Once Upon a Time has done it again. This week’s was another spectacularly Snow White heavy episode that quite frankly left the audience bored to tears for most of it. We are constantly being bombarded with the ‘Charmings are good, Regina is not’ theme of the show and a heavy focus on that fact. I, like many others, am getting bored of it.
Watching this week’s episode, I took away the information that Snow was a brat as a kid and not much has changed since. Everything in Snow’s little world is so clearly black and white to her, when quite frankly, nothing in any world is black and white. And she’s not the saint she’d like to think she is. Her morality is based on her self-sacrifice, which boils down to “I wanted my mother to live, I could have done it but I stopped myself, because I am good.” Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying losing a mother isn’t a big deal, I lost my own when I was barely legally an adult (I was eighteen, my brother was three days short of his eleventh birthday), but seriously, has she even contemplated her actions since then?
You can defend her attitude towards Regina all you would like, but as a child she broke a promise and manipulated the situation with Cora by telling about Daniel. It wasn’t wide-eyed innocence that made her do it, it was pure selfishness because she wanted to have someone love her and be interested in her. Regina was too young to marry a man Leopold’s age and as we now know, and long since suspected, it was Cora’s doing that she did. Snow had the ability to be a little brat from an early age, we saw that in this week’s episode, so trying to make us believe she’s the victim in all this is about as useful as trying to use a chocolate teapot to hold hot tea. Yes she lost her mother, no that was not her fault, but that doesn’t make her a saint. That makes her a child who, like many others have, lost her mother due to circumstances that were despicable.
Regina isn’t faultless, I’m not saying that either. But she’s a whole human. One who has been through the whole gamut of emotions, is still dealing with the psychological abuse and manipulation of her mother and who is fighting against it. Maybe not successfully but we saw it in the latest episode. She is trying and the conflicting emotions are there. Those unmistakable moments, where her face flashed the confusion and difficulty in her decisions were there and I’m hoping will lead to her turning against her mother. Snow on the other hand is a one trick pony who believes her morality is the only one.
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