whitesheepcbd:

Esp as it relates to Rumple’s death (3×11) and Hook’s (5×11).

So I started my rewatch of OUaT in Wonderland yesterday, to be a little ahead of the @ouat-rewatch schedule. And the scene where Cyrus (he’s a genie, for those who haven’t watched Wonderland) tells Alice the rules of magic caught my attention. According to Cyrus, they are: 

1. Can’t kill anyone

2. Can’t bring anyone back from the dead.

3. Can’t make someone fall in love.

4. Can’t change the past. 

I think that first one might apply only to genies and which wishes they can grant, b/c we’ve seen plenty of magic practitioners commit murder on OUaT. But the other three, I think, are pretty consistent with the other times that the limitations of magic have been mentioned on OUaT.

Now, I’m coming at this from the perspective of having just finished a rewatch of OUaT s5, with Hook’s death and then return from the Underworld. I had literally watched Robin Hood’s death and funeral just two days before, with the emphasis from the show that he can’t come back. So it was fresh in my mind that they obviously broke rule #2 with Hook. 

But…didn’t they already break it with Rumple in 3×11? He came back from the dead too. 

Now, I’ve enjoyed fantasy and sci-fi since I was a kid, and I’m willing to suspend disbelief and accept any number of fantastical things happening in a book, movie, or TV show. The one thing I ask, is that the creators of the fictional world play by their own rules. And if they break their own rules, there better be a damn good reason for the exception. 

So…what’s the exception for both cases? Was Rumple able to come back b/c he was the Dark One? Did the fact that he killed himself, with the Dark One dagger, having anything to do with it? It’s been established that the only way to kill the Dark One is with the dagger, and the murderer becomes the next Dark One. So…I guess Rumple was both the murderer and the victim, in this case? If the Dark Ones were numbered on some list, I guess he’d be #247 and #248? 

And what was the exception for Hook? That one’s trickier b/c he wasn’t a Dark One at the moment of his death, so I’m not sure. 

Any theories, opinions? I’d really like to have a conversation about the rules of magic as stated on OUaT, and how they’ve bent those rules in certain cases. Can we have that conversation without bashing either Hook or Rumple, please?

Ok *dons tinfoil hat* I think this thread post could potentially get long with back and forth and I’m probably going to go on a bit, so under the cut for length 🙂

Rumple’s survival
Pre-underworld arc, my theory on how Rumple “came back from the dead” is that he was never actually dead. I thought that he had banished himself to the vault, where he would remain until someone let him out, it was sort of a way of containing the darkness.

He was the dark one and that curse tethered him to life. It’s sort of like in Warcraft, there’s this expression of “there must always be a Lich King” and I figured that perhaps there was a similar thing of “there must always be a dark one” and so Rumple couldn’t die because he hadn’t passed on the curse.

However, by respawning him in essence, that magic carried a hefty price – the death of the one that summoned him. So by not technically being dead, and the price of his ‘new life’ being the death of someone else. I was comfortable with that as fitting with the rules of magic. “Magic can do much but not that. Dead is dead.”

However, then season 5 completely torpedoed that because Rumple said he had been to the underworld, because he had gone and come back, that’s why his blood could summon the ferry. Therefore he was ‘dead’ and even the swapping of one life for another, didn’t really help.

I suppose it was still his curse, that tethered him to the living world but to be honest I would rather him never have been ‘technically dead’. I watch a lot of fantasy and sci-fi and I know ‘death is cheap’ but it can get a bit silly. My favorite show is Stargate SG1 and one of the characters on that (Daniel Jackson) died so many times it became a running gag. If he had ever died for real, nobody would have believed it. Death should have consequences.

Hook’s survival
Problematic to say the least. Like you said he wasn’t the dark one when he died, so there isn’t that excuse. Nothing tethered him to life, he was completely dead. Basically I guess it wasn’t magic that brought him back – it was the gods and they don’t have to obey the rules.

I would be a lot more comfortable with this if the reason Zeus had given had made sense. Nothing Hook did had any affect on the outcome with Hades, in fact it nearly made things worse as it almost convinced Zelena that Hades was right, and they were all working against her.

Plus putting this alongside Robin’s death, which was true self-sacrifice. How about other heroic deaths? Why didn’t they get a pass from the gods? It just didn’t seem fair and that’s not bashing Hook because if it was any character in Hook’s position, it wouldn’t be fair. I have no problem with them bringing Hook back, I just want it to make sense.

I actually wrote an alternate season six fanfic, in which I theorized that Zeus wasn’t Zeus, it was Loki and he was trolling everyone for his own amusement. That theory has no basis in fact but it made more sense than what little we know. To be honest, when it comes to Hooks survival I don’t think we know enough. I think there has to be something more to it, some reason why Zeus did what he did. I wish they would explore this in season 6 but I suspect that the storyline has wrapped now and they won’t revisit it.

So my theory in the end is the gods don’t have to obey the rules, and they did it for reasons unknown. Not exactly a good explanation but what other evidence is there to help form a better theory? /shrug

Magic can’t make someone fall in love
What about that magic dust on Guinevere? She certainly became the every appearance of a dutiful and loving wife afterwards. The Camelot arc was kinda dropped and so while they said that Arthur had been arrested off screen, they didn’t say what Guinevere’s fate had been.

I mean is the appearance of love when it’s magically induced essentially the same as real love to someone that doesn’t care about the difference? It’s not real love because it’s coerced but Arthur didn’t seem to care about that. It’s really horrible when you think about it, it took away her free will and that’s really sinister and creepy. Arthur was a nasty guy.

Can’t change the past
Although they’ve never mentioned it since, didn’t they allude to the story having been changed at the end of the season 3 finale? David remembered ‘Charles and Leia’ and how Snow and Charming met had been altered.

I have some serious problems with that because the only way time travel makes sense, and someone can go back to their own reality, is if it’s in a loop. In which case they don’t change anything, they only do what they had already done. Therefore Emma shouldn’t have remembered that the story was any different from what it ‘was’.

Otherwise the timeline branches and a new reality has formed. In which case when Emma and Hook returned to the present, everyone should have been seeing double, as their counterparts from the new reality would have been there.

To be honest this bothers me so much I pretend like it never happened. They didn’t change anything /hides

thatravenclawbitch:

freifraufischer:

thatravenclawbitch:

efnewsservice:

Hiatus Flashback:  Dopey 5.02 The Price

The last we will ever see of this character, who was tragically treed and then forgotten about on the outskirts of town. He was later chopped down for public safety reasons. Regina is militant about infrastructure and trees sprouting in the middle of the road is a big no-no.

Actually I figured that the Maine transportation people cut him down.  Since he’s on the other side of the town line someone driving down a rural road ran straight into a tree in the middle of the road.

Good point. And he has to be gone at this point. Since then Belle has driven in and out of town. Rumple has driven out of town. Emma and Regina have driven out of town. Henry and Violet have left town. And Emma, Regina, Henry, Violet, Snow, Charming, Hook and Zelena have all driven back in to town. No mention of the giant tree blocking the road.

Actually the tree was only on one side the road, so they could have driven on the other side.

Screencap source

Plus the third dark curse is still in effect. Belle could drive out because she had the pouch of magic dust. Everyone else could drive out because Storybrooke didn’t have magic at the time. However, now magic has been restored, until the curse is broken, no-one can cross the line again, otherwise the road truly would get blocked 🙂

I reckon when the third dark curse gets broken, they will just show the footage of Dopey transforming in reverse because the actor isn’t on the show anymore. That would be a way round it, providing they remember that he’s a tree and about the third dark curse that is …