Magic, Enchantments, and Curses: Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo

[YaddaYadda]

Why doesn't he just glamour himself or make himself invisible as he was walking around?  Then freeze people as needed?  Or take their memories after, so they don't remember?  There were multitudes of other ways.

 

This show doesn't really know what it's doing.  And didn't Rumple put Belle to sleep during the Shattered Sight spell?

 

The Queens of "Darkness" have been useless.  It's like you said, Maleficent has to look like she's doing something.  They could have had her interact with a number of people who she feels screwed her over and seeking payback.  David planted that egg in her, Snowing were the reason she lost her kid, Regina locked her up under the library (which is all forgotten and forgiven), Emma slayed her in her dragon form and Hook fought her zombie form.  Maleficent could have had a lot more to do than just prancing around in her gangster suit and running her mouth.

 

The greatest magic of all is how these villains have motor mouths and promise to turn everyone's lives upside down but do nothing of the sort.  All the do is put me to sleep and turn my hair gray and I'm entirely too young for that.

[Camera One]

I had forgotten about Maleficent's connection to Emma and Hook.  Not to mention the ridiculous "all is forgiven" schtick with Regina and Rumple.  And apparently, Aurora and her parents are now completely off her radar?  Wouldn't the girls' wild night out doing "evil" involve magic instead of getting drunk and setting a Sheriff's car on fire?  Especially when, in the flashbacks, Maleficent murders 3 guards for kicks and Ursula talks about how her tentacles are getting bored asking if she could kill Snow and Charming?  It's all inconsistent as hell.

Edited April 18, 2015 by Camera One

[FurryFury]

Wouldn't the girls' wild night out doing "evil" involve magic instead of getting drunk and setting a Sheriff's car on fire?

 

I'm still not over the lameness of 4 villainesses doing something as pathetic as that. Was this the 4th jump the shark or 5th?

Edited April 18, 2015 by FurryFury

[KingOfHearts]

 

It's all inconsistent as hell.

Replying in All Seasons.

[Shanna Marie]

The Elixir of the Broken Heart, with the revelation that Rumple's heart is weak by his evil, which has NEVER been alluded to before

I like the concept. It would make sense, given the role of the "heart" on this show, that his heart would have been corrupted over time. It just would have been nice if it had been hinted at before. It doesn't even seem to be one of those "this only applies in the world without magic" things because he was clutching his chest while talking to unconscious Belle in Storybrooke. It should have been a factor earlier and might even have played a role in his motivation for the dagger cleavage -- if freeing him from the Dark One curse helped with the heart. I wonder if he's had a particularly long tenure as Dark One. It might only bring immortality up to a point -- no aging for a very long time, but the body can only sustain that kind of darkness for so long before it becomes damaged from the corruption. About damn time that magic that always comes with a price actually had, ya know, a price.

 

Though there's no good reason for Zelena to have bothered to send any of the elixir with Walsh into New York. What would that have to do with anything she was up to? Or was he maybe using it on Emma to get her to drop her Neal-related walls so he could get close to her?

 

Author's pen is made out enchanted wood, and Rumple has one.

I wonder if that's one of those things from the Enchanted Forest that conveniently found its way into Gold's shop. Didn't the Author drop it before he was sent into the book? Knowing the way "lost" things happen to end up in the shop, I could buy it having landed there, and Rumple may not have dropped by the shop during the sleeping spell just to chat at Belle.

[Camera One]

The concept that there is actually a price for doing evil is good.  The fact that there's a random ass cure for it, is another example of the writers pulling something out of their you-know-where.  The fact that Rumple did not worry at all about this when he went to NYC in Season 2, Regina didn't worry about it when she went for adoption papers, and Zelena isn't affected by it herself living in the real world with Robin Hood (oh riiiight, it's because she has a bottle of it that she swigs once an hour), is horrible world-building and demonstrates they made it up the day before they wrote "Heart of Gold".

Edited April 19, 2015 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

Isaac: "The truth is I don't go across the country collecting stories for the paper. The places I go, well, they're a lot farther apart. I travel across realms, realms of storytelling. This place right here is one of them. It exists out of time. Tell me, what year is it? Exactly. We're not in a time, we're in a realm of story. There are many, some beautiful, some horrific, and some just plain magical."

 

Gosh this worldbuilding just gets more and more confusing. So are "realms of storytelling" created by authors? Are they just places where interesting things happen for recording? I don't get it. The "existing out of time" throws the timeline analyzer in me for a real loop.

Edited April 20, 2015 by KingOfHearts

[FabulousTater]

Gosh this worldbuilding just gets more and more confusing. So are "realms of storytelling" created by authors? Are they just places where interesting things happen for recording? I don't get it. The "existing out of time" throws the timeline analyzer in me for a real loop.

In my best Neo voice: "There is no timeline".

[Camera One]

Isaac: "The truth is I don't go across the country collecting stories for the paper. The places I go, well, they're a lot farther apart. I travel across realms, realms of storytelling. This place right here is one of them. It exists out of time. Tell me, what year is it? Exactly. We're not in a time, we're in a realm of story. There are many, some beautiful, some horrific, and some just plain magical."

 

Gosh this worldbuilding just gets more and more confusing. So are "realms of storytelling" created by authors? Are they just places where interesting things happen for recording? I don't get it. The "existing out of time" throws the timeline analyzer in me for a real loop.

 

I was assuming he was referring to worlds like the Cruella one and the Fictional Victorian Stories one from "Wonderland", where the world stays perpetually in one historical time period (like Victorian times).  Though you would think *within* those worlds, they do have a way to measure time.  Like even though Cruella would be living in a world where perpetually it was 1940s-era, they would still have years.  

