She lives in my head, so I figure I ought to weigh in!
Regina has pushed and pushed and manipulated the hell out of every situation. She's clearly not a safe person for Henry to be around, and though Emma, Archie, and Graham have all pointed out that the only person likely to get hurt in a fight between the two of them is Henry, she's been playing dirty pool the whole time, and Emma is nooooooot a patient person.
Aside from all that, I think it is super important to keep in mind the speech Regina gave Emma when she first came to Storybrooke (complete with "no, you don't get to talk") where Henry is clearly referred to as a possession and which so closely parallels this one, with a few pertinent points ("All I care about is what happens to my kid."). I don't think it's an odd or unsurprising tack for Emma to take, and I also think she knows that Regina will not take her seriously unless she lays it on the line the way she did.
I figure Emma thinks of it like this: Regina keeps hurting people she loves, and they can't fight back for themselves, so she'll do the fighting for them. It seems far too complicated to boil it down to her just trying to punish Regina by taking away a toy: she's genuinely concerned for Henry's wellbeing because Regina is clearly an unbalanced, dangerous, vengeful person.
As for losing her temper...well, it's Emma. She does that kind of a lot. There's a reason why she tells Henry from the beginning that she's no saviour, and she spends the whole show struggling to make the right choices and trying to make them because of him. I don't think she's being held up as a paragon of virtue, except to Henry, who's a ten year old who sees the world in terms of good and evil, black and white. I think she's a damaged, difficult woman who's trying to be good because it's what's expected by someone so important to her.
Re: Emma vs Regina over Henry
Regina has pushed and pushed and manipulated the hell out of every situation. She's clearly not a safe person for Henry to be around, and though Emma, Archie, and Graham have all pointed out that the only person likely to get hurt in a fight between the two of them is Henry, she's been playing dirty pool the whole time, and Emma is nooooooot a patient person.
Aside from all that, I think it is super important to keep in mind the speech Regina gave Emma when she first came to Storybrooke (complete with "no, you don't get to talk") where Henry is clearly referred to as a possession and which so closely parallels this one, with a few pertinent points ("All I care about is what happens to my kid."). I don't think it's an odd or unsurprising tack for Emma to take, and I also think she knows that Regina will not take her seriously unless she lays it on the line the way she did.
I figure Emma thinks of it like this: Regina keeps hurting people she loves, and they can't fight back for themselves, so she'll do the fighting for them. It seems far too complicated to boil it down to her just trying to punish Regina by taking away a toy: she's genuinely concerned for Henry's wellbeing because Regina is clearly an unbalanced, dangerous, vengeful person.
As for losing her temper...well, it's Emma. She does that kind of a lot. There's a reason why she tells Henry from the beginning that she's no saviour, and she spends the whole show struggling to make the right choices and trying to make them because of him. I don't think she's being held up as a paragon of virtue, except to Henry, who's a ten year old who sees the world in terms of good and evil, black and white. I think she's a damaged, difficult woman who's trying to be good because it's what's expected by someone so important to her.