Rules of Magic

There have been a few rules that have popped up repeatedly in the show…there might be clues in some of them.

The most obvious is that True Love’s Kiss can break any curse, as long as the love is mutual (doesn’t work on Snow when she’s forgotten Charming or Belle when she’s lost her memory).

Dead is dead, and magic can’t bring anyone back. Science might be able to, but it has its limits too.

Killing someone in vengeance makes you as evil as the person you kill. Rumple warned Charming that this would happen to Snow if she killed the queen while in her lack-of-true-love state. Belle’s pleading with Rumple to not kill Hook (because that would destroy every bit of goodness in him) seems to relate to this rule…so does that mean he’s as evil as the old Dark One (probably), Milah (shudder), the horrible Hordor who was taking children to the ogres war (that’s pretty evil), and all those other random people he killed as the Dark One? That’s a lot of evil to overcome. Also, it apparently doesn’t count if it’s an execution or in self-defense, since Snow and Charming have definitely killed some guards in their various escapades, and Charming said there was a difference when they were going to execute Regina.

Loving someone can keep part of you human even through all that: The Blue Fairy tells Bae that he’s the part of his father that’s still human.

Magic always comes with a price, though the price isn’t always made explicit.

No one breaks a deal with Rumplestiltskin, though this may simply be that in full power he’s capable of enforcing that rule.

Names are powerful. It is interesting, then, that at this point everyone who was cursed has at least two.

If you hold someone’s heart, you control that person. We’ve seen that with Graham and Aurora, as well as the zombies. Crushing said heart kills the person instantly. Sometimes removing the heart seems to kill the person faster–but maybe it’s in how you do it–because Henry Sr. collapses immediately when Regina takes his heart. Oh, and apparently you don’t need magical training to put hearts back, cf Mulan with Aurora. You do, however, need either that or a spell to take the heart successfully, cf Hook and Regina’s training.

It’s possible to see the future, but it’s like a puzzle with missing pieces and never, never what you expect. So what does one do with such a power? Also, Rumple seems to have blind spots–big ones–if he actually uses his power, because he completely missed that Belle wasn’t dead, and while he’s the first of the men in the room to realize that Henry is Neal’s son, he kinda missed that bit too. Are those the missing pieces? Or is there some other restraint on it?

Everybody has a choice. …and yet everything happens by design. These rules seem to contradict one another! Whose design is the first question I have about this…we’ve seen that Cora, Regina, and especially Gold have been the designers for the most part, but the Seer seemed to indicate that someone or something had some power over Gold’s fate.