KAOS Agent April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 (edited) I don't think they put much thought into how things really come off because they are always focused on the villain's point of view. Jesters, just marrieds and young children are simply collateral damage in the villain's inability to be satisfied with life. There is simply no understanding that having the Evil Queen "relishing in the horror she wrought" and smiling amidst the carnage makes Regina an irredeemable psychopath. She enjoys the slaughter. It's not about revenge on Snow White at that point. She is truly beyond redemption. It's not just Regina either. I always though the Darkness could be used to explain Rumpel's craziness and psycho tendencies since he completely changed upon becoming the Dark One, but neither Emma nor Hook displayed any such eagerness for violence and blood as Dark Ones. Emma went out of her way not to hurt Zelena's unborn baby and Hook may have been vengeful, but he wasn't enjoying torturing anyone or fantasizing about ripping out someone's throat and crunching his veins with his teeth. It's like the writers didn't even see that those victims were people too. They have lives and families who are suffering just as much (probably more) than the villains they consistently try to make me feel sorry for. If a villain gets slightly off track in their quest for vengeance that's one thing. Showing them crave and revel in torture and violence is another thing completely. Edited April 26, 2018 by KAOS Agent 12 Link to comment
companionenvy April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 (edited) 3 hours ago, KAOS Agent said: It's not just Regina either. I always though the Darkness could be used to explain Rumpel's craziness and psycho tendencies since he completely changed upon becoming the Dark One, but neither Emma nor Hook displayed any such eagerness for violence and blood as Dark Ones. Emma went out of her way not to hurt Zelena's unborn baby and Hook may have been vengeful, but he wasn't enjoying torturing anyone or fantasizing about ripping out someone's throat and crunching his veins with his teeth. This brings up another key question I have. My interpretation of the effect of the Darkness was actually pretty different from yours. Prior to S5, I didn't see Rumple becoming the DO as something that explained, or explained away, his behavior, except to the extent that absolute power corrupts. This was exaggerated by the fact that Rumple had spent so much of his life feeling powerless and humiliated, which left him especially prone to giving in to temptation; his previous experience, even as a reasonably good man, hadn't given him much reason to give a damn about anyone except for Bae, so once he had ultimate power, it was an easy descent from stopping a war to giving into long-standing resentment towards basically everyone else. That's different from the darkness actually removing his moral sense or leaving him with some compulsion to do evil. S5 seemed to me to turn all that on his head. I agree that it turned out Emma was really never much more than light grey as the DO; the worst things she actually did were forcing Violet to break up with Henry and trying to kill Zelena, neither of which is exactly a moral event horizon moment. But it also seemed clear to me that Emma wasn't really morally accountable for these things in the first place. She was constantly fighting visions of Rumple egging her on to evil, to the point where she came pretty close to offing Merida, which would have been a genuinely terrible thing to have done. When other people talked about her, discussions were predicated on the idea that she needed to be rescued from the darkness; when Snowing et al decided she "wasn't Emma" anymore, what they meant was that she had given into the curse and could no longer be reasoned with as the Dark One,, not that there was no coming back if they could find a way to remove it from her. Like, even when Henry was furious with her, if they'd found a way to remove the darkness the next day, I don't think there would have been any lingering resentment, because it hadn't really been Emma. Hook then reinforces this further. It is true that he wound up doing the right thing in fairly spectacular fashion in reasonably short order, but that was before descending to pure evil, like, instantly. Which, again, I don't think he's supposed to be held entirely responsible for, at least. After the fact, he's (rightly) ashamed that he proved so much more immediately susceptible to the darkness than Emma did, and I do think that it is clear that someone's behavior as the DO is tied to elements of their original character: Rumple can't stand being powerless, so he gleefully abuses power, Hook is vengeful and lashes out when hurt, and so his reaction to being lied to by Emma is "kill them all," and Emma is a fundamentally good person, but has been shown in the past to sometimes have more willingness than, say, the Charmings or Henry do to do ethically iffy things for a good reason (I'm thinking specifically of her holding Snow back to allow Regina to take the Lost Boy's heart to question him in Neverland). At the same time, unlike early seasons Rumple, I think Hook and Emma are shown clearly to be not fully accountable for their choices once they're back in their right minds; it is possible for a DO to choose to do the right thing, or be better or worse than another DO, but the DO also does things that he or she would clearly never, ever have done in their original state, to the point where it really wouldn't be fair to punish a person relieved of the darkness for something they had done while under it. Whereas again, Rumple seemed to have been given the capacity to do great evil rather than the inclination for it. To use an analogy, I think in S5, Once basically started taking the approach that more or less applied to souled/non-souled vampires in the Buffy-verse. Angel, and later Spike, felt they had to atone for things they had done while soulless, and it was significant that Angel's vampire incarnation, Angelus, was really, really evil even by vamp standards. In addition, while Spike ultimately does get his soul back, he's capable of some growth even before then, which does suggest a certain moral agency. On the other hand, Spike notwithstanding, vampires without souls have been essentially robbed of any ethical sense plus have a natural lust for human blood, so while a vampire can undergo experiences that convince him to change (they still have emotions, which is how Buffy manages to influence Spike for the better), they are so fundamentally altered by the change that once Angelus is back to being Angel, he's no longer precisely the being who committed those crimes, which is why a spot of mass murder doesn't prevent Buffy from loving him once he's "back" (the Scoobies take more time to come around, but even that's more, IMO, out of a sense that Angel can't be trusted as long as there's a chance he could lose his soul again than from a maturely considered belief that Angelus's crimes are fully chargeable to Angel. And on Angel:the Series, team Angel holds no grudge against him once their brief encounters with Angelus are over). Whereas prior to Season 5, and maybe even after it, I didn't actually see original recipe Rumple as less responsible for his DO crimes than Regina or Hook are for the crimes they one committed If Rumple was no longer the DO, he wouldn't be capable of causing much damage, in the same way Regina wouldn't have been capable of causing much damage if she had been a random peasant and not the queen, or even if her magic had been taken away from her entirely, but I think he has to own what he did. For this reason, I also didn't like the portrayal of non-Dark One Rumple in season 5 (or, one of a few reasons I didn't like it) was because I don't think removing the dark curse from him should have made him revert more or less to pre-DO Rumple; it should have just removed his power. Edited April 26, 2018 by companionenvy 1 Link to comment
Rumsy4 April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 5 hours ago, KAOS Agent said: If a villain gets slightly off track in their quest for vengeance that's one thing. Showing them crave and revel in torture and violence is another thing completely. Rumple enjoyed physically and psychologically torturing people, and Regina enjoyed murdering people. There’s nothing to excuse that away. I recently was reminded of Rumple gleefully beating the crap out of people (sometimes right in front of Belle’s eyes), and really wonder how anyone could stay with such a violent person without fearing for themselves? “Because True Love” was a piss-poor reason. 5 Link to comment
Rumsy4 April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 9 hours ago, tennisgurl said: Not to get all paranoid, but I always wondered if they doubled down on Hooks villain cred for the same reason they ret conned bad deeds into the good guys backstories: To make their pet villains look better, and because adding morally dark stuff in peoples backstories (or learning pointless lessons) is basically all they had in their wheelhouse after awhile. By making people look worse, they feel like they can make Regina and Rumple look better. This is what I've thought all along. Hook was in danger of becoming more sympathetic and popular than their pet villains, so they cut him down to size. I really do think it was Hook's remorse and self-loathing that continued to make him more believable as a redeemed villain. But the angst and self-flagellation got too much in Season 6. 9 hours ago, Camera One said: I think the reason is the usual - their lack of creativity. This was a large part of it too. The writers were too lazy/afraid to step out of their self-established tropes for their characters. But viewers want to see progression. Not the same old same old for six years. That's why the show steadily kept losing viewers. 7 Link to comment
andromeda331 April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 That makes sense. He was becoming so popular. More so then their beloved Regina and Rumple so A&E gave him the Hero treatment. 3 Link to comment
andromeda331 April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 8 hours ago, KAOS Agent said: Hook may have been vengeful, but he wasn't enjoying torturing anyone or fantasizing about ripping out someone's throat and crunching his veins with his teeth. It's like the writers didn't even see that those victims were people too. They have lives and families who are suffering just as much (probably more) than the villains they consistently try to make me feel sorry for. If a villain gets slightly off track in their quest for vengeance that's one thing. Showing them crave and revel in torture and violence is another thing completely. They really don't which is really weird. They love showing us Rumple and Regina murdering people. Doing really horrible stuff. Slaughtering villages, murdering a groom on his wedding day, killing a mute, sending children to their deaths, murdering his wife. But then once they finish showing us that or telling us about it they immediately want us to forget. It was no big deal. It was in the past. While also making anyone horrified by those crimes or trying to avenge is clearly evil. That is completely fucked up. Regina smiles as she slaughters a village but the one lone survivor who tries to murder her? He's deserved to be murdered. Oh, look how funny Regina is! She murdered a groom because she was sad! Rumple turns a man into a bug and steps on him! Hilarious! He murders a mute. Who cares. Rumple murders his wife. Who cares about her. You can't show villains crave and revel in their crimes and then act like its no big deal later. It doesn't work that way. 7 Link to comment
