a second class citizen in the culture I live in. I am not a second class citizen and I do not act as if I am. The last time someone asked me when I was going to get married already (I'm twenty!) I explained to them exactly what was wrong with that attitude; I rage at microaggressions and make a conscious effort to unlearn internalized misogyny (which is inevitable as a result of growing up in a misogynistic culture).

(*confusion arising here as a result of difficulty parsing specific differences between queerplatonic/romantic when sex is removed from the equation)

I am also privileged: I am white, I am educated, I come from a reasonably well-off family, I am cisgendered, I could pass for straight if I bothered. I am very aware of how those privileges have given me advantages in a culture where homophobia, transphobia, racism, and classism also run rampant. I am not ashamed of having these privileges, but I do work at not being a jerk because of them.

Or do you really want to argue that every person who says "our society deals with X in a really problematic way" is saying that as a matter of acceptance rather than as the first step in a long journey to correct the problem? Because that is very much the implication that I'm seeing in your objection, here.

That sociopaths cannot feel emotions is not, strictly speaking, accurate. What IS true is that they cannot feel emotions in the sense that a non-sociopath does; HOWEVER, sociopaths can and do experience shallow but intense flashes of feeling; they can feel rage, possessiveness, disgust, superiority, obsession, and boredom (which they abhor).

That a sociopath can thoughtlessly stab someone just because does not mean they are not also capable of purposefully taking vengeance over even the tiniest slight. (Tom Riddle, for example, takes "vengeance" on his father's side of the family for what he perceives as his father's abandonment by murdering all three of them and turning that into his first Horcrux. That there's a reasoning behind his decision to kill the Riddles does not render him not a sociopath)

That sociopaths are incapable of love does not mean that they cannot develop obsessions with particular people and call it love as part of the manipulation process—this is why getting into a relationship with a sociopath is so very dangerous.

That sociopaths do not feel regret or remorse does not mean that they won't grovel and beg and cry and apologize at length in order to cajole their victims into forgiving them and allowing the sociopath to win once more and continue manipulating.

I don't interpret pre-Dark One Rumpel as a sociopath anymore than I interpret pre-heartless Cora as a sociopath, for the same reason: the Dark One curse and heart removal are both demonstrated as inherently corrupting and I believe that becoming the Dark One itself rendered Rumpel a sociopath. (One cannot rely solely on psychological science in a world where magically removing one's physical heart destroys one's ability to feel normal emotions, and the Dark One curse is already portrayed as extremely corruptive—it's not a big leap in logic. You're not the kind of person who likes extrapolating this far from the text, and that's okay.)

Rumpel hasn't tried to change his ways because of his love for Belle and Bae. He's gotten better at hiding. There's a very important distinction there.

"Lost Girl" is the episode that pushed me from "Rumpel's relationship with Belle is unhealthy" to "Rumpel's relationship with Belle is just straight up abusive." I mean, he chokes her (and not only does he not show remorse or even apologize, it isn't treated in the narrative as a sick thing to do), tells her he's seriously considering sacrificing his grandson's life to save his own, and then she reassures him that he's good. Which is basically how their entire relationship has gone to this point, so... I continue to ship Rumbelle for the same reason I ship Bellamort—it's creepy and gross and abusive and I find that weirdly fascinating as long as it's in fiction and not reality.

You have, however, convinced me that Snow is merely a terrible person with antisocial tendencies, not a sociopath.

Lit analysis and visual analysis are not actually that different, though, at least not in terms of one being more subjective than the other.

[sidenote before we begin: if you're the type to just enjoy actors having a blast, OtGaP is worth a watch for Rachel Weisz, who hams the hell out of her role and clearly had an awesome time]

I'm going to talk about theatre here, because that's what I know best.

In theatre, analysis from an audience standpoint can be broken down into about five general categories: text (the script itself), actors (the choices the actors make and casting choices), scenic (costumes/sets), lighting, and sound.

The text can generally only be examined through the lens of the acting, because an actor's interpretation can make HUGE differences in what the text means, but those differences can't be too off the wall or the viewer will pick up on discrepancies from what's happening in the words versus on stage and get kicked out of the action.

