So, as mentioned before, my husband and I are making our way through our summer Red Shirt programs. Last night I made it up to episode 18 of Once Upon a Time.

Oh Snow … Snow, Snow, Snow. Never rat out your friends. This turns them into Maniacal Evil Soul Crushing Bitches! It doesn’t matter your ‘pure as the driven snow’ child heart was in the right place. As they say in Chicago, “Keep your mouth shut!”.

Naw, I’m kidding.

Well, maybe not. To think all that evil heart-demolishing the Queen has done could have been prevented by the axiom of ‘Mind your own business’! I mean, as the show likes to hammer into its audience, ‘Evil is not born, it’s created.’

Which, yeah. Anthropologists all over the world nod in affirmation.

This reminds me of an argument my husband and I once had in the middle of the night as we were watching some show, I think it was Rizzoli and Isles or maybe Mobwives or perhaps I was mocking his beloved Criminal Minds, I don’t remember, but I made the comment that criminals deserve love too and their family members should never have to apologize for loving them. This devovled into an argument about whether or not sociopaths are capable of love and therefore whether they deserve the devotion of their family and friends or whether it’s the ulitmate con (his point of view).

What, doesn’t everyone have philosophical debates with their significant others in the middle of the night? No? *crickets*

True, he loves his cops shows, but he especially loves them when the cops in question dance all over the shades of grey (Damn you EL James!) as you see in The Shield or The Wire. So I was surprised he took this hard line stance. See, for me, I luuurve complicated family relations involving morality and situationally justifiable law breaking from Les Miserables and The Count of Monte Cristo all the way to The Godfather. And I believe that no matter what side of the Thin Blue Line you are on, if you have a Code you live by … you live and die by it. But you were taught that code. It’s not a given. The issue of morality always has to be contextualized by its setting. And similarly, people are taught how and what it means to love people in their own families. Love is even more irrational than morality. So to debate whether anyone is deserving of love is specious to me.

So it should come to no one’s surprise that in response to his comment “Is this supposed to make me feel sympathetic to Regina?” I said, yes of course! She was taught her nastiness. Isn’t that the point? No one is saying it’s ok to rip a man’s heart out of his chest and pulverize it. It’s just some of us are saying if only Snow had kept her trap shut, if only the King weren’t such a douche, if only Regina’s mother weren’t an abusive controlling sociopath … and a thousand other if onlys that are actually what make the storyline compelling.

Yes, right is right and wrong is wrong (within your culturally taught emic worldview) but isn’t it simply delicious getting to know all the sides of a person?

“This was like discovering your vanilla cupcake had a chocolate fudge center.” — Tommy Gates, “First, I Love You”