Zelena Mills/The Wicked Witch of the West Character Analysis

[RumplesGirl]

The Captain Hook and Nealfire threads are slowly wrapping up and I know there was some desire to do a few of the more minor characters. I thought we could start with the most recent. I’ll re-ask the question that was posed a few posts up:

 

1) Zelena: justifiably angry or unhinged whiner?

and

2) Do you think ONCE’s take on Oz/ The WWW was successful?

[WickedRegal]

1. Unhinged Whiner

Unhinged whiner…I find that Zelena should have had a more remorseful story. We know Regina turned evil because of her losing Daniel, Rumple was about to lose his son, Hook lost Milah….and Zelena was only wicked because of envy….hmmm….I don’t know. Now, we could have stuck with the Zelena being jealous of Regina, and being not chosen by Rumple….but I believe we could have had more sympathy for her if we had her fall in love, and being left by her true love. That would have added more depth, and could parallel with Oz the G/P of Heartbreak/Betrayal leading more so into the formation of the Wicked Witch of the West.

2. Unsuccessful So Far…

First and foremost…Adam and Eddy destroyed the entire Wizard of Oz story….no Scarecrow, Tinman, or Lion….the Good Witch of the East….Toto being killed under the house (lol), the whole story was just screwed over. I feel that we don’t know the full extent of Zelena’s backstory…I think there are some missing layers to it. Much like we all thought that Regina immediately turned evil in Stable Boy, but we learned there were a lot lot lot pieces missing (We Are Both, The Doctor, Quite A Common Fairy)….so I feel there’s more to Zelena than what we’ve seen. And hopefully we will see when she resurfaces in Season 4…and yes…Adam and Eddy did say we’d meet Zelena again in Season 4, how I don’t know…. 😛

"If you go as far as you can see...you will then see enough to go even further." - Finn Balor

[PriceofMagic]

1. Unhinged whiner. When we first saw Zelena, I thought she was going to become one of my favourite characters. However, her motivation for being wicked was weak at best and her treatment of Rumple made me dislike her immensely. Jealousy is not a good motivation when there is no reason for it. Zelena went from “I have a sister?” to being insanely jealous of Regina in seconds when there was no reason for it. Regina didn’t do anything to Zelena to warrant the jealousy. The writers tried to force the audience to feel sympathy for Zelena and it didn’t work. She came off as whiny and unhinged.

Whilst it is nice to have 11 uninterrupted episodes, a downside is that they can’t flesh out characters and story arcs too much because they are trying to fit it all into half a season. The characters also don’t really get chance to breathe between one crisis and the next.

2. Not as successful as it could’ve been. They ticked off the elements you need for an Oz story but you could’ve had the same story with any characters that weren’t from Oz.

All magic comes with a price!

Keeper of Felix

[WickedRegal]

The characters also don’t really get chance to breathe between one crisis and the next.

And that is why I personally don’t believe that the half season thing is a good thing…I mean eleven episodes are great and all, but I think we need to go back to the two week breaks in between every three to four episodes of the season. I know, I can’t believe I said that either. The first eleven episodes of Season 3 could have dealt with the Pan’s Neverland Threat….and then the next eleven episodes could have dealt with Pan’s Storybrooke Threat. They could have stretched it out just as they did with Cora’s EF/SB threat, because Going Home actually felt like a Season Finale type of thing to me…And plus we could have seen how Pan met Rumple’s mom, how he gathered the Lost Boys, just really expose the villain to the audience.

Then Season 4 could have dealt with the Oz Arc, as Zelena could have been under the Midwife Persona Act for the first eleven, and then we deal with the Wicked Witch Persona for the final eleven. Like we really didn’t have enough time to digest Zelena’s backstory, and could have actually been handled better if they had taken their time with it. We could have seen the missing pieces to Zelena’s backstory. Like…why did you wait so long to cast the Dark Curse if you were that powerful? Why didn’t you try contacting Regina first…what was your relationship like with the Wicked Witch of the East? I just felt eleven episodes wasn’t enough to do the Wicked Witch of the West actually justice, and that Zelena’s arc was rushed.

