Dani-Ellie

Towards the end of 2B, I remember thinking that Regina at that point was a lost cause. She was a sociopath at the very least. Henry had at least been able to reason with her (which, we won't even get into how terrible it is to allow an eleven-year-old to be your moral compass, but whatever), but he was quickly losing even that ability. By the end of the season, she was so into her revenge fantasy that when her son, whom she claims to love, is telling her that he'll never love her if she kills his entire family, and she deals with it not by taking his wishes into consideration but by wiping his memory. I'm sorry, but in my opinion, that's not okay. The writing has thankfully backed off from that and made her a little less psycho but, like everything else on this show, it was never dealt with. Does Regina feel bad that she wiped her kid's memory? Does she feel terrible that she was going to kill his entire family even though he very clearly did not want her to? "No regrets" would suggest not, which is highly problematic in terms of redemption.

Exactly. Despite how it sounds, I don't actually hate Regina. She's funny and there have been scenes with her where I've been all, "Aww." At this point for me, it's character weariness. I'm tired of her. I don't care about Round 74343 of Regina vs. Snow. I don't care about how she doesn't understand that killing people makes people mad at her. I don't care that she can't comprehend that killing her son's entire family is not going to make him love her. I don't care that she's gaining all these little steps and bits of happiness because I know the show's just going to take it from her to make her the Evil Queen again. I'm just over it. Either redeem her or don't, but stop playing this back-and-forth game. Like Camera One said, a more gradual redemption would have been preferable to me over this constant giving and taking, is she good today or is she going to throw someone out a window for sneezing near her, nonsense. Show me that she's actually trying and that she's not going to revert back to Evil Queen mode the second she suffers a setback. Because if she's going to keep reverting, what's the point in believing in or caring about her redemption? If we're going to focus this much attention on a character, especially at the expense of others, I want to feel like the attention is warranted. I've long stopped believing the attention on Regina is warranted because the writers want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to make her happy but they want to keep her the Evil Queen, so they rip that happiness away so she has "reason" to be miserable. There's no forward momentum because they keep resetting her, which then in turn means I stop giving a shit and would rather the story attention focus on characters who might actually be allowed to grow.

I agree that it's a journey, but my problem with it is they keep swinging her too far one way or the other. One minute she's promising her son she's going to try to be a better person and the next minute she's trying to kill his entire family. They take pains to show us all the atrocities she's committed as the Evil Queen and then expect us to cheer for her when she says she doesn't regret any of them. The only thing that got her to recognize that life was worth living in the missing year was having someone to destroy and then she gave Henry True Love's Kiss and performed white magic all without a heart. She defeated Zelena while everyone else in that barn stood around and did nothing. How much more of a white hat could they have given her at that moment? But they wanted to end the season on a tense note so they had her blaming Emma for Marian, comparing it to her blame of Snow for Daniel, the implication being that now Regina's going to go after Emma the way she did Snow. Every time they give her even the tiniest bit of growth, they reverse it, and all that does is make it look like Regina hasn't grown at all.

This pisses me off, because Regina is the source of her own unhappiness. Yes, watching Daniel murdered in front of her was traumatic, I'm not denying that. However, she's the one holding onto that. She's the one refusing to move past it. She's the one keeping herself trapped in the most awful moment of her entire life, and not only that, but like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum, she's taking her pain and her anger out on everyone else. Even if you buy into her beef with Snow, what the hell else did everyone else in the Enchanted Forest have to do with it? Because they supported Snow and not her? Well, boo-hoo, Regina. Not everyone is going to like you, and news flash, when you kill people and torture people and persecute and usurp a beloved princess and make everyone else's lives miserable out of anger and vengeance, they're not going to like you. Not only that, but you don't get to dictate when or even if they have to forgive you. And I don't even buy that Regina's the most victimized person on this show. From my perspective, that title goes to Emma. An innocent newborn baby who had nothing to do with anything was torn from her parents and grew up in this world completely alone. Even Regina had a father who loved her, no matter how inefficient he may have been against or cowtowed he may have been by Cora (and, let's not forget, the only reason Regina's father isn't with her now is because she killed him). Even Regina didn't have the man she thought loved her dump her in jail and never contact her again. And did Emma turn around and punish everyone else for her hardships? No, she internalized it. And if Regina had dealt with Daniel's death by crying and eating the Enchanted Forest equivalent of a pint of Haagen-Dasz, that would have been different. But she didn't. She decided to murder and torture and curse an entire population instead, and I'm sorry, but that's on her.

