Reply To: "All he does is lies."

I’m bothered by the fact that he’s been outright lying so much this season, actually, because Rumple USED to believe that he didn’t lie (granted, a lot happened after he made that claim, so maybe that’s part of his character development–PS, development doesn’t have to be positive). He manipulated and took advantage of desperate people, sure, but he told them some version of the truth while he was doing it. It had been part of his personal code with the deals, which I still believe were partly his way of controlling his own darkness while still working towards his goals. It put the responsibility for what happened on his victims, along with the price of his magic use.

I am NOT saying he was ever HONEST. As Charming pointed out in The Crocodile, there’s a difference between literal truth (which Rumple stuck to out of a legalistic principle) and honesty of the heart, which is what Belle always wanted from him. That’s part of why his lies against her this season were so heartbreaking–she’d told him ages ago (in show time anyway, but at least a year before their marriage anyway) what she really wanted from him for their relationship to work–trust. And he violated that knowingly and directly to do things she never would have accepted (she was friends with the fairies, she’d saved Hook’s life before, and while she might have been okay with his being free of the dagger with power intact she certainly wouldn’t have appreciated his condemning a town full of people she liked in the process). Even if he deluded himself into believing he was doing it all for her, he knew it was wrong–that’s why his excuses were so thin and weak at the town line. And that moment when he starts to say “I can have everything” and then switches to “we” is the moment he realizes (and she does too, sob) that his goals were more selfish than he thought.