From Tumblr: Anon Ask - Do I think Rumple's a coward?

[nym_wibbly]

In your opinion is canon-Rumple correct to call himself a coward?
~ Anonymous

He’s a coward a lot of the time - his brand of selfishness is cowardice, in that he treats other people badly for his own protection and gain. That’s a cowardly choice. I think he’s utterly wrong about what makes him a coward, though. When he’s afraid to fight, to face danger, he has other people’s idea of cowardice hanging over him; Milah’s words, and Hook’s, and whatever the deal with his father was that made him feel a need to prove himself in a war in the first place. He thinks being afraid of danger is cowardice. When the chips are down, Rumple is and always was capable of doing the hard thing, and he completely fails to see that as courageous. Rumple thinks in necessities. He’ll die for the people he cares about, and I don’t think he struggles with that at all. It’s a given as far as he’s concerned - if you’re one of that tiny handful of people he actually gives an eff about, he’ll step up and save you from the big bad, even if it costs him his life. Even if you hate him for it afterwards. And he’d rather die for you than hurt for you, every time, because that’s where he’s truly a coward. He’d rather drive you away than lose you.

Rumple’s a coward when it comes to facing what’s hard to live with - when it comes to living with fear, or being abandoned, or with the fear of being abandoned. He takes extreme action to avoid ending up in a situation where he has to confront the feeling of powerlessness - a pre-emptive strike. He’s so scarred by his past that he can’t see the wood for the trees with his own behaviour - he gets the general idea that his behaviour drives people away and that this habit costs him happiness, he can accept and lament the fact, but I don’t think he understands, even by the end of the show, exactly what it is he’s so afraid of. He’s learned to face it and overcome it, in losing Belle and taking the slow path back to her; he’s defeated it one day at a time. I’m not sure he ever learned to define it. I think he’s most afraid of… being afraid, and of feeling powerless because he’s afraid. When he faces it, deals with it without resorting to selfishness, he’s courageous. More than most people could be - the way only story book characters can be, perhaps. When he lets it define him, lets it be his reason to treat other people poorly, he’s a coward. When he lets it push him to a choice like the one he made in Skin Deep, letting Belle go before he got too attached… which was that? Selfless or selfish? Hero or coward? For her sake, or his own? I don’t think even he could say for sure. I think it was both. Beautifully, messily, both.

The take-home message of Once Upon a Time, for me, was ‘we are both’. Rumple’s both - hero and coward, and everything in between. I’m dubious about his own definitions, though. He doesn’t spend much time listening to other people’s opinions - except about that. That cost him, and, I think, held him back.