Not meaning to double-post, but, from the Snow White thread: Me too. It's funny; I think if the show ever chose to go this direction, Snowflake could be a wonderful catalyst for Emma to face things about her past. Watching her brother get all kinds of love and cuddles could make her face and deal with all the love and cuddles she never got. She's going to be able to watch her parents be parents to someone else, and it could make her really see what she'd missed out on. And I don't mean this in an "Emma's jealous" kind of way, more like a wistful, "I never had this and I should have" kind of way. It could be an inroad to finally making peace with it ... realizing it first, recognizing it was unfair, and letting herself finally feel everything she's pushed down her whole life. Of course, the show will never go this direction (and if it does, I will buy a hat just to eat it). Even if it does, though, I can still see Emma being a protective and loving big sister, simply because of the pain in her past. We saw how she was with Henry and Ava and Nicholas and even Ashley; she saw these kids with no one looking out for them, no one protecting them, which spurred her to protect them and to fight for them. She wanted to make sure they didn't end up with the lonely, loveless life she had. I can totally see her giving her brother little comforting touches simply because she never had them. I can see her wanting him to know that he matters to people, because she felt she never did. And I can see her wanting to make sure he knows he's loved, because she never was.

Answering in the Emma thread.

My summer show is Rizzoli & Isles. The Bostonian in me loves all the Boston shoutouts, and I think they manage a nice balance of the darkness of the crime drama and the humor of a workplace comedy. Plus, I've less-than-three-ed Angie Harmon since she was Abbie Carmichael on Law & Order, so that helps, too. :)

Plus, in realistic terms, you now have a three-year-old who'd just had her entire world turned upside down. The people she considered Mommy and Daddy had just handed her off to strangers, as far as she was concerned. She would have been scared and confused and hurt, and she wasn't old enough to express those emotions in a healthy way. She would either shut down or she would act out. Either way, you now have an emotionally troubled three-year-old, and once the kids are labeled with that, their chances of being adopted drop even lower, because being a parent to an emotionally troubled child and dealing with that kind of fallout is extremely difficult.

Neal being dead is the big reason I'm sure this'll never come up again. Not speaking ill of the dead and so forth. And when I suggested that Hook or Henry would want tell Snow and Charming, I didn't mean for it to be in a "guess what Neal did, that jerk" kind of way. More like a "you might want to ask Emma about her life prior to you coming into it" kind of way, making it more about being there for Emma than disparaging Neal. If they did ask and she told them she didn't want to talk or it was water under the bridge, okay, fine. But where we didn't even see them ask, it makes them come across to me as remarkably tone-deaf, especially given the things Emma told cursed Mary Margaret about Henry's father. Maybe Snow believed that first love = True Love because that was her experience, but as Mary Margaret she did hear Emma say that Henry's father was no hero and that he didn't need to know the real story. I would think that would have been a red flag to her that something had happened beyond a bad breakup or obstacles similar to what she and Charming faced, and I would think she would want to get to the bottom of that before pushing her daughter to give him a second chance.

Yeah, sorry, show, but saving a woman's life is not a mistake, no matter what undesirable complications may arise from saving that life. I did like that Jen said that it's complicated because she can't apologize for saving a woman's life but at the same time, she didn't mean to throw a monkey wrench into Regina's life. Like, damn straight she shouldn't apologize for saving a woman's life.