andromeda331 April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 5 hours ago, companionenvy said: This brings up another key question I have. My interpretation of the effect of the Darkness was actually pretty different from yours. Prior to S5, I didn't see Rumple becoming the DO as something that explained, or explained away, his behavior, except to the extent that absolute power corrupts. This was exaggerated by the fact that Rumple had spent so much of his life feeling powerless and humiliated, which left him especially prone to giving in to temptation; his previous experience, even as a reasonably good man, hadn't given him much reason to give a damn about anyone except for Bae, so once he had ultimate power, it was an easy descent from stopping a war to giving into long-standing resentment towards basically everyone else. That's different from the darkness actually removing his moral sense or leaving him with some compulsion to do evil. S5 seemed to me to turn all that on his head. I agree that it turned out Emma was really never much more than light grey as the DO; the worst things she actually did were forcing Violet to break up with Henry and trying to kill Zelena, neither of which is exactly a moral event horizon moment. But it also seemed clear to me that Emma wasn't really morally accountable for these things in the first place. She was constantly fighting visions of Rumple egging her on to evil, to the point where she came pretty close to offing Merida, which would have been a genuinely terrible thing to have done. When other people talked about her, discussions were predicated on the idea that she needed to be rescued from the darkness; when Snowing et al decided she "wasn't Emma" anymore, what they meant was that she had given into the curse and could no longer be reasoned with as the Dark One,, not that there was no coming back if they could find a way to remove it from her. Like, even when Henry was furious with her, if they'd found a way to remove the darkness the next day, I don't think there would have been any lingering resentment, because it hadn't really been Emma. Hook then reinforces this further. It is true that he wound up doing the right thing in fairly spectacular fashion in reasonably short order, but that was before descending to pure evil, like, instantly. Which, again, I don't think he's supposed to be held entirely responsible for, at least. After the fact, he's (rightly) ashamed that he proved so much more immediately susceptible to the darkness than Emma did, and I do think that it is clear that someone's behavior as the DO is tied to elements of their original character: Rumple can't stand being powerless, so he gleefully abuses power, Hook is vengeful and lashes out when hurt, and so his reaction to being lied to by Emma is "kill them all," and Emma is a fundamentally good person, but has been shown in the past to sometimes have more willingness than, say, the Charmings or Henry do to do ethically iffy things for a good reason (I'm thinking specifically of her holding Snow back to allow Regina to take the Lost Boy's heart to question him in Neverland). At the same time, unlike early seasons Rumple, I think Hook and Emma are shown clearly to be not fully accountable for their choices once they're back in their right minds; it is possible for a DO to choose to do the right thing, or be better or worse than another DO, but the DO also does things that he or she would clearly never, ever have done in their original state, to the point where it really wouldn't be fair to punish a person relieved of the darkness for something they had done while under it. Whereas again, Rumple seemed to have been given the capacity to do great evil rather than the inclination for it. To use an analogy, I think in S5, Once basically started taking the approach that more or less applied to souled/non-souled vampires in the Buffy-verse. Angel, and later Spike, felt they had to atone for things they had done while soulless, and it was significant that Angel's vampire incarnation, Angelus, was really, really evil even by vamp standards. In addition, while Spike ultimately does get his soul back, he's capable of some growth even before then, which does suggest a certain moral agency. On the other hand, Spike notwithstanding, vampires without souls have been essentially robbed of any ethical sense plus have a natural lust for human blood, so while a vampire can undergo experiences that convince him to change (they still have emotions, which is how Buffy manages to influence Spike for the better), they are so fundamentally altered by the change that once Angelus is back to being Angel, he's no longer precisely the being who committed those crimes, which is why a spot of mass murder doesn't prevent Buffy from loving him once he's "back" (the Scoobies take more time to come around, but even that's more, IMO, out of a sense that Angel can't be trusted as long as there's a chance he could lose his soul again than from a maturely considered belief that Angelus's crimes are fully chargeable to Angel. And on Angel:the Series, team Angel holds no grudge against him once their brief encounters with Angelus are over). Whereas prior to Season 5, and maybe even after it, I didn't actually see original recipe Rumple as less responsible for his DO crimes than Regina or Hook are for the crimes they one committed If Rumple was no longer the DO, he wouldn't be capable of causing much damage, in the same way Regina wouldn't have been capable of causing much damage if she had been a random peasant and not the queen, or even if her magic had been taken away from her entirely, but I think he has to own what he did. For this reason, I also didn't like the portrayal of non-Dark One Rumple in season 5 (or, one of a few reasons I didn't like it) was because I don't think removing the dark curse from him should have made him revert more or less to pre-DO Rumple; it should have just removed his power. I agree. In season five we saw two different Dark Ones and neither were as bad as Rumple. Yes, Hook descended fast as he predicted but he pulled back from it and did the right thing. Emma never really did anything bad despite her constantly being accused of being worse then Regina (which never in a million years not even close) she took a heart that ended up freeing Merlin and wanted to kill Zelena in a way that would have ended the Dark Ones forever. Yeah, that is so evil. But Rumple's slide to evil was really quick. There's also the fact he chose to keep his magic rather then follow his son to a place without it. He made excuses to Bae as to why he couldn't get rid of the power. But zero as to why he couldn't stop hurting people. Because he didn't want to. He loved the power and they have shown over and over that Rumple loves his power more then anyone or anything. He could have settled down with Belle at any point and had a nice life, probably a couple kids. That's not the Dark One power that's Rumple. Link to comment
CCTC April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 I think part of the reason season 5 was kind of meh, is because they were reluctant to go all Dark-One with her. Her Dark One ended up being pretty boring. She tormented Meridia, but who could blame her for that. One interesting thing about Hook and Emma post-Dark One. Neither of them hungered for that power afterwards and wanted it back, whereas Rumple could not wait to jump back in once freed of the darkness. His heart was clean for about a half a week before he blackened it again. That is one of the reasons his latest redemption seems false. 5 Link to comment
Camera One April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 It also seemed like originally, the deal-making had to do with being the Dark One. But I don't remember Dark Swan going up to multiple people with contracts and "All magic comes with a price!". 1 Link to comment
KingOfHearts April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 (edited) What's creepy about this show is that sometimes Regina and Rumple's murders were played for comedic effect. Remember Regina's musical number where she twisted the necks of two guards for no reason? I'm pretty sure killing the jester was meant to be funny, since he was close to the camera to appear annoying to the audience. Rumple turning Gaston into a rose was probably meant to be humorous too. Can't quote from phone very easily, but @Camera One, didn't Rumple strike a few deals before becoming the Dark One? I'm thinking it started with selling off his secondborn child. After that, the deal making was just a clean and neat way to cover the price of DO magic. Edited April 26, 2018 by KingOfHearts 3 Link to comment
Rumsy4 April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 18 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said: What's creepy about this show is that sometimes Regina and Rumple's murders were played for comedic effect. Remember Regina's musical number where she twisted the necks of two guards for no reason? I'm pretty sure killing the jester was meant to be funny, since he was close to the camera to appear annoying to the audience. Regina's murder of Wish Snowing was played for laughs too. They keeled over instantly like puppets. 1 Link to comment
KingOfHearts April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 Those two guards that Regina killed during the musical... if everyone lost their memories of what happened on that day, won't somebody notice they're missing? Link to comment
Rumsy4 April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 She probably killed a couple of soldiers on a daily basis. 1 Link to comment
Shanna Marie April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 14 hours ago, Camera One said: I think the reason is the usual - their lack of creativity. Yeah, I don't think there's a conscious "we need to make the heroes look worse than Regina" mentality. It's more a case that the only way they know to add what they consider "complexity" to a character is to show the character being different in the past. When Hook was still just barely redeemed and we mostly knew him as a bad guy pirate, they showed us Lt. Jones, who was a super uptight, by-the-book teetotaler. How complex! But once he was fully on the hero side of things, they started showing him doing awful stuff in the past to contrast to the present, to the point they even went back before he was Lt. Jones to show him having been a bit sketchy then (at the very least a drunk who gambled away his and his brother's life savings). Even with Regina, once she was a hero in the present, they had her flashbacks get worse and worse. With the people who were already heroes, like the Charmings, we got stuff like the eggnapping. Or Emma getting an innocent woman killed while trying to look up her past (and having a bounty hunter after her for skipping bail when she was an adult, which doesn't fit with continuity). As for the Dark One stuff, I came up with a bit of a handwave during season five. This is purely my headcanon and not based on anything explicitly said on the show, but I think it kind of works. Rumple deliberately and consciously chose to become the Dark One by way of treachery and murder with an agenda already in mind, so he didn't need any prodding from the Darkess/Head Nimue to use the power. His agenda was in line with what Nimue would have wanted him to do. After all, she became the Dark One by using the power to kill someone who'd made her feel powerless (and it's typical of this show that the way to become the most evil Evil ever is to kill a mass murderer). The Darkness was probably acting more as a cheerleader to Rumple. Rumple seems to have managed to stay firmly in the driver's seat, using the Darkness rather than the Darkness using him. Emma took on the Darkness deliberately, but not with the intent of using it at all. Her only agenda was to hold onto it and keep it from doing harm until she could come up with a way to destroy it. As a result, she got a lot of nagging from the Darkness about needing to use it, and it was a struggle for her to hold onto herself, but she was still more or less in the driver's seat. Hook had it forced upon him when he was on the verge of death (possibly even already dead), so he was weak, not even conscious when the Darkness filled him. As a result, he didn't get the chance to be in the driver's seat and with him it worked more like a demonic possession. The Darkness was mostly in control of him and manipulating him when he resisted at all by drawing upon the darkest urges of his inner self. It took everything he had to pull himself together mentally and emotionally to regain control of himself and fight off the Darkness enough to do what he wanted to do, rather than what it wanted him to do. The circumstances of them all becoming Dark Ones were different enough that I could buy the difference in how it played out. Rumple was always a pretty nasty person (Belle's claims of his having a good heart aside). He just became a nasty person with power that allowed him to be the person he'd always wished he could be. Emma and Hook may be the only people ever to become Dark Ones without killing to do so and who didn't want that power, so it may have altered how it affected them. 7 Link to comment
companionenvy April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 25 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said: eah, I don't think there's a conscious "we need to make the heroes look worse than Regina" mentality. It's more a case that the only way they know to add what they consider "complexity" to a character is to show the character being different in the past. Agreed. The show's favorite tactic was doing a total 180, rather than thinking in subtler ways about how a character might develop over time, or have been different under different circumstances. So, Bae, who was a thoroughly decent kid with a lot of integrity (until the retcon episode in S6), becomes petty thief Neal Cassidy circa 2001 because --- surprise! In the Heroes and Villains world, basically, Regina = Snow and Snow = Regina; in Wish World, tough as nails Emma is totally useless. Whereas it would have been a lot interesting to explore subtler gradations; an evil Snow wouldn't logically have been more or less identical to evil Regina, because they aren't the same people, and an Emma raised in the EF by Snowing could have been visibly different without being a total damsel in distress. 32 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said: Rumple was always a pretty nasty person (Belle's claims of his having a good heart aside). He just became a nasty person with power that allowed him to be the person he'd always wished he could be. I agree with almost your whole post, but part ways with you here. While, as I said before, I do think that his actions as the DO were a logical extension of human Rumple getting power, rather than the externally imposed result of the darkness, I actually think he was a decent person earlier in life. Human Rumple's tragedy, to me is that he was someone who valued heroism, didn't have the strength to actually live out a heroic narrative, and, crucially, was forced in several circumstances to confront this in the most painful ways possible. And, significantly to me -- and here's another reason I didn't like non-DO S5 Rumple -- I don't actually think Rumple was necessarily more cowardly than most people. He wasn't particularly brave, but the situations in which he most showed cowardice were also fairly stacked against him. It is one thing to accept the possibility of death in battle, maybe even in the course of doing something particularly heroic. It is another thing to have a seer tell you that you are definitely going to be cannon fodder tomorrow. Similarly, Hook - as he acknowledges while talking to DO Emma -- put Rumple in a total no win situation solely to further humiliate him. Rumple didn't have a chance in hell of saving Milah. It might have been satisfied some abstract sense of honor to fight Hook, but the upshot would have been dead Rumple, orphan Bae, and Milah in no better position than before. Frankly, most of us aren't natural heroes. The thing is that most of us never have to find that out. Rumple did, and, aside from having to live with that, paid a terrible price for it, losing the love of his wife and the respect of everyone else around him. And yes, he should definitely have listened to Milah and moved away, rather than digging in his heels and staying where he was. But I still think he was fundamentally a good man, which is consistent, not only with Belle's naive faith, but Bae's far more clear-eyed perception of his father as a once decent person who had been irretrievably corrupted. 5A Rumple, by contrast, really was a sniveling coward who had to be pulled kicking and screaming into becoming a "hero." 2 Link to comment