[KAOS Agent]

I found it sad that some people are stuck living in one time period in perpetuity. The 20s weren't so bad, but it would suck to be stuck there forever where there is no societal or technological progress. I think this is their way of trying to explain the lack of progress in all worlds. For example, the Enchanted Forest hasn't seemed to have changed or advanced technology-wise in over 300 years and that's been pointed out. But still, it's silly to say that they have no concept of time passing. They obviously acknowledge the passage of time in the Enchanted Forest since both Snowing and Hook expressed dismay at the 28 year curse.

[Lrdmordain]

I am fascinated to know exactly how that thing the Author wrote that took away Cruella's killing ability actually works.

 

Is it the paper and ink itself that is doing it? If it was destroyed would Cruella get her ability back? It clearly still affected her in the real world even though we've been told previously that since the world lacks magic, magic effects and spells and such won't work in the world, hence why "Marion" was saved from freezing by leaving Storybrooke.

 

Now to the actual wording of what was written, does intent matter or can she not take any life for any reason or through any method? If she was going to hit a squirrel with her car but had no idea it was there, would the squirrel still be killed? Could she do something indirectly that would lead to someone dying, like say firing a bullet randomly into the air and having it come back down and kill someone. 

 

What if she knowingly poisoned one punch bowl, in a line of 10 lets say, but she had no guarantee anyone would ever actually drink that specific punch, would everyone still be in danger?

 

What about non-lethal attacks? Could she beat someone within an inch of their life but not actual kill them? Like they say in Return of Jafar, you'd be surprised what you can live through.

 

There are some many what ifs? and situations with this wording that I would love to know about.

[YaddaYadda]

For example, the Enchanted Forest hasn't seemed to have changed or advanced technology-wise in over 300 years and that's been pointed out. But still, it's silly to say that they have no concept of time passing. They obviously acknowledge the passage of time in the Enchanted Forest since both Snowing and Hook expressed dismay at the 28 year curse.

 

I always thought that the EF stayed the way it was because of magic.  There's magic and it is relied upon heavily.  Rumple would be in his castle and people would visit him seeking whatever and making deals with him.  Snow cures her infertility issue with magical waters while something like this would have been dealt with with in vitro and she learns the sex of her baby by using an amulet (which is kind of cool and I've seen people do it) while here, a woman would just have an ultrasound.  Though I don't know how you would change the nature of your child in our world.

 

Magic is a huge problem on this show.  

[Camera One]

So the Author has the following powers with the Pen, just by writing it.

 

From "Sympathy for De Vil":

1. He can create expensive jewelry out of thin air.

2. He can give someone a specific magical power, in a world that presumably does not have magic.

3. He can stop someone from doing something (eg. stop Cruella from killing someone ever again)

 

From "Best Laid Plans":

4. He can control what someone says and does (eg. he controlled the Sorcerer's Apprentice and forced him to do a spell with Maleficent's Egg)

 

He can also travel between realms/worlds.

 

Who "decides" whose stories gets recorded?  He does?  How does he decide which realm to go to?  What if he "misses out" on a big story?

 

Why didn't his power become eliminated completely when he was fired by the Sorcerer's Apprentice?  Why will he still be able to write/change stories if he does get the quill and ink?  

[MaiLuna]

I don't understand why Zelena didn't carry out her original plan and went back to the time when she was just a fetus to kill Eva. I thought it was because it was just her essence/spirit/soul/whatever that went into the portal and she wasn't strong enough to open the portal but in the EF she had her body and all her magic back even without her pendant. Is that why she couldn't kill Emma? She needed her for the portal to work?

 

And if she had gone back in time to when Cora was pregnant, what would her grown up self have done? Would there be two Zelenas forever, or would she have merged with her fetus self?

 

And why am I trying to make sense out of this when there isn't any? :P

[Shanna Marie]

I got the impression that Zelena was stuck with wherever Emma went through the portal because Emma was driving and Zelena's essence couldn't do anything. But while Zelena was in that time, there was a lot she could have done to change history or otherwise thwart Regina that would have been far more effective -- and far closer to her original objective -- than pretending to be Regina's boyfriend's wife. Not that I have any idea how she knew Marian was Regina's boyfriend's wife, since Emma didn't even know that.

[Camera One]

Why would Regina put a protection spell around her office for ONLY Rumple?  As someone else said, why didn't Maleficent poof over and take the Heart back from Will?  

[Faemonic]

Here's my big wall of text theory about magic in the Enchanted Forest (which includes anywhere you can eventually get to from Misthaven by transporting your body without magic, like Agrabah or Arandelle)...be warned that most of this isn't at all rooted in canon. #ItHappenedOffscreen

 

The entire realm is precariously situated between Fairyland and several other realms including The Land Without Magic. The ancient civilizations of the Enchanted Forest grew into sovereignty of the realm and wanted to keep it. This meant restricting portals, because if you had too many portals then you don't have a world anymore. How much cheese can you really eat if it's mostly holes? No, they didn't want a Swiss cheese slice world, they wanted a ball of Edam cheese dipped in wax. That was their world, seceding from all the others and becoming isolationist. There might still be fairies there, just as there might still be humans there, but there are no indigenous (or "original") Enchanted Forest people. It was a liminal space that turned into a solid and proper realm.

The monarch-sorcerers of this new world concluded that the way to keep their realm a solid and proper realm was to control people's magic. They had the most of it, but everybody had a little. What created the coalescing of The Enchanted Forest from raw liminality was the collective magic of belief, and that same belief could tear the fabric of reality apart if it wasn't united enough. Magic was generated on a spectrum between emotion/belief and action (including words). If the monarch-sorcerers controlled words, they controlled meanings, they could influence belief, and that would influence reality even more effectively than a monarch-sorcerer could directly influence reality.

