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damkiannaBefore I say anything else: OUaT! I was not sure how I felt about this ep at first, but I think I'm warming to it? They killed another dude to tell a woman's story, for starters, which, maybe I sound a tiny bit creepy here, but that is a-okay with me. And I actually think it's fairly reasonable, given the abusive nature of Regina's relationship with her mother, that she would redirect her anger and bitterness over Daniel's death to Snow. She's been shown repeatedly and very vividly that anger against her mother does nothing, gets her nowhere, only makes things worse - and the need to keep that particular secret from her mother was so obvious to her, I don't think it's necessarily strange that her kneejerk reaction would be to tell herself bitterly that Snow should have known better, even if objectively that's a ridiculous expectation, given a ten-year-old on one side and a woman who has successfully manipulated Regina's own emotions in the past on the other.
I also can't say I'm surprised at the speed - in a Doylist sense, they had to show that this was the beginning of the Regina we know by the end of the episode, and in a Watsonian sense, there's still a fair amount of time between the Regina we know and the Regina whose face first obviously screams "I hate you forever" at Snow White, y/y? There's a lot of space in there for Regina to decide to conquer her fear of magic, to start learning to use it so that no one will be able to do to her what her mother could, to decide that the cruelest/most controlling thing her mother did (heart-ripping/squishing) is the cruelest and most controlling thing she can do to others. I don't think it's necessarily a tremendous leap. (Especially in the first flush of something traumatic; in my head, until the show says otherwise, that initial rush of hatred for Snow planted a seed and then faded a lot - but the seed remained, to grow slowly as time went by and Oh Richard Schiff What Are You Doing Here's court continued unwelcoming, people wouldn't shut up about how great the old queen was, very few people paid mind or were more than nominally kind to Regina, &c. &c. I would write that story if I could do it in less than six months.)
Then again, I possibly have something of a tendency to construct generous headcanon to fill in the blanks. :D
I do think that Oh Richard Schiff What Are You Doing Here, if he's as great a guy as he's supposed to be, would have let Regina out of the engagement if Snow had asked him to - but I'm not sure whether Snow would have thought to, at that time, because that would have been spilling the beans on her own initiative, and she promised not to. Regina's mother had to do some coaxing to get it out of her, and partly that worked because of Snow's own mother-related issues; it's reasonable to me that Snow wouldn't actively take the secret to her father, but would spill more reactively, the way she was shown doing. And the parallels (aka grimorie's post, warning for moving gifs)! I so so love having multiple women's storylines to compare and contrast to one another. ♥
However. I want to no longer be punched in the face with true love. Yes, fine, they were working something of an inversion here, as in Ruby's ep, with true love not enough, not saving the day, not guaranteeing a happy ending, but the phrase "true love" is starting to not seem like real words anymore. STOP MAKING EVERY CHARACTER DELIVER A MONOLOGUE ON HOW GREAT IT IS. I'm also not sure how I feel about a serious chunk of Regina's motivation being attributed to a dude; there are so many other incredibly complicated things she's done since then that the "We got her, Daniel" seemed a little weird. :/ I mean, I get that it's related to the gender-swapped fridging, but where it is usually narratively treated as something of a sign of dudely awesome that Our Hero doesn't just forget about That Dead Chick In His Past (because it would be so easy! he could just let it go! but he ~remembers, because he's a good guy - this being not unlike the rapist-nonrapist scale of morality in action movies) it seems doomed to read a little differently when Our Hero is a woman.
On the other hand: KATHRYN IS ALIVE YAAAAAAAAAAAY. \o/
There was also some catching up on Awake that happened, which, I have a couple thoughts. At the end of ... the second episode? Whenever Lucius's police captain had that conversation in the park with the guy who evidently orchestrated the accident. I ended up hypothesizing that there was a third world, because IIRC the police captain said something about how it had been overkill, and used the words "his whole family" - you didn't have to kill his whole family, didn't have to take out his whole family, I can't remember the exact verbiage that came before that, but it made it sound like both Lucius's wife and son were dead, when so far we've only been given the options of one or the other. It seemed to me like conspicuously weird wording if one of them were still alive, and I suggested to my mother that there was a third reality where they were both dead. After all, when the wife or the son is not either onscreen or being directly discussed, the lighting is the only real hint as to which world we're in.
I also suggested to her at some point that they were going to need an answer, and/or a larger plot - is one of the worlds actually not real? Can he travel between parts of the multiverse? Is he a merge point between universes (the middle of a Venn diagram, essentially)? Is he in a coma post-accident and all this is in his head? &c. &c. Now, the serial killer from the more recent ep might be lying about being able to do the same thing, but if he's not, that would seem to suggest a multiverse option; and the babysitter kind of supports that, in my opinion. The babysitter is the first person I can recall who has been in both known worlds and clearly took different paths in each that spring from one particular fork. (A particular fork coming before Lucius's accident, that is - IIRC, his partner being different is the result of changes that came post-crash.) So that would seem to argue for the multiverse, to some degree. (Obviously if it's all in his head anything could happen, but I doubt they'd pick that option.) All this comes with a grain of salt, of course, because I haven't been paying nearly as much attention to this show as to OUaT.