Shanna Marie April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 15 minutes ago, companionenvy said: But I still think he was fundamentally a good man, which is consistent, not only with Belle's naive faith, but Bae's far more clear-eyed perception of his father as a once decent person who had been irretrievably corrupted. I guess it depends on whether you look at him as having been corrupted by power or as power merely bringing out and enhancing something that was there all along. Does power really "corrupt," or does power remove the constraints and provide opportunities to act on one's impulses that were there all along? I don't really blame Rumple for most of his "cowardice" because he was, for the most part, acting in a way that most people might be when facing those circumstances (though didn't he even get the prophecy from the seer by withholding water from her?). I think it's a worse sign that he was prone to acting out of selfishness, with total disregard for how his actions might affect others, like we saw with him refusing to listen to Milah's pleas for them to move, with his comfort being a priority over her happiness, or him selling their secondborn child without thinking about how that would affect his wife. I also don't think that a truly decent man would have betrayed and murdered someone in order to obtain power. I don't think he was evil all along, but was his more or less decent behavior because he was truly decent or because he was too powerless to get away with being anything but decent and too afraid to even try to see what he could get away with? The moment he had the chance to have power, it went to his head and he almost instantly became a horrible person, in a very petty way. It wasn't a slow corruption on a slippery slope. That makes me suspect that if he'd been born into any kind of power or wealth where he didn't have to worry about the consequences of bad actions, he'd have been a petty tyrant, even without having magical darkness. Look at the kind of person he was in Storybrooke when he had no magical power and no awareness of who or what he was until he was awakened upon Emma's arrival. With just a bit of wealth and status, he was cold and vindictive and lorded his power over others. He's always been capable of being decent to the people he cared about. When Bae wanted him to get rid of the power, it wasn't because he was awful to Bae but because Bae couldn't tolerate the way he was treating other people. But how would he have treated other people before he became the Dark One if he hadn't been afraid of what they might do to him? 1 Link to comment
Rumsy4 April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 (edited) I think for me Rumple crossed the line to completely unsympathetic when he proposed to Belle using the fake dagger as his alibi. He deliberately manipulated Belle's naivety to take revenge on Zelena. From then on, he didn't have any mitigating factors for his bad or evil choices, flimsy or otherwise. If the writers had planned to make him an unredeemable villain after his resurrection, that would've been an excellent choice. They could have shown him slowly losing all of his humanity after the loss of his son. But they meant to redeem him, and didn't have him do a single decent thing from that point, and sent him off into the sunset with Belle and their child, and his power intact. Edited April 26, 2018 by Rumsy4 3 Link to comment
KingOfHearts April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 Going back to "Skin Deep", that episode seemed to believe it was Rumple's Dark One curse that made him so beastly. His refusal to get rid of it was framed as cowardice, born from the idea that no one could possibly love him. The POV was definitely Belle's. It kind of worked in a vacuum, but it was later retconned to "Rumple was just evil the whole time and Belle secretly loved it". Originally, it seemed like the curse corrupted him. But as we found out in S5, Rumple is just an asshole. Link to comment
companionenvy April 26, 2018 Share April 26, 2018 1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said: I guess it depends on whether you look at him as having been corrupted by power or as power merely bringing out and enhancing something that was there all along. Does power really "corrupt," or does power remove the constraints and provide opportunities to act on one's impulses that were there all along? I think it is a little of both. He was corrupted by power, but only because the totality of his experiences prior to that point --and, yes, elements of his core personality -- had made him susceptible to such corruption. For me, though, the reason early season Rumple remained someone whose redemption I could root for was because I could see how the events of his pre-DO lifetime had gradually turned someone who did have basically good impulses and intentions into a villain. It goes back to our earlier conversation about Hook, and also to our even earlier one about the reedemability equation, so to speak. Hook was redeemable in part because there were several highly traumatic events in his history that gave us a somewhat convincing portrait of how a person who was once a goody-two shoes naval officer went rogue and then broke bad. It wasn't just random, psychotic evil, it was the sum total of a complicated set of events that produced someone who was guilty of terrible things, but who could believably be credited with enough of a lingering conscience to give him a desire to change. Indeed, I get the sense that even during his lowest points, there was a level at which Hook desperately wanted a way out. That's why he was so quick to float the idea of abandoning piracy for Bae, and I think if Bae hadn't rejected him (which I don't at all blame him for doing, BTW), he would have done it, just like Wish Hook reformed for Alice. That's also why he so readily embraced team Hero after meeting Emma - and he would have done it earlier, I think, if not for the beanstalk betrayal (which I don't blame her for doing, either). I don't think Rumple was looking for a way out, of course; quite the contrary, he was consistently horrified at the thought of giving up his power, once he had it. But in his case, too, I find the circumstances psychologically understandable enough not to write him off as rotten to the core, or to conclude that he wouldn't be capable of change under the right circumstances. No one should have the kind of power the DO has, but someone with a different background wouldn't have the same motivation for abusing it that Rumple would, because his backstory is specifically tied to a lifetime of powerlessness and humiliation. So yeah, DO Snow wouldn't have been likely to giggle as she murdered people who sneezed funny around Snowflake, but then, she's someone whose life story doesn't involve years and years as a pariah after repeatedly failing tests that had been kind of rigged in the first place. She suffered plenty, obviously, but it wasn't the kind of suffering that would seem likely to manifest itself in that particular way. Rumple was partially to blame for his own plight, but his sense of resentment wasn't wholly misplaced. So the fact that he was susceptible to corruption by the darkness doesn't, to me, mean that he was inherently a bad man - just one who was a uniquely poor candidate for dealing with the power he had been granted. If he had been born into a life of privilege and had never been abandoned by his father, rejected by Milah, scorned by his neighbors, etc, he would have wound up a totally different kind of person, and wouldn't, IMO, necessarily have been a spoiled bully, because DO Rumple abuses power, not because he's privileged , but precisely because he hasn't been. Lacking As for Gold, the relationship between cursed and EF selves is so complicated that it doesn't prove much for me; certainly, whatever the curse did, it wasn't returning people to a blank slate or bringing out their truest nature. For me, an effective redemption arc for Rumple, besides avoiding the extreme yo-yo-ing, would have had to have him make real connections with people other than immediate family members, since I think the original reason he was able to see everyone else as so disposable is precisely because he really never had that. Instead, he pretty resolutely resisted efforts to expand his own circle even so far as to consistently include Henry, and, within a year of the end of S6, retreated to a life that included no one but Belle and Gideon. Which isn't convincing in terms of long-term redemption, since being able to be good in a world in which you interact with no one but the two people you love most isn't all that impressive. I haven't been watching S7, but I understand that post-Belle's death, Rumple is still on the same see-saw where he at least considers doing terrible things to others in order to serve his own end of reuniting with Belle. Even if he doesn't go through with it, it is hard for me to buy someone as fundamentally changed if they're just barely able to avoid resorting right back to total villain territory as soon as the motive is good enough. See also Regina considering killing Marian in S4. 1 Link to comment
Rumsy4 April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 I didn't think of Rumple as irredeemable in earlier seasons. In fact, he used to be one of my favorite charatcers in Season 1, when he retained some ambiguity. But in later seasons, he become more and more two-dimensional, and he's now lost all of his complexity. The only way for him to be a good person now is to live in a bubble with nothing around that could tempt him to evil. Not interesting. 2 Link to comment
KingOfHearts April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 12 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said: I didn't think of Rumple as irredeemable in earlier seasons. In fact, he used to be one of my favorite charatcers in Season 1, when he retained some ambiguity. But in later seasons, he become more and more two-dimensional, and he's now lost all of his complexity. The only way for him to be a good person now is to live in a bubble with nothing around that could tempt him to evil. Not interesting. 4A destroyed him. That was the turning point for him. He had everything he wanted, only to throw it away to get power he didn't need. The Hat gave him very weak character motivation, imo. "He's power hungry" should only be half the story. Cora, for example, was a social climber, but she was trying to rid herself and her lineage of the harsh life as a battered miller. Rumple in 4A claimed it was just Zelena PTSD. Like, whatever. The heroes have been through much worse. 6 Link to comment
