Dani-Ellie

Then there's the whole thing with Marian. The fact that Regina locked up Marian was never addressed at all, aside from a bit of Marian not trusting her (as well she shouldn't!). But Regina's role in it didn't cause any issues between Robin and Regina; in fact, Robin didn't seem to blink twice! So Regina splits up a family in the past and when it should come back to bite her in the ass, it's nothing doing? The narrative has a tendency to be Regina-blind, in that she can do whatever she wants and the most she has to pay for it is a snarky insult or two directed her way. Adam and Eddy remind us all the time that Regina did awful, awful things during her reign as the Evil Queen, but when it comes to the narrative, those awful, awful things don't seem to have a lot of consequences that negatively affect Regina the way the consequences of other characters' actions come back to haunt them.

This is my exact problem with shipping Regina with anyone currently on the show. The show is so hell-bent on making everyone connected in their pasts that they've completely botched the opportunity to give Regina a love interest whom she didn't personally screw over during her reign as the Evil Queen. Robin could have been that person but then they had to go and make Regina be the one to imprison Marian and now as far as I'm concerned, the whole thing is so very icky. Because the fact of the matter is, all that pain and grief Robin went through losing Marian and having to try to raise Roland on his own was because of Regina. In one timeline, Regina executes Marian. In the other timeline, Regina imprisons Marian, who then escapes and time travels with Emma and Hook. Either way, Regina is responsible for breaking up that family. She clearly didn't care at the time that she was breaking up a family; how much you want to bet it never even occurred to her that this woman she's imprisoning and sentencing to death may have people out there who love her and would miss her? That same pain that Cora inflicted on her, she inflicted on Robin. But the show refuses to go there. It refuses to allow the characters to acknowledge Regina's role in separating Robin from Marian in the first place. So now you've got this relationship that's surviving based on ... what? Lust? Because why wouldn't Robin be utterly disgusted to find out that Regina imprisoned Marian? Does he even know? If you're not going to use the plot you set up in a realistic manner, show, why even bring it up?? But for me, this relationship is so very unhealthy because once again, you've got a victim in love with his abuser. Regina may not have done anything to Robin's person but she split up his family. And by some miracle, he gets his loving wife back and he's in love with the woman who took her from him in the first place but we never see them acknowledge the elephant in the room. And he's so in love with Regina that his wife, miraculously returned from the dead, is dying again, and he goes off and sleeps with the woman who took her from him in the first place. That's just all kinds of messed up. So yeah, I really need for Regina's love interest to be someone who had no previous dealings with her whatsoever.

Just got the chance to watch the above video of the panel. There are no words for how much I absolutely adore her.

Oh my goodness, I'd completely forgotten that! "Had my fiance killed"?! She's totally presenting it as if a ten-year-old put out a hit on the man. FFS, Regina.

My thing with Regina is that at some point, her choices have to be her own. No, she did not want to marry Leopold. Yes, she tried to run away and Cora stopped her. But even after she trapped Cora in the mirror, she still went along with it. If she truly did not want this marriage, why go through with it when the person pressuring her into it is gone? In my eyes, it's because she did have her own agenda, even if that agenda was revenge. And I'm sorry, but that is most definitely on Regina. As far as Regina being trapped in the castle, this is also the woman who spent how many years exacting revenge on a child for someone else killing her boyfriend. Anything that comes out of her mouth, as far as I'm concerned, is suspect, because her perspective has been shown to be suspect. I'm not saying she didn't feel trapped, but her language, especially to Tink ("prisoner" and the like), calls to mind shackles and cells and punishments for going awol. We have no evidence of that. We've seen she was free to disappear for magic lessons and visiting friends. That's not a literal prisoner who has no freedom. And once Regina was practiced enough in magic, she could have just disappeared. Just poofed out of the castle and into another kingdom and blended in with them. If she'd done it well, no one would have been able to find her. We have no indication that anyone in the kingdom paid Regina any mind until she put a price on Snow's head. But she chose to stay, because she had plans of her own. And regardless of how shitty a husband Leopold may or may not have been, he did not deserve to be murdered. (This, incidentally, is where I first came across the marital rape headcanon. I argued this same point on LiveJournal and the other poster was all, "Wow, so a rapist doesn't deserve to be killed?" Needless to say, I was all, "WTF?!") Basically, for me, Regina needs to take responsibility for her choices instead of constantly blaming her path on Snow, Leopold, Rumple, the constituents she terrorized, Emma, and the Author. She may have been led towards a path by the hand but no one had a metaphorical gun to her head and forced her to go down it. She made choices out of anger and vengeance, and those choices (and the consequences of those choices) are on her.

But that's where the headcanon comes in. :) That could all very well be true, but it could be just as true that they did in fact leave the marriage unconsummated. We have no indication on camera one way or the other.

Those exact kind of headcanons, yes. It is seriously a thing and it doesn't fit into anything we've seen onscreen. Not at all. Don't even get me started on it.

