Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6175354-20130930170041/@comment-22525977-20131003031254

Regina actually didn't immediately switch from liking Snow to loathing her—easy to miss, since we barely see any of their relationship post-marriage but prior to Leopold's death, but what we do see of that period is (1) Regina lying to protect young!Snow's innocence, soon after Daniel's death (a few days? a week?), (2) Regina having a moment shortly after that that involved her fantasizing about killing Snow and which was sparked by Snow inadvertently salting her still-recent wounds by playing with the ring Daniel gave her (and being immensely disturbed by the fact that she had the fantasy at all), and (3) Regina comforting Snow immediately following Leopold's death. We never do see (or if we have, I don't remember it and please, please correct me on this) exactly the moment Regina switches from trying to do right by Snow to actively trying to kill her ("I should have left her to die on that horse" does not count, since it was, again a few days or at best a week  after Daniel's murder, and Regina was speaking from a place of extreme pain rather than true murderous wrath).

Think about it: If Regina truly hated Snow from the moment Snow spilled the beans about Daniel, she would've taken the first opportunity to rip Snow's heart out and use it to make her kill Leopold in public. Everyone sees Snow kill her own father—clearly she's a traitor. Regina then replaces Snow's heart (to twist the knife, and all—no guilt if you don't have feelings!) and uses magic to wipe or modify Snow's memories so Snow has no idea that Regina had anything to do with it. Problem. Solved.

My personal belief is that after a while, it wasn't that Snow had accidentally caused Daniel's death, it was that Snow had no idea that her actions had caused Regina's death and, from what little we see of them during that period, Snow never figured out how miserable Regina was. How would you feel if were horrifically miserable all the time and your stepdaughter thought you were, if not happy, at least content and treated you like she expected you to be happy/content?

If Snow really, truly was morally opposed to sneaking around and going behind Kathryn's back, there was NOTHING stopping her from going to Kathryn and explaining the situation. She CHOSE to wait around for David to do that and CHOSE to bully him into telling the truth instead of cutting out the middleman. I do not admire her for this—she was, per usual, all talk and little to no real action, and the actions she did take put her at almost no personal risk.

I do not buy that Mary Margaret is different from Snow, anymore than David is different from Charming or Ruby is different from Red or anything else. They are the same people, but they were put in very different cultural contexts (fantasy feudalism versus our world) and they respond differently to them—if you had grown up in, say, Victorian England, you'd be a lot different than you are today, for example.

Snow shooting that ogre was acting heroically. Snow giving the dagger to Cora was (while naïve) equally heroic. All of the characters we've been talking to have shown themselves capable of heroism: Rumpel stops the ogre wars, Regina saves young!Snow and, in "Heart of the Truest Believer," drops everything to save a woman that she hates, without prompting. (Though I do think it is noteworthy that Rumpel chooses to save his son by helping the greater good, Regina demonstrates frequently that she's more than capable of fighting for people she doesn't even know or actively dislikes, and Snow only lifts a finger is someone she specifically cares for is in trouble—the only exception I can think of is when she swings into the village to murder Dark Mook #346 to save disguised!Regina from execution, and she explicitly uses that to win the favor of the peasants.)

Drinking George's drink and eating Regina's apple were not instances of heroism, they were instances of stupidity; George's drink in particular. She knows that George despises her and Charming and would love to sabotage their relationship; she gives nary a thought to drinking the unknown liquid he offers her. That isn't thrill seeking, it's a complete lack of common sense and unbearably naïve (compare, if you will, to reckless, impulsive Harry remembering Moody's mantra of "CONSTANT VIGILANCE" and not drinking the Veritaserum-laced tea Umbridge offered him in OotP).

Regina's apple is a teensy bit more understandable, since it's part of a treaty and Regina tells her what will happen first. I submit that it was still stupid, because Snow had no guarantee that Regina would keep her word, made no effort to get some kind of guarantee, and believed that Regina was just plain evil at that point. (Bear in mind, she also had the promise of True Love's Kiss, which she and Charming had used several times before to great success. That makes me question how self-sacrificing she was actually being.)