Shanna Marie April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 25 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said: 4A destroyed him. That was the turning point for him. I thought Rumple was far more redeemable than Regina in season one, but for me the tipping point was season two, when we learned that he murdered his (ex) wife. But domestic violence is a hot-button issue for me, ever since I was on the jury for a case (and I just got home from a presentation about a shelter my church women's group has been raising funds for). For me, there's no coming back from that, especially since he never expressed remorse. Worse, he gloated about it. 5 hours ago, companionenvy said: Rumple was partially to blame for his own plight, but his sense of resentment wasn't wholly misplaced. So the fact that he was susceptible to corruption by the darkness doesn't, to me, mean that he was inherently a bad man - just one who was a uniquely poor candidate for dealing with the power he had been granted. If he had been born into a life of privilege and had never been abandoned by his father, rejected by Milah, scorned by his neighbors, etc, he would have wound up a totally different kind of person, and wouldn't, IMO, necessarily have been a spoiled bully, because DO Rumple abuses power, not because he's privileged , but precisely because he hasn't been. I guess we can't really know what Rumple might have been like if he'd grown up in a stable middle-class home, without a genie to create an alternate universe. I think there's probably supporting evidence that could be claimed, either way. He might have been just as bad a bully, but with power behind him, or he might have turned out okay. There are plenty of people who grow up in powerless situations who come out of it even more compassionate and empathetic, so his destiny wasn't entirely set by his circumstances. I think one of the telling bits of Rumple's character that I think is facilitated by the darkness but that may have always been there is his selfishness. I'm not sure I'd call him a narcissist on the level of Regina. She really doesn't seem to recognize that other people have feelings like hers and doesn't seem capable of connecting what she feels to what other people might be feeling. Rumple seems aware of other people's feelings. He just doesn't really care unless it somehow affects him. That was the big problem in his first marriage, that he knew Milah was unhappy, but his own comfort was more important to him, so he couldn't be bothered to take any steps whatsoever to help make her happy. Likewise with the deal to sell their second-born child. It made things easier for him and he was okay with it, so he didn't even think about how she'd feel. The whole curse thing is pretty extreme, with him being willing to destroy a civilization so he could get what he wanted. He wasn't angry at anyone like Regina was. It wasn't personal. It was just that all those people didn't matter as long as he got what he wanted. When there's been a crisis, he generally won't bother to help unless he's threatened or someone he specifically cares about is threatened. He was willing to just let the whole town be destroyed when he thought his son was dead and Belle didn't remember him. Or there's letting Ingrid kill the whole town as long as he could protect Belle and Henry. He was willing to trap everyone in a bizarre alternate universe so that he could be a hero, and he was willing to kill to stay there. It's the selfishness and lack of caring about most other people that I think is the bad trait he carried with him from before being a Dark One that I think makes a difference in the kind of Dark One he is and that I think makes him kind of a nasty person, with or without the Darkness. It may be something he learned from his father or maybe it's genetic, but he had a better example from the women who raised him, who seemed decent and who were caring enough to take him in. It was just that once he gained more power (magical and otherwise), he was in a position to be selfish on a larger scale and do more harm with it. Before being the Dark One, he was just willing to let his wife be miserable rather than caring about her happiness. Afterward, he was able to destroy the lives of hundreds of people in order to get what he wanted. 5 Link to comment
KAOS Agent April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 It was obvious that the Rumpel character as written in S1 & 2 was different from S3 onward. We know this because there was a deleted scene in Manhattan that featured Rumpel's father running out on his family due to his cowardice, which means the writers were writing from a different perspective on the character's origins. In the same episode, Rumpel told Milah that he'd been living under the shadow of his father's actions for too long. To which she responded that just because his father was a coward doesn't mean Rumpel was. This was always his main stress point in the first two seasons. He maimed himself because he was too afraid to stay and fight thereby marking himself a coward. He abandoned Bae because he was too afraid to give up his power. He tried to murder Henry because of the same fear. It was always about who he was without the power of the Dark One. Then S3 happened and they retconned his father into Peter Pan, but they also had Rumpel overcome his fear and end himself and Pan, so they concluded the Rumpel character arc. In early seasons, he was doing bad things in the present while working towards an understandable goal. After that, he became a conscienceless asshole. He'd screw anyone and everyone and didn't care a bit unless he got caught. It wasn't always about more power either. The 4B finale was only about giving him exactly what he wanted in life. More power wasn't one of his requests. I think they lost sight of what they wanted Rumpel to be for plot reasons. Even at the open of S7 when he's apparently supposed to be a good guy they showed him torturing a man in Hyperion Heights. Dark Ones have been shown to be able to act with free will. It may be a struggle, but it's entirely possible. He chose to act this way not because he was possessed, but because he's a selfish ass. The lack of remorse and consequences for his horrific actions makes him completely irredeemable to me. He twice chose to become evil incarnate. That says something about him as a person. 4 Link to comment
Camera One April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 (edited) 10 hours ago, companionenvy said: While, as I said before, I do think that his actions as the DO were a logical extension of human Rumple getting power, rather than the externally imposed result of the darkness, I actually think he was a decent person earlier in life. I haven't watched many old Rumple flashbacks in a long time, but I remember feeling that Rumple was decent before becoming the Dark One. From what I vaguely recall, Rumple initially was trying to help the old man Zoso. It annoyed me that no good deed went unpunished on this show. Refusing to leave the village when Milah wanted to was hard to understand and showed he couldn't really understand Milah's perspective, but I don't see that as a precursor to his horrible behavior as the Dark One. Even in the retcon where Baelfire was bitten by a snake, I don't blame him for not killing the healer. It was basically a no-win situation. In the first Dark One flashback episode, I definitely believed that his new personality was due to the Dark One Curse. Before that, he seemed perfectly content to live a simple life. He wasn't venting about how unfair the world was, from what I remember. But after the 5A arc and seeing Emma and Hook darkened, that premise was blew to hell. I remember back in Season 3, I think, I commented on how Rumple wasn't ruined yet. But then 4A came along, and I agree that was pretty much when it all went to hell for the character. And then the constant whip-lash we got between Wumple and Rumple was beyond tiresome and unconvincing. Now in Season 7, Rumple is completely beyond redemption to me. Yet the Writers are still insisting that he deserves a happy ending. In this week's episode, he didn't give a second thought to screwing Henry over. Which he has done over and over (most recently, Season 6 finale). Edited April 27, 2018 by Camera One 2 Link to comment
tennisgurl April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 Its weird, because at the start of the show, I thought Rumple was the more sympathetic villain, who I thought could be redeemed. Unlike Regina, he got sympathetic reasons for what he was doing (finding his son) and had something of an excuse for his evil with the Dark One stuff (before all that got messed up), and was often played as more of a Wild Card than a full on villain. I mean, he did awful things, dont get me wrong, but his motivations were more in the dark, and you felt like he might end up siding with the heroes if they had common interests, and that maybe he could become good for real. But instead, we got Regina, who had no sympathetic reasons for her evil beyond petty revenge against a child's well intentioned mistake, no excuse beyond her mom being a stage mom and her dead boyfriend, getting the big redemption arc, while Rumple wobbled back and fourth until he became less complex and ambiguous and more of a badly written asshole who was addicted to power, where all his sympathetic qualities were rubbed away, until he was basically only good because it got him brownie points (much like Regina) or when he had absolutely no temptation to be wrong at all. I've said it before, but I think Rumples story basically ended when he killed his father to save Henry. That was him finally overcoming his shortcomings, and doing something selfless, like he couldn't do for Bae. Maybe they could have brought him back, but they would have had to have found a much better story for him than what he got. 10 Link to comment
companionenvy April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 2 hours ago, tennisgurl said: I've said it before, but I think Rumples story basically ended when he killed his father to save Henry. That was him finally overcoming his shortcomings, and doing something selfless, like he couldn't do for Bae. Maybe they could have brought him back, but they would have had to have found a much better story for him than what he got. Yeah, that's why I think his post S3 - story should have involved him actually developing relationships with and eventually making a sacrifice for someone other than Belle, occasionally Henry, and later Gideon. Which they kind of did in a very half-assed way in the S6 finale, but it was too little, too late. As I said above, I do think there's some good reasons why Rumple is so able to write off others (even if, as Shanna said, there are obviously people who have been treated poorly who don't become totally selfish and inconsiderate of others), but that's precisely why a believable redemption arc had to address that. And I actually would have been OK if it took a while, and if he hadn't been totally woobified post S3 - in fact, I would have wanted him to keep being pretty grey. But instead, he descended into the depths of darkness in S4 -- immediately after committing to be a better person. 4 hours ago, Shanna Marie said: I thought Rumple was far more redeemable than Regina in season one, but for me the tipping point was season two, when we learned that he murdered his (ex) wife. But domestic violence is a hot-button issue for me, ever since I was on the jury for a case (and I just got home from a presentation about a shelter my church women's group has been raising funds for). For me, there's no coming back from that, especially since he never expressed remorse. Worse, he gloated about it. I think it is always hard when a fictional character's deeds come closer to things we have real word experience of - that's why, I think, fandom is often more willing to forgive a mass murderer than a rapist. Trying to put that aside -- and I agree the killing of Milah was probably one of if not the most viscerally terrible things Rumple did -- for me that was still something he could have come back from if he had shown remorse. But, as you say, he never did, and when he met Milah in the Underworld, continued taunting her before throwing her in the River of Souls. Which is consistent with the fact that even Rumple's occasional capacity for remorse is always tied to hurting or letting down the very few people he cares about; even at the points at which he was closest to redemption, I don't think he ever gets to the point of caring about any of the random people he's killed, much less about Milah, whose betrayal he sees as justification for what he did. That's a key difference between Hook and Rumple: while Hook's redemption is closely tied to his relationship with Emma, his moral sense isn't entirely Emma-centric, and his guilt is bound up in things he did to other people (including even Rumple) independently of whether or not Emma blames him or feels let down. Hence even when he was destroying the dream-catcher, it wasn't just to keep Emma from knowing about his killing David's father, as he could have easily kept the secret forever without that; it was because he himself felt terrible about it and wanted to get rid of the memory. Whereas Rumple's morality is pretty much exclusively Bae or Belle driven. It is almost like Dexter, a show that operated under the premise that the main character was a sociopath whose father had created a "code" to impose upon him externally the boundaries that he lacked. 4 Link to comment
daxx April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 10 hours ago, Shanna Marie said: I guess we can't really know what Rumple might have been like if he'd grown up in a stable middle-class home, without a genie to create an alternate universe. I think there's probably supporting evidence that could be claimed, either way. He might have been just as bad a bully, but with power behind him, or he might have turned out okay. There are plenty of people who grow up in powerless situations who come out of it even more compassionate and empathetic, so his destiny wasn't entirely set by his circumstances. We’ve seen fictional characters with terrible life circumstances that turned out as good people with power so it could go either way. I’m thinking of Steve Rogers here, bullied didn’t become a bully. 3 Link to comment