Question: “Do you believe Zelena may have been more powerful than Rumplestilskin?”

On some level…I really really wanna say yes, but I’m not sure. Because it seemed as if Rumple couldn’t kill her when she had her magic, and that was before she got the dagger, I mean when they were in the EF. Like if you knew she would one day be a problem…why not take care of her?

"If you go as far as you can see...you will then see enough to go even further." - Finn Balor

[RumplesGirl]

1) Zelena: justifiably angry or unhinged whiner?

Unhinged whiner. I never felt that her anger towards Regina was justifiable. She never even tried to talk to Regina, who probably would have liked to learn that she had a sister. She goes from young girl who has a rough home life to insanely jealous in an instant. And, yes, her father was a piece of work, but from what we can gather, her mother was a good person who loved her. So the whole living her life without love and affection, is rather hooey. I also REALLY don’t think they explained why she is SO powerful. She was not born of true love; she was born out of deception and lust and trickery. If they’re going to go with emotional trauma of being abandoned then they needed to do a better job of it. Her relationship with Rumple was just awkward and strange, especially knowing that her mother was later Rumple’s love interest.

 

2) Do you think ONCE’s take on Oz/ The WWW was successful?

Unsuccessful. I really didn’t like the Oz take at all. It fell very flat. Like with PP the season before, all the elements were there (Dorothy, slippers, witches, Oz) but they were all shells of what Baum intended. There was never any real explanation given for a lot of what we saw (like Glinda and Oz..what up with that?? Or even Oz himself).

 

Question: “Do you believe Zelena may have been more powerful than Rumplestilskin?”

I want to say no. They keep coming up with people or objects that are more powerful than Rumple which doesn’t jive with what we know from S1, that Rumple’s Dark One curse is supposed to be the supreme darkness. The pecking order was supposed to be:

Blue Fairy

Rumple

Regina

But suddenly there is the Black Fairy and her wand and now Zelena. And the BF is basically just a thing that drops in unexpectedly to help you and flit away (or she does nothing at all)

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

[RumplesGirl]

1) Zelena: justifiably angry or unhinged whiner?

Unhinged whiner. I never felt that her anger towards Regina was justifiable. She never even tried to talk to Regina, who probably would have liked to learn that she had a sister. She goes from young girl who has a rough home life to insanely jealous in an instant. And, yes, her father was a piece of work, but from what we can gather, her mother was a good person who loved her. So the whole living her life without love and affection, is rather hooey. I also REALLY don’t think they explained why she is SO powerful. She was not born of true love; she was born out of deception and lust and trickery. If they’re going to go with emotional trauma of being abandoned then they needed to do a better job of it. Her relationship with Rumple was just awkward and strange, especially knowing that her mother was later Rumple’s love interest.

 

2) Do you think ONCE’s take on Oz/ The WWW was successful?

Unsuccessful. I really didn’t like the Oz take at all. It fell very flat. Like with PP the season before, all the elements were there (Dorothy, slippers, witches, Oz) but they were all shells of what Baum intended. There was never any real explanation given for a lot of what we saw (like Glinda and Oz..what up with that?? Or even Oz himself).

 

Question: “Do you believe Zelena may have been more powerful than Rumplestilskin?”

I want to say no. They keep coming up with people or objects that are more powerful than Rumple which doesn’t jive with what we know from S1, that Rumple’s Dark One curse is supposed to be the supreme darkness. The pecking order was supposed to be:

Blue Fairy

Rumple

Regina

But suddenly there is the Black Fairy and her wand and now Zelena. And the BF is basically just a thing that drops in unexpectedly to help you and flit away (or she does nothing at all)

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

[Myril]

1) Zelena: justifiably angry or unhinged whiner?

Neither. I found Zelana’s jealousy trip as justifiable or unjustifiable as Regina’s vengeance against Snow. Neither Regina nor Snow were responsible for the suffering, they were scapegoats, while the true culprits got away.