 

Lies wouldn't be much of a threat, not even conspiracy that deviated from the monarch-sorcerer's grand conspiracy. The liar knew they were lying, and that undermined their personal magic, like not remembering somebody would undermine True Love's Kiss. Speaking histories would be no danger, either, not even when they were slightly wrong. Storytelling was another thing entirely, because it gave magic power back to words. It worked on people's beliefs, suspending and creating new beliefs, and that could generate enough magic to turn the realm into a Swiss cheese slice of portals and collapse it into raw liminal space.

By Dark1Rumple's day, everybody knows about True Love's Kiss. But even he never knew or believed that storytelling could create portals, if he could only get the entire population to enjoy a series of stories about a Land Without Magic. That was less likely than traveling by mermaid or rabbit or bean, because anybody he told his plan to would only just fall short of accusing him of lying. There is no such thing as a Land Without Magic. There could have been, if they told enough stories about it, not just as a concept but as a way to imitate the experience of being there. Again: suspend disbelief, and then agree to believe, that equals magic, and a specific kind of magic that thins and bruises the fabric of reality. But nobody does that. This is not because everybody knows that indulging in storytelling time could cause the end of the world. Nobody knows that anymore, except for a dangerous few who live alone in a cave or tower. What everybody else is told is this: Imitation of reality are hubristic and considered "competition" against the gods.

 

I can think of two cases to consider at this point:

 

1. Devotees of Ursula. Milah was one of those, and she continued the tradition in drawing lifelike objects, considered risky by the cave-tower hermits, and weird/wrong by everybody else (because the intellectual predecessors of the cave-tower hermits told everybody else that realistic drawing was weird and wrong.) Ursulanians don't see the fuss because the ocean is a liminal space rather than a portal, and the oceanic deities have managed that sphere of responsibility well enough not to break reality apart. The oceanic deities are also very mysterious, even to their devotees for whom they don't actually care. So, the devotees of Ursula could be persecuted with impunity by landlubbers. Why did the Archduke of the Frontlands use Dark1Zoso to recruit children against the Ogres when he could have ordered him to defeat the Ogres with magic instead? Because the Ogres were never the enemy. It was an excuse to wipe out Ursulanians. Rumple wasn't one, having heard that mermaids (the Chosen People of Ursula) could not be trusted, and Milah wasn't even devout, but the Archduke's a bigot and a puppet of the cave-tower hermits.

 

All the other deities, from Aslan to the Olympians, discourage storytelling in the Enchanted Forest. Everything communicated in the Enchanted Forest is, by the laws of gods and people, either a factual truth or a lowly deception. Wanna get a bunch of friends to reenact something that never happened in the amphitheater? Nipped in the bud with a lightning bolt. Calormene storytellers? Closer to bards.

 

2. The bards of the Enchanted Forests were not storytellers, they were news reporters who were strongarmed from every direction all the time. Bardic tradition included a strict rhyme, meter, melody and subject matter. That was how they cast magic, and they were the most heavily-regulated magic users ever. The bardic community regulate themselves, but have enough limitations to require the support and patronage of monarchs, so the bards end up being regulated by the monarchs as well. Of course, some monarchs then preferred to have information spread about them that wasn't true, and most people who heard it would be in no position to call it a lie. That made public relations dangerously close to a story. The key to all bardic magic then became prophecy: bardic magic moved what they told into the future, if it wasn't true in the past or present. This saved their songs from thinning the walls between The Enchanted Forest and any other world. However, most bards did not know that was what they were doing, or why. They only knew to follow the traditional forms of song. Unofficial bardic activity, or even being unusually creative in apprenticeship, was considered witchcraft and punishable by death.

 

By Regina's time, the risks have been long forgotten and relaxed. People could paint portraits of other people, or make drawings on "wanted" posters. Another Language is written in stylized pictograms. Performance art continues to be restricted to dance, however. The stageplay or theater still does not exist, they only have gladiators who don't reenact anything. Bards only play instrumentals, the era of ballads and sagas long past and left to town criers. People can have motives, nobody can stop that, but several generations of conditioning have robbed most people in the Enchanted Forest of imagination. Roughly, both motive and imagination are needed to create belief, to perform sorcery, and an unprecedented amount of that (plus the ritual trappings of wizardry) to cast The Dark Curse.

 

The lineages of magic in the Enchanted Forest follow...

 

Sorcery. So, proto-Enchanted Forest had become something like a land of its own, still with pockets of Fairyland attached, and frequent portals. Sometimes, when certain people said things in this specific place, their words very often became true. This phenomenon was known as sovereignty, and those with a greater talent for it made their homes in the proto-EF. They would open their homes to travelers, and the travelers would look to the speakers of true words as monarchs. Eventually this union of monarchs, or monarch-sorcerers, wanted to secede from all the other realms and enter isolationism, to better develop their "dimensional sovereignty". The portals closed up, but the Fay refused to either leave for Fairyland or stay in proto-EF. They wanted to come and go as they pleased, as they always had. The monarch-sorcerers collectively threw up their hands and said, "All right, go anywhere you want between here and Fairyland. Just don't break the fabric of reality." Some representatives of Fairyland promptly went, "Oh, you mean like thiiis?" And started swapping their fay babies with people's babies from the Land Without Magic, using the Enchanted Forest as a halfway point. Portals were involved.

 

That meant war, resolved by the development of miasma, which is a sort of primordial Dark Magic made from the curse words of the monarch-sorcerers. Before the development of miasma, the Enchanted Forest would merely have reverted to a liminal space again after getting Swiss Cheesed by portals. Now that every particle of matter in The Enchanted Forest was imbued with miasma, the destruction of the Enchanted Forest meant that any associated realms would have untethered miasmatic forces bleed through and destroy that realm as well. The monarch-sorcerers repeated, "No portals! Or you'll break the fabric of our reality and we'll take your realm into oblivion with us!" This time, representatives of Fairyland agreed that it was better not to risk it. The monarch-sorcerers allowed a liminal space (to Fairylands only, such as Neverland and Oz) in the firmament of the sky, and continued to entrust a liminal space to the guardianship of those at the bottom of the ocean, who nobody ever heard from anyway. Pocket realms within The Enchanted forest were tolerated, but portals were outlawed.