Mabinogia April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 I think the acquisition of power shows who you really are. It doesn't change who you are. I know the show begs to differ but I do think people are born with some element of good or evil in them already and their life experiences either enhance or squash that propensity. I think Rumple was born with mischief in his heart, life helped by beating him down a bit, and then he gained power. He wasn't born particularly good or raised to be particularly good so he went dark. Someone like Snow, who I think was born good natured and was raised very lovingly and with everything she could want, at least in her formidable years, if given the same power Rumple had, I think wouldn't even have the urge to do terrible things. It's just not who she is or who she was raised to be. Someone like Emma is a wild card. She could have gone either way. I think she was born good but her life situation could easily make her resentful and hard. So when she got that kind of power it was a struggle for her but her good nature won out. I think the show wants us to think that everyone is born pure and then evil people (who were also born pure but magically changed at some point) ruin you and make you evil. I don't think it's that cookie cutter. I think each person is born at a different goodness level (it's in our genes) and our lives effect how we turn out, if we can overcome the bad in us or if we end up losing the good in us. It can go either way. I'd say Rumple = bad/bad Snow = Good/good Emma = good/bad Regina = good/bad That's what makes Emma vs Regina so interesting. I do think Regina was born good, as evidenced by her desire to rescue Snow, a total stranger. But she, like Emma, didn't have a great upbringing. Where Emma was able to fight the darkness Regina fell head first into it. It shows just how different we all are and how there is no easy way to know which side will win for each individual. With Rumple, though, I never really saw an honest attempt at being good. As soon as he saw he could get away with it and not loose the things he wanted, he ran right back to being bad. It's in his nature, IMO Not sure that's what the show wants me to think but as far as I'm concerned that is exactly what they've shown me. That's why I scratch my head at these writers. They seem to want to tell one story but end up telling it different than they intend. Sorry, that ended up way longer than I anticipated. 1 Link to comment
KingOfHearts April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 There's an Abraham Lincoln quote - "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." 7 Link to comment
Camera One April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 (edited) It was already clear by 2B that Regina's "redemption" was very poorly handled. But in some ways, ultimately, Rumple's redemption was even less convincing. As said above, he has never shown remorse to anyone except Belle. Eventually he even told her that he is who he is and she needs to accept it. Regina hasn't said a full apology to Emma or Snow (except stuff like "I was a bad stepmother), but at least she has tried to demonstrate remorse through her actions. The infuriating part of Regina's redemption is more how they have written her victims, who have literally thanked her for the horrible things she did to them. They haven't done that to Rumple (though it came close this latest episode when Alice and Whook had to show gratitude that he didn't destroy Alice's life). Edited April 27, 2018 by Camera One 4 Link to comment
companionenvy April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 A lot to chew on, there, Mabignogia. I do think some people are born with more of a propensity to good or evil than others, but it is really hard to sort out nature vs. nurture because it isn't like we can set up a controlled experiment. We're being shaped by our environments from the moment we're born, so it is hard to say precisely what someone would have been under different circumstances. To reply to a few specific points: - The question of Emma's propensity for darkness, specifically, is forever muddled by 4B, aka by far the worst arc of the show, IMO. On one hand, supposedly she had a potential for darkness that exceeded that of the average person, hence the eggnapping. But then, Snowing had transferred the darkness to Lily before Emma was born anyway, so actually, she should have wound up as pure light by the time she was born - yet somehow Snowing was still scared that she could go darkside years later, even before she became the DO, and the Chernabog confirms this fear by going after her rather than Regina, a very recently reformed mass murderer. -I don't see much of a comparison between Emma and Regina's childhoods. IMO, Emma had it considerably worse. Regina at least had a father that loved her and lived in upper-class comfort. Emma never went more than a few months before being passed around to the next foster home, and spent parts of her childhood on the streets. While I'll agree that Regina seemed to be a decent person when we see her with Daniel, I also don't think the fact that she wanted to save a random ten year old makes her naturally good; it just makes her not (yet) a total sociopath. -On whether or not Rumple ever made an "honest attempt at being good." In the present-day, no, which is why I'd say he ultimately has a failed redemption arc ( again, I've only caught scattered scenes from S7, so I don't know to what extent that's continued). He was capable of making the right and even noble choice on rare occasions, but never even really tried to sustain that for more than isolated moments. He'll be good only as long as being good is working out for him; when sufficient motivation comes along, he pretty much always goes back to evil. But pre-DO Rumple, while flawed, did make some efforts at living at least an ordinarily decent existence. He may not have done anything that showed him to be a particularly good man, but I don't think he was shown to be a particularly bad one, either. If not for the seer, he would presumably have died in the Ogre Wars and left a legacy as a loving husband who fell protecting his lands. And if the ogre wars hadn't happened at all, he probably would have lived out his days as a weaver and been a perfectly fine husband and father (well, at least, unless Bae still got sick and he sold his next-born to save him - but he did that only after the self-maiming/loss of Milah's love/ostracism had begun to effect him, so that may not have happened in an alternative scenario). And if he had somehow become the DO while living a quietly happy life with Milah and Bae, I'm not sure that he would have necessarily become especially power-crazed and maniacal, because I see that as less the result of an essential nature that would have been the same under any circumstances than as a specific response to a specific set of experiences. Link to comment
andromeda331 April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 9 minutes ago, companionenvy said: -I don't see much of a comparison between Emma and Regina's childhoods. IMO, Emma had it considerably worse. Regina at least had a father that loved her and lived in upper-class comfort. Emma never went more than a few months before being passed around to the next foster home, and spent parts of her childhood on the streets. While I'll agree that Regina seemed to be a decent person when we see her with Daniel, I also don't think the fact that she wanted to save a random ten year old makes her naturally good; it just makes her not (yet) a total sociopath. Also, after Cora was gone Regina was completely free. She could have done anything she wanted then. Regina had a lot more opportunities and options then Emma had. Emma went from one bad foster home to another, the one good one she had Lily manage to ruin for her, if Emma ran away before 18 she had to worry about being found by the police and sent to another foster home. She still had the memory of being sent back at age three because that family had a baby of their own. Emma was on her own her entire life. She had Lily for a friend who again ruined Emma's one good foster home and lied to Emma about her past, Neal who helped commit crimes with her before getting her arrested and sending her to jail for his crimes which lead to her giving up her son, August who abandoned baby Emma in a foster home and ran off for years when he knew he was suppose to watch and help her because she'd break a curse only to show up later two different times one to convince Neal to call the cops on Emma and stole the money Neal gave him to give to Emma and later in Storybrook needed her to break the Curse for himself, and Ingrid the foster mother who she really liked and thought cared about her but dragged her in front of a car and later only wanted her for her powers and feel Ingrid's need for family. But yeah Regina totally had it worse. Oh and so did Lily. 4 Link to comment
andromeda331 April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 6 hours ago, companionenvy said: Yeah, that's why I think his post S3 - story should have involved him actually developing relationships with and eventually making a sacrifice for someone other than Belle, occasionally Henry, and later Gideon. Which they kind of did in a very half-assed way in the S6 finale, but it was too little, too late. As I said above, I do think there's some good reasons why Rumple is so able to write off others (even if, as Shanna said, there are obviously people who have been treated poorly who don't become totally selfish and inconsiderate of others), but that's precisely why a believable redemption arc had to address that. And I actually would have been OK if it took a while, and if he hadn't been totally woobified post S3 - in fact, I would have wanted him to keep being pretty grey. But instead, he descended into the depths of darkness in S4 -- immediately after committing to be a better person. I think it is always hard when a fictional character's deeds come closer to things we have real word experience of - that's why, I think, fandom is often more willing to forgive a mass murderer than a rapist. Trying to put that aside -- and I agree the killing of Milah was probably one of if not the most viscerally terrible things Rumple did -- for me that was still something he could have come back from if he had shown remorse. But, as you say, he never did, and when he met Milah in the Underworld, continued taunting her before throwing her in the River of Souls. Which is consistent with the fact that even Rumple's occasional capacity for remorse is always tied to hurting or letting down the very few people he cares about; even at the points at which he was closest to redemption, I don't think he ever gets to the point of caring about any of the random people he's killed, much less about Milah, whose betrayal he sees as justification for what he did. That's a key difference between Hook and Rumple: while Hook's redemption is closely tied to his relationship with Emma, his moral sense isn't entirely Emma-centric, and his guilt is bound up in things he did to other people (including even Rumple) independently of whether or not Emma blames him or feels let down. Hence even when he was destroying the dream-catcher, it wasn't just to keep Emma from knowing about his killing David's father, as he could have easily kept the secret forever without that; it was because he himself felt terrible about it and wanted to get rid of the memory. Whereas Rumple's morality is pretty much exclusively Bae or Belle driven. It is almost like Dexter, a show that operated under the premise that the main character was a sociopath whose father had created a "code" to impose upon him externally the boundaries that he lacked. I agree. While being around Emma and his love for her might have help. Hook had already learned that revenge wasn't the answer. When he thought he killed Rumple he didn't really feel how he thought he would. He abandoned the town at the end of season two but decided on his own to come back. Looking at the marks he made on his ship for Bae helped him decide to go back. He offered to give passage to Neverland and help to people who didn't like him or trust him and included his sworn enemy to a place he hated. He really did try to help during the Neverland episodes warning them not to go into middle, warning them that Peter Pan wasn't what they thought he'd be, warning them about cheating with the map, helping Charming when he was poisoned. In the first episode of season three Regina's talking to him about how Greg called her a villain (I have no idea why she was surprised by that but that's Regina and A&E for you) but Hook response that if that's true then they've wasted their lives. Hook was starting the ball rolling or at least thinking about changing or how much he wasted on revenge before he decided to pursue Emma. Emma just helped it along or gave him more reasons to change. He really did want to help her. 5 Link to comment
