Curses!

What are curses?

What are curses?

Their own category of spell? Or just a spell that people don't like?

Probably there are other categories of spells if there are curses, but curses are a special case because people regard them differently from other spells, even when they aren't really.

They can be. If witches or wizards are needed to work other kinds of magic, but anyone can lay a dying curse, or another curse in revenge, obviously curses differ from any other kind of magic.

Can you detect a curse, as opposed to other kinds of magic? So that you can tell whether a situation is a curse, or some other misfortune? Perhaps another spell having an unexpected side effect?

Can you remove a curse by means that would remove no other spell? Do you have to work about other spells about while removing it? Do you have to carefully research a spell to remove it, and curses are no different?

Or can you remove other magic by ways that do not even perturb a curse?

Do curses require loopholes in a way no other magic does? That you can be woken up if the bite of apple is dislodged from your throat? Where the blessing that turns your kingdom into a prosperous and happy land doesn't need such a loophole? (It can, of course, which may be a convenient plot point for your characters to act, but it doesn't have to even though curses do, if that's more convenient.)

If you turn your fairy goddaughter into a bear to let her run away from the marriage to her father, do you have to use a different spell than when you turn your stepson into a bear to curse him for not marrying your daughter?

What happens when you turn your stepdaughter into a deer to punish her, and she runs away so you can't catch her again, and uses the way she can live in the woods to stay away from people? If someone just undoes it as a curse, what happens to her?

Is it possible for a curse to have beneficent effects? Can that be done with intent? Cursing the princess to sleeping could let her escape a war. Does that work only when your intent is malicious, and she accidentally benefits and leaves you gnashing your teeth? Or can you do it willfully?

Can you even work out how to cast the curse if you aren't doing it in the heat of passion? A vengeful ogress can curse a princess to have to disenchant a sleeping prince to ever marry again, and so require a quest, but if the princess's fairy godmother realizes that her mother and father are spoiling her rotten, and they keep her out so she can have no influence on the girl's character, and there is a grave danger she will be a wicked and miserable queen, being a blight on the land until her subjects rise up and drive her out, at which point she will be lucky to be eaten by wild animals -- can the fairy godmother devise a spell that will remove her from their influence quickly enough? Which, since neither she nor they want it, is going to look enough like a curse that it's quibbling to question whether it is. Still, do her good intentions make it a different and probably more difficult spell?

Some forms of curses are more ambiguous. When the young prince laughs at an ogress, and the ogress curses the prince to be unable to marry anyone but Rose-Red-Lily-White, she's acting as a plot device. The same effect can be achieved by having him dream of the lovely lady. Or go into a room of stained glass windows to pick his bride, and to curiously pull aside the curtain of the one covered window.

What if she just aroused his curiosity so much that he can't stand the idea of marrying a bride less marvelous in nature?

What if his father descends on his fairy godmother in a rage demanding that she remove the curse? And she can't persuade him that it's not a curse?

What, after all, is a curse?