But there is really nothing, nothing we can do. Love must be forgotten. Life can always start up anew.
I think that in this scene, we’ve all been focusing on Henry telling Regina he doesn’t want to be her and the parallel that brings with Regina not wanting to be Cora and her being faced with the fact she has turned into her mother. And that is the big part of this scene, that’s what we’re supposed to take away from this.
But. There’s something else at play in this scene that is so interesting to me. And that’s Regina’s line “You can make them not be scared. You can make them love you.”
Can we just take a minute to think about that and what it says about Regina and her ideas about love? We go from this innocent, sweet young woman who believed that true love was the most powerful magic of all, to Regina now who is saying that you can’t find that magic, you can’t just have it - you have to make people love you.
And it’s so sad and it’s so upsetting, but it’s also so true for her. Because no one ever loved her enough to teach her that it isn’t something you make someone else do, it isn’t something that can be forced. There was Daniel, but he wasn’t around long enough to really impress that on her.
Instead, we have her formative influence when it comes to love being Cora, who Regina loved and wanted to love her back so much, that basically ingrained it in her head that she had to make people love her. She wasn’t enough on her own to be loved, she had to be good, she had to be obedient, she had to be like her. And even then, she never got an ‘I love you’, she got an ‘I’m proud of you’.
Regina has been trying her whole life to make someone love her - her mother, her father, Snow, Graham, Henry - because after Daniel (and maybe even before) she never felt like she was good enough, worthy enough of love. And time and again that’s just been reinforced to her - she wasn’t enough for Cora, she wasn’t enough for Henry to stand up for her, Snow betrayed her, Graham didn’t feel anything for her, Henry left her.
And part of that is because she was trying to force the issue so much. She kept Henry under lock and key, bought him things to try to win his affection, used magic to get him back and keep him because it’s so true what she said later - she doesn’t know how to love someone. She doesn’t know - to steal from Moulin Rogue - how to love and be loved in return. And that just makes me so, so sad.
Someone get Emma back here to teach her, please!
“I think Ken and Peggy have this really interesting, sweet relationship. They’ve always gotten along, they’ve always helped each other, and they’ve kind of been two of the only characters who’ve never had a problem, really. She just sort of respects the idea that he’s doing something outside of the office, even though she makes fun of him for it. It’s a really sweet scene near the end when he decides he’s not going to write anymore. I think she really feels like her heart goes out to him in that sense because I think she admires that he has this creative side to him and is disappointed to see that he’s not going to keep going with it.” -Elisabeth Moss
