Your recent Regina post got me thinking about theories of justice. What do you think is OUAT's philosophy of why/who/and how to punish someone? I feel like there's a fair amount of karmaic punishment by the show universe ("villains can't get their happy endings...[because they] always go about getting them the wrong way" i.e. Hook vs Oncoming Car), but less direct punishment by wronged characters (Belle sending Rumple over the town line). Would love to hear your take!
Oh Nonnie, what a delightful question this is! I hope I'm going to answer this well for you, because I had so much fun thinking about it while I was away. :) This is officially my favorite thing.
OUaT is a fairy tale; that's the language it speaks, the symbolism it uses. Fairy tales are, to a large extent, concerned with rules. Do this, or a wolf will eat you. Don't do that, or the fairies will get you. Be polite to old women, or don't come crying to me when you get cursed.
So what are the "do this or elses" of the Once-verse, what is the "else," and who deals it out?
Justice in Human Hands
My sense from this show is that in a world of magic, humans simply cannot be trusted to carry out justice. The sham processes in place under the Dark Curse in S1 operated at the whim of the powerful characters -- even if they didn't have magic at the time, they had the institutional power, wealth, and knowledge advantage the curse gave them. Mr Gold and Regina were immune to any action taken against them. They effectively used the system to attack others (Moe, Mary Margaret) and escape punishment.
Since then, we have repeatedly seen how vulnerable mundane justice is to magical manipulation: in S2 with Cora's framing of Regina, in S3 when Rumple killed Zelena, and in S4 when he blackmailed Hook. A system based on the assumption of an objectively verifiable reality can't function when some people can alter perceptions, memories, and reality itself with a thought -- and even if it did, there's no way to enforce such a system's judgments. Magic-users are untouchable by virtue of their power; at best, you end up in a magical arms race in which ordinary people are at the mercy of whoever happens to be on top.
So it's really no surprise if law enforcement in Storybrooke these days tends to be arbitrary (and revolves around plot priorities). Will gets a couple days in jail for breaking into the library, but no one is ever going to file assault charges against Regina for that business with Lily. The operating basis for the system has been removed, and the system itself is unworkable.
Things in the Enchanted Forest are even worse, as there is no system of justice there at all. Every power, magical or not, appears as a law unto itself. Rulers are absolute in either their malice or their mercy; Cora would have been executed for lèse majesté, while Regina is allowed to go into exile. Justice doesn't seem to be on anyone's radar as a component of goodness.
If Not Justice, What?
My thinking had been that justice gets left out because the story is primarily concerned with personal relationships, especially familial ones, and not with systems. But then I thought no, you can certainly write a story about personal relationships within a framework that includes the concept of justice! My new theory is that the show is ultimately concerned with means rather than with ends, with what is in the hearts of the characters rather than what they accomplish per se.
Which is how we end up with things like the near-absolute prohibition on killing. Self-defense is allowed in the moment, and apparently so is warfare; many a Black Knight has met an untimely end without anyone's heart being damaged by it. Outside of those strictly limited contexts, however, any action taken against someone because of any wrong they did moves into revenge territory.
For some of us in the audience (c'est moi) this tends be a hard bit to swallow. Killian's quest against Rumple is wrong by these rules because he wanted Rumple to suffer -- but what course does that leave that would have been right? Apparently there was none. Similarly, Snow's heart was assumed to be damaged because she harbored hatred for Cora when she killed her, no matter how necessary it was. Even if the act is just (by many measures), the emotion behind it is more important to the story.
Needless to say, this limits the methods by which the heroes can defeat villains.
Villain Outcomes
So how do villains get beaten, then?
S1 - Regina was defeated by Emma breaking the curse.
S2 - Cora was killed by Snow, but with spiritual consequences for her.
S3 - Pan was killed by Rumple, who also died; Zelena was defeated by Regina -- note Regina's explicit disavowal of anger beforehand -- and later "killed" by Rumple.
S4 - Ingrid killed herself; Rumple was sent into exile; Maleficent and Ursula's motives were removed; Cruella was killed by Emma, with spiritual consequences; Isaac was ultimately defeated by his own incompetence; and Rumple wasn't defeated at all, but was instead given enough rope to hang himself.
S5 - Emma and Killian defeated each other (all together now: awwwww), as a result of which Emma killed Killian; Zelena killed Hades. (It just now occurred to me that both Rumple and Killian died and came back -- in such different ways! -- yet another thing they have in common. I love this.)
Out of those conflicts came a mere seven deaths -- or "deaths" in Zelena's case -- of characters who can be described as villains at that time. Three of those deaths (Rumple, Ingrid, Killian) were self-willed acts of atonement. In the other four cases, the villain posed a clear and present danger to the lives of others, and even then the killer got angst later if they were originally presented as a "good" character.
Game of Thrones, this is not.
Of the other villains, Maleficent and Ursula got no punishment at all, Isaac is in prison, and the rest are major characters whose ultimate disposition remains uncertain. Whatever happens to them, direct punishment by other characters appears to be off the table. They either physically can't do it because magic, or they can't do it without encountering the no-go zone of vengeance.
We'll come back to this in a minute. :) But first, if human justice is unreliable at best, what else is there?
Divine Justice
So humans can't handle the job; what about the gods? So far we've met Poseidon, Hades, and Zeus. They appear to be small-g gods, each with a strictly demarcated sphere of action. They display the same kinds of behavior and the same moral limitations as the mortal characters. Poseidon was motivated by revenge, Hades by envy, and Zeus by benevolence.
