Regina Mills: A Purity of Heart

A meta on Regina’s childhood…

Regina was born a princess, one among many grand children of King Xavier, but among court life and riches. Trained from a very young age to rule in preparation to be queen. But not just any queen. Cora wasn’t shopping around for the right kingdom. She wasn’t sending her daughter to balls so that she could meet the right prince. No she had a long game in mind. One that fit both her revenge and her ambition.

A young girl humiliated Cora, not once but twice, and it was her family that she would destroy in order to put her daughter on a throne. But somewhere along the way something went wrong. Cora’s family was no longer living in a castle. But on an isolated country estate. There are two possibilities. Henry and his ambitious and dangerous wife could have been banished to a country estate. Henry was fifth in line ot the throne and Xavier certainly knew his daughter in law was dangerous. Potentially to dangerous to keep around at court.

Another option is that Xavier’s family was displaced from their kingdom and castle. There is some evidence in the show to suggest that Xavier’s family lost it’s kingdom to Prince Eric’s family. They live in the came castle …

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One could guess that Eric is one of Regina’s cousins, but given that all of Regian’s male relatives are played by Latinos and Prince Eric is white, along with the fact that the guards are wearing different heraldry the simpler explanation is that Henry’s family lost their kingdom. Perhaps Xavier, and arrogant man, wages wars beyond his ability to fight and even Cora’s ability to influence with her magic.

There is actually a suggestive element in the games Regina and Zelena play in the brief time in which they are together. Playing “princesses” for ten year old Regina meant combat. She acted out the violence that she had seen at some point. Magic was not yet something Regina was rejecting but there is every reason to believe even at that age she lived in a very unsettled world.

We already know from 5.19 that Cora has used her magic to hurt Regina before because she can’t use it to save her.

Henry Sr: Can’t you heal her? Cora: My magic won’t work, not when it’s the cause of her pain.

And we have other evidence of parental abuse even at a young age. It is not just that Cora will not play with her daughter but she also places the blame for her accident on Regina.

Regina: Who’s that? Cora: The girl whose magic saved you from yourself.

And there is this charming piece of dialogue right before she rips her screaming daughters apart and forces them to drink a forgetting potion because their bond is inconvenient to her social ambitions.

There is a lot of blank time between ten year old Regina’s brief encounter with her sister and eighteen year old Regina’s next appearance but there are some very notable changes over the course of that time. The two most important being her rejection of magic and her outright fear of her mother. I believe these are related.

We know that Cora used her magic freely to control and to punish and that she had done that since at least before Regina was ten years old.

We know that Regina had seen some sort of magic combat before she was ten years old.

We know that not long after her marriage she has a very strong aversion to the idea of taking hearts. That she sees it as evil.

And we know that Regina was able to hear the beating of her mother’s massive collection of magical hearts under the floor of her childhood home.

The logical conclusion is that at some point she began to recognize her mother’s evil and to reject it. I think that it is logical to assume that she saw her mother rip out hearts, control people, and likely even kill. Given Regina’s brave and heroic nature it’s even possible she tried to intervene with her mother on behalf of someone and paid the price. It would not surprise me if Cora crushed a heart instead of simply taking it to teach Regina a lesson in sentimentality.

We know she was a lonely child but imagine if she forced herself not to try and make friends knowing that any friendship with her endangered the person who she might befriend. Perhaps that is how the relationship with Daniel started. A secret friendship that turned into a secret love.

We know that Regina was obsessed with horses. Not simply being around them but reading about them and about horsemanship. And she was very very good. Let’s just appreciate this gif for a moment. She is riding at speed and jumping without a saddle.

I think horses and the outdoors became an escape for her. Anything that got her out of the house and away from her mother’s domain where violence, discipline reigned and where every action she took would be met with a sharp word. Another suggestive element of this is her love of the apple tree transplanted from her home orchard. Apple orchards are wonderful places to get lost in for a child and it is easy to imagine Regina running away from her lessons and spoiling her dress in the dirt under an apple tree day dreaming of a life she couldn’t have.

