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swanqueensalad · 3 years

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TRIGGERWARNING!

Without triggering anyone I wanna ask two things:

1) Was Cora ever physically abbussive towards Regina?

2) I know many ppl's head canon is that Leopold raped Regina again and again as his bride, but is that your headcanon too?

ok again TRIGGER WARNING for abuse & SA (and brief mention of suicide) for anyone reading/scrolling!

i'm going to just explain my personal interpretation of the show and these subjects, bc i find regina so interesting and heartbreaking. and i actually do think part of what makes regina so fascinating as a character is her relationship within the cycle of abuse and how yes, she was incredibly hurt and manipulated all her life, but she eventually managed to break free of it all and work to be better for her own child.

buckle up because i have a lot of feelings and this is probably going to be LONG

so, my thoughts on exactly what happened and why regina is as fucked up as she is:

so yeah, cora was a horrific parent. it's canon that she abused regina both emotionally and physically for practically all her life.

in practically her very first scene, we see cora using magic to hurt her eighteen year old daughter - to violently restrain her/drop her to the ground when she 'misbehaves' which pretty clearly says this is a woman who uses power and fear as a control tactic, and is not afraid of physically hurting regina.

and if this is what she was doing when regina is almost an adult, i think it's safe to assume she's been doing it since she was very young - regina's response 'please don't, i'll be good' is the conditioned response of a much younger child. everything about the way regina was written, her relationship with cora, and the way lana and the directors chose to play it screams abuse victim. she is hypervigilant - she jumps when people come close or make sudden noises. when she's choked with magic she immediately knows not to struggle or fight back. as a young girl, she is terrified of doing things wrong.

(also, when we get the flashback to actual 10 year old regina, cora says she can't help her because 'it needs to be someone who's magic has never hurt her')

while i think most of the time cora relied on magic to physically punish regina - knowing how much regina particularly hated it/was afraid of it - i think she was definitely not above slapping her for more minor infractions

beyond just physical abuse, cora was clearly emotionally distant and got regina to a place of being pretty touch-starved and desperate for affection. (lana and barbara play this so masterfully as well) we see her being constantly, nastily critical of everything her daughter does.

i think it's also implied in the regina rising book that cora was controlling/restrictive of regina's food to ensure she stayed thin/attractive which is just a whole other can of worms

as for leopold. please bear with me while i RANT:

nothing will ever make me more mad than the fact this man was never held accountable in the narrative for his role in regina's story and how absolutely fucking awful he was.

first of all, even before he meets regina, he is dodgy af. he supposedly genuinely loves cora, but throws her out immediately when he discovers her pregnancy without even asking her if it's true/discussing it. also, even in that flashback the man is visibly much older than cora and even more so than eva, who he actually does marry (although i do believe they came to truly love each other). so yeah he has a habit of Not Listening to women and not looking at women his own age

and then we get to regina. the eighteen year old daughter of his ex fiancee (younger even than the unborn child who cora carried when she was engaged to him)

yes i think he raped her. because powerful old men do not marry pretty eighteen year olds for the company. (also, if it was just so snow would have a mother figure, well, she already had her maid joanna. and if snow really wanted regina around that badly, leopold could have just brought her to court as a lady in waiting, a fitting role for a noblewoman, and more appropriate seeing as regina was only about eight years older than snow)

regina is visibly distressed by the proposal. she is panicked. she looks to her father to help. cora accepts the proposal for her. and leopold does not care. i think this tells u all u need to know about his views on consent

(also it all gets ickier when you remember leopold was attracted to cora, and regina is considered to look like cora did when she was younger)

leopold clearly had zero interest in regina as a person. he used her for arm candy for events, to make snow happy, and to keep his bed warm. (later, he invades her privacy so much regina counts on him reading her diary as a thoughtless and integral part of a plan, and locks her up for receiving a present from another man) and yet he is never treated as a villain or ever held accountable (besides regina killing him - good for her - but even then it's framed more as a way to villainise her for tricking sidney) and it makes me FURIOUS

i sometimes see the take that leopold might have stopped raping her towards the latter years of their marriage, but i disagree - i think maybe it did get fewer and farther between, but regina was still his wife who he only saw as serving a few purposes, and the way he is so possessive of her in 1x011 makes no sense otherwise, seeing as he was so uninterested in her in every other way

i do think a lot of regina's rage and vendetta against snow is because of this abuse too.

hear me out: in s1 especially, both snow and regina refer to snow as 'ruining her life'. because regina blamed her for everything that happened to her. not only did snow cause daniel's murder, it was her desire for regina as a mother that prompted leopold to marry her.

and this marriage was hell. and i think people don't realise how long it lasted either - snow went from a child to at least her late teens before regina killed leopold. regina was a traumatised young girl, grieving the love of her life, with no friends, no allies, nobody except the literal dark one who was grooming her for his own gain. (no wonder she clung to the brief sense of freedom and control his lessons offered. no wonder she nearly killed herself.)

and while regina suffered, she was forced to play with snow white every day, who was so spoiled, so loved, so happy, and had no idea of the life she had unwittingly trapped regina in.

so yeah, it's all pretty dark.

and it's for all these reasons i think ouat ended up shying away from many more regina backstory episodes centring on the time she was married/pre-evil queen years, because they were on abc after all, and i don't think they were really equipped to deal with the horrendousness of the story they'd created

but lana most certainly did her work becaue i think all of this nuance does show in her portrayal

and it all just makes regina's ending - the good queen, in her own name, safe and strong and loved, part of a true family, her bond with snow healed - so much more of a relief.

#tw abuse #tw rape #regina mills #regina mills meta #anti king leopold #anti cora

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