Reply To: Your True Love Is Power

[Keb]

Yeah, we barely saw his affection for Belle and got nothing at all about why he’d care for Henry (beyond the obvious–he’s his grandson), for the entire arc. We were presented with Horrible Man who LIES to the nicest most adorable wife ever and kills nuns who want to save an entire town and LOVES the fact that he gets to crush a heart to get Ultimate Power. We weren’t shown any hint of the coward (the label wasn’t even brought up until the finale this season) trembling inside, and most of the bits that showed how he doted on Belle were cut (as was anything with Belle in it, as far as I can tell).

For a fan as invested in Rumple as I am, the fear we’ve known about for three seasons is still there, and you can see it in some of Bobby’s work, but it was never played up, not even in Family Business where there was an open opportunity for him to express it in some way. Even I was convinced that there had to be some reason he needed to leave Storybrooke besides simply covering his trail so Belle wouldn’t find out and be mad at him for what he had to do to keep his power. If there had been a HINT that he feared that, it would have made sense sooner, and felt far more IC.

And connecting his experiences with Nealfire to his experiences with Belle (which are quite parallel in a lot of ways) would indeed have been the sensible thing to do. For someone like me who is desperate to understand him, who rewatches and rewatches the episodes taking meticulous notes, while following the creators’ commentary etc, it’s not so hard to put most of the pieces together and say okay, yeah, that works…but for an average viewer just watching it as a show? We last saw Rumple do anything actually kind or even acknowledge what his son would have wanted three months ago. Who actually remembers little things from three months ago if they’re not obsessive about them?