 

While this demonstrates the monarch-sorcerers' powers over reality, these powers faded as the Enchanted Forest settled into its physical laws. Words just became words, and nobody could escape from age and death. One pocket dimension in The Enchanted Forest served as a prisoner of war camp, accessible to warden-sorcerers through scrying mirrors created by sovereignty. Its history since then has been a strange one. It rejected the miasma of the Enchanted Forest and resisted teleportation to it. The monarchs of the Enchanted Forest signed this territory over to the Fay, whose bards were equally flabbergasted by the behavior of the pocket dimension and named it Wonderland. The Fay used the Wonderland realm as a penal colony before signing this territory back to the Enchanted Forest. The dimensional sovereignty of Wonderland has never been recognized either by those in the Enchanted Forest or the Fay, but its existence has largely been forgotten.

 

Long before Rumplestiltskin was a wee lad with a straw doll, The Enchanted Forest had sorcerers. These were usually descendants of the monarch-sorcerers, but considering how the monarch-sorcerers were discovered in the first place, that sorcery just happens spontaneously to random people isn't unusual. The potential for sorcery is marked by a sensitivity to miasma, as well as an unmistakably backwards sequence of speaking truth (as in, instead of witnessing something true and speaking it, you speak it and it becomes true.) The speaking part is figurative, as most sorcery is silent and anchored more to gestures and actions. Most people in baby Rumplestiltskin's time believed that sovereignty referred to politics, and that sorcery had always been a separate thing.

 

Wizardry. Curiously, only in proto-EF would specific words from specific people come true. Many monarch-sorcerers could speak the same words in their own realms-of-origin without the same effects. Wizards investigate the magic inherent in the world (rather than the person) and construct magical transformation from what they find. Without the ability of the sorcerer to manipulate magic directly, or at least without the willingness to get so personal about it, wizards often work laterally. They use symbolic correspondences and magical items to create complex machines that are partially magic, magic potions, magic mirrors (although the Wonderland mirrors were products of pure sorcery, not wizardry), magic lockets, spellbooks, duplicated papyrus that allows for instant messaging, the draconic monorail system known as torii, tempest teacups for natural irrigation and relieving drought-stricken areas, and many other magical and technological advancements.

 

While wizards used to hold the stigma of being pretenders to power, or thieves of magical crafts, most sorcerers eventually also dabble in wizardry and consider the theoretical structure ideal for educating neophyte sorcerers. As wizardry is also the vehicle by which magic can be distributed among the common people for a better quality of life, its practice enjoyed good repute in most towns of the Enchanted Forest.

 

Wizardry was not without its controversies, however. Many wizarding organizations had suffered divine smiting from a number of pantheons for the production of love potions. The University of Avalon attracted the attention of cave-tower hermits when some of the wizards there engineered magic beans that could aid in teleportation (previously a rare skill exclusive to Sorcerers.) The beans, as it was later learned, could also open portals. Since the disappearance of Avalon, the wizards there have also been rumored to have experimented on human children in poverty-stricken areas to create Seers, Werewolves, and possibly giants.

 

Even further back, the Convention of Warlocks was established during the pre-miasma war of the Enchanted Forest. Neutral parties, that is neither monarch-sorcerers nor Fay, had studied the primordial world's magic but did not yet call themselves Wizards. They had discovered that it was possible to extract a magic heart from any being and command them to be at peace. World peace was the sole purpose of establishing the Convention of Warlocks, to lock up the war. They failed to do anything but add to the number of casualties before disbanding. While the governance system of wizardry is often broken up into units of Universities, the most often-used term for unauthorized or derided magic is witchcraft, and a derided practitioner known as a witch. The second most often-used term is warlock, although nobody knows why, as Enchanted Forest history is never well recorded.

 

Alchemy. Alchemy is a fringe study that focuses on transforming dark magic into light magic. It was the Alchemists who reversed the precognition method of the wizards (or wizard experiments, the Seers) and bore witness to pieces of the past instead of the future. It is through this Alchemical magic that anybody knows about monarch-sorcerers and their war with the Fay. However, Alchemists also pieced together a parallel alternative history in which miasma was not developed but discovered. In this alternative, the Fay initially attacked the monarch-sorcerers for harboring such a thing, but then made an everlasting peace with an agreement as to how to contain the miasma at the border of Fairyland.

The Alchemists believe that this discovered miasma, and by extension all Dark Magic, is the "prima materia" or the first thing to exist. Thus, Dark Magic has infinite potential that can be realized with proper transmutation, but is wielded harmfully only because nobody bothers to transmute it. Other wizards and sorcerers know this is nonsense, that alternative history is not possible, and that Dark Magic is a harmful and hazardous substance without exception.

 

While it is common for Sorcerers to supplement their natural talent with Wizardry, most Wizards do not or cannot become Sorcerers. Alchemists are the exception, or they were. Due to the stigma attached to Alchemy, their numbers dwindled. A scandal involving the prevention of plague via alchemical miasma theory and exploding plague-preventative potions systemically delivered to villages led to anti-Alchemy sentiment that almost eliminated the Alchemists in both universities and public spaces. Alchemists also occupied a secular or ecumenical position between mortals and gods, which offended clergy more than it offended the gods themselves. The last Alchemist was turned to stone by Dark1Rumplestiltskin after divulging her philosophy of eternal life and the manufacturing of gold from base materials such as lead or straw.

