First of all they gave no build up to the story of Zelena’s childhood, they just jumped from two Oz peasants finding a magical baby and deciding to keep it to, what… 18 years later? Was it a bad childhood? Abusive? Unhappy? We don’t know. One thing we do know is that, despite what everyone keep saying, Zelena actually did know love; her adoptive mother. From what her father said her mother had apparently loved her enough to treat her as her own child, to the point where she didn’t even want Zelena to know she was adopted. We have this huge gap where we are presumably supposed to just believe Zelena… suffered? I don’t know, you know why? Because there was absolutely no context given to anything the Oz characters did. It felt like everything that happened to Zelena to make her the Wicked Witch took place at her home, just a few seconds before leaving, and then with Rumple after he ‘dumped’ her. We weren’t shown any build up to her being bitter, she ‘just was’.
I would like to applaud this paragraph.
This is a big problem the writer of ONCE have had with their villains as of late. Malcolm had one line of dialogue about being an apprentice and how it sucked but we got NOTHING that really let us inside his head. Cora had two backstories and will probably have one more now that we know Zelena is in fact her daughter.
It seems that this episode is full of ‘just because’ –ness. Zelena’s mother decides to adopt her ‘just because’. Zelena’s father hates that his daughter is magic ‘just because’. Zelena is jealous of Regina ‘just because’. I can’t speak for other viewers, but I need CONTEXT in order to give a crap about characters and their behaviour.
Yeah I agree, especially about Zelena hating Regina. It came out of NOWHERE. Why not Cora??