Of horses and freedom and a place that magic couldn’t touch her. Perhaps that is where she made her first wish. Her first of many wasted wishes. Because the fairies weren’t coming to help her. No matter how many times she begged at the blue star.

And the fairies weren’t the only ones who couldn’t or wouldn’t help. There was her father. She probably thought when she was a little girl he could do anything but no matter how much he loved her he was as trapped by Cora as she was. And Cora’s demands on what was proper and lady like were constant [though one wonders if her particular insistence on a saddle at this point was less about being graceful and more about the fact that her rescue of Snow White would be much more difficult riding without a saddle.]

By this point in Regina’s life Cora was quite free with her use of magic to “correct” Regina and Regina’s responses conditioned to her abuser.

Conditioning so deep into her psyche as to manifest well into her adulthood decades later. Enough that I wonder if one of the issues that was going on in the confrontation with the Snow Queen was that Regina was experiencing post traumatic stress. That for a moment she was not a powerful sorceress but a young girl being corrected for her disobedience. The fact that Regina says very little in this encounter suggests so.

But there is so much more to young Regina than being a victim. Because let’s not forget that the defining trait of young Regina was that she was a hero. That when a child cried for help she jumped on a horse and road out of her mind to save her life. There was o magic. There was no flashes of light. Simple physical bravery.

And that heroism was teamed with a kind and nurturing soul. Notice how after they dismount Regina carefully checks Snow to make sure she isn’t hurt and hasn’t broken anything.

And once she is sure she is physically safe she assures her that fear is to be faced and overcome. This is a young woman who lives in a constant state of fear and she responds to it with love, compassion, and patience.

But let us take a step back from this and remember something else.

This entire incident was set up. Snow’s horse did not just go wild. It was spooked by Cora. It was part of her plan to make her daughter the Queen. But for that plan to work she had to be sure that Regina would do exactly what she needed her to do. Cora had to be absolutely sure of her daughter would be a hero.

The only way she could be sure of that is that she’d done things like this before.

And no I don’t mean that she’d rescued kittens from trees. I mean that there must have been other incidents where Regina without hesitation or reservation performed acts of physical bravery in order for Cora to be sure that her plan would work.

And Cora took no chances. They weren’t in her nature.

But there is something else that Cora had to be sure of. She had to know that Regina was so well trained and so conditioned against rebellion that no matter how much she did not want this marriage proposal that Regina would remain silent and lady like. The evidence of Cora’s hand here is not just in her acceptence of the proposal but in Regina’s stunned silence.

Cora had punished, trained, corrected, and molded her daughter and when she did rebel. When she did resist Cora made sure to remind Regina that not even her life was her own. That her mother owned her and every choice she would make. [It’s also worth wondering as an aside what the revelation that the rescue of Snow was arranged by her mother did to adult Regina who then lost the one unambiguously good thing she’d done in her life. Her one heroic act was part of her mother’s evil plans. That even when she was a hero once upon a time not only was she not rewarded for that good but she wasn’t even really a hero.]

Cora’s abuse also left other scars that merged with other indignities. Did Regina ever exist in a world where she wasn’t looking over her shoulder. What does constant surveillance from such a young age do? We know from 5.19 that Cora had a habit of spying (which continued later in life as this example from Wonderland shows).

How many layers of shields and masks and protection did Regina have to learn to put up to protect the real her from everyone who wanted to know her thoughts and feelings in order to use them as weapons against her. But despite this dangerous world young Regina tried to hold on to the things she knew were true.

She had seen pain. She had seen death. She had seen magic. And she wanted no part of it.

She had been trained and bread to power. She had seen her mother wield it. It was being presented to her on a silver plate. And she wanted no part of it.

She had seen magic. She had seen it in it’s rawest form. And she believed there was something more powerful than magic. Something more valuable than magic. That true love, pure, simple, something anyone could have and that no one could buy was the most powerful force in all the realms.

And then it was ripped from her. In an act of cruelty in the face of a thousand acts of cruelty that were handed to her with her ladies lace and her morning tea and her lessons in how to rule. In all the knife cuts delivered at her mother’s hand. It was taken from her and there was no one not her father not a king not a fairy not a god to stand up for her. For her bravery. For her goodness. For her purity of heart.