I'm the person who asked about Regina and Henry and thank you for clearing things up. Thank you for going into great detail and helping me out with understanding their relationship better. I wonder why the fandom reacts that way. I personally found their relationship realistic and so the development seems inevitable. It's such a beautiful relationship and I was shocked at the amount of people saying how abusive it was.
There really aren’t a lot of them. They are just obsessed and so will talk endlessly about it and jump on any article or post to talk about how horrible Regina is. The number of notes one of their posts gets versus the number of notes a positive post about Regina and Henry gets is telling. They are orders of magnitude different. As the show has gone on they have gotten much more vitriolic in their arguments as it has become more and more clear that the show is contradicting their headcanons.
But because i’m a fairly prominent Regina blog I get trolled by them a fair bit so that’s why I know their arguments very well. Sometimes I just respond with gifs… because they’re just so adorable…
But honestly what annoys me most is that the show has shown a case of child abuse and someone who shows the scars of that abuse into adulthood.
Cora’s abuse of Regina was shown to us on screen. It’s not debatable (though there are crazy people who do). Regina’s behavior speaks of the systematic nature. When the Snow Queen uses similar choking tactics on her she, unlike Emma, has completely different body language because she is used to it…
She displays a very common form of resistance to extreme child abuse called silent insolence (as opposed to Henry who is able to openly rebel against Regina because he has no fear that she will ever hurt him).
When she is being actively abused she raises her voice a bit and says exactly what her abuser wants to hear in order to get the abuse to stop.
She expresses direct fear of Cora on multiple occasions, looking over her shoulder …
… and even into adulthood tries to warn people that she isn’t strong enough to fight her mother…
… unfortunately for her no one is listening to her. Even as she is dealing with Cora she knows she is being manipulated but years of physical and mental abuse make it so that she is actually quite incapable of fighting. Cora set out to break her and break her she did.
That abuse has lasting effects on Regina not just in her completely damaged personality, but also in some very classic abuse survivor tells…
… for instance this startling reflex is often lifelong. Another example is something called invasive thoughts, which were dramatically illustrated by the scene where Regina fantasizes about killing young Snow White but is horrified by it. Believe it or not invasive thoughts are completely normal and not at all evidence that Regina is sick but rather her own horror at them is evidence of her mental health. She was in an insane situation and her mind was rejecting it.
Cora used classic gaslighting techniques, like here she tries to convince Regina she left the Henry hand print in her car and hadn’t been in her house despite the fact that Regina knew better. As a long term form of abuse this causes the victim to have difficulty figuring out what thoughts are theirs and what are the messages of their abuser. It’s highly disruptive and extremely difficult to get over causing lasting damage to both self worth and trust in her own judgement.
But most importantly abuse runs in cycles. Hurt people hurt people. And breaking the cycle of abuse is incredibly difficult. You can tell that Regina has tried very hard not to be the kind of mother to Henry that Cora was to her. Cora was controlling and denied Regina freedom and independence. Henry has the run of the town within limits and shows a very strong independent streak. That independence is learned behavior.
When she did find herself repeating the behaviors of her childhood she immediately stopped.
Which is the fundamental problem with the ARBs. They don’t understand the difference between a mistake and abuse. They don’t understand how incredibly hard breaking that cycle is. And they do tremendous damage to the adult survivors of child abuse by ignoring Regina’s experience and characterizing her missteps as abuse because so many are afraid to have children at all lest they repeat the same mistakes as their parents.
This is I think one of the most important things about this relationship and really the only important thing about this show. To show someone who has experienced that kind of horrific abuse as a child be a mother and have a healing and warm relationship with her son. Parental relationships on television are rarely allowed to be messy and complicated and loving and to evolve the way this one has.
And for that we can thank Lana Parrilla, because she fought hard for that relationship and she had Jared Gilmore have worked hard to build that relationship and go from this…
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