 

Bards. While the magic of bards might be considered merely an artistic sort of wizardry, its origins were Fay and operated beyond the limitations of sorcery and wizardry. Bardic magic concerned itself with interdimensional travel, time travel, awakening sorcery in other people, and intuiting any change in patterns (or rules/laws) underlying wizardry in any realm. That last one was usually done through augury, or listening to songbirds considered sacred to the first bards of the Enchanted Forest (the only realm that this method applies.) Bards of old usually remained in advisory positions to monarch-sorcerers, however, as their powerful magics were kept in check by an even stronger communal ethic. By the height of bardic practice in the Enchanted Forest, much of the magic associated with the practice had been lost and forgotten, and those who called themselves bards were little more than political puppets. Vestiges of this magical tradition is survived by bird-talkers (the methods of which are common folk knowledge, although the talent for it is rare), and a cousin to the bardic calling may still survive in the interdimensional organization of Authors.

 

Genie Magic. Genies were created by the three daughters of some deity from a monotheistic mythology, who are also goddesses, and as these goddesses originated from a monotheist mythology...this has inevitably caused problems. No monotheist associated with the records, especially not the clergy, would ever admit to being associated with any record of these beings. These goddesses are referred to as "Nix" or "Naught" or nothing, because they are meant to be unnamed, and they're seen as eerie corpse-like women who are associated with freshwater. Some wizardly scholars try to make a connection between Nyx and Ursula, but seriously can't get more than two words from either goddesses, (some ruder variant of "Go away,") and any more invasive studies are done at the scholar's peril.

 

A text attributed to Amergin the bard records the "rules of magic" in proto-EF settling into three primary constants: you can't go back in time and change things, you can't make somebody fall in love with you, and you can't bring the dead back to life. The text continues on to say that these rules were set by the Nyx Naught Nothings.

 

However, bardic tradition forbade committing any of their knowledge to text, and so these records have been dismissed as forgeries...also because of the inconsistencies with mainstream Enchanted Forest history evident in the text, as well as a mostly disastrous level of inconsistent descriptions about the mechanics of magic. The exception has been mention of the three prime constants of magic. It might have been attributed to Amergin by a publisher in the Enchanted Forest to try and lend credence to its content, but many scholars are certain that it was written in Wonderland where education of the Wonderland people by the Enchanted Forest people has been largely futile.

 

Fairy Magic. Other traditions of Fay magic survive through the Fairies (Fay that have spent a number of generations in the Enchanted Forest or Wonderland, enough to develop mannerisms too strange for those from Fairyland to accept them as true Fay). Fairies have developed their own innate magic based on belief that is not called sorcery, although it shares many similar principles. Perhaps some Fairy wizardry could be observed in the reliance upon magic wands, or crystal formations that could be mined and ground into "fairy dust." The mechanics of fairy magic remain mysterious, shrouded by an insular culture with a mysterious history. At this point, it would be worth noting that the Rock Trolls of Arandelle testify to having once lived in harmony with Pixies and Elves. While Fairies also use "pixie dust" (collected from the flowers of thinking trees,) and the earliest records of wizardry that exist in the Enchanted Forest were written in Elvish (although the phonetic script is based on Another Language rather than the traditional Futhark), there are neither Pixies nor Elves to be found anywhere in the Enchanted Forest, Arandelle, or nearby Fairylands. On this, the Rock Trolls refuse to comment. The symbiosis between Fairies and Dwarves also remains a mystery.

 

By Regina's time, most monarchs have long forgotten the treaty that granted guardianship of the firmament to Fairies, whose continued fulfillment of this task is what forms the constellations. Wizardly research into the potential magic of the firmament is diligently discouraged by the Fairies, often with the assistance of a pointy stick. Thus, it had been decided that the affairs of the Wee Folk are best left to the Wee Folk.

Edited July 31, 2015 by Faemonic

[legaleagle53]

Where is your evidence to support this world-building such that it could reliably be considered canon (or at least a strong case for making it canon)?

[Camera One]

That's very intricate and thoughtful, Faemonic!

[Faemonic]

Where is your evidence to support this world-building such that it could reliably be considered canon (or at least a strong case for making it canon)?

There is none. However:

 

1. I need to do this, Legaleagle. You know that. (It was just bugging me.)

2. It didn't contradict anything that we've been shown. Even the stuff that contradicts each other. (Are you born with magic OR do you need wands and stuff to magic? Is Neverland part of the Enchanted Forest AND Storybrooke you can get there by flying? Why is realm travel such a big deal when rabbits can do that all the time? Regina could use the brightest of light magic since when?? Who can and can't talk to birds???)

3. Hopefully, it didn't contradict itself (although I'm iffy about immortal gods when "only the Dark One has life eternal" and have got to do some tweaking so there's a reason Ursulanians are oppressed but non-Ursulanian Rumple got sent to the front lines before "you've got the sea in your blood" Milah.)

4. Thank all the gods for Wonderland. That was basically setting rules of magic so that the heroes could break them, although genie wishes can apparently send a person from Aghrabah to Wonderland without a mirror or rabbit, and there wasn't much of a reason for Nyx to

turn Cyrus into a genie if she didn't care at all about character-building but demanded the water back. Amara was right there, Nyx could have bitten her neck and sucked her blood.

I loved Nyx's character design and the way she was written, though. She was very "otherworldly force of natural order."

 

That's very intricate and thoughtful, Faemonic!

Thank you! But a lot of words don't mean a lot of thought. ;-P I just wanted Tiana to be an alchemist in the fanfic that I was never going to write. (Don't worry, they respected alchemists in headcanon Graeco-Roman Egypt when the Jewel of the Realm was a-sailing through.)

Edited August 1, 2015 by Faemonic

[Writing Wrongs]

I started my Season 4 re-watch. The whole Zelena/Marian thing makes no sense to me.

 

1) Wouldn't the frozen spell have lowered Zelena's glamour spell and revealed her?

2) Why was her heart still red when Regina pulled it out? She's the Wicked Witch ffs.

 

Why don't others with magic sense magic? Shouldn't the all powerful Dark One have sensed Zelena's glamour?

