**Due to recent misinterpretations of some one post
from this blog, a disclaimer is now apparently necessary. If this is your first visit to The
Scratched Camera, please read the introductory post and discover, for yourself, that every typed word that
follows is unabashedly my opinion and mine alone. In said introductory post, which,
shockingly, I did not simply type up for my own good health, I state that we
all read events and characters with our own baggage in mind; no one observes
with a perfectly clear lens—hence the
name The Scratched Camera.
Therefore, it is completely your will to disagree with any material that
follows, just as it is my will to agree and advocate for what is mine.** ~End, irritating obligatory disclaimer~
Regina Mills—She Doesn’t Know How to Love Very Well
Regina
lives on a sliding scale. At any
time, she has the potential to slide from the kindness evident in the Original
version of the character, to the ambitious and cruel nature of the Evil Queen
and, finally, to the middle ground composite that is the Mayor.
The
audience first witnesses Original Regina’s character in The Stable Boy. In
stark contrast to the Evil Queen the audience has seen throughout the bulk of
season one, the Regina present in The
Stable Boy appears to be very kind-hearted. She saves Snow White, has a love she wishes to spend the
rest of her life with, and attempts to dutifully obey her demanding
mother—albeit with a measureable count of rebellion that hints at the future
version of the character to come.
However,
once her mother kills Daniel and forces her to marry King Leopold, the wholly
original and organic version of Regina is gone and will never be seen
again. She will certainly slip on
her sliding scale towards her original inclinations from time to time, but she
will never again be completely the generous version of her the audience sees
here.
As
time progresses and she continues to be stuck in a loveless marriage to the
king, her heart only becomes darker.
Miserable and hurt by the king’s repeated insistence that she constantly
falls short of the previous queen, she is still inclined towards the Original
Regina end of the scale. It isn’t
until she proactively reels in the Genie and manipulates him into killing the
king that she shifts to the Mayor position.
Say
what you want about the Mayor of Storybrooke, but she knows what she wants and isn’t
afraid to seek it out. The mayor
setting on Regina’s sliding scale isn’t necessarily murderous, but she can be
very cruel. She has a very tough
exterior—weathered by the various trials and tribulations she suffered through
in her time as both the Original Regina and her reign as the Evil Queen. There’s also a territorial sense about
her, put in place by losing her kingdom and her castle to Snow White and Prince
Charming. As a result, she detests
others attempting to touch things that she views as belonging to her. When Emma attempts to protect Henry
from her, it only causes Mayor Regina to lash out and struggle to sabotage Swan’s
every move. When Sheriff Graham
develops a closeness to Swan, to the point where his loyalties have evidentially
shifted, she kills him with very little thought—although, I would argue this
is infused with a bit of Regina’s old friend and persona the Evil Queen rearing
its ugly head once again, but more on that to follow.
Throughout
the bulk of the season one Storybrooke plot line, we see Regina in varying
shades of her mayor persona. She
typically shoots to injure, not to kill.
Snow’s reputation is almost destroyed as Regina frames her as the
murderer of Kathryn. However, she
doesn’t strike outright against Snow or Kathryn, who is returned, slightly
traumatized, but basically unharmed—a mercy the Evil Queen certainly wouldn’t
have bestowed. Belle has spent the
previous twenty-eight years held captive just for the sake of inciting some
form of misery in Rumplestiltskin.
Again, Evil Queen Regina would’ve simply murdered her and saved the
space in Storybrooke’s mental hospital.
This
isn’t to say we don’t catch glimpses of Regina’s Evil Queen persona in our time
in Storybrooke. Throughout her
hold of her title as queen, she was arguably at her most successful peak—the
Evil Queen would probably call it happy,
but I believe she is far from even being able to label herself as content in
this stage. Her murder of King
Leopold started her on the path towards becoming the Evil Queen, but it was the
murder of her own father to appease the requirements of the curse that sealed
her fate in this position. Just as
the death of Daniel cemented a permanent disconnect between the the current
Regina and the Original Regina, her willingness to kill her own father for the
sake of her own supposed happiness erected a dam between her current and Evil
Queen personalities; while she may not always be wholly the Evil Queen, the
waters of her past travesties would always overflow over her current sense of
self.