For me, part of it is that. Part of it was, if Snow is going to push her daughter towards this guy, shouldn't she want to know the whole story? How can she properly judge whether Emma's just being Emma or whether Emma has a valid reason to be conflicted if she doesn't know the history? Because to me, a mother pushing her daughter to reunite with the guy who'd dumped her 17-year-old self in jail was grody. I'm not at all saying Snow was intending to be grody; I think her heart was in the right place. But she was talking out of turn, and it was painfully obvious that she'd never once asked. She just assumed she knew best, and I can't imagine any mother giving her daughter the same advice if she had known. Part of me would like to see Snow and Charming taking an interest in their daughter's life. And no, Emma's not going to freely share everything, but I would like to see them at least offering to be that ear for her if she ever needs/wants it. (I do love when Daddy Charming comes out to play so I love when they have him talking to her and presenting himself as a judgment-free zone.) I would have liked to see them ask Emma if naming the baby after Neal would be all right with her, as a way to honor Neal's sacrifice and his place as Henry's father. Yeah, Emma seemed happy with it, but at that point, it was a done deal. What if she hadn't been? It just would have been nice to see them take her into consideration. A large part of it is, though, the fact that Snow and Charming not knowing about Neal is indicative of a larger problem. This family doesn't know each other. We have parents making decisions that affect their daughter without consulting her or even filling her in (and I'm sorry, but nothing will convince me that Emma was not hurt by her parents deciding to give up and stay in Neverland). We have a daughter who's been so hurt by life in general that she can't bring herself to trust anyone, we have broken promises from mother to daughter, and where does the story attention go? Snow working on her relationship with the woman who took her daughter from her in the first place. At this point, the ship has sailed on a lot of the stuff I desperately wanted to see. Maybe I can hope that Emma being more open with them now will allow them to get into some of this stuff, but I seem to remember saying the same thing regarding Emma getting her memories back and hoping the eleven years of fake memories along with the one year of real ones would have tempered her hurt a bit and opened her up enough to talk. And we all saw how 3B worked out, so I'm not exactly holding my breath for it. It just frustrates me because the Charming Family is a freaking emotional goldmine that could have provided potential storyline material for years and the show has squandered it.

Ha! Very true. But even Snow and Charming not knowing is problematic, because why don't they? Okay, I mean, I get that the reason they don't know is because Adam and Eddy have no desire to truly deal with it, but in-story, why don't they know? Have they ever asked? Have they ever stopped to think, "Gee, I wonder what the hell happened between those two?" Because like I said above, assuming it was just a bad break-up is so damn out of touch, considering we know what really happened, and the longer it goes, the deeper that wedge is driven. I mean, at this point, I think we can safely assume they'll never know. So they'll never know that this guy they all think is a hero dumped their 17-year-old daughter in jail. They'll never know about this very important piece of Emma's life, an experience that, for better or worse, made her who she is today. How can they ever really know her, then? How can they ever see things from her perspective or truly appreciate the woman their baby girl has become if they're not allowed to know what made her who she is? (Which is a problem not just with Neal but with everything from Emma's past.)

It makes me so angry that we have no idea if Snow and Charming even know what Neal did to Emma. These are the things we should know if the characters even know about each other. And yeah, I buy Emma not exactly offering up the information, but I don't buy Snow or Charming not at least expressing an interest. Henry and Hook both know. (And I couldn't even tell if when Emma told Hook onscreen if that was the first time she'd told him! He didn't seem surprised by the information and he did get in that earlier dig to Neal about how he'd already left her once, but did he know the extent of it then or was that dig just from observation?) Wouldn't Henry and Hook at least want to fill them in? Not in a going-behind-Emma's-back kind of way, but just as a way of letting them know that he deeply, deeply hurt her and maybe they should try to find out why? It's like, if they know, great. If they don't know, great. But it shouldn't be a question if they know or not. That should have been clear in the narrative. I see that side of it, too, but at the same time, cursed Mary Margaret Blanchard had such a better insight into Emma than Snow seems to. Mary Margaret would have gently pushed to find out the whole story before she passed judgment and decided Emma was just being Emma and "owed it to herself to he happy" with the guy who made her so miserable in the first place. I just don't understand what the writers were doing, and if it had led to something, some big emotional parent/adult-child standoff, I would have accepted it. As it stands, though, it just makes Snow and Charming look so out of touch with their own daughter and Emma's accepting it just because it's better than anything she's had so far.