While the showrunners are not getting tired to babble, that evil isn’t born, it sure looks quite different by now on the show: There seem to run a legacy of psychopathy or some evil craziness in the female side of the Mills’ family (the men seem to vanish or turn into more or less drunken wimps). While with Regina at least nurture could play a role, she was raised by Cora, though her father seemed to be a nice, caring guy, there is nothing of that with Zelena. It’s the biggest problem I have with the character. She was abandoned by her mother for ignoble reasons, but then found by a couple, of which at least the woman seemed to be a nice and caring person, the guy maybe a bit fearful but not so bad either. It looked liked Zelena was raised by friendly people, who had no riches but never seemed to lack, she was maybe struggling with her magic, and her foster parents told her to never show it, or did all to hide it, but still doesn’t seem like Zelena had much of an unhappy childhood. I couldn’t buy that Zelena was going from naive country wallflower to jealous magic nerd and then sexy, sassy green revenger in more or less no time. Rumple has some toxic effect on the Mills’ women, has he. If they’d put Zelena more into a kind of Oliver Twist situation, found by a couple running an orphanage in bad old style, exploiting the kids as workforce – that could have explained Zelena as damaged goods a lot better. Besides they could have explored parallels to Emma, tie in her character in the season’s bad guest star story arc that way, and made the final episode so much more connected to the rest of the half season. They tried that with the premise of Dorothy and Oz, but it didn’t work well.

I could buy into Zelena’s jealousy towards Regina if changing the background story this tiny bit, Siblings can be terrible rivals and very unreasonable and destructive ones. It is soap operatic, but have seen it to some degree in real life as well.

I could get somewhat, that Zelena got obsessed with the idea to go back in time and change things, though I am not sure in which direction that should have gone. Never be abandoned by Cora? Regina never born? Zelena as Rumple’s puppet and Curse caster? Did she hope to get a family and home and love that way? Was it about family or about approval and career so to speak? Or was it just to destroy Regina’s happiness as a parallel to what Regina tried to do to Snow? Maybe a bit all of it and maybe even Zelena had no clear picture, what her goal was – I sure was wondering.

2) Do you think ONCE’s take on Oz/ The WWW was successful?

There was Oz in it? As I see it, they found the green Wicked Witch intriguing, but didn’t look to me like they had much of an idea what to make of Oz. Maybe they would have fared better to make it a spin-off mini series quite like Wonderland. Well, they still in theory could, but doubt after the rating disaster of Wonderland they will do it, and not with the task at hand to work with Frozen. (Seeing the potential of OUaT as it could have become the Star Trek franchise of this century, though think they blew that already, it could have been an idea, to start workshops for screenwriters at the beginning of a career, take the best of them, let them write under good supervision of seasoned writers and showrunner miniseries and expand the OUaT universe, and it doesn’t always have to be a primetime show, while helping to bring new people into business: yeah, I know the big networks are way too anxious too take such risks – as if they hadn’t their fingers in smaller networks as well).

No, Once’s take on Oz was rather a failure. When even I feel like I had to do too much thinking to find something of the story and mythology of Oz and not just marvel at some flashy props from that world… You know I love digging and thinking. But guess for many the flashy references where enough, who cares about story and meaning anyway. Not even the Wicked Witch made much sense to me, besides that this was the green season in a way (Neverland and Oz, somehow both have connections with the color green. Could be something to give every season a color theme – nah, too ambitious for this show.)

¯\_(?????? ?)_/¯

[PriceofMagic]

PriceofMagic wrote:

The characters also don’t really get chance to breathe between one crisis and the next.

