Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-11058666-20150826195114/@comment-26033121-20160215162852

I think they are both antiheroes/antivillains to be honest. I don't think that Rumple accepts that he's evil, or that he loves power more than anything. I think this power thing is a writers block thing on the part of A&E because they don't know what to do anymore now that his son is gone. I really do feel like he loves Belle and Baelfire more than anything. A&E just don't know how to move him forward without keeping him morally ambiguous anymore, so they are moving him back and forth abruptly through flanderdization. They don't want him to be redeemable yet, but they don't want him to be irredeemable either, so they go back and forth between good and evil. The issue is that they want to keep him a mystery by blurring his motives. They want to keep Rumple a mystery, but as of 3B with the death of his son, they have been stripping away the entire essence of his character by vaguing up his sympathetic motives to the point where he has been coming across as almost one-note and just power hungry. The fact that they have made him such a "foil" to Hook really bugs me too. Did Michael Raymond James (Neal) decide to leave OUAT because he wanted to, or was it because more people wanted Hook with Emma, instead? Either way, I do think that Rumple will be the ultimately redeemed and get a happy ending with Belle if the series lasts to an S7 before getting cancelled. However, I no longer care to watch the show if he keeps getting seemingly one-dimensionalized into something that is so OOC, and goes abruptly back and forth between good and evil with no deeper explanation. I want to be able to see the journey to redemption in between too, not just purposeless hopping back and forth between hero and villain until the end. That's no fun. Unfortunately, the show has become so inconsistently plot versus consistently character driven since the end of 3B that I fear the days of good writing with progressive compelling character development for Rumple is over. And it's not just Rumple, but Emma, Regina, Snow, Charming, Belle, Henry, and even Hook. They've all fallen flat, and are no longer credible characters because they have sacrificed plot for characterization way too much, and they have all been dehumanized. Rumple's just th most obvious because he's the most complicated.