I ended up dressing as Emma when we took my nephew out for Halloween this past year, mostly because I could throw a costume together with stuff I already owned. (Jeans, white T-shirt, snowboots as a quick substitute, red leather jacket that was my Nana's). I hadn't intended on dressing up at all, but when your three-year-old nephew asks you what you're going to be on the Saturday before Halloween, you can't say "nothing." ;) My sister took one look at me and said, "I love it!"

For me right now, it's both. It's not my favorite show ever of all time but it's my favorite show airing right now, and it's the one I'm most obsessed with (online discussion, fanfic, searching for pics and articles, etc).

Thank you, ShadowFacts. He's such a good little guy, and I don't understand how anyone could look at his little face and not want him. Among the rest of us, though, he's not hurting for love, so we're hoping that's enough. :)

All right, I don't usually talk about this here, but it's really bugging me and I need to vent to someone. Those of you who were at TWoP know a little bit about my nephew, but a quick introduction for those who don't: my brother and sister-in-law took custody of my nephew from my sister-in-law's sister last June for a variety of reasons, not the least of which included the fact that she was leaving my two-year-old nephew alone in the apartment at night (and saw nothing wrong with that because "he's asleep, what difference does it make?"). In the ensuing year, with love and attention and a lot of hard work, my brother and sister-in-law have transformed my nephew from a sad, lonely almost-three-year-old into a happy and giggly goofball of an almost-four-year-old. Anyway. I found out today that while my sister-in-law was complaining about something my nephew had done, his mother told her to "just give him to [cousins of theirs]." And normally I just roll my eyes when I hear she's said stuff like that, but for some reason, this is really bothering me tonight. Because she talks about him like he's an unwanted piece of furniture and not a lovable and loving little boy with feelings and attachments and hopes and dreams, and it just breaks my heart. To end this vent on a lighter note, we were drawing pictures today before heading out for dinner and I drew him a very cartoony version of the Jolly Roger. And a castle. The castle came out better, haha.

I could have bought the "I love you" if they hadn't followed it up with the "I need you." Because no, Emma, sweetheart, you don't. I mean, look, I think part of Emma is always going to love Neal. He's the father of her child, and that love may evolve into a different kind of love but I don't think it ever goes away completely. When my parents split up, my mom told me she would always love my dad, because he gave her me and my siblings, but she wasn't in love with him anymore. I kind of saw Emma and Neal the same way. They're bound together because they have Henry and they were in love at the time, but Neal sent her to jail and time passed and understandably, they were no longer in love. The problem is the show didn't make the distinction between "love" and "in love" and allowed Emma to still carry a torch for this guy, which, in my opinion, was grody. Because regardless of what the writers think, I don't see any earthly reason why Emma would still be in love with the guy she spent 11 years believing used her as a patsy.

I've noticed that there's an awful lot of this with this show, more than I can recall for any other show I've watched. Maybe it's just because of this day and age and TV writers being so accessible on social media, but in all my years of TV watching, I've never come across a show where so many of the big story problems have to do with how the story plays out onscreen versus how the writers intended the story to play out. There is a very big disconnect between what actually happens versus the intention, and I don't know what the fix for that is other than Adam and Eddy actually taking the constructive criticism and changing the way they plan the story. Let's talk about Emma and Neal for a second, because Jean brings up good points. That may have been their intention but that is not at all how it came across to me, and from what I can remember from Twitter and whatnot, that is not at all how it came across to a good many people. What we saw was Neal and August set Emma up to go to jail and when Emma confronted Neal about it in "Manhattan," all he said was that he did it to get her home. No mention of how leaving her in jail and then never speaking to her again was supposed to get her home. No mention of how she was supposed to find her way home with no one to guide her. Maybe Neal trusted August to guide her, but even still, why would he trust her life to some dude he just met who'd pretty much admitted he was a sucky guardian angel? How the hell is that heroic? Wouldn't it have been more heroic to not send her to jail at all and to stick by her and guide her and make sure she found her way home? When they had countless people tweeting them and asking them to clarify Neal's position, that should have been an indication to them that something was wrong with the narrative. When a couple people "misread" something or need an explanation, that's the people. When a whole bunch of people "misread" something or need an explanation, that's a fault of the text. This actually made me angry. Considering that Emma spent a third of her life emotionally reeling from Neal's betrayal, it's perfectly all right for Emma to not want to get back together with Neal. It's perfectly all right for her to give him shit because the way he treated her was not okay. The drama and angst for Neal/Emma should have been Neal attempting to make it up to Emma, not Emma being closed off, especially since Neal was a good chunk of the reason she was so closed off in the first place. Yeah, she runs, but Neal's the one who freakin' taught her to run, both physically and emotionally. He was the one who told her she had to run away to find somewhere she missed and he was the one who screwed her over so badly that she thought it was easier to just never take a chance on anyone else again. And this guy is supposed to be a hero? Pull the other one, writers.