 

My head canon is that Ingrid knew Marian was Zelena and froze her to get her out of the picture. LOL

[Camera One]

2) Why was her heart still red when Regina pulled it out? She's the Wicked Witch ffs.

 

Good questions.  This one Adam said on Twitter glamour spells change your heart color too.

[Writing Wrongs]

Magic on this show confuses me.

 

Is there a difference between innately magical and someone who is taught magic? Rumple's magic is from being the Dark One and he can teach magic. Emma was born with magic. So apparently was Zelena. Was Regina? Why would Zelena be more powerful than Regina? I would think that Cora, Zelena and Regina would've had to have been born with magic to have it passed on.

 

Why is Emma the only one born as a product of true love and magical? Would't Phillip and Aurora's kid and Cinderella and Thomas' kid be too? And now Baby Snowflake. Is it because Rumple bottled their true love?

 

It's like the problem I had with Charmed. A Whitelighter was made that after someone died. It wasn't inherent, so their kids should not have had Whitelighter powers.

Edited September 8, 2015 by Writing Wrongs

[YaddaYadda]

I did a re-watch of 1x22 yesterday and something Rumple said which I had not remembered made me wonder if that wasn't the reasons Emma didn't have powers. Rumple said he put a drop of the true love potion on the parchment he wrote the dark curse on. Emma's reply was that's what made her the Savior, but what if it's really the thing that inadvertently fueled her powers. Emma was born devoid of darkness, there's the whole thing with Snow's infertility being cured by the waters of Lake Nostros as well. It's like all the stars aligned for Emma to have all these powers.

 

Emma isn't the only one born with powers. Ingrid, Elsa, Zelena were also born into their powers. Henry has the heart of the truest believer. We especially never got an explanation for that. Neal was Emma's first love and she still produced a child that was special enough because she is special, and I don't buy the whole Dark One's lineage because Neal was born way before Rumple became the Dark One, so nothing would have been passed down to him. It would be like saying that Rumple derives some of his power from Pan which is not remotely true.

[legaleagle53]

And no, Cora and Regina weren't born with their powers.  Rumple taught them both how to tap into the magical forces that existed in their world, just as he learned how to do it after becoming the Dark One and just as Cora would later teach Anastasia in Wonderland.  Now, I agree that that makes Zelena somewhat problematic, as it was established that she had her powers from birth, so it begs the question of how she could have inherited any magic when Cora hadn't yet met Rumple and her biological father didn't himself possess any innate magical powers, either -- at least, not that we know of.

[Curio]

So, can anyone be trained to do magic on this show? If so, why haven't Snow, Charming, Hook, Belle, or any of the other good guys tried to learn magic now that they know good/white/pure magic exists? With all the bad guys who have increasing levels of magic coming to Storybrooke on a daily basis, wouldn't it behoove the good guys to learn white magic as a defense against the villains, instead of crying to Emma or Regina to save the day? Or, you know, the easier route...create magical defense weapons. There's nothing within the show's established magic rules that stops the good guys from doing any of that. The only thing that's stopping them is the writers' lack of imagination. 

[legaleagle53]

Actually, Snow knows how to use squid ink -- it's how she got Team Princess out of Rumple's jail cell after Hook and Cora had left them there to die.   And Rumple taught Belle a cloaking spell that she was able to cast to keep Storybrooke safe while he and everyone else went off to Neverland in search of Henry.  Belle also was the one who freed Phillip from the curse that had turned him into a monster.

 

Part of it is the emotional motivation that is required to learn the magical arts.  With Cora, Rumple tapped into her desire for power and her anger at the way Eva had treated her in outing her planned deception to Leopold (and subsequently humiliating her in public as a way of keeping her in her place).  For Regina, it was her own fear and hatred of Cora's abusive and controlling nature that led her to learn magic, and even then, she had trouble with it at first because she had a hard time committing fully to the process.  And Anastasia's motivation was similar to Regina's -- compensating for her own mother's rejection of her and her envy of stepsister Cinderella's happy ending.

 

Emma, of course, had an entirely different motivation for learning to use the light magic that she already had:  protecting her loved ones.

[Curio]

I'm not talking about simple magic like using squid ink or using a cloaking spell, I'm saying the good guys should attempt to learn super powerful magic like Emma and Regina where the energy shoots out of their hands. As long as the good guys follow the path of Emma and learn white magic to protect their loved ones, couldn't they learn how to shoot white lightning magic beams from their hands after some hardcore practicing?

 

Basically, the show hasn't established the magical rules well enough to separate who can and can't use magic. As it stands, it seems like genetics doesn't really play a big role in whether or not you can use magic. Cora, Regina, and Anastasia weren't born with whatever magical gene Emma and Zelena were born with, but they still learned magic. So what's stopping Snow and Belle from learning hardcore white magic, too?

[Camera One]

Even if they did, the pinnacle would presumably only be the magic of Glinda the Good, who said she couldn't even have defeated Zelena without the pendant.  LOL.  So in a sense, why bother?

Edited September 10, 2015 by Camera One

[Curio]

So, would a team of five lame Glinda-level white magic users be able to defeat one dark magic villain? I'd like to see this theory tested out.

[Camera One]

The five lame Glindas won't be able to gather.  They'd be sent off to separate snowy prisons.  Does anyone want to go and free Glinda?  Anyone?  No?  

[KingOfHearts]

Snow and Belle both used magical objects. They didn't learn to use magic in capacity of Cora, Regina or Emma. They would need more training for that. However, likes other have stated, it makes you wonder why they show no interest in it.. maybe "all magic comes with a price" just scares them off?

Then you have people like Cruella, who had magic inserted into their bodies...

Edited September 10, 2015 by KingOfHearts

[legaleagle53]

Then you have people like Cruella, who had magic inserted into their bodies...