Next chapter of LttE: 9k. There is also auction fic, and I'm still trying to claw my way to the end of that Murphy/Luccio beast - it is so ridiculous, how did I end up with twenty-six thousand words of The Eagle + zombies? I don't even like zombies. /o\
I also can't say I'm surprised at the speed - in a Doylist sense, they had to show that this was the beginning of the Regina we know by the end of the episode, and in a Watsonian sense, there's still a fair amount of time between the Regina we know and the Regina whose face first obviously screams "I hate you forever" at Snow White, y/y? There's a lot of space in there for Regina to decide to conquer her fear of magic, to start learning to use it so that no one will be able to do to her what her mother could, to decide that the cruelest/most controlling thing her mother did (heart-ripping/squishing) is the cruelest and most controlling thing she can do to others. I don't think it's necessarily a tremendous leap. (Especially in the first flush of something traumatic; in my head, until the show says otherwise, that initial rush of hatred for Snow planted a seed and then faded a lot - but the seed remained, to grow slowly as time went by and Oh Richard Schiff What Are You Doing Here's court continued unwelcoming, people wouldn't shut up about how great the old queen was, very few people paid mind or were more than nominally kind to Regina, &c. &c. I would write that story if I could do it in less than six months.)
Then again, I possibly have something of a tendency to construct generous headcanon to fill in the blanks. :D
I do think that Oh Richard Schiff What Are You Doing Here, if he's as great a guy as he's supposed to be, would have let Regina out of the engagement if Snow had asked him to - but I'm not sure whether Snow would have thought to, at that time, because that would have been spilling the beans on her own initiative, and she promised not to. Regina's mother had to do some coaxing to get it out of her, and partly that worked because of Snow's own mother-related issues; it's reasonable to me that Snow wouldn't actively take the secret to her father, but would spill more reactively, the way she was shown doing. And the parallels (aka grimorie's post, warning for moving gifs)! I so so love having multiple women's storylines to compare and contrast to one another. ♥
However. I want to no longer be punched in the face with true love. Yes, fine, they were working something of an inversion here, as in Ruby's ep, with true love not enough, not saving the day, not guaranteeing a happy ending, but the phrase "true love" is starting to not seem like real words anymore. STOP MAKING EVERY CHARACTER DELIVER A MONOLOGUE ON HOW GREAT IT IS. I'm also not sure how I feel about a serious chunk of Regina's motivation being attributed to a dude; there are so many other incredibly complicated things she's done since then that the "We got her, Daniel" seemed a little weird. :/ I mean, I get that it's related to the gender-swapped fridging, but where it is usually narratively treated as something of a sign of dudely awesome that Our Hero doesn't just forget about That Dead Chick In His Past (because it would be so easy! he could just let it go! but he ~remembers, because he's a good guy - this being not unlike the rapist-nonrapist scale of morality in action movies) it seems doomed to read a little differently when Our Hero is a woman.
On the other hand: KATHRYN IS ALIVE YAAAAAAAAAAAY. \o/
There was also some catching up on Awake that happened, which, I have a couple thoughts. At the end of ... the second episode? Whenever Lucius's police captain had that conversation in the park with the guy who evidently orchestrated the accident. I ended up hypothesizing that there was a third world, because IIRC the police captain said something about how it had been overkill, and used the words "his whole family" - you didn't have to kill his whole family, didn't have to take out his whole family, I can't remember the exact verbiage that came before that, but it made it sound like both Lucius's wife and son were dead, when so far we've only been given the options of one or the other. It seemed to me like conspicuously weird wording if one of them were still alive, and I suggested to my mother that there was a third reality where they were both dead. After all, when the wife or the son is not either onscreen or being directly discussed, the lighting is the only real hint as to which world we're in.
I also suggested to her at some point that they were going to need an answer, and/or a larger plot - is one of the worlds actually not real? Can he travel between parts of the multiverse? Is he a merge point between universes (the middle of a Venn diagram, essentially)? Is he in a coma post-accident and all this is in his head? &c. &c. Now, the serial killer from the more recent ep might be lying about being able to do the same thing, but if he's not, that would seem to suggest a multiverse option; and the babysitter kind of supports that, in my opinion. The babysitter is the first person I can recall who has been in both known worlds and clearly took different paths in each that spring from one particular fork. (A particular fork coming before Lucius's accident, that is - IIRC, his partner being different is the result of changes that came post-crash.) So that would seem to argue for the multiverse, to some degree. (Obviously if it's all in his head anything could happen, but I doubt they'd pick that option.) All this comes with a grain of salt, of course, because I haven't been paying nearly as much attention to this show as to OUaT.
Next chapter of LttE: 9k. There is also auction fic, and I'm still trying to claw my way to the end of that Murphy/Luccio beast - it is so ridiculous, how did I end up with twenty-six thousand words of The Eagle + zombies? I don't even like zombies. /o\