Having
achieved her goal of ruining all happy endings, Regina felt very accomplished
as she set up her life in Storybrooke, Evil Queen persona still at hand, as she
began her cruel reign over the citizens of the town. However, it didn’t take long for Regina to grow bored of
everyone’s complacent surrender to her orders. With this tedium, Regina takes her first small step away
from being strictly the Evil Queen.
While she’ll return to her reigning tendencies from time to time, she
will never be wholly evil again.
We
have Owen Flynn to thank for this.
In Welcome to Storybrooke, we
see Regina reach out to the boy, who fills a certain hole in her heart that Rumple
warned her about when she took action against her father. While Regina returns briefly to her
Evil Queen ways to murder the boy’s father, she does actually miss him once
he’s gone, proving to the audience that she can never be truly evil again; her
loneliness—ironically incited by her own murder of her father—won’t allow for
it.
To
permanently fill this void, she seeks out Rumple to provide a child for her—but
as he makes oh-so clear, not in that
way. Once Henry enters her
life, he reaffirms the benefits to her persona started by Owen, further
developing the Mayor role discussed previously. While Mayor Regina can be cruel and unjust as she actively
works to destroy Snow White and Prince Charming, she can also display the vulnerability
and affection of Original Regina.
Her actions against Emma are excessive and unfair, often resulting in
the unjustified arrest of Swan—which, ironically, only served to bring her
and Graham closer together.
Perhaps the quen should’ve thought that through a bit better—but
they are done in the sake of what she views as the best possible choice for her
son; an instinctual certainty from Regina’s point of view that is
particularly interesting, given she can no longer remember Henry’s origins.
No
matter what horrible revenge Regina attempts to achieve as she works towards
that comfortable previously successful persona of the Evil Queen, one
disapproving word or glance from Henry is all that is required to slide her
straight back towards her middle ground as the mayor. In A Land Without
Magic, Regina is scattered across her scale, as she struggles between
selfishly wanting Henry all to herself and dealing with the inevitability that
Emma Swan isn’t going anywhere. She
attempts to poison Emma to regain the authority of her Evil Queen reign over
Henry’s love. However, the second
it backfires and it is revealed to her that Henry is the one paying the price
for her choice to use magic, she slides almost back to Original Regina as the
pitch of her voice raises as she delivers her emotional confession about the
apple turnover. Once they leave
the storage closet, however—which sounds oddly like a poorly written fan
fiction. It isn’t, I swear—Regina
has slid back towards her position as the mayor, her demeanor stricter,
stronger as she forces herself to work with the one woman in the entire town
she may actually dislike more than Snow White. But, for the sake of her son, Regina has no other choice
and, therefore, makes compromises on her brewing Evil Queen ego.
Regina
spends the first part of season two in the mayor phase, sliding along various
posts on her spectrum in the process.
Her subjects, now fully aware of who she is and none-too-happy about
their predicament, constantly suspect the mayor is responsible for every mishap
about town. This begins Mayor
Regina’s perpetual state of penance paying for the actions of both Original
Regina and Evil Queen Regina. She
pays for her failure to save Daniel once again as Frankenstein—still not
sure what the hell he’s doing in anything related to fairy tales, but whatever—reanimates
his corpse and sends zombie Daniel running about town. We see another brief glimpse of a
Regina that closely resembles her original personality, only to have it ripped
from her yet again as she is forced to kill Daniel and watch him die for a
second time. Every attempt Regina
makes to grow closer to Henry is sabotaged by a mistrustful Snow White and
Prince Charming, who seem eager to trip over themselves to assume Regina has
anything but good intentions.
Regina
will continue to struggle against the constant leak in her Evil Queen dam,
particularly towards the end of season two where Cora returns and quickly sets
to manipulating the queen into undoing all the progress she had made at
developing her mayor persona in the first half of the season. Cora’s argument is that magic and power
will inevitably be the only way to win back Henry’s love—a fact which is
obviously very untrue, but serves as the easy path out. Regina, suffocated by the disapproval
of the citizens of Storybrooke, fails to see the fallacy in the plan, and,
therefore, falls pray to Cora’s control.