And that is why I personally don’t believe that the half season thing is a good thing…I mean eleven episodes are great and all, but I think we need to go back to the two week breaks in between every three to four episodes of the season. I know, I can’t believe I said that either. The first eleven episodes of Season 3 could have dealt with the Pan’s Neverland Threat….and then the next eleven episodes could have dealt with Pan’s Storybrooke Threat. They could have stretched it out just as they did with Cora’s EF/SB threat, because Going Home actually felt like a Season Finale type of thing to me…And plus we could have seen how Pan met Rumple’s mom, how he gathered the Lost Boys, just really expose the villain to the audience.

Then Season 4 could have dealt with the Oz Arc, as Zelena could have been under the Midwife Persona Act for the first eleven, and then we deal with the Wicked Witch Persona for the final eleven. Like we really didn’t have enough time to digest Zelena’s backstory, and could have actually been handled better if they had taken their time with it. We could have seen the missing pieces to Zelena’s backstory. Like…why did you wait so long to cast the Dark Curse if you were that powerful? Why didn’t you try contacting Regina first…what was your relationship like with the Wicked Witch of the East? I just felt eleven episodes wasn’t enough to do the Wicked Witch of the West actually justice, and that Zelena’s arc was rushed.

Question: “Do you believe Zelena may have been more powerful than Rumplestilskin?”

On some level…I really really wanna say yes, but I’m not sure. Because it seemed as if Rumple couldn’t kill her when she had her magic, and that was before she got the dagger, I mean when they were in the EF. Like if you knew she would one day be a problem…why not take care of her?

“Going Home” was quite depressing because it felt so much like a series finale. It was a bittersweet ending which some shows do like to do but I hope Once will end on a happy note when it does eventually end.

I agree completely with you about how season 3 could’ve dealt with just Pan over the 22 episodes but still had the two 11 episode arcs- Pan in Neverland and Pan in Storybrooke. They could have then included scenes of Belle in Storybrooke in every episode during the Neverland arc so that the audience wouldn’t feel like they’re missing Storybrooke instead of waiting until episode 7. They could’ve fleshed out Pan, Felix, Tinkerbell and the Lost Boys a bit more as there are a lot of unanswered questions there. They could’ve also covered Bae’s time in Neverland and his escape. They could’ve shown Henry starting to fall under Pan’s spell so that he didn’t appear to be so gullible especially when one episode he’s doubting Pan then the next he trusts Pan just because Wendy said to. What did Wendy do the whole time she was in Neverland? Why did it take Regina so long to cast the dark curse in season 1 when Pan and Felix were able to collect all the ingredients and be ready to cast it in one night?

If Zelena had been saved for season 4, they could’ve actually taken the time to show Snow starting to trust Zelena instead of Snow instantly trusting a random woman she just met that she never saw before on the off-chance that they might have been friends in the missing year. A woman who couldn’t have been more suspicious or looked more witch like if she tried. Ginny’s pregnancy probably played a part since Snow wasn’t meant to be pregnant in Neverland but she was so obviously pregnant in 3B. New York City Serenade was laughable since Snow wasn’t meant to be pregnant but Ginny was so obviously pregnant. It gave a funny visual of Robin helping Regina off the floor but leaving an obviously pregnant Snow down there. They could’ve really fleshed out Zelena’s backstory, had her try to connect with Regina (just say Rumple or Cora slipped Regina a forget potion to explain why Regina had no recollection of Zelena), maybe even have Regina reject Zelena- it would give Zelena more motivation for why she felt so hard done by.

All magic comes with a price!

Keeper of Felix

[RumplesGirl]

Let’s say Rumple did not kill Zelena. 1) Would she have taken the second chance offered to her? and 2) What would that have looked like?

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

[PriceofMagic]

1) I don’t think Zelena would have taken the second chance. It was only because she realised that Rumple was literally going to kill her that she tried to play the second chance card. I also think that it wasn’t Regina’s place to be offering Zelena the second chance.

2) I think Zelena would’ve bided her time, licked her wounds, but her jealousy of Regina would’ve reared its ugly head again because she would’ve seen Regina as lording it over her because Regina gave her the second chance. Zelena would’ve tried something again.

All magic comes with a price!

Keeper of Felix

[Author]

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