Casting influences meaning. It is impossible to put a minority on the stage without making a political statement. A Latina woman is the best choice for Margie in Good People? Great, you've got a show more focused on the racial aspects than the class ones. Genderbend Waiting for Godot? Your show has a gender discussion at its heart (and also you're praying you don't get sued by Beckett's estate).

Blocking is important—if A is upstage of B while A delivers a monologue, B is still the focal point of the scene because B is downstage.

Scenic elements can do a lot to change the meaning of the play: is the set close and cramped and claustrophobic or empty and sparse and stark? Are the costumes intricately detailed or simple? What does it say about the characters if everyone is dressed in black evening wear?

Do you underscore your show? Do you do it with instrumentals or vocal pieces? Do you compose new music specific to the show? Is it a musical and if so how are the songs orchestrated—is it a twenty-eight piece concealed orchestra, or do the actors play their own instruments (2006 Company did that, and the instruments became a metaphor for the emotional involvement of the characters). Is the music period, or do you put on Shakespeare underscored with 80's rock?

Are the actors backlit for the climax or do you do a red wash? If you put a spotlight on OTTO but not otto in the final scenes of Me, Myself & I, the audience is going to focus on OTTO over otto and OTTO is going to seem more important.

It's more or less the same with film, with the additional concerns of cinematography etc. (And yes, I have watched films in post-production—I've helped with post-production work)

A director can oversee all the production teams in charge of these decisions and make the final call, hopefully creating a coherent narrative out of all these variables. At the end of the day, though, the director cannot sit in the audience and say "I made this choice for XYZ reasons" any more than an author can invade living rooms and explain their word choice.

An author can make almost all of the same decisions a director can. As a writer, I can decide whether the protagonist of my novel is white or Asian or Indian or Native American, I can decide whether xe is cisgendered or trans*, I can decide that xe always dresses in baggy jeans or sundresses. I can decide that xe is actually an antelope if i want to.

I can introduce the villain by having xem knock on the protagonist's front door with a plate of brownies or with an ambush on a rainy street in mid-afternoon. I can set my story on a chilly, windswept island with a strong fishing economy or a sprawling metropolis with every luxury imaginable.

I can begin the conflict at morning in the sun or at noon under harsh fluorescents or at night under the bleachers at a football game, or on the surface of the moon or in a dank cellar where the only light comes from the glow of a single phosphorescent crystal clutched in the hand of the room's sole occupant.

I can create sounds as well as visuals if I need to to set a scene. ("Neverland at night doesn’t sound like her world or even the wreckage of the Enchanted Forest—there are no crickets or cicadas, only the sound of leaves stirring in the breeze and a high keening sound.")

I can direct the reader's focus based on what the POV character emphasizes and what xe ignores; I can modify pace and tempo by screwing around with something as simple as commas and dashes (and, yes, when I write fiction, I am very specific and intentional about every piece of punctuation that I place—I am not exaggerating here).

By your logic, because I can and do make these very specific decisions as a writer, lit criticism shouldn't be nearly as subjective as it is.

On Snow and Wilma specifically:

1. The score, the blocking, the acting, and the actions Snow takes convince me that Snow is being honest here and Regina believes her 100%.

2. Snow's character in general, the overarching situation of Snow's long term goal being rebellion, the way in which she saved Wilma, and a basic assumption that anyone raised as a ruler will have some knowledge of how to rule convince me that Snow is managing her rescue of Wilma to make her look as good as possible.

These are not contradictory conclusions.

Lana did not act emotionless and indifferent when she hugged Snow. She was crying and before she was crying she was showing visible signs of distress. I watched that episode eight hours ago, I remember it quite clearly.

I don't feel as if we've been having a one-sided conversation. You make points that are, for the most part, internally consistent (barring a few things that I find to be just as much bizarre leaps of logic as you find some of mind, most notably your ongoing insistence that things that aren't contradictory cannot coexist). I don't agree with you, but you make yourself clear enough that I can understand where you're coming from and how you get to the conclusions that you make.