Why is qualifying behavior that I find skin-crawlingly creepy and uncomfortable as "creepy" something you find unreasonable? I'm not saying it's creepy because it's weird, I'm saying it's creepy because it literally creeps me out the same way Rumpel's casually tyrannical treatment of Belle and Bae does, or Cora's use of Henry's appearance to trick Regina into letting her into the secret vault room does, or so on and so forth.

It isn't a matter of technicality that I expect Snow and Emma's current relationship to tend more towards platonic than maternal—it's a matter of human psychology. The human brain learns by experience and acts accordingly; it does not have an on/off "mother" switch any more than it has an on/off "sibling" switch. Look up genetic sexual attraction and what happens when siblings who skip the Westermarck effect by being raised separately meet as adults—in the event that people experiencing GSA find out that their siblings, there's often a revulsion response because of how incest is treated in our culture, yes, but that doesn't automatically make the GSA go away. Look up Patrick Stübing and Susan Karolewski, for example.

Which is to say, for the majority of their relationship, Snow has been Emma's friend, not her mother. To suddenly switch to determined maternal behavior strictly because she remembered that she gave birth to Emma once—and it bears repeating that Emma is currently the same age as Snow, if not a bit older—flies in the face of everything we know about how the human brain works. Motherhood is more than giving birth; it's about raising a child to adulthood, and Snow didn't do that, ergo she is only Emma's mother in the biological sense. Sad? Absolutely. But dealing with it by infantilizing Emma by treating her like a recalcitrant child?

Snow does not have to learn what it means to be a mother; the time for mothering Emma is gone and she can't get it back. Compare Rumpel and Bae: Rumpel KNOWS that Neal is an adult now, and the way he wants to fix their relationship is by turning Neal into a child again because he knows that he can't treat Neal like a little boy anymore—and this is a man who raised Bae for, what, fourteen years? Logically, it's Rumpel who should be having the problem of treating his adult offspring like a child; however, he does not and when Neal refuses to go back to being fourteen, Rumpel respects that.

I don't want her to try to become Emma's mother, and neither does Emma (she makes that quite clear in the premiere—she wants Snow and David to be a part of her family, but not as parents). Emma is a grown woman with very nearly three decades of real-world experience under her belt, and at this point in her life she doesn't need parents; she needs friends and confidants, people she can trust and love and be loved by. Is it any wonder she's rankling because one of her close friends is trying to mother her instead?

Certainly the circumstances are weird and that leads to awkwardness for everyone, but I do think Emma honestly needs and wants Mary-Margaret-her-friend more than Snow-her-mother, and what she's doing in the premiere is coming to and expressing the realization that allowing Snow and David to act like her parents in season two was a mistake.

Evil, like alcoholism, does not happen out of a vacuum.

It almost always isn't a matter of "giving in." It isn't a matter of being too weak or lacking the desire to stop. In cases like Regina's, it is a matter of reaching the point at which she cannot physically, mentally, or emotionally take any more and breaking. It's not letting go—it's clinging to morality by her fingernails and having that finally yanked out of her hands by the agony of having hope again and promptly having that final, desperate hope crushed. And once you fall, it is so, so much harder to get a hold of it again, especially if you have a nonexistent support network—to say nothing of someone who is actively trying to break you like Rumpel and Cora were to Regina.

Alcoholism isn't a perfect metaphor—alcoholics often aren't driven to drink; often they begin drinking the way most people do, as a social thing, and the difference is that they have a bit of poorly-coded genetic material that makes them unable to self-regulate their drinking after they've had the first drink. It's just like any other addiction—physical dependence develops and then it is very, very hard to stop because the brain has literally been rewired to need the substance it's addicted to. That's why an alcoholic who doesn't drink is called a "recovering alcoholic." The alcoholism is still in their genes. It's never going to go away, no more than any other genetic code they might possess. But with struggle and a support network, they can get to the point of overcoming the disease.

