I feel like this season we’ll be getting Shadow 101 lessons like last year was Hearts. Apparently if you yank a shadow out of someone’s back, it kills them (a la Greg), but if you cut it off around the feet (WONDERFUL nod to Peter Pan I might add since they were always trying to reattach his shadow from his foot), then you can control it and send it off to do things for you. Very interesting indeed!
Maybe if your shadow is taken by force then you die; but if you offer up your shadow in service to Pan or carve it out yourself, then you get to live.
I think you’re right.
But I would say that the actually the difference is that Pan’s shadow rip off the shadow of someone else while Rumple did cut it off by using a magical item (the dagger).
And the way Rumple cut off his shadow is actually the complete opposite of how Wendy reattached Pan’s shadow in the original story. She uses needle and thread and Rumple used a dagger.
So I think that Pan also has at least a magical item which he used to cut off his own shadow. It might be another magical dagger with the origin like the dark one’s. But it could also be something else.
Maybe he has a magical scissors.^^
“There were thousands and thousands of forms of joy in the world, but that all were essentially one and the same, namely, the joy of being able to love.”