Shanna Marie April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 7 hours ago, companionenvy said: I think it is always hard when a fictional character's deeds come closer to things we have real word experience of - that's why, I think, fandom is often more willing to forgive a mass murderer than a rapist. Trying to put that aside -- and I agree the killing of Milah was probably one of if not the most viscerally terrible things Rumple did -- for me that was still something he could have come back from if he had shown remorse. I was pondering last night why I'm so much more bothered by Rumple killing Milah than I am by the other killings on this show -- like Regina and the genie killing Leopold -- and I do think this has a lot to do with it. While there are cases in history of rulers being murdered by usurpers, it's rare enough that it really does make history, and it depends on who the usurper is (and who writes his story) whether he ends up being immortalized as hero or villain. But you pretty much can't open a newspaper without seeing at least one story about a woman being murdered by her ex for leaving him or for being with another man after leaving him. The scary pattern we're seeing in so many of these mass shootings is that there's generally something involving domestic or relationship violence at the root -- a man/boy angry because a woman left him or started seeing someone else or wouldn't date him. So it's really hard to classify something that happens every day in the real world as merely "fantasy violence." It's dangerous to minimize something like that as merely the stuff of fantasy and fiction because it's not something you want to normalize. Belle staying with him after learning he murdered his first wife, seeing that he has no remorse, and watching him lose his cool and perpetrate violence on someone he hates primarily because he was the person his wife left him for is a really dangerous thing to show as "romantic" because it's a situation real-world women and girls can find themselves in, and they should be given the message that these are major red flags, not the stuff of romance. I feel like the episodes that deal with this part of the story need to show some kind of domestic violence PSA and hotline number at the end. It's especially dangerous to show Belle hanging on in spite of Rumple's repeated betrayals and manipulations because she believes in his good heart or because he gives her yet another tearful apology (after which he goes right back to what he was doing as soon as she's not looking), and then to claim on the show that he did change, after all! Sorry, I guess I'm a bit keyed up after spending yesterday evening listening to survivor stories, most of which involve them staying far too long in dangerous relationships because of that belief that he could change, and then having to go into hiding in a gated shelter complex once they did leave. 52 minutes ago, companionenvy said: The question of Emma's propensity for darkness, specifically, is forever muddled by 4B, aka by far the worst arc of the show, IMO. On one hand, supposedly she had a potential for darkness that exceeded that of the average person, hence the eggnapping. But then, Snowing had transferred the darkness to Lily before Emma was born anyway, so actually, she should have wound up as pure light by the time she was born - yet somehow Snowing was still scared that she could go darkside years later, even before she became the DO, and the Chernabog confirms this fear by going after her rather than Regina, a very recently reformed mass murderer. That was all so bizarre. As I recall, it wasn't so much that Emma had such a great potential for darkness as it was that she had the potential to be a great hero, but the potential for being a great hero meant that she had an equal capacity for going dark. So if she went dark, it would be really dark, but she could also be a great hero. I guess that has something to do with her power, so that the great power she had as Savior meant she could either be a powerful hero or a powerful villain. I find it rather disgusting that not only was a fetus judged as unworthy just because it had a lot of potential, and therefore had the possibility of being dark, but a pregnant woman was rejected as a hero because her newly conceived fetus had the potential to be dark. Grrr. You could get a master's thesis out of the tortured morality on this show. 7 Link to comment
Mabinogia April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 1 hour ago, companionenvy said: The question of Emma's propensity for darkness, specifically, is forever muddled by 4B, aka by far the worst arc of the show, IMO. On one hand, supposedly she had a potential for darkness that exceeded that of the average person, hence the eggnapping. But then, Snowing had transferred the darkness to Lily before Emma was born anyway, so actually, she should have wound up as pure light by the time she was born - yet somehow Snowing was still scared that she could go darkside years later, even before she became the DO, and the Chernabog confirms this fear by going after her rather than Regina, a very recently reformed mass murderer. OMG I had totally forgotten (possibly on purpose) that stupid "Dark swapping". That was really pretty shitty of Snow, condemning some other kid to darkness to save her precious baby. I know, it was more than that, but I hate that they had her do that. I don't think it was in character for her to alter another babies life/soul like that. 39 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said: I find it rather disgusting that not only was a fetus judged as unworthy just because it had a lot of potential, and therefore had the possibility of being dark, but a pregnant woman was rejected as a hero because her newly conceived fetus had the potential to be dark. Grrr. Indeed. WTF? Or that another infant deserved darkness because she was born to a dragon mother. Yeah, I'm not going to get past that any time soon. I wish that all hadn't happened, and Emma, grown up Emma, had her full potential either way and that her story arc was the struggle within her between powerful good and powerful evil. That would have been some compelling shit. Better than that lame attempt they made at making her a temporary Dark One by dressing her in black and putting weird white shit in her hair. 1 Link to comment
Rumsy4 April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 With Rumple, everything they've shown us suggests that in his deepest nature, he is morally weak, and when temptation comes, he will always make the selfish choice. When I say someone is morally weak, I'm not saying that it means either that they have no choice to do good, or that they're innately terrible human beings. It's just that they have to struggle harder to do the right thing. Rumple, however, has never made an attempt to resist temptation except on very rare occasions. It's not like he doesn't know what the right thing is. He just doesn't care about doing it. I think the storybook AU came closest to revealing the writers' concept of the core personality traits of these characters. Some of it was deliberately done, some of it was played for laughs or out of laziness, but it still gave insights into their ideas. Snowing were so comically evil, that it was obvious as an extreme opposite of their true personalities. It also showed how little the writers cared about them. Regina's core trait was linked to sacrificing her life for Henry. That's always been at the core of her redemption (even if it has been poorly done). Robin was wishy-washy as usual. Zelena was jealous. The writers didn't care about them either. Hook's core trait was linked to courage and sacrifice once he found a purpose. Again, very true to his character. Henry's arc was once again tied to getting Emma to help save other people. Emma inspired people into being better and making better choices. But once again, she was prevented from doing the climactic "saving", and that role was given to someone else (Regina). They just never strayed from this. Rumple's core trait was shown as a lust for power and selfishness. Belle was just a prop in Rumple's story, which again reflected more on Rumple's desires than revealing anything about her. It's never been his choice to give up power. Even with Pan, when he sacrificed himself to save Belle and Neal (and maybe Henry), he didn't have to live without his power. So, now that he wants to give up his power to reunite with Belle, it all rings false. 3 Link to comment
Mabinogia April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 54 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said: Regina's core trait was linked to sacrificing her life for Henry. That's always been at the core of her redemption (even if it has been poorly done). I know they LOVE Lana so it would never have happened, but I think the best ending the Regina's story would have been her finally, truly giving her life to allow Henry to live his. It would have been the ultimate act of true love, the ultimate redemption for her. It would have affected Henry and given him a better reason to go out in the world and make his own way. It could have been what caused him to run to HH even. 54 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said: Rumple's core trait was shown as a lust for power and selfishness. Belle was just a prop in Rumple's story, which again reflected more on Rumple's desires than revealing anything about her. I never bought that Rumple truly loves Belle for her own sake so much as she loves the way she sees him. Does that make sense? I'm not exactly sure how to say it. He loves her. I'm not saying he doesn't. But the reason he loves her, IMO, is because she allows him to pretend to himself that he is the great man he wants people to think he is, though he doesn't want to do any of the work. He is too cowardly to actually try to be this hero Belle imagines, but so long as he has her, he can fool himself into thinking he could be that man. It saddens me that the show kind of gave up on Snowing. They were, for me, the heart of this show. I just think A&E have no idea how to right truly good, decent human beings. I think they just have no interest in writing stories for "good" people. They just want to write redemption over and over and over and over, even if they have to keep using the same few characters to do it. 2 Link to comment
Rumsy4 April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 (edited) 47 minutes ago, Mabinogia said: He is too cowardly to actually try to be this hero Belle imagines, but so long as he has her, he can fool himself into thinking he could be that man. Oh, absolutely! It seems like he only loved her because she was always stroking his ego even when he put in zero effort, and even when he was actively and consistently abusing her. I also wanted to add something about pre-DO Rumple. He wasn't evil, but he was selfish. There is nothing commendable about playing with his son, but letting his wife bear the brunt of his poor choices. While I can't blame him for not killing the healer to save Bae, he had no qualms about how his decision to sacrifice his second-born would affect Milah. This probably also meant that their conjugal days were over from then on, as that would be the only way to not have another child. He made no apologies to her. He assumed she would be okay with his decision, just as he expected her to adjust to staying in the village despite how deeply unhappy she was. He never tried to compromise for her sake. His wife just had to lump every decision he made. His selfishness carried over in his marriage to Belle, but she was a willing aider and abetter. Belle was everything Milah was not. She even gave up her dreams of travelling to go live alone with Rumple in an empty realm. It felt like the narrative justified Rumple's (multiple) murders of Milah because she was mean to him and left him. Edited April 27, 2018 by Rumsy4 1 Link to comment
Mabinogia April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 41 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said: While I can't blame him for not killing the healer to save Bae, he had no qualms about how his decision to sacrifice his second-born would affect Milah. This probably also meant that their conjugal days were over from then on, as that would be the only way to not have another child. He made no apologies to her. He assumed she would be okay with his decision, just as he expected her to adjust to staying in the village despite how deeply unhappy she was. He never tried to compromise for her sake. And then he had the nerve to be pissed at her for leaving him. As much as I loved Belle from the Disney movie (one of my all time favorite Disney Heroines) I would take Milah who thought her own hopes and dreams were at least as important as her husbands to Belle who gave up everything for an abusive man any day. I know Rumbelle has it's fans and no disrespect to them, we all see things through our own eyes and experiences, but I never saw anything romantic about Rumbelle as the show presented them. I saw a classic abusive relationship and I will never get over that this show destroyed one of my favorite Disney Princesses on top of my all time favorite Disney Villain Maleficent. It's like they are actively trying to piss all over my childhood. And the aggravating thing is, like Regina's story, Rumple's could have been very compelling, very interesting and spanned several seasons but these writers do not know how to maintain a good story. They screwed up all the stories they tried to tell IMO. I really can't think of a single storyline on this show I felt had a good beginning, middle and ending. They mostly started really strong, got a bit weird around the middle and then splattered up against the wall in a big, ugly mess at the end, those that didn't just get dropped at some point and forgotten. 4 Link to comment
