Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-25926288-20160713182420/@comment-27060727-20161002195625

I don't think you have to literally help everyone to be considered a hero. That's highly unrealistic and unfair. It would be different if we saw Belle (or Rumple) asking for help and then the heroes were like "nope." That never happened. She went to Zelena, who was also not close with the heroes here. Why she made that choice, idk, but we didn't see her informing the heroes of the baby or the contract before she left them and subsequently fell under the sleeping curse.

They found out in 5x20. When Hades got Zelena back, Rumple's contract was ripped up. The heroes now knew the baby was free. I assume they find out Belle's asleep in the box in 5x21 when they got back and Emma saw Rumple at Maurice's, but at that point, Hades was in Storybrooke and that was the bigger, more pressing problem. Rumple wasn't helping with anything else, so if I was one of the others, I'd assuming he was working on a solution. In 5x22, Rumple decided to steal all the magic from the town and while Regina knew that he was trying to wake Belle, his method caused problems for a ton of people so now helping the town > Belle. Is that unreasonable? I don't think so. The main group literally had no time off from dealing with the "bigger problems" to invest their resources in helping Rumple wake Belle - not that he was eager for their help either. And yeah, so 6x01 opened up right after they dealt with the NYC/portal shenanigans, and Hyde is now in SB - another immediate pressing problem. 6x02 is the first new day shown since 5x22 and we'll see in the first act that Belle is already back.

I don't see any time previous to 6x02 where it was problematic of them to not focus on saving Belle. There were other things going on that they had to deal with and she was deliberately placed into a box while under a breakable sleeping curse.