Right. I also think the genre this particular show is in needs to be taken into consideration as well. This isn't some teen high school movie where a beautiful girl moves into town and everyone loves her and all the guys fall over each other racing for her affections. This is a fairy tale. A modern-day fairy tale, but it's still a fairy tale, and Emma is a modern fairy-tale princess. Fairy-tale princesses are special. Fairy-tale princesses do come up from nothing and do have princes fawning all over them. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty never even met their Prince Charmings before these men were braving wilds and dragons and other fairy tale dangers to save them, for crying out loud. Cinderella shared one dance with her prince and he roamed his entire kingdom looking for her again. Emma lived an awful, lonely, loveless life and is just now realizing how special she is. And maybe some see that as over the top, but for me, knowing she'd likely never been told she was special before Henry showed up at her door, all I can think is, "Finally." If anything, I think 3B Regina was Mary Sue territory. She's a fairy-tale villain, for crying out loud, (which, sorry, Adam and Eddy but Regina's a villain ... I miss the point in time where the show actually remembered this) and she did everything and got everything (True Love's Kiss and light magic all without a heart will never not go up my ass sideways) and every other character was shoved aside in service of Regina. If the story were more balanced, maybe I would feel less like this, but here we are.

From the "Tallahassee" thread: Right. I mean, full-on, I was one of those completely "no way in hell" people when it came to Swanfire but had it been dealt with in any kind of reasonable way (read: not just talking around everything ... let's see Charming and Snow find out what happened between them, let's see Neal and Emma actually hash it out, let's see the fallout, dammit) and we could have seen Emma healing and responding to the situation in a positive manner, my "no way in hell" could possibly have been swayed to a "maybe." As it played out, though? No way in hell, period, full-stop. Because I cannot think of a single reason why Emma should have trusted Neal with her heart again since he treated it so shoddily the first time and gave her no real explanation as to why he did so and since he'd had the opportunity to find her again and decided to leave her behind instead. That's someone you put in your rearview mirror, not someone you go running back to, imo.

Replying in the Relationships thread.

Seriously?! Because I seem to remember Regina zipping up her dress in the mirror and talking to Graham in the shower in their secret tryst room at Granny's in "The Price of Gold." What the hell else were they doing, then, writers?

I'm also reasonably sure I've seen rotary phones in the sheriff's station.

Absolutely. And it kills me because Jen played the moment of Snow's confession as hurt. Emma dropped her eyes and when the camera panned away, she was still looking down. So the last impression we have of Emma hearing Snow's confession is she was so hurt and saddened by it that she couldn't even look at Snow, and then the next episode, for Emma, it's like it never happened. WTF, show? Because I gotta tell ya, I know my mom loves me and would lay her life down for mine, but if she ever said what Snow said in front of Emma in front of me, I'd be devastated. Emma doesn't have the luxury of unconditional love, so how the hell else is she supposed to feel after that? The inattention to the consequences of the plot points drive me batty. For an emotionally satisfying story, it's not enough for me to just hit a check mark and be done with it, especially when the check mark the writers come up with are freakin' emotional Tazmanian Devils. They're emotional tornadoes that whip through, run roughshod over everyone, and whip right back out again, and no attention is focused on the cleanup and restoration period. It's maddening.