Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2012-10-20 04:07 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2012-10-20 04:07 pm
[ SECRET POST #2118 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2118 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
__________________________________________________
02.
__________________________________________________
03.
__________________________________________________
04.
__________________________________________________
05.
__________________________________________________
06.
__________________________________________________
07.
__________________________________________________
08.
__________________________________________________
09.
__________________________________________________
10.
__________________________________________________
11.
__________________________________________________
12.
__________________________________________________
13.
__________________________________________________
14.
__________________________________________________
15.
__________________________________________________
16.
__________________________________________________
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 102 secrets from Secret Submission Post #303.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
no subject
Regina isn't a villain. Villain are clear-cut, obviously evil. She loves. She sees her own flaws. She's done some pretty villainous things, to be sure, but she most definitely is not a villain. She's more of an anti-hero.
It would be possible to tell the whole of Once Upon a Time from Regina's view, rather than Emma's. The show writers have been great at exploring everyone's backgrounds. Imagine this from Regina's view. She is abused all her life, but finds love with Daniel. Her mother kills him and forces her to marry some old guy and babysit the girl that 'helped' her mother kill Daniel. She is forced to live surrounded by everyone she knows achieving happiness but her. She finds one chance at being happy, but it involves the death of her father. And this is heartbreaking for her. But she's been taught her whole life, that in Fairy Tale Land, everyone gets their true happiness.
And back in Storybrooke, she's finally found some kind of happiness. She's raised a son for ten years, a son that by all legal and ethical rights should be hers. A woman just waltzes back into his life, claiming to be his mother, and tries to take him back. And her own son wants that too. Imagine spending ten years loving and raising someone, only for them to toss that back in your face.
She's the 'Evil Queen', and she sure as hell embodies that, but what she's done hasn't been for evil. It's been for love, and acting for love, no matter how twisted, cannot make you a villain. Evil desires power. Rumple wants power, Cora wants power. Regina had power, and all she wanted was love.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-10-20 10:18 pm (UTC)(link)There really is no truly good or evil character in the show, they've done an excellent job of driving that home.
no subject
And back in Storybrooke, she's finally found some kind of happiness. She's raised a son for ten years, a son that by all legal and ethical rights should be hers. A woman just waltzes back into his life, claiming to be his mother, and tries to take him back. And her own son wants that too. Imagine spending ten years loving and raising someone, only for them to toss that back in your face.
All of this. Exactly.
I'm glad there are others out there who think like me about Regina.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-10-21 12:09 am (UTC)(link)I think the problem you're running into is this is NOT the definition of villain most people use. Normally it is meant as "antagonist" which Regina clearly is (or at least was last season).
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-10-21 12:26 am (UTC)(link)If you truly think that, chances are you're a very shallow person. Villains are not clear-cut or obviously evil. Some are, sure, but many aren't and that's where motive comes in. Villains have all different kinds of motive, not just 'lol let's be evil'. Regina's motive was revenge. She wanted revenge on her mothers, Snow's dad, Snow, and eventually everyone. Everyone.
Yes, she wanted to be loved, too, but that was tainted by everything else she's done. She has still destroyed lives over it. Repeatedly. She has murdered people over it. Repeatedly. Just because all she ever wanted the entire time was a ~hug~ doesn't sweep that away. She is still a villain.
Do I think she can redeem herself? Sure, why not, but redemption is a long, hard road. It isn't and shouldn't be easy, from a good narrative standpoint anyway.
no subject
Jaime "The Things I Do For Love" Lannister would like to argue with that.
(Vague GoT/ASOIAF spoilers follow, with an actual spoiler for the first episode of the show/an early part of the first book.)
I'm actually a huge Jaime fan and think he has really understandable motivations for most of the things he's done, and think he is going through a very interesting possible redemption arc. But that doesn't change the fact that he pushed a child out of a window, and it's not defensible (or, for many, forgivable) just because his entire world view has been warped by his love for his sister and his emotionally abusive father. He was clearly painted as a villain in the first book/season, and if people want to continue to see him that way because of what he did to Bran, I have a really hard time arguing with that -- and this is in the ASOIAF verse, which involves WAY more moral ambiguity than OUAT-verse.
Or, another example: Walter White. He starts off doing what he does at least in part out of love for his family. If you ask him, it's ALL out of love for his family, though clearly it becomes about power. I think the same is true of Regina, to be honest, though her lust for power might be linked more to the corrupting power of magic than Walter's is to the corrupting power of anything but his own personality.
While Regina's actions come from an understandable root, I think she clearly is villain in Season 1. Same for Rumple, who I adore to death (and who I happen to think does most of what he does not for power, but to find a way back to Bae, but that is neither here nor there -- he's still a villain to me, though an understandable and potentially redeemable one). But I agree with the person above -- I think it might boil down to differing definitions of villain. I don't think it's a set category that characters are stuck in, either. If Regina (or Rumple, for that matter) actually is redeemed, than in my opinion she'll be a character a lot like Anakin Skywalker: A good character who become a villain and then is redeemed.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-10-21 12:47 am (UTC)(link)no subject
Totally motivated by love/a broken heart, a la Regina. Totally has moments where he is sympathetic and understandable. Still a villain.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-10-21 01:17 am (UTC)(link)And the unhappiness of EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD.
I'm sorry, but putting your happiness above the well-being of EVERYONE ELSE is pretty much a villainous thing to do.
And it's not like she's the only one who lost her chance at True Love. Red ate her love!
no subject
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-10-21 01:53 am (UTC)(link)no subject
no subject
Uh... no, they are not. Not always.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-10-21 06:31 am (UTC)(link)You're underestimating the human ability to fuck things up. Acting for love can absolutely make you a villain. (Well, I suppose you could twist the definition around to say that if it makes you a villain, you weren't actually motivated by love, but I think that invalidates the argument you were trying to make.) Some love is just toxic. Even a non-toxic love can lead you to do bad things.
Wanting to be loved is... actually quite similar to wanting power. (In some cases it falls under wanting power.) Both are natural human urges. Both are, strictly speaking, selfish -- it's about wanting something for yourself. Both can be taken too far.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-10-22 04:33 am (UTC)(link)He wants power, and he wants it for reasons that are motivated by love. (Originally to save and protect, then get back to, Bae.) Sometimes that's the truth, and sometimes that's just what he tells himself; however, I think giving the dagger to August was an ample demonstration that he was willing, at least at that point, to choose family over power.
I love him as a character, if not always as a person, and find him relatable as hell.
But he's a villain. In a real-life circumstance, if you locked him up and handed me the key, I'd throw it away.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-10-22 04:21 am (UTC)(link)What about the curse, though? She cast that with the *express purpose* of making everyone else in the world unhappy (which seems pretty evil to me), and in order to do so was willing to sacrifice two things:
a) The only love she had left, her father, and
b) Any *capacity* she might have still had to love ('a hole in your heart you'll never be able to fill')
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-10-24 08:44 pm (UTC)(link)Make sure you make the distinction between your thoughts or assumptions and the character's motivations. A person doesn't need to be labelled as a villain to do villanous things. A rapist can claim they committed a heinous act out of love, while everyone else will see an evil crime. Everyone has reasons for doing the things we do, but that doesn't excuse us, only explain us.