RolloTomasi April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 Speaking of the Storybook AU, I really wish the writers hadn’t swapped the characters for each other. Meaning, I wish rather than have Snow become an evil queen, have Snow the bandit be someone the villagers feared and resented, maybe have her stealing from villagers and antagonizing the Black Guards. Instead of Regina being a low rent version of Bandit Snow (jeez they even had the same costume), keep her as the evil queen but with the love of the people. I actually thought this was what they were going to do - have the villains be the heroes and vice versa, but keeping them the same characters. I was so annoyed they just swapped the characters out. It could have done so much more (like Dark Swan, and the Underworld, and the Land of Untold Stories, and the Wish Realm...). 8 Link to comment
Mabinogia April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 52 minutes ago, RolloTomasi said: Speaking of the Storybook AU, I really wish the writers hadn’t swapped the characters for each other. Meaning, I wish rather than have Snow become an evil queen, have Snow the bandit be someone the villagers feared and resented, maybe have her stealing from villagers and antagonizing the Black Guards. Instead of Regina being a low rent version of Bandit Snow (jeez they even had the same costume), keep her as the evil queen but with the love of the people. I actually thought this was what they were going to do - have the villains be the heroes and vice versa, but keeping them the same characters. I was so annoyed they just swapped the characters out. It could have done so much more (like Dark Swan, and the Underworld, and the Land of Untold Stories, and the Wish Realm...). See, now, that would have been interesting. Which is why they didn't do it. Regina as the beloved leader, Snow as the dangerous rouge. It would have been life the way Regina imagined it in her head. That's kind of her fantasy, what she tried to make happen but couldn't. It could have been interesting to see how it all played out. Especially if they started there, but ended up slowly morphing into the roles they played in real EF. Like, Regina just couldn't keep the darkness down forever, Snow eventually realized that she was unfulfilled doing evil and wanted to help. She could have become Robin Hood. It could have played into a theme of, you can't escape who you truly are. Or, given this is A&E, we could have learned that this is how it was supposed to be until that meddling brat Snow went and ruined it all by acting like a typical little girl and trying to help Regina by telling her mom she was in love. Damn that Snow and her belief that love will conquer all! haha 4 Link to comment
andromeda331 April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 1 hour ago, RolloTomasi said: Speaking of the Storybook AU, I really wish the writers hadn’t swapped the characters for each other. Meaning, I wish rather than have Snow become an evil queen, have Snow the bandit be someone the villagers feared and resented, maybe have her stealing from villagers and antagonizing the Black Guards. Instead of Regina being a low rent version of Bandit Snow (jeez they even had the same costume), keep her as the evil queen but with the love of the people. I actually thought this was what they were going to do - have the villains be the heroes and vice versa, but keeping them the same characters. I was so annoyed they just swapped the characters out. It could have done so much more (like Dark Swan, and the Underworld, and the Land of Untold Stories, and the Wish Realm...). That would have made more sense. There's no way Regina's idea of herself being a hero would ever include being Snow bandit. Come to think of it wouldn't Regina have wanted Daniel in her life since this is what her idea of her Hero life would be? 1 Link to comment
tennisgurl April 27, 2018 Share April 27, 2018 9 hours ago, daxx said: We’ve seen fictional characters with terrible life circumstances that turned out as good people with power so it could go either way. I’m thinking of Steve Rogers here, bullied didn’t become a bully. Yeah, that really is the issue when you put ever part of your villains redemption arc so solely based abound them having a hard life or a dick parent. If you whole redemption seems to center around "well, this crappy thing happened to them so now everything they've done isnt really there fault because this would be how anyone would react", its so easy for viewers to just point to any number of other fictional characters (of, hell, even real people) who have had just as bad, if not worse things happen to them, and they've still stayed good people. I mean, not to be insensitive, but either Regina or Rumples tragic backstory really impresses me that much. I've seen a lot of sad backstories over the years, from both heroes and villains, and both of their are pretty middling. Sad, sure, but not to the extent of a lot of other characters, and not so bad that they justify the evil things they've done. Like, if you have a character that routinely raped, murdered, and oppressed with gleeful abandon for years, you need a DAMN tragic backstory to make us feel sorry for her, and "stage mom, dead boyfriend, and dull marriage" really doesn't seem proportionate to that kind of evil. Its not even in my top 20 tragic backstories (or tragic presents) that I've ever heard in fiction. And most of my top 20 are of good guys, or at least people who haven't done nearly the evil that Regina has, or were too crazy to even really be blamed for their actions anymore. Regina and Rumple ended up having so much of their evil wiped away because of their backstories, and their backstories weren't even that impressive! 6 Link to comment
Camera One April 28, 2018 Share April 28, 2018 (edited) 7 hours ago, RolloTomasi said: Speaking of the Storybook AU, I really wish the writers hadn’t swapped the characters for each other. Meaning, I wish rather than have Snow become an evil queen, have Snow the bandit be someone the villagers feared and resented, maybe have her stealing from villagers and antagonizing the Black Guards. Instead of Regina being a low rent version of Bandit Snow (jeez they even had the same costume), keep her as the evil queen but with the love of the people. I actually thought this was what they were going to do - have the villains be the heroes and vice versa, but keeping them the same characters. I was so annoyed they just swapped the characters out. It could have done so much more (like Dark Swan, and the Underworld, and the Land of Untold Stories, and the Wish Realm...). That would have been great. It would actually have fit in with the concept of villains getting their happy endings despite being villains. Because that was the key. The villains didn't want to live goody-too shoe lives. They wanted to still do the despicable things they do AND still get a happy ending. Rumple had enough magic to be the Knight in Shining Armor if he acted wanted to, so why would that be his happy ending? The Wish Realm was another AU (in this case, apparently AU = actual universe) which was sorely disappointing. We had often wondered what Emma's life would have been like if the Curse had never been cast and she had grown up with Snowing. What a great tribute to the main characters to see a poignant portrayal of how Snow, Charming and Emma's life would be if they had stayed together. But be careful what you wish for because we got Emma as a useless scared Princess caricature. They basically had Emma admitting that she was glad Regina enacted the Curse because she would never have wanted that life. What a great gift to fans for (essentially) the final season. Edited April 28, 2018 by Camera One 7 Link to comment
Shanna Marie April 28, 2018 Share April 28, 2018 19 hours ago, RolloTomasi said: Speaking of the Storybook AU, I really wish the writers hadn’t swapped the characters for each other. Between that and Henry's novel, you've got to wonder if these writers have ever read an actual book so that they know how storytelling in a book works differently from storytelling on TV. I know part of this was due to the Author writing what he wanted, but Isaac's book was supposedly so groundbreaking and daring because he switched the heroes and villains. But "Regina" isn't a thing outside this show, so how would anyone have known that she was the Evil Queen, since it didn't seem like the Regina in the book had ever been the Evil Queen. We knew, because we could see her and knew it was the same actress who'd played the Evil Queen, but you wouldn't have known that from reading the book. The only thing unusual in the book was the fact that Snow White was the villain, but she was just the Evil Queen with a different name and the casting. It doesn't sound like this situation came about because Snow White, instead of being sweet and meek, went "oh hell no" and fought back against the Evil Queen, exiling her. It was just the same story as we'd seen before, with the characters having different names and being played by different people. That's not switching heroes and villains if you're reading it in a book. I also don't think they had a good sense of what they were even trying to do by swapping heroes and villains. There are a couple of different approaches they could have taken. This could have been a world where villains could win and get their happy endings that way -- the Evil Queen defeats Snow White and reigns triumphant. Except unless we're taking that to the endgame where Snow doesn't come out of the sleeping curse, it would look exactly like any flashback of the Snow vs. Regina era, with Regina ruling from the palace and having total power while Snow was on the run. Or they could have tilted the perspective (basically, Regina's headcanon): Regina was the Queen, but beloved by the people because she got rid of that useless Leopold and that monster Snow White, with Snow White the traitor and horrible bandit who posed an ongoing threat to the people. They do have a habit of taking on these huge concepts without thinking them through. I doubt they really know what they mean by "hero" and "villain" or what it means to say that villains can't win. Like with the concept of darkness, with Lily getting all of Emma's innate darkness and how that affected her life. What would it mean to have bonus darkness? The way they had it play out, it was more that she just tended to make bad choices, which made her life suck, but is that really darkness? Wouldn't extra darkness be more like Regina or Rumple's lives? They weren't happy, but they had power and they inflicted that power on others. Would Lily have been a sad-sack loser because she was extra dark, or would she have been ruthless and selfish enough to become a huge success, either on Wall Street or in D.C., not caring about the impact of her policies on people or the environment? And how would someone without innate darkness be affected? 5 Link to comment
Mabinogia April 28, 2018 Share April 28, 2018 2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said: They do have a habit of taking on these huge concepts without thinking them through. That is exactly what they do. They come up with what they think is a brilliant idea and they are so excited they quickly scribble it all down. That's all well and good. But that's as far as they get. I feel like the show is a rough draft. It's the brainstorming part of writing without the editing and actual writing part. I get the same brilliant ideas all the time. OMG What if Snow was the villain and Regina was the hero? That would be so unexpected. But, unlike A&E, I sit down and I think about what that means, how it will play out, and how it is going to end. They just come up with the idea and jump in. This show really has just become one big overpaid fanfic. (only less well thought out than some fanfiction, though better than others.) But I still can't get over the fact they get paid for this. They kind of suck at their job. 6 Link to comment
Camera One April 28, 2018 Share April 28, 2018 22 minutes ago, Mabinogia said: That is exactly what they do. They come up with what they think is a brilliant idea and they are so excited they quickly scribble it all down. That's all well and good. But that's as far as they get. I feel like the show is a rough draft. It's the brainstorming part of writing without the editing and actual writing part. Yep. And if we had gotten to Season 10, they would be at "What if the Land Without Magic was actually on the head of an elephant?" 2 Link to comment
Rumsy4 April 28, 2018 Share April 28, 2018 18 minutes ago, Camera One said: Yep. And if we had gotten to Season 10, they would be at "What if the Land Without Magic was actually on the head of an elephant?" It's on the head of an elephant, with nine more elephants below it. The heroes--the great great great great grandchildren of Snowing (all of them the same age as Snowing, who are still in their 30s), will band together to destroy the Final Evil--the Avatar. 3 Link to comment
