Hey, thanks for your message, you raise a couple of interesting points.

First, I’m pretty certain you are being sarcastic which raises the first point. I find it fascinating that two people can watch the same show and see completely different things. I love Agents of Shield, and actually that’s one of the few shows a real life friend watches, but we couldn’t be more different. Every character I love – they hate, and vice versa. We’ve actually probably spent longer discussing that than the actual show, trying to work out why that is.

It leads to us having completely contradictory opinions. The best part about that is, we both usually have justification for our theories/opinions. We just have different ways of looking at the situation.

Which brings us back neatly to your argument. You are not wrong. Rumple has done some terrible things. Trying to put Emma in the hat was beyond the pale – it was very wrong. That’s the mother of his grandchild, I can’t fathom what he was thinking. Except I’m fairly certain he wasn’t.

I can list reasons for why Rumple made that choice. It doesn’t excuse what he did, but maybe it explains it. He’d lost his son, his reason for being, and had given into despair. He was losing the battle with the darkness thanks to his time in the vault, and his subsequent year of imprisonment/torture. None of that gives him a pass. Rumple should still work for redemption, forgiveness, get back on the path he was on before he died to save everybody. Basically Rumple backslid, and wound up revisiting his more villainous days.

So why am I not just blaming Rumple full stop? Because every single character on the show has done bad things. Even if we just take into account acts against one another, there’s still a lot. I’m a big Regina fan, I think she’s had one of the better, more consistent and thorough redemption arcs. She’s earned her redemption but she still tried to kill David and Snow so many times that she lost count. They forgave her, they call her family because of Henry, why don’t they extend the same ‘second chance’ to Henry’s grandfather?

Please don’t get me wrong Rumple would still need to earn it. He shouldn’t be given a pass, but I think he should get the same chance as others. Hook while consumed by darkness (just like Rumple) tried to kill everyone, to send Emma and her entire family down to the underworld. Nobody ever blamed Hook for that because it was the darkness. I don’t think they can have it both ways. Either the darkness makes people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do, or those people need to own their actions and earn forgiveness for them.

Now I’m not saying 100% that Hook poisoned Emma and her family against Rumple. To be honest it was a little tongue in cheek that “Hook got his revenge!” because well like I said in the actual post, a lot of characters have never given Rumple a fair shake anyway. Rumple did dozens of deals with Snow and Charming, they would be dead or not together if it wasn’t for him, but because he never did anything for free (though he never asked for more than they could pay either) he was the ‘scourge of the realms’.

I really don’t know, and I would like somebody to tell me, what exactly Rumple had done to them when they helped lock him up over the Cinderella situation. I found their actions appalling the first time I watched that episode, and it was only episode 4, so I hadn’t learned the full extent of everything he’d done for them at that point.

So it probably isn’t Hook’s fault that everybody hates Rumple. I was just saying pre-Hook Emma was willing to at least hear Rumple out, and afterwards not so much. The timing makes it a possibility, but we can’t definitively prove cause and effect. Other things happened at the time, for instance Neal dying. That didn’t only affect Rumple, that affected Emma as well.

Basically yeah you aren’t wrong. Rumple has done some terrible things. Do I think Emma et al would have got over it without Hook? Not sure, probably not, but I think they should have given him a chance. Rumple is family through Henry and this reminds me of a fanfic I read just last night. In that it said that the best way to defeat a villain was to bring them in from the cold.

They defeated the Evil Queen by calling her family and being there for her when she needed help. Rumple has a couple more centuries of trust issues to work through, but wouldn’t the same thing work with him? A lot of what he’s done in more recent times has been a direct response to everybody’s mistrust and hatred, making him feel like he doesn’t have another option.

I had a thought earlier about Hook. It’s a bit random and not my usual because I do try and stay away from anti-character posts. However…

It occurred to me that “revenge is a dish best served cold” – Hook spent several lifetimes searching for a way to make Rumple pay for Milah’s death. For most of that time this took the typical form of “I will kill you!!!” but then think about what he’s done lately?

Successfully romanced Emma – who not only did Rumple’s son love, but is also the mother of his grandchild. Emma and Rumple used to have sort of a frenemies thing going on. Rumple had respect for Emma in season 1-2 (pre-Hook) and Emma was never 100% sure that she could trust Rumple, but she was willing to work with him/give him the benefit of the doubt sometimes. Since Hook has been on the scene, it’s everybody hate Rumple all the time. Hook has successfully poisoned not just Emma, but also Henry and her entire family against Rumple. I mean admittedly Snow and David were kinda fair weather about him before, happy to use him when they needed something but would jump at the chance to imprison/control him if possible. Emma wasn’t like that though, not back then.

Formed a friendship with Belle – or at least made Belle consider him a friend, to the point where Belle lived on his ship and looked to him for protection. Now it was only ever strictly platonic but still it must have been eerily familiar, having another wife leave Rumple to live on the same ship. That must have really hit Rumple where it hurt.

So I’m thinking Hook got his revenge after all. He could only kill Rumple once and then dead is dead (well sometimes) but stripping away everything and everyone that Rumple cares about? That’s going to cause years of suffering for Rumple, with Hook smugly knowing that he won in the end.