However,
Regina comes back around by the end of the season, as she works with Emma to
save Storybrooke in And Straight on ‘Til
Morning. In the season finale,
she actually ponders sacrificing herself to save the town, a concept that has
shades of improvement even upon the Original Regina from The Stable Boy. Her
collaboration with Emma, however, preserves the character safely in her mayor
persona, as she finally earns some credit from the now utterly annoying
Snow White and Prince Charming.
This
sacrifice only carries her so far, of course, as Mary Margaret and David
instantly start doubting her once more as they set foot on the Jolly Roger to
save Henry in the third season.
Regina, who previously caved to this pressure at the sightings of her
mother’s easier path, stands her ground this time around, insisting that she
needs to be an active part of the rescue mission for her son.
It
is this repeated struggle that makes Mayor Regina one of my favorite characters
on the show. Original Regina was
very sweet and altruistic, allowing her own ambitions and desires to be
stripped away by her mother. Evil
Queen Regina murders people, even those she most cares for, to get what she
wants. But Mayor Regina is edgy, sarcastic
and dry—particularly as she snarkily tears apart all plans devised by Mary
Maragret or David, based on her perception of their stupidity—while still maintaining
an ability to love and cherish her son in the way she was never capable of as
queen and in a representation of the missed opportunity that was her
unfulfilled love for Daniel.
From Bella to Katniss:
Is Regina a good Role Model?
Regina is one of the strongest characters on Once Upon a Time—both physically and emotionally. She’s suffered a plethora of loss,
which has built a hard exterior similar to Emma’s—hence all of the SwanQueen
shipping business. While she
may not always use her magic for the best of purposes, she’s very successful
when she does and has shown an ability to very easily defend herself and those
she cares for. She would also go
to any length to protect Henry, much like Emma. However, frequently Regina’s definition of defending her
loved ones or protection for Henry leads her back towards her Evil Queen
persona—a personality that consistently fails to provide a good example, particularly
with all the murdering and such.
On the other hand, where the Evil Queen lacks in morality, she provides
in pure-driven ambition; after her resistance against her own desires as
Original Regina, she never makes that mistake again, as she actively strides
towards her goals in both her position as Evil Queen and the Mayor. Raw ambition is a trait rarely assigned
to televised females—a remnant of the Cinderella days of old, where women were
allowed to have goals, but not to seek them out on their own—and it is,
therefore, refreshing to see a female character going after what she wants and
obtaining a high level of power as a result.
Role Model Rating:
4/10
From Lorelai to Wonder Woman: Is Regina relatable?
The strong sense of ambition about Regina, while serving to make her a
rather positive role model—if not a tainted one, what again with all the
murder—it could potentially hinder her ability to relate to the
audience. As I mentioned above,
women in media—and real life, for that matter—are rarely shown to be brazenly
ambitious. Even Emma, arguably one
of the strongest characters I’ve seen on television in this decade, isn’t as
driven as Regina. Swan is, of
course, motivated to protect her son to her very last breath; she is not,
however, as determined as Regina to hold a high rank of power and be recognized
as an authority figure. I’ve
noticed a trend that women in media who hold this type of authority or power
must also be seen as cruel, hard-hearted or evil—for instance, Maleficent,
Ursala, Margaret Tate from The Proposal,
President Coin from Mockingjay and
Umbridge from Harry Potter, among
many others—although to be honest, that last one really is just evil. Regina, while occasionally lingering in
this trend as her Evil Queen tendencies beckon at her, typically defies this
standard after the start of season two.
However, with her loss in authoritarian tendencies, there is also normally
a notable drop in her power, as Snow While and Prince Charming once again take
control of her territory. This
conflict creates a struggle that reveals a vulnerability to Regina that, in
turn, creates a far more human and relatable character than the likes of the
perfection that is Mary Margaret and David. While viewers may not have been forcibly removed from a
throne they thought was rightfully theirs by a younger, more agile opponent who
seems incapable of failure, we have all stood in the shadow of someone who
seems perpetually and inherently better than
us. Likewise, the average audience
member may not have been forced into an arranged marriage at the hands of a
manipulating mother, but we can relate to pressure from parents on what course
we should take in life. In short,
Mayor Regina manages to combine an ambition for a general sense of improvement
in her life, while realistically struggling with how to achieve such ends—an
effort that results in a revealed vulnerability that seems far more relatable
than Snow White’s pristinely perfect life.
Relatability Rating:
7/10
