I recently made a post commenting on Henry being trapped in a "time loop" and what would happen if Emma didn’t break the curse. He would grow up and see everyone with the same age and kinda go mad (What would have happened to Henry if Emma hadn't shown up?.
Anyway, while I was rewatching the first season—something I’ve done multiple times—this time, one thing bothered me more than anything: Why does Henry hate Regina so much? Think about it—your child, whom you adopted and raised for the past 11 years, starts reading a random book, believes you’re the villain from the story, and overnight starts hating you, openly saying you’re evil, that you don’t love him, that you’re cruel, etc. What made me question this even more is that—it makes sense for Henry to believe in the book so easily (as I mentioned in my other post), but his hatred toward Regina seems a bit exaggerated.
Then, I understood. Henry was literally trapped in a time loop, and NO ONE believed him. In the second season, we see Regina’s first years in Storybrooke, enjoying her victory until the repetitive days start to frustrate her. Now, imagine Henry—a child—growing up in that. Every day (or every week or month) having the same lessons at school, the same conversations with people, asking others about their lives and being met with, "um... huh... I don’t remember," and a shrug. We see that Henry is a curious, smart, and precocious boy, imagine how strange and borderline insane he must have felt watching all of this happening!!
Now, imagine him confiding (or questioning) this to his mother—telling her how weird the people in town are, how they don’t seem to act normally or how they repeat theirs days, only for her to dismiss him, tell him he’s crazy, that he needs a dose of reality, and send him to therapy, just to hear, once again, that he’s delusional, needs to stop lying, and accept that he’s wrong.
I understand why Henry resents Regina, and after he believed in the book and saw all the horrible things she had done before, it’s understandable why he thought she didn’t truly love him. He believed she wasn’t capable of love, and he also believed that if she truly loved him, she wouldn’t lie to him or make him feel like he was insane.
Rewatching the first season, Henry’s comments about his mother irritated me deeply, but I understand that he was just a kid. An 11-year-old child, lonely, feeling rejected, and desperately wanting someone to believe him.
Anyway, this is more of a reflection post than a discussion one. Thank you if you read all of this, and let me know what you think!