Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-4839682-20131003142941/@comment-22525977-20131008162938

XxBadWolfxX wrote: When I saw Snow doing her speech. I didn't see a tired person not interested in ruling.

I saw a woman fearing for the safety of her people. And willing to give up power and prestige instead of even seeing one person get hurt.

...

As far as Regina is concerned. The spell on the map thingy. She should have learned her lesson back when she turned the mermaid into wood that that using her magic to cheat

has consequences. Is she just going to keep doing this? It would be fun to watch but c'mon.

Her son's life is at stake. Pan is ruthless and watching every move. They are all his chess pieces. One wrong decision can have huge consequences. Snow is a woman fearing for the safety of her people and willing to surrender to stop even one person from getting hurt... but spurring people to civil war in which thousands will die, that's perfectly fine (this is if we assume that Snow did not continue to claim to have Excalibur the magical divine right sword to her name, of course).

Henry's life is at stake and he's being held captive by a demonstrably psychotic demon-child who even Rumpel is terrified of, and you expect Regina to not use every tool at her disposal to attempt to find him?

Why are Emma and Rumpel and the Charmings allowed to use magic to further their own ends, but when Regina does it it's cheating? Lest we forget—Emma used magic to troll through Pongo's memories and that had disastrous consequences, but so far no one's said a word to her about maybe not using magic so much. In this episode, we saw that Charming's first impulse when he needed to "make Snow believe in herself the way he did" (ick) was to go to Rumpelstiltskin and demand magical help. And if it isn't Rumpel, it's the Blue Fairy.

Regina's major uses of magic in Neverland so far has been (a) throw fireballs at attacking mermaids—her equivalent of using the swivel cannon on them, and quite successful, (b) turning the mermaid whom they all believed to be causing a supernatural storm into wood, which was just as much problemsolving as David holding a sword to said mermaid's throat, (c) offering (not even doing, just offering) to teleport the group where they needed to go—which would've been a massive time saver, kept them from getting exhausted and potentially poisoned by walking through the jungle, and gotten them where they needed to go that much quicker, (d) using the tracking spell to find Pan, which was only a "cheat" in the sense of not playing by the rules of Pan's obviously-rigged game, and (e) defending herself against the Lost Boys. None of this is using magic to cheat, it's reasonable use of magic in response to the circumstances.

Yes, some of what Regina did in two and what we see in flashbacks is an inordinate use of magic, but it's not any moreso than any of the other characters and in Neverland, at least, Regina is making the best use of what resources she has.