Cursed Personalities

[Keb]

Been working on a theory based on spoilers about Lacey, about what the cursed/SB personalities really were made up of. It’s been suggested that they’re opposites or just completely different, but there’s a lot of evidence that this isn’t really true. Rather, I think that the cursed personalities bring out elements–mainly weaknesses–that characters already had, or that they had in some way overcome in FTL.

First, the spoilery bit:

Belle's counterpart, Lacey, has been described/shown as a barfly, which is pretty different from the brave, adventurous Belle we know and love. Yet, when Rumple kicks her out and her heart is broken, her response is to hang out in the local tavern, drinking, reading, and giving advice to Dreamy. She's there for at least two nights, and she doesn't actually go adventuring without Dreamy's push. She becomes a stronger, more determined character through her adventure with Mulan, and maybe even overcomes whatever traits made her head to the tavern in the first place.

Mary Margaret doesn’t lose Snow’s kindness, friendliness, or belief in love and hope. She does, however, stop standing up for herself (“Why don’t you fight back?” “Why would I do that?” — Welcome to Storybrooke), and stop always doing the right thing (cheating with David even when she knows better, the whole thing with Whale). Yet, in FTL she lies to Charming (to save his life), she passively offers herself as a sacrifice for her kingdom to the Huntsman, and she was manipulated heavily by Cora as a kid, oh, and she became a thief. She learned to stand up for herself and make better choices, but those weaknesses were always there–the Curse just brought them out again.

Archie lets Regina make him do things that he believes to be wrong…just like his parents used to. He overcame that in FTL by becoming a cricket and caring for the boy he had unintentionally hurt most, but the Curse brought back his weak-willed state.

Still working on other characters. Someone asked me in the thread where I initially proposed this: What about Gold? That’s a tricky one because the only time we’ve seen pure Mr. Gold is briefly in Welcome to Storybrooke, but my impression is that we can base a good deal of it on his surface character before Regina calls him out on being Rumple again. He’s cold, anti-social, and ruthless…which were his worst traits as the Dark One, especially early Dark One before he started to see the irony in everything. He also gets his limp back, which is -really- interesting, because there’s no way Regina could have known about that, is there? That was a physical weakness of his, though, so it might support the theory of the curse drawing out weaknesses; it’s also a symbol of what he believes to be cowardice, his biggest weakness of all.

I’m still trying to work out David Nolan vs Charming, and Ruby vs Red, as I think they’re the most interesting other contrasts we have atm.

[RumplesGirl]

I do like this.

Re: Rumple. I think the limp is the interesting part. It was always so strange until we saw A Desperate Soul because the Dark One never had a limp so I didn’t understand why Gold had it. And as far as we know there is no reason for Regina to have known about it. She only ever knew the Dark Rumple, same goes for Cora so she didn’t hear about it from her mother unless somehow Cora found out and told Regina. The only person who knew was Milah and the village people who all died long before Regina. But that limp is very symbolic. It’s his physical manifestation of his cowardice which is one of Rumple’s biggest characterizations. (I always thought of it like the limp Dr. Gregory House had on House which showed that he was a very broken person and had a lot of pain both internally and externally.)

Re: David and Charming. I think this has to do with who Charming was before he was Charming. He wasn’t a prince or a hero. He was simple shepherd and I think part of him feared that he was never good enough to be the Prince. Perhaps the worst part of himself was his self-doubt, though he hid it quite well in FTL. David is the opposite of Charming in so many ways but he also wasn’ the kind shepherd who did what was right. It’s like David wasn’t worthy to be either of them.

Ruby/Red. Hmm. I’ll have to think about that one.

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[angiebelle]

The impression I got of the cursed personalities is that they are still the same people, it is just that the curse emphasizes their weakest personality trait and takes away their strengths. Since they don’t remember their FTL lives, they don’t have those experiences to build them up- hence Mary Margaret is weak, David tries too hard and messes up, Ruby acts like a tart due to a lack of self respect and confidence.

[wewerecursed]

That’s basically what I’ve always thought, that the curse only made them the worst version of themselves. Magnifying their faults. Taking away their confidence. Because when you get right down to it, that’s exactly what they all were, themselves, without confidence in themselves.

Also, since the point of the curse was to take away the happy endings, everyone had something in their lives that made them miserable. (And I’m mostly talking about before Emma stirred things up. ) MM had her loneliness. She probably walked around in their groundhog day world with a constant ache and emptiness not just because of not having her true love, but because of not having her baby she didn’t know existed. Gold had his weakness, his painful leg, but because of his deal with Regina he still had power. Ruby had her restrictive life under her Granny and lack of self-respect.

When Emma arrived and the clock started to move, everyone slowly began to regain what they lost. True, MM and David’s affair was a fiasco and bad decision on both their parts, but that I don’t think happened because of the curse. It happened despite it. Since Emma broke MM’s loneliness, her ability to stand up for herself and go for what she wanted SLOWLY began to return. Because of that, David got to wake up. Because she encouraged Ruby, Ruby was capable of growing up and gaining self-respect. Like Henry said, Emma was changing things. I think the curse started to break the moment she decided to stay and continued to weaken throughout the coarse of the season and all that kissing Henry really did was restore their memories. They were already slowly becoming themselves again.

[PriceofMagic]

I agree that the curse brought out people’s worse traits and emphasised them but the traits had to be there to begin with. No way would Regina have had the time and patience to craft each individual personality in Storybrooke.

I think Ruby’s cursed state of being promiscuous has a lot to do with werewolves and their links to women’s menstrual cycles aka that time of the month. Ruby turns into a werewolf because she’s young and in her prime whereas Granny doesn’t because she’s old and post menopausal. Because Ruby couldn’t turn into a wolf during the curse, it is likely “the wolf” had an influence on her behaviour. For example, she was on the “hunt” for men.

All magic comes with a price!

Keeper of Felix

[storybrookegirl]

Also I think Ruby’s personality was like that because she always had a weakness for turning to the wrong people for love. When she doesn’t know she’s a wolf, she shuns and ignores Granny, even though Granny is trying to protect her. She starts to get it in the episode where she meets her mom, because she chooses to save Snow, her one real friend, instead of staying with those wolves who I think didn’t really care about her. In SB, that weakness manifested itself in the form of her looking to men for love rather than her Granny. And of course, that took her and Granny’s happy ending away, even though they were technically together in SB.

[storybrookegirl]

When you think about it, that would actually be very similar to the original Red Riding Hood’s problem: Not knowing who to trust.

[Author]

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