The line “All magic comes with a price” is a recurring peace of dialogue for all seven seasons of Once Upon A Time. And it’s a sentiment, without which fairytales have no real meaning. The idea that you can make a gorgeous gown for yourself with the snap of a finger or be woken from a curse with a mere kiss needs something equally powerful and equally negative to cancel it out.

That line may as well be: all actions have consequences. Because one thing this show does really well is proving that karma will always catch up to you. And the longer it takes for you to pay your debt, the greater that debt will actually be.

And that obviously doesn’t mean that if you’re good, nothing bad will ever happen to you or that if you’re bad, nothing good will ever happen to you. We can clearly see numerous instances of good people facing injustice.

The point is that once you have the chance to gain power and protect yourself, you should stop while you’re ahead. If Cora, Regina or Rumpelstiltskin had been content to simply exercise just the amount of power needed to be safe and content, they wouldn’t have faced so many tragedies.

And the same goes for every other character in OUAT. Because if the show has any message, it should be that outside of the children, no one is truly innocent.

Let’s Start With The Ones Who Started This Generational Curse: Rumpelstiltskin’s Parents

Rumpelstiltskin’s parents are a classic case of overcompensating going too far. On the one hand, you have his mother, who in her attempts to protect her child became the very thing that would doom her child. She had good intentions to begin with but she took it too far. And once she had power, she allowed it to corrupt her beyond recognition. Rather than helping her family in any way, she caused pain everywhere she went.

Then you have Rumpelstiltskin’s father: Peter Pan. A man so afraid of the world and so dissatisfied to live in it, he became a predator with the face of an eternal child. In trying to keep the monsters of the world at bay, he himself became the monster. He was so obsessed with finding a perfect life that he brought misery on himself and his entire family line.

Rumpelstiltskin’s parents are the reason why he is so truly broken. After being raised by awful parents and even worse people, he too become doomed to follow in their footsteps. While trying to stop himself from becoming like his father, he returns home a coward and is resented by a wife who once adored him. In not simply being happy with what they had, they robbed him of his chance to a saviour and instead gave him a life of forever choosing wrong and losing what he most valued. He most likely would have had a shorter life if not for his parents’ choices but he also could’ve had a chance to be truly happy.

But in cheating fate, his parents ensured that they and him would continue to pay the price until death.

Rumpelstiltskin & Cora

Now this was a coupling I absolutely didn’t expect. There are times that I am for it and then there are times that I remember that Rumpelstiltskin had a thing going on with Regina (Cora’s daughter) and it disgusts me all over again.

I genuinely don’t think Cora would have turned out as evil if she’d held onto her heart. She felt so much heartache that in the end, when she had the opportunity for true love, she stopped herself from being to feel it. And in doing that, she began a generational curse. She cursed both of her daughters to a life of resentment and cruelty. On the one hand, you have Regina who, on the cusp of running away with her one true love, was instead forced to marry an old man. Her heart turned bitter and cruel and the only peace she found was in tormenting the innocent. And all of her deeds came back to bite her. Every time she thought she could be truly happy, she lost it all.

And then you have Zelena, who spends most of her life bitter, lonely and abandoned. She resents her sister, who arguably had just as bad of a life as her. She craves the love and attention she perceives Regina to have and because of this, she spends most of her time onscreen competing for something that simply isn’t there. And in the end, she has a daughter who might love her but she’s targeted by other evil characters in every other episode. Is it a wonder that her one chance at happiness (her daughter) is constantly at risk after she deceived a man into sleeping with her to get that daughter. And considering that Robin would never have slept with her without her disguising herself as his wife, I’m not surprised that the universe punished her for raping the man. The real tragedy are the innocent people who got caught in karma doing her thing.

When each of these characters received a little bit of power, they weren’t satisfied. They couldn’t be content to simply be safe, they had to overpower everyone else. And in doing that, they drew the universe’s wrath.

Regina Mills & The Charmings

While Regina Mills (as the evil queen) is a pretty clear example of karma, if you go far enough into the show, you realise the Charmings are also paying for some shady behaviour.

There is a reason why things keep going wrong for Snow and Charming. They hide under the cloak of righteousness and rarely ever even attempt to make amends until it’s almost too late. Now I’m not talking about Snow telling Cora about Daniel. I’m talking about when the Charmings sacrificed Maleficent’s baby for Emma. I’m talking about when Snow tricked Regina into killing her own mother the moment they might’ve had a chance for reconciliation. That adds up. And it means that the Charmings pay over and over and over again.

Even this is part of a generational curse. If you go back to Snow’s mother, while she had been a decent person as an adult queen, she had been pretty shady as a teenaged princess. She degraded Cora in a way that stuck with her for decades. And when Cora gained power, she returned the favour by killing her, attempting to force her daughter to turn to darkness and arranging it so that Regina would take her place as Queen.

None of these characters seem to understand that sometimes the weak become strong. Power is a fickle thing. There’s no guarantee you will always have it. And when you treat people terribly with the expectation you will always be above them, you risk creating resentment that will eventually come back to bite you. I’m sure Snow’s mother hurt many people as a princess. And I doubt she apologised or made amends for that.

At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter if you change and become good if you have done nothing to make amends to the people you hurt. You can’t expect the universe to give you a blank slate when you have yet to pay your debts.

Emma Swan & Pinocchio

I hate including these two in this list considering that Emma was a baby when the curse started and Pinocchio was a little boy. It should’ve been neither of their responsibilities to break the curse. But unfortunately, the very fact that magic saved them from falling victim to the curse meant that they both owed a great debt. Take Pinocchio for instance, no one in their right mind would ever threaten to take the life of a little boy simply for lying or not keeping his word. But Pinocchio owes his life to magic. He was made of wood and because of a great sacrifice, he was given the gift of life. This meant that he had to be better.

And when he gave into human selfishness, when he chose his own self-interest, he was punished for it. If he had stuck around and raised Emma to believe in magic. If he had ensured that she was going down the right path, he never would have had such a hard time persuading her when she was needed. And he has this great responsibility because he’s a product of magic. All magic has a price. And the price of being made into a human means you have to be better than the average human.

Same for Emma. She never should have been in the real world. She was supposed to fall victim to the curse that trapped her people in Storybrooke. But she escaped through the use of magic. This meant she was responsible for breaking the curse whether she wanted to or not. And when she tried to escape that responsibility, she was punished harshly for it.

Let’s not forget that before the curse was broken, the only times Henry was truly in danger was when Emma outright rejected his belief in magic. And it was when she tried to leave Storybrooke that he fell victim to the sleeping curse. All magic has a cost and if you refuse to pay it, someone else will. And after seasons of Emma doing the right thing (for the most part), resisting evil (for the most part), she is rewarded for her consistency with a gift few ever receive.

Hook is literally brought back to life to reward her for all she has done. So this goes both ways. But you have to be patient. Sooner or later, karma will catch up to you. And it’s up to you whether or not you are given a gift or a tragedy.

Final Thoughts

Say what you will about the convoluted plot and the twisted family tree, I actually love this show. It’s not perfect by any means but it keeps you interested (which is arguably the better characteristic in a story). But I will admit, doing a rewatch can be time consuming. I thought I would have time to finish the show before writing this review but I don’t think I have the stamina for that.

If I got any facts wrong, let me know. And even if I didn’t get anything wrong, tell me what you think anyway. If there’s one thing this blog is sorely missing, it’s opinions that aren’t my own. So please, fill up my comments section. But be respectful. We want heated debates in here, not personal attacks.