The gods live in the space wherein human souls are judged and sorted, but they do not appear to perform those tasks themselves. Hades' realm was a waystation, and he had no proper role beyond caretaker. Zeus' realm represents heaven to Hercules and Megaera, but not to everyone; he is positioned in "Last Rites" as an intermediary. He is not in charge of the bridge of light, and there is a place beyond it where he does not rule.
One might well conclude that the gods have power, but that their actions are no more right (or wrong) than other characters'. Whatever else they are doing, they're not enforcing justice in the Once-verse.
What's Left?
So who, or what, is doing so? Other than the writers, obviously -- and by associating themselves so closely with Isaac in 4b, they made a meta-textual effort to disavow specific responsibility, to say "we're just recording the story, not rendering judgment". But somebody certainly is.
(Since you brought up Killian vs Car, I wanted to note that while that was a truly delightful moment of instant karma -- and I say that as a fan of his -- it was also an efficient piece of character work. If you're going to fast-track a redemption, the less the character has to atone for, the easier your job is. Hook's story has its tit-for-tat karmic rhythm so that when he switched sides, he didn't have a massive weight of sin that needed to be dealt with.
Also, of course, whump looks good on him. But who arranges for that within the story?)
The longer the show goes on, the clearer the outline becomes of a higher power, and I suspect that this power is very much concerned with justice; this is the source of the "karmaic" system as you call it that we see most often in the story.
(I'm interested that Merlin is so closely associated with its manifestations, since he was presented as the character most in tune with magic -- the curse that wounds the caster, the pen that forfeits its power if the Author writes their own ending. The final form of the Dark One curse is elegant in its simplicity: if you kill for power, you will surely be killed for it in turn. And I'm still not entirely sure that the business with Killian didn't go as intended.)
The writers have avoided providing any details that speak to religious practices in the show-universe, but they have also drawn an outline that most people in our world would call God. Rumple calls this entity Fate, so I suppose we can, too.
The Nature of Fate
What are the characteristics of this entity?
It is not bound to any one realm, with or without magic, but operates equally in all of them -- Underworld, LWM, Enchanted Forest, etc. -- and beyond them.
It has a long perspective, in which the thousands of years of Hades' story are given the same attention as Ingrid and her sisters.
It appears inclined to intervention, but in subtle forms. If this entity is responsible for what even the characters consider implausible coincidences, such as Neal and Lily meeting Emma, then one must also infer that it has goals.
I believe it to be the source of magic, and such, it enforces those rules. No specific god is named when Merlin receives his power, and no god manifests when the curse descends on Nimue, but there was clearly someone watching. (It is very easy to read them as an Adam and Eve story.)
It frowns on killing, or at least on killing named characters on-screen -- and unlike the small-g gods we've met, I think it does something about it. Here we come back to the conflict outcomes described above.
The flip side to heroes not being allowed to kill except under strictly defined circumstances is this: of those characters who have been seen to do murder, only Regina and Zelena have not actually died (yet -- Zelena came close). The list extends beyond major villians to smaller ones ike Arthur and Tamara (who at least intended to kill two people), and even to minor characters like James and Jack(ie).
The pattern becomes even stronger if we take the Wonderland spin-off into account, and I think it's too clear to be coincidental. Killers die, either at the hands of regretful heroes or those of other villains.
This is where I suspect the entity's interest in justice comes in, where it has to come in, because murder is final. Anything else can be addressed between the characters, messy and broken though their system is; an apology can be made, restitution can be attempted, what was stolen can be returned. Even in a situation like we had with Snowing and Mal in 4b, things can't be made right, but they can be made *better* -- we come back again to what's in the characters' hearts here. Mal and Lily have the option to forgive their attackers, the option of choosing to live for the future because they have one.
Murder, obviously, cannot be made better. Humans have demonstrated that they can't handle this situation without sliding into vengeance. It's up to "Fate" to balance the books with respect to a stolen future, and so far it has an excellent if not always speedy record. In the UW, Cora, Liam, and Killian all demonstrated that even for that, forgiveness is possible -- but only after you've paid the bill (in Killian's case, more than once).
Fate's intervention does not appear to operate in the other direction, mind; innocent characters are by no means safe. If it has perfect foresight, it does not prevent killers before the fact. Perhaps that's too much encroachment on free will.
Free Will and Happy Endings
Speaking of which, you mentioned villains not getting happy endings. I'm not actually sure this one is Fate dispensing justice, though, so much as akin to gravity in operation. :)
True happiness, in the Once-verse, can only be had through love. However big or small your circle, you have to be with them, and you have to give and receive love, period. There is no other definition of happiness going. The definition of a villain, meanwhile, is someone who behaves in a self-centered fashion that harms others. This is antithetical to love; love requires a reciprocal balance between the self and the other(s).
Villains don't get happy endings simply because they don't behave lovingly, just like I don't get tomatoes if I forget to water them. No triumph will ever satisfy them without happiness, and their own actions ensure that happiness will never be theirs. Ursula and Mal (and Ingrid) got to be happy because they recentered their lives on loving their families. Nothing else changed for the better other than that one thing, but presto! now they're happy (albeit dead in one case). Fate doesn't have to lift a finger.
Conclusion
So there you have my theory of justice in the Once-verse, both human and cosmic. The rules of this fairy tale are simple:
- Love others, don't kill, and things will work out all right eventually.
- Murder will be repaid with death, eventually.
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