The original poster is a notorious Evil Regal. (Like, one of the ones who totally argue headcanon as if it were actual canon and then doesn't understand why everyone doesn't see it that way ... like, there is no televised evidence for your argument, that's why.) I would take her opinions with a grain of salt.

I'm sure there is some homophobia directed at SQers, simply because people suck, but I also think it would help if some of the more militant SQers didn't call absolutely everyone who don't like SQ for reasons having nothing to do with the characters' sexualities and are instead based on the history between the two characters homophobic.

Thank you. I guess I just wasn't expecting it to hit me that hard. Clearly I'm not ready yet but the shelter holds the applications for six months so I'll at least have some ducks in a row for when I am. :)

So ... I went to the animal shelter today to fill out a kitten adoption application for when I’m ready. (They're still two or three weeks from having kittens available, anyway.) The whole act gave everything a bit of finality that I wasn’t really anticipating. I still miss my little munchkin.

Did she really make any friends when she stayed with Ingrid? Six months is not a long time. If Ingrid was foster care, kids would come and go. Emma by that point had been moved around so much that she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. When she saw the papers in Ingrid's bag, she immediately assumed she was being moved again. That tells me she didn't once consider that her placement with Ingrid would be permanent. So again we're back to Emma not reaching out to make friends because why bother if they weren't going to be a lasting fixture in her life? She also tells Killian that after Lily, she didn't go out of her way to make friends. She was placed with Ingrid immediately after the incident with Lily, so she was still smarting from Lily's betrayal.

We have seen Regina poof both herself and other people to physical places before, most recently Anna and Kristoff in "Shattered Sight." If I recall correctly, the only one who says that the only way out of the Infinite Forest is by magic is Rumple but he also wanted Charming to do hide the true love potion in Maleficent for him so, y'know, grains of salt. It could very well be that there's a path through the Infinite Forest that you're fine if you follow (which is what I believe the Peddler/Author says) but if you're just plunked down somewhere in the middle of it, finding that path is nigh on impossible. (Which is, incidentally, the basis for every single maze in every single fantasy video game I've ever played.)

This. I really, really like that Hook got his revenge ... and it changed nothing. Milah didn't miraculously come back and all that pain still remained. He learned that vengeance is a hollow victory and that in the end, vengeance wasn't really what he wanted at all. This, too. I very much appreciate Hook's self-awareness. re: the discussion in the fandom thread: I wasn't a huge Hook fan in season two, either, but I kinda think that was the point. He was an asshole and the characters treated him as such. I was super against the idea of him and Emma together in season two. Then over the hiatus between seasons two and three, I liked the idea in a crackship-y kind of way, mostly for all the apoplectic Daddy Charming stuff I was imagining would arise. Then season three happened and the character grew up and now Captain Swan is my happy place and I think they're the cutest things in the history of cute things. So considering the trajectory the character has taken, I think his early asshattery was very much intentional.

No, but Snow stole an egg from a dragon and it hatched a human. To me, that's just as crazy as an ostrich egg hatching a human simply because humans don't hatch from eggs. As noted above, Dwarfs aren't human. They're Dwarfs. They do hatch from eggs fully grown. They have no mothers. That's not human. We've seen countless times on this show that magic is not hereditary. Snow and Charming and, if Ingrid can be believed, baby Neal all don't have magic but Emma does. Henry does not. Zelena had powers from babyhood but Regina and Cora needed to be taught. I get that they were playing with already-formed Disney properties here, but Elsa has magic while Anna does not and as far as I know, neither do their parents. Ingrid had magic while her two sisters did not. The whole reason Ingrid needed to wait for Emma to complete her magical sister trifecta was because innate magical abilities are rare. Just because the mother can shapeshift does not automatically mean the offspring can, too. We come into this knowing Maleficent lost a child. I'm reasonably sure most everyone figured out the child was Lily. But for Snow and Charming, a dragon laid an egg, ergo Maleficent's "child" was a baby dragon. Obviously there was a chance the being in the egg was a human baby, because it was, but as far as I'm concerned, it was so outside the realm of possibility that I don't fault Snow and Charming for not thinking of it. I was never arguing that it was. It was still wrong whichever way you slice it. All I'm saying is that their intent was not to harm a human baby, nor was it their intent to separate a family.

I'm not arguing that what Snow and Charming did was right by any stretch of the imagination, because it wasn't at all. But I am seeing a lot of assumption that obviously the being in the egg was human when I don't see at all why that should be obvious because even in the Enchanted Forest, are human babies hatched from dragon eggs all the time? If they are, then okay. If they're not ... that would be the magical equivalent of me expecting a human baby to hatch from an ostrich egg. I never said it was, nor was Snow and Charming's intent to kill, regardless of what was in that egg.

