Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-26394456-20171122060155/@comment-25375217-20180104042116

DracoWombat wrote: DatNuttyKid wrote: DracoWombat wrote: If Alice was supposed to be a magical character we'd likely have seen it by now. I can see her being the Guardian, but it's highly unlikely that she's a normal magic user. What makes you say that? There's yet to be a moment that it would make sense to show her using magic, except maybe right when she was born a la Zelena. But Zelena's been the only example of that.

A logical reveal, however, would be having Gothel try to manipulate her daughter into joining the Coven and somehow giving her access to her powers in the Land Without Magic. Her magic could then go haywire like Emma's did in Season 4 and Ana's did in the winter finale, but with the help of Robin, she gains control over them and is able to use them to help defeat Gothel.

OUaT typically likes to show a character's magic as early on as possible. Drizella's an exception but it's because she was specifically written to be a "big reveal". Alice isn't.

Zelena's establishing character moment is her defeating Regina easily in 3x12. Pan's establishing character moment is using fairy dust to fly in 3x01. Cora's was her contorlling Regina with magic in the horse in 1x18. Regina's was, well, the iconic opening of the pilot. Fiona's was her resisting squid ink easily and overpowering Rumpel in 6x09. Ingrid's was freezing the wall in 4x02.

If a character has magic, the show will most likely reveal it as soon as possible unles sit's part of a big reveal, as was Drizella. It's unlikely that they plan that for Alice since she already had her big reveal (Being Gothel's daughter in 7x07). These are all completely irrelevant cases compared to Alice: they're all villains, Alice is not (that we know of).

Emma wasn't revealed to have magic until midway through Season 2 and it wasn't a big reveal. It was just "I don't think I can use a protection spell." "Sure you can. Watch this." She didn't get a huge reveal magic usage until Season 3B.

Anastasia wasn't revealed to have magic in her first appearance. Even ignoring the fact that she appeared as a corpse multiple times before One Little Tear, she wasn't revealed to have magic until The Eighth Witch. She was hinted to have magic, but that's it. And her magic wasn't a particularly big reveal, either. (Although that may be because it was spoiled in the promo. It might have been more effective had I not seen it coming.)

There's also a spoiler-y example I could list here but it's the wrong board. Suffice to say, there's another character who has already debuted has not been revealed to have magic yet.

And anyway, Alice very well may have used magic in 701 when she trapped Henry with plants. Her manipulation of those plants is very similar to what Drizella did to kill her beau.

Regardless, from a narrative standpoint, there's been no reason to explicitly confirm that Alice has magic because we have not seen her interacting significantly with someone who might teach her. Rumple is the most likely candidate but we've only seen her interacting with him a handful of times -- mostly while in the Land Without Magic. The two scenes where they weren't in the LWM was their first meeting ever (not a great time to go "Hey, do you have magic?") and one scene where Rumple was out of his mind, and also eight years after any training may have begun so she likely would not use it except when she needed to. A narrative reason to use her magic may come up later, though, should Gothel try to recruit her to the Coven or otherwise take advantage of her.