 

I'm sure that Isaac would be flattered by that description, even if it sounds a little dirty!  ;-)

[Faemonic]

I'm not talking about simple magic like using squid ink or using a cloaking spell, I'm saying the good guys should attempt to learn super powerful magic like Emma and Regina where the energy shoots out of their hands.

Snowing has True Love's Kiss sometimes. I guess that's the most that they can manage. Maybe it's kind of like learning to sing until you have a coloratura. Some people's bodies just aren't built for that. Some people have both the talent and the means to educate themselves, but they get interested in something else like ecosystems or the stock market.

 

Basically, the show hasn't established the magical rules well enough to separate who can and can't use magic.

 

Or that.

[KingOfHearts]

Continuing the long argument of who can use magic... My headcanon at this point is pretty close to Faemonic's. To use magic without an innate ability, you need to have the skill to dig deep into your psyche and draw the power out. It's apparently difficult enough that a tutor is required, such as Rumple or Cora. Some have a more natural talent for it than others. (Regina definitely did not, but her mother picked it up quickly.)

So why did Zelena have it? My only explanation is that Prince Jonathan came from a line of magical people, like Ingrid and Elsa.

[YaddaYadda]

So why did Zelena have it? My only explanation is that Prince Jonathan came from a line of magical people, like Ingrid and Elsa.

 

Yeah, but Elsa having magic sounded like the direct result or the part of the price of magic Gerda paid when she erased her sisters from Arendelle's memory.

 

How did Emma come by her magic? We are just assuming the reasons she has magic.

[Curio]

I don't mind that some characters are given magic while others aren't. It's a classic fantasy trope. But I wish they did a better job of addressing how boring and useless the non-magical people are. Every time a magical villain comes to town, everyone has to rely on the magical people because the non-magical good guys are powerless and haven't made magical defense weapons yet. Even though we have scenes like this...

Henry: It must be nice to have magic and be useful.

Regina: What's that supposed to mean?

Henry: I went out there to help her, but I couldn't do anything because I'm just... Ordinary.

Regina: Henry. We are each given our own gifts. You have the heart of the truest believer. You brought us all together. Never think you're ordinary just because you don't have magic.

 

...sorry Henry, but you're 100% correct. You're boring without magic. Unless you have magic, you'll never get to be a writer's pet. Look at the three main characters who get the most love from the writers: Regina, Rumple, and Emma. They all have magic. Emma didn't even start getting multiple flashbacks a season until she became magical. Sure, sometimes Belle comes through at the last second to banish Rumple from the town, or Henry might use the author's pen, but for the most part, non-magical characters will always play second fiddle to the magical ones on this show. Just look at how far down Snow and Charming have fallen in importance since Season 1.

Edited September 18, 2015 by Curio

[KingOfHearts]

 

...sorry Henry, but you're 100% correct. You're boring without magic. Unless you have magic, you'll never get to be a writer's pet. Look at the three main characters who get the most love from the writers: Regina, Rumple, and Emma. They all have magic.

It's Mary Sue writing. If you're a character in the circle of the writers' favorites, you're going to get godlike powers via magic. While the story implies there are rules and restrictions, it's been proven time and time again that anything can be pulled out of a hat at any time. While the writers are free to do whatever they want, the solutions that defy precedented structure are rarely earned. Regina, Rumple and Emma are three walking deus ex machinas that can do what they feel like whenever it's convenient.

 

 

Regina: Henry. We are each given our own gifts. You have the heart of the truest believer. You brought us all together. Never think you're ordinary just because you don't have magic.

Replying in Henry's thread.

Edited September 18, 2015 by KingOfHearts

[Shanna Marie]

While the story implies there are rules and restrictions, it's been proven time and time again that anything can be pulled out of a hat at any time. While the writers are free to do whatever they want, the solutions that defy precedented structure are rarely earned. Regina, Rumple and Emma are three walking deus ex machinas that can do what they feel like whenever it's convenient.

That's the problem -- they haven't really established a structure. They don't necessarily have to have spelled it out onscreen, but they should know how it works and write accordingly, and the implications should be seen through the worldbuilding.

 

I have no problem with the idea that only some people can do magic. That's a pretty common fantasy trope. There are cases where magic users are a separate race. There are cases where it's mostly genetic, but sometimes people from magical families don't have power and sometimes people from non-magical families do have power. There are cases where anyone can do basic stuff, but there's talent that can set some people apart. The issue for me with this show is that there are so few people with power, and yet no real reason has been given for these people, and no others, to have power, and they all seem to have come by their powers in different ways. And then no one in the world acts like magic is all that rare or dangerous.

 

Aside from magical beings, like the fairies, within the Enchanted Forest, Emma is the only good magic user. There was no powerful user of light magic when they needed to fight Zelena. The only other human magic users we've seen in that world, aside from Elsa's family's ice magic, have been the Mills women. Regina seemed to mostly get her power by absorbing it from the book. She didn't have magic at all in Storybrooke, even after Rumple returned magic, until she huffed the book. She didn't seem to have a lot of natural talent and took a lot of prodding by Rumple to do much of anything -- something that seemed to have been forgotten when they decided to make her the most powerful light magic user ever.

 

So it should be a really big freaking deal that these people have magic. Magic should be something strange and wonderful. Magic users should be feared, since they tend to be evil. Or maybe there needs to be some suggestion that there's a magic shortage, or humans shouldn't be able to do magic and they're an exception, or maybe there should be other people doing magic.

 

Regina's character arc and the writing in general would have been improved significantly if they'd treated her magic like it was established, where it's not something that comes easily and she can't do all that much without Rumple backing her up. It would have been even better if she didn't have that book handy to be able to huff magic after the curse broke and she had to deal with being ordinary, other than having some magical objects and the ability to make potions.

[KAOS Agent]

 

Henry. We are each given our own gifts. You have the heart of the truest believer. You brought us all together. Never think you're ordinary just because you don't have magic.