Evil is all about nurture; even sociopaths are capable of living crime-free, productive lives, if they put the work into it. There isn't an evil gene or even a group of evil genes. Put a person—any person—into a situation like Regina's, who grew up with a mother who tormented and belittled her in the name of shaping her into an acceptable facsimile of what Cora wanted for herself and a father who did nothing to stop it, then got married off to a man three times her age and lost the only person who ever loved her and fought for her not once but twice, and never, ever got a break, and I guarantee you they will either spiral into suicidal depression or start fighting back with everything they've got.

By the same token, relapsing isn't about "realizing how much [the alcoholic] misses alcohol," it's about the alcoholic is fighting their own genetics and a brain that has been wired to need alcohol to function. You can have enough determination to move mountains with the sheer might of your will and not succeed at beating an addiction by yourself—recovering addicts need people to support and help them or they will fail. They may show progress in the beginning, but sooner or later they are going to fail. This isn't a new idea—you can barely walk for stumbling over another story about the self-sufficient hero who tries to be self-sufficient in beating their addiction to whatever and fails miserably and learns that they have to rely on friends and family to succeed.

Regina wants, desperately, to get better. She wants it for herself: she wants it because she wants love, and getting better is the only way she's going to get it. She wants it because she knows evil isn't the route to happiness and she wants—needs—to not be miserable. Are these selfish reasons? Yes, of course. But they're reasons for and about her. Regina does not care about redemption until she realizes that evil and being loved are incompatible; notice that her big relapse happens because her mother shows up and starts showering her with what is, for Cora, unimaginable levels of kindness and affection (Cora even breaks out the tears and says she wants to make things better between them and that she was wrong! She compliments Regina and praises her and is exactly the opposite in her approach from what we see in the flashbacks—and, barring Daniel, that's the biggest demonstration of kindness Regina has ever experienced in her entire fifty-odd years of living.) Of course she goes right back to doing what Cora preaches; she's getting loved for it, rewarded for it. Whereas the most Henry ever gives her for being good is a thank you or if she's lucky a quick hug before he leaves her again to be with the people she can't stand and who can barely tolerate her, the people he keeps telling her with words and actions that he believes to be his real family instead of her, who raised him for ten of his eleven years.

Snow broke, too. She reached the point at which she couldn't handle the situation with her much-lauded righteousness and, like Regina, when she broke, she went straight into murder mode.

The difference is that the threshold of awfulness at which Regina broke was exponentially higher than the levels necessary to break Snow; Regina had at least twenty years of having an indisputably horrible life. Snow did not.

They both broke because of the death of a loved one. In Regina's case, she had no one else to turn to and there were people actively conspiring to turn her into, quote, "a monster." Snow had David, Ruby (who is ostensibly her best friend), Emma and Henry, the dwarves, and so on to help her through the mourning process, and David was actively trying to talk her out of killing Cora and reminding her that fighting fire with fire and death with death was not the right response. He did the exact opposite of what Rumpel did to Regina—helping instead of tearing down. Snow chose to go full steam ahead with killing Cora in spite of that.

(And using an abused woman's desperate desire to be loved to trick her into killing her own mother? Is not "a little too far." That's straight up jumping off the deep end.)

And now they are both trying to get better. Most recently, Regina did this by willingly sacrificing herself for an entire town of people she hated (for Henry, a selfish motivation) and ceasing her fight with Snow to get Emma out of the water  (not for Henry—if Emma died and the others turned against her, she could just strike out off on her own like Rumpel, she's powerful enough—a selfless motivation).

So far, Snow has done it by asking Regina to kill her because she couldn't take the guilt, refusing to accept accountability for punching Gepetto ("that wasn't me!"), helping to find Regina after she went missing, and then completely ignoring the fact that she killed Regina's mother at all ("we're not killers!").

Basically, even if Snow isn't a sociopath—and I still think she is—she's dealing with her darkness by pretending it doesn't exist and repressing it. Not a recipe for success at all.

Or: acknowledging that you have a problem or weaknesses does not mean you fall into it again. Saying, "I have a problem with abusing magic and powertripping" is a step on the path to not doing that anymore, not the reverse.

(Is there somewhere more appropriate that we could take this discussion? I feel we're derailing the topic at hand, which is supposed to be the premiere.)