Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26385535-20150511060338/@comment-27213286-20160201205800

Eskaver wrote: Farerb wrote: Eskaver wrote: To add, I think the "laws of magic" aren't laws that restrict magic, but laws that are just present as guidelines. We've seen the dead brought back as early as season 2 and we see that all magic comes at a cost. To save a life another must lose it or extensive psuedo-scientific experiment to bring the loved one back in agony. We've seen Cora having a spell that can make someone think they love you (which is pretty close). All that was simply in season 2. You can't change the past, but we saw that in season 1.

As Zelena said, there are no limits just noone strong enough to do them, noone smart enough to discover those spells...until now. Yes. Just seems contrived that they discover all of them at once by the same people. Yeah, but I think it's a matter of perspective. Rumple sees time travel as an impossibility and never tries, while stating others have failed. Zelena discovered a time travel spell (which is sort of odd that using Oz's witches mean time travel, but probably much more, but Zelena didn't care about love or ressurection).

I think it was placed there because Once's magic system is wonky and Zelena (who's becoming the light in the Darkness that this show is) is a walking testament to nearly all of that. They have spells and curses and handwave-y magic, but you can't tell what's what in terms of limits, so the contrived part is that there are very vague rules (based on Aladin, because the writers surely didn't think of them themselves). Zelena handwaves a tethering spell by looking at a tethering potion recipe............Yeah, I made a big point about that already.

Anyhow, getting closer to the topic at hand, I think they need in some season or episode is to actually show us how magic works and how it does what it does. I mean, we had the DO be the birth of Dark magic, but that means there was what? The DO was the first to teach "Use your anger to summon magic, mwahaha"? Who made these rules? The Gods?

And the most important part, who determines the price of magic, or the start of that phrase? Rumple could have been making that up (and it's just psychological). Rumple couldn't have been making it up because of the thing (i forget what it was called) that came to get Robin after the group came back from Camelot. Emma said something along the lines of all magic comes at a cost and he is here to collect the debt. If Rumple had made that phrase up nothing would have come to kill Robin. It just appears that the usual cost of using dark magic is the darkening of ones heart which is not very threatening.