I still think there's a difference between a dragon and a person, and make no mistake, they thought there was a baby dragon in that egg. Snow even says "Do you think her dragon offspring will be any different?" It may or may not have been naive to believe so, but the fact remains, that was what they believed. (I still maintain that unless Snow and Charming had witnessed -- or even heard of -- a human baby emerging from a dragon egg, why would they expect a human baby to emerge from a dragon egg? Just because the mother can shapeshift? Who says that's a hereditary thing? There's a lot of assumption going on again based on the 100% knowledge we have as the audience that does not necessarily transfer to the characters.) Snow and Charming never intended to harm a human baby. Regina sent her guard in to the castle with full intent on killing a human baby. Not to mention all those other people she killed and all those children she sent to their deaths. As far as I'm concerned, Snow and Charming are nowhere near Regina level.

I was not at all suggesting that they didn't take their lesson and apply it previously. I was responding to the point that they only started acting super-guilty and worried about Emma turning dark this season and not any other time. They were worried that Emma was going to turn dark when she found out. That was where I was saying they didn't have to worry about it up until now. Emma was never going to find out if only Snow and Charming were around but once Cruella and Ursula show up, well, now there are two people who know and could easily tell.

This. I took that to mean that whatever the spell did (assuming it in actuality did anything) tipped the scales more in favor of light than dark but because free will is a thing that exists, it's not certain. Emma could always grow to choose the dark path, which was why she needed her parents to guide her toward the light path. We know that Emma grew up with absolutely no guidance whatsoever. She still grew up to be a good person on her own because she chose to be. Because she grew up around darkness and decided that was not how she wanted to live her life. She did not want to inflict on others the pain that was inflicted on her, she did not want others to live through the same things she did. She has shades of gray, of course, but she's still fundamentally a good person and that's completely on her.

This could very well be a fanwank, but up until Cruella and Ursula came to town, they didn't really have to worry about it. The only people who knew were Snow, Charming, the Apprentice, and the Evil Trio. No one had seen the Apprentice, Cruella and Ursula were somewhere but who knew where, and Maleficent was trapped in whatever ghost-like form underneath the library. Their issues in Storybrooke have been more about Emma finding out and the knowledge of what was done pushing her towards the dark side (not that she'd turn dark just because) than any sort of residual guilt for what was done; hence all the lying and cover-ups. So until Cruella and Ursula found their way inside Storybrooke's town limits, they didn't have to worry about the secret getting out because there was no one who would tell.

I actually think that was the entire point. How sad and lonely must Emma's childhood have been if she didn't make her first friend until 14/15 and that one afternoon and evening in the company of a girl who was essentially a stranger is the best friendship she ever had? If, as she said earlier in the season, six months was the absolute longest she'd ever stayed in a foster home, that kind of instability doesn't lend itself well to making and keeping friends. I'm sure at a certain point she just stopped trying because what would be the point if she was just going to get moved again? Why put herself through the pain of making friends only to have to leave them?

I think this has more to do with her first family keeping her until she was three and then returning her. If they fostered her until she was three but never adopted her and then sent her back into the system at three, you now have an angry, confused, scared toddler who is well beyond prime adoptable babyhood. An angry, confused, scared toddler is a difficult child and not every prospective parent wants to deal with that. When my sister-in-law and brother took custody of my nephew (my sister-in-law's sister's son), he was almost three. Blond hair, brown eyes, and the social worker told them flat out that he would have a bitch of a time getting placed because he was 1) almost three, and 2) "emotionally troubled." (He wasn't so much emotionally troubled as had never had stability in his young life and was angry and confused.) ETA: Or what aquarian1 said, hehe.

If we're getting into karmic justice, shouldn't their lives as a whole matter? Exactly how far down did this drag them? Does their inherent goodness in all other aspects cushion the fall a bit? If the hole is 20 feet deep and this is a 10 foot drop and they started at the top, they have 10 feet to make up for. Compare that to, say, Regina, who may have already started 10 feet down the hole when this happened. If she'd been the one who did this and dropped 10 feet, she would have 20 feet to get back to the top. It's perhaps a simplistic way of looking at it, but I do think there is a difference between Snow and Charming and the rest of the villains. Intent matters. I still maintain that the fact they thought there was a baby dragon in that egg matters. I don't care if Snow can talk to birds. Has there ever been a good dragon? Have we ever seen a good dragon? Every time we've seen them on this show, they've been terrorizing villages. No, it's not at all right to attempt to tip the scales of any living creature, but their thinking was that the dragon was going to be evil anyway and what's a little more darkness? They did not intend to hurt a human baby and they did not intend to separate Maleficent and the baby. It was absolutely a selfish thing to do but as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Which is true, and I don't think the show is saying anything different. Is "pure" 100% clean or is it Ivory soap, 99.44% clean? No one is 100% clean, and that was my original point. Snow and Charming have stumbled along the way but they were still considered heroic and pure of heart enough to go through Glinda's door. I can certainly take that as a testament to how far Snow and Charming have come after their mistakes rather than calling it a retcon.

Walt was an Author. As mentioned above, August also namedropped Plato and Shakespeare as Authors. Maybe it's just me but I actually like the idea that the people we consider the great storytellers throughout history are Authors.