Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25926288-20160321010032/@comment-27257290-20160327000007

I must say I disagree.

To me, true bravery is simply facing your fears, which is often the fear of what doing the right thing will bring, as the right thing to do is rarely the easy thing to do. So the good thing and the brave thing are very often the same, although not always. Rumple never does the right thing because he's such a coward e.g. going with Baelfire to the land without magic, or sparing Milah and having a harder time getting out of Underbrooke. All his cowardly acts are also his selfish acts, because selflessness and bravery aren't that different (Divergent) and to me selflessness is true goodness, while selfishness is evil. Notice how the cowards in this show are the ones who have done unspeakable things - e.g. Rumple, Pan and Hook before he was good.

Sometimes accepting your fate can be a form of bravery because it means facing the fear of what will come, even if that is losing your son. All the times when a character was brave to fight back, they were fighting the person responsible for their suffering or they weren't killing others in the process or both. But the healer was not responsible for Baelfire's poisoning, the snake was.

Even Merida herself defines true bravery for us when teaching Rumple to fight, saying how he wasn't thinking of himself or his limp, he was thinking of Belle. Which meant that bravery is fighting for others without thinking about yourself - which is the same as being selfless.

So when I say Rumple made the right choice not to kill the healer, I do mean it would not be brave to kill him. The bravest thing would be to find a better way to help Baelfire than through murder, as it means facing Rumple's fear of failing to save his son and the fear of what he would have to do to save him instead of killing a man.