I don’t think is Robin Hood, they are going to be in NL for awhile SB is going to be on the back burner.
Just because NL will be the main focus, that doesn’t mean SB and everyone in it will be completely ignored while the NL storyline is happening. And just because the character who will be Regina’s love interest is being introduced early on, that doesn’t automatically mean that their love story will happen early on as well.
We may well see SB in 302, because we know for sure that we’re seeing Belle in 302. If she’ll appear in NL somehow, it probably means she’s doing something in SB and we’ll see it. RH is guaranteed 4 eps, and a story arc involving Belle. I’d expect to have SB and Belle referenced at least 4 times before the rest get back from NL. Those 4 eps can be used to establish RH’s character, (as well as appearing in SB, he could also appear in FTL flashbacks, like I suspect he may in 302, because the actor was in town when they were shooting that ep, and it’s a Snowing ep, and it’s been implied that Snow knew RH).
Like I said in my previous post, I don’t think they’ll give Regina a romance while she’s in NL. It wouldn’t be believable IMO that she’d get interested in a guy which would distract her from saving Henry. Saving Henry is all she cares about in the immediate future. I don’t think it should be assumed that just because her future love interest is introduced early on, that that automatically translates to her interacting with him early on.
If Regina arrives back in SB some time around mid-season (or shortly after), and by then we’ve seen RH’s 4 eps to establish him as a character in his own right, they could then have them interact and maybe actually hook up towards the end of the season. It would pace out the progress for Regina’s character journey and growth at a believable rate.
I love how they added in ‘or she’ so that they didn’t piss off the Swan Queen shippers XD
I’ve noticed some stuff on tumblr recently where people are planning to ship her with Tink. I’m all for crackships (obviously), got no problem with same sex ships, read into and interpret subtext all you want. But I honestly don’t know where people get the idea that Regina being a lesbian (or bi) is ever gonna be canon, and there do seem to be some people out there who believe that she’ll ultimately end up with a woman as her canon partner. If Regina was anything other than straight, they’d have blatantly, canonically shown us that by now…and they haven’t.