 

There's a huge problem with this because in Season 2, Regina explicitly told Henry that she could teach him magic. The massive contradiction between then and now really shows how very little thought they put into the magical world building. We know that it is teachable, but now there's some implication that one must be born with the talent which did not exist in their previous presentation of how magic works.

 

There have to be people out there with the talent that should be taught. If nothing else, I would expect healing mages to exist. They live in a place where woodcutting accidents would be prevalent. I don't know that magic can cure cancer, but it can reattach limbs and heal gunshots and cuts. These people would be in high demand and would be practicing light magic, so why don't they exist? Why is no one interested in pursuing the idea of teaching this? 

 

Even if they can't for whatever reason teach magic healers, why not explore the potions part of magic? What about the fantastic long term birth control curse that can be cured with a sip of lake water? Infallible long term birth control that involves a quick drink of something and you're done? Sign me up. Even if you're not willing to take the risk that Lake Nostos water would be available when/if you want kids, it seems like this would be much easier and safer than a tubal ligation or even a vasectomy for people who are done with adding to their family, don't want a family or for whom getting pregnant would be an extreme health risk. Why is this not a known thing? Why is it considered so terrible? It seems to me that this could be a literal life saver for some women. I'd be willing to bet that there are other magical potions that could be used in a positive way and that shouldn't require a magical person to create or use.

[KingOfHearts]

The phrase is "all magic comes with a price", but does light magic come with one? Have we ever seen that on the show? Especially after last night's episode it seems only dark magic comes with strings attached.

[Camera One]

Dark Magic also doesn't have a price 99% of the time when Rumple uses it.  Or when Regina used to use it.  

[tennisgurl]

Why does healing someone now count as Dark Magic if Emma uses it? Is Emma never allowed to use any magic, even though she used it before and was fine. Is being the Dark One automatically making all magic Emma uses evil, no matter what she does with it?

[LizaD]

Light magic comes with a price too and we've seen it. Emma put a down payment on it 28 years in advance.

Maybe this is why the Blue Fairy seems incompetent. She's faking it cause she doesn't want all these people coming to her. This could apply to Glinda and the rest of the seemingly useless on the "good" side. They can't say no cause that would be mean so they discourage people from coming to them in the first place.

[Camera One]

LOL, I'm thinking back to Blue encouraging Belle to go with everyone since she's so "resourceful".  She probably doesn't want to go to Camelot herself since she'll have to pay all sorts of prices for her magic.  In the 3A finale, she gave them the Black Fairy's wand and didn't even go herself to help.  The Hat was probably some fun resort for magical creatures.

Edited October 6, 2015 by Camera One

[Serena]

And no, Cora and Regina weren't born with their powers.  Rumple taught them both how to tap into the magical forces that existed in their world, just as he learned how to do it after becoming the Dark One and just as Cora would later teach Anastasia in Wonderland.  Now, I agree that that makes Zelena somewhat problematic, as it was established that she had her powers from birth, so it begs the question of how she could have inherited any magic when Cora hadn't yet met Rumple and her biological father didn't himself possess any innate magical powers, either -- at least, not that we know of.

The Zelena thing - I'd say Zelena is magical while her parents and sister are not (until taught) for the same reason Emma is magical while her parents and brother are not: genetics. Maybe she inherited a great-great-grandparent's magical ability her parents didn't, like sometimes a blue eyed child is born from two brown-eyed parents.

[KingOfHearts]

 

The Zelena thing - I'd say Zelena is magical while her parents and sister are not (until taught) for the same reason Emma is magical while her parents and brother are not: genetics. Maybe she inherited a great-great-grandparent's magical ability her parents didn't, like sometimes a blue eyed child is born from two brown-eyed parents.

I assumed that Prince Jonathan was or descended from someone magical. I've also wondered the same thing about Emma. Back during 3B, there was a theory going around that the Witches of Oz represented regions not only in Oz, but in the Enchanted Forest. Zelena to the West, Regina to the East, Eva to the North and Glinda to the South. So I thought maybe Eva had some sort of magical background involving light magic. However, it's all been but confirmed that she didn't. All the other grandparents are dead. Charming's dad is the only one we really know nothing about (except he was an alcoholic). It would be a bit of a stretch if the show wanted to explain magical genes with great-grandparents. Ingrid and Elsa's magic was hereditary it appears, so it's not like that's an alien concept.

 

What I still don't understand is what exactly makes Emma the Savior. I'm also a bit foggy on what exactly the title entails. Is her light magic part of it? Is she still the Savior, even though she wasn't built into the current curse? Why is she a True Love Baby, but not one else is? The show likes to throw the term around and I'm not sure what it means any more. It hasn't really given me a satisfactory answer regarding her powerful magic. That's why I'm speculating genetic involvement.

Edited October 6, 2015 by KingOfHearts

[Terrafamilia]

Dark Magic also doesn't have a price 99% of the time when Rumple uses it.  Or when Regina used to use it.  

I'm assuming the price is involved in specific magical feats, particularly those which others want to have done for them. The run of the mill day to day teleporting, conjuring of mundane objects, fireballs, etc are just the salt, pepper, and water in the recipe. Whatever "price" there is for them is minor. If you do a lot of them in a short time you might get all tuckered out. But if you want beef bourguignon, you'll have to pay a specific price for it. 

[Mari]

I actually kind of appreciated the price thing.  

 

Not the way it was resolved, with the Care Bear stare and hand-holding, but the concept they introduced that in order to use the Dark One magic, even if it's only on something big, there's an actual price involved.

 

It made Rumple's obsession with deals make sense, and since the Dark One magic was apparently supposed to be able to do more things than your average magic-user, it would be reasonable that it has slightly different rules.

[Camera One]

Rumple's deals were always to screw over someone asking him for help, yet he himself rarely ever had to pay the price for doing dark magic to further his own agendas.