companionenvy April 28, 2018 Share April 28, 2018 20 hours ago, tennisgurl said: Yeah, that really is the issue when you put ever part of your villains redemption arc so solely based abound them having a hard life or a dick parent. If you whole redemption seems to center around "well, this crappy thing happened to them so now everything they've done isnt really there fault because this would be how anyone would react", its so easy for viewers to just point to any number of other fictional characters (of, hell, even real people) who have had just as bad, if not worse things happen to them, and they've still stayed good people. I mean, not to be insensitive, but either Regina or Rumples tragic backstory really impresses me that much. I've seen a lot of sad backstories over the years, from both heroes and villains, and both of their are pretty middling. Sad, sure, but not to the extent of a lot of other characters, and not so bad that they justify the evil things they've done. Like, if you have a character that routinely raped, murdered, and oppressed with gleeful abandon for years, you need a DAMN tragic backstory to make us feel sorry for her, and "stage mom, dead boyfriend, and dull marriage" really doesn't seem proportionate to that kind of evil. Its not even in my top 20 tragic backstories (or tragic presents) that I've ever heard in fiction. And most of my top 20 are of good guys, or at least people who haven't done nearly the evil that Regina has, or were too crazy to even really be blamed for their actions anymore. Regina and Rumple ended up having so much of their evil wiped away because of their backstories, and their backstories weren't even that impressive! I don't necessarily think the fact that other people have had it worse without going evil undermines a villain's potential redemption. For me, a good villain backstory isn't supposed to excuse what they've done, or suggest that they had no choice. It is an attempt to invest their story with psychological depth and, potentially provide groundwork for their redemption, because someone who became a killer because they just liked killing is a lot less interesting, and a lot less likely to believably have the capacity to change, than a deeply damaged person who gradually convinced themselves that they were justified in some way, and could conceivably be brought to recognize that that justification was totally hollow and self-serving, followed by experiencing convincing remorse for their actions. . So for me, it isn't that Regina's backstory wasn't tragic enough, although that was part of it, it is that it wasn't psychologically convincing enough for me to buy that she could commit that particular set of sadistic, deliberate crimes as a response to that particular trauma -- especially in which a world in which she still had a ton of agency and other options at her disposal -- and be in any sense redeemable. Maybe this is a good time to bring up the dissertation I've been sitting on for a while about what my version of a good backstory for Regina would have been... I'll write it up in a separate post. 3 Link to comment
companionenvy April 28, 2018 Share April 28, 2018 As promised, or threatened, the continuation. This will probably be long even by my standards... I've given an excessive amount of thought to how I would have fixed Regina's backstory. Here's what I came up with, expressed as a rough chronology: 1. The flashback sequence in "The Stable Boy" would be more or less unchanged, except at the end of the episode, rather than Regina saying she should have let Snow die, she would vow revenge against Cora. 2. Next Regina-centric flashback episode, chronologically, would have opened with Regina shortly after her marriage. There'd be a scene to establish that she had grown close to Snow, and then a scene with her and her father about how she was still grieving Daniel and felt like Leopold was a total stranger she could't love. Henry responds that there are "other things" to live for, even in a loveless marriage, and points out that she is still queen, after all, and has a lot of power to do good. Later, Regina is out at a public event with Leopold, and does something benevolent - maybe she intervenes to get him to show mercy on a thief, or something. Back when they're alone, Leopold, clearly impressed by her show of goodness, tells Regina he's aware that they don't know each other very well, and notes that he and Ava didn't either, at first. He tells her that raising Snow brought him and Ava together, and he hopes maybe one day their own child will do the same for them. Regina is obviously pleased - but then, in the last scene of the episode, Rumple comes to offer her the chance of revenge against Cora, and Regina agrees. 3. Next episode: Establishing scenes to show that a) Regina is advancing in her magic studies with Rumple and b) Regina is becoming beloved by the people, and continuing to develop a motherly relationship with Snow and at least a cordial partnership with Leopold. Rumple tells Regina she's ready to take out Cora. Regina does it (obviously, Cora will survive or be resurrected somehow, but this won't be readily apparent) - but Rumple, wanting Regina corrupted for his own purposes, has engineered the situation so that a peasant has witnessed it. He tells Regina she has to kill the peasant to protect herself, but Regina won't do it, and simply swears him to silence. Of course, he tells - and the next scene is Regina going out on her usual benevolent rounds as queen, and having people noticeably avoiding her and whispering about "the evil queen." Later, Leopold, having heard the rumors, asks Regina to explain herself, and she tells the truth. Leopold is outraged - first of all, he's freaked out with his wife being a "sorceress" and furious that she jeopardized their position by getting caught in her act of revenge, but he's also incensed that she had planned on humiliating him by eloping with a stable boy after their engagement had already been announced - and worse, that she had tried to draw Snow into her plans. He lays down the law: in order to avoid scandal, they are going to still appear as husband and wife in public, but their marriage is over, and she's to be kept on a tight leash within the castle and given no access to Snow, who he has warned against her. Regina protests that she's sorry and they can still have the life and child they planned together, and Leopold cruelly tells her that he'd have to wonder whether any child of hers was actually the stable boy's, showing that his rejection also comes with a heavy a dose of classism and misogyny - he's disgusted that his virginal young bride had been ruined by a commoner. In the final scene, Regina sneaks in to see Snow, who, having been poisoned against her by Leopold, calls her a "monster." To defend herself, Regina finally tells Snow what Cora had done to Daniel, and Snow becomes upset and tells Regina she doesn't believe her before again rejecting her. 4. My version of "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree." The opening ball scene establishes that, several years later, the evil queen mythology has only grown and Regina is still totally estranged from Leopold and Snow, who he publicly declares the "fairest of them all" and ostentatiously praises while sidelining Regina. Snow acts snotty to Regina, although it is clear she is justly beloved by the people. Some version of the Sidney plot then happens, but in a way in which Regina comes off as less cold-blooded; the two conspire to kill Leopold, rather than Regina manipulating Sidney into doing it, and maybe she does have some real feelings for him. It should also be emphasized on screen that Regina, as a powerful magic user, had options at her disposal other than killing Leopold, like running away and starting a new life elsewhere; this was revenge - as is banishing Snow, which will also happen in this episode. In the last scene, Regina is holding court, when a peasant accused of poaching comes before her for judgment, in a mirror of the earlier flashback scene in which she urged Leopold to mercy. Instead, Regina sentences him to death - and declares that they shouldn't expect Leopold's softness to continue under her. 5. This entry will potentially cover a number of flashback episodes, and relates to the extent of Regina's crimes. Most of Regina's plots against Snowing I would have left pretty much unchanged. I also would not have changed the severity of her crimes against others - including the village massacre from "The Evil Queen." What I would have changed is the motivation. Rather than hurting people because she's sad or to get revenge on Snow, Regina wants revenge against the people themselves for turning against her. Instead of manifesting itself in bursts of random violence, Regina, as indicated in the last episode, would have become a merciless ruler, instituting capital punishment (sometimes via heart-ripping, of course) for petty offenses and also doing things like levying punitively high taxes so that more people would be driven by desperation into such crimes. When her father questions her, she essentially says "They didn't show mercy to me when they deemed me guilty, why should I show mercy to them?" The impetus for the village massacre in TEQ, rather than being their protection of Snow, would be aiding Snow in outright rebellion against Regina's regime. Regina would still meet Snow while disguised, and Snow would admit to having been unfair to Regina when she was a child, confiding that part of her anger came from her own inability to deal with her role in causing Daniel's death. Snow would still wind up declaring Regina irredeemable upon seeing the results of the massacre -- but Regina would also be horrified by this and feel immediate guilt for what she had done. At home, she'd ask Henry if he thought she was capable of change, and he would suggest that it was always possible to "start over." 6. Now we get to the Dark Curse. As others have noted, the Dark Curse didn't make a ton of sense as punishment. So in my rewrite, it wouldn't have been intended as such, but rather as the "fresh start" that Regina wanted, which to her means a world in which she is the mayor of a town of happy citizens who love her - and to protect this status quo, time is frozen and people can't leave. So, still an outrageous violation of free will, and a sign of massive delusion on Regina's part, but less overtly malicious. However, she'd still be jealous of Snow White and desperate to steal her life. When she finds out that the child of Snowing will have the power to break the curse, rather than deciding to kill a baby, her plan will be to steal Emma and raise her herself; if Emma loves Regina, why would she want to break the curse? Snowing will still believe that Regina wants baby Emma dead (I can imagine Regina saying something like "That child will never live to call you mother," which everyone naturally assumes means she plans to kill the baby), as will the audience, for much if not all of season 1. In addition, while I'd cut the plot with her stealing Graham's heart and raping him, which doesn't work for my version of Regina, she'd have set up the curse so that she is David Nolan's wife, except he winds up in a coma after the EF fight with the black knights anyway. Also, of course, the Charmings successfully hide Emma, so Regina doesn't get to raise her. She would still have to kill her father to cast the curse, but in my rewrite, she would have done so only after finding out that he was seriously ill and likely dying anyway --although he would still die begging her not to do it. 7. SB doesn't, predictably, work out the way Regina wanted it to; she still has trouble befriending people and feels that any relationship she does begin to develop is hollow. Some version of the Greg/Owen incident happens, in which delusional Regina tries to force them to stay - maybe through trying to change the curse to incorporate them --, but the killing of Owen's father would be accidental. The story of Regina adopting Henry would go on as is. 8. The present-day scenes in S1 would tamp down the rhetoric about Regina not loving Henry, and Henry himself would express some ambivalence about Regina; he might even be slower to conclude that Regina is the EQ, and initially think that she's another victim of the curse. Regina would, out of disappointment in the way that the curse has worked out, have become a fairly forbidding figure as mayor, but she wouldn't have done things like keep Belle in the asylum (having simply given her and Gold cursed identities that had no connection) or separate Jefferson and Grace. A version of the David and Mary Margaret plot would play out, with the difference that David thinks he's married to Regina, not Katherine. There would be no frame job, but Regina would humiliate MM as an adulterer - and sleep with cursed David, which would still, obviously, be a form of rape, but not quite the same as what she did to Graham, who knew he was being controlled. She would, eventually, still try to kill Emma in a desperate attempt to stop her from breaking the curse, leading to the poisoning of Henry and the season-ending TLK. To me, that's a sequence of events that would have still left Regina guilty of real, horrific crimes, while turning her into someone who could plausibly have been redeemed. Crucially, her motivation would not have been a vendetta against a ten year old, and even Daniel's death would only have been one part of the path that led her to evil. Her crimes, while still horrific, would have had a somewhat more logical basis, and her sense of hurt and resentment against Snow and the people as a whole would have had greater justification. Snow's position as the good guy in the conflict between them would still be secure, but there would be some justification for lines like Snow's "you know I could be a brat as a child," and some grounds for Snow to at least feel bad about how she had treated Regina. Regina would also have shown capacity or remorse much earlier in the game, and have had a still-terrible but at least non-sadistic reason for casting the curse - and a history that didn't include extensive plotting to kill an infant. The character I've described would have had tons to atone for, but its a redemption arc I think I would have liked watching. 4 Link to comment
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