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nym_wibblyI was just reading your post about Rumple confusing Belle re: lies. Has he ever actually told a lie in Bed of Thorns? I can't think of one. What made you change that from canon?Heh, I didn’t change it - they did! Rumple obfuscated, obstructed, handwaved, and misdirected his way through Season One, but he wasn’t big on outright lies until later on. I drew mostly on Skin Deep for A Bed of Thorns, and noted how carefully he answered Regina when she cornered him in the cell - he made sure his words were literally true, even though he was trying to deceive her with his answer. He lied to Baelfire about his mother in Desperate Souls, though at the time that was questionable. Other than that, as the Dark One, Season One Rumple let people’s own bias and foolishness - their self-deceit and sloppy failure to ask the obvious questions - entrap them, the way he did with Ella, and the way he, himself, was entrapped by Zoso and August. He made a game out of it - it was ‘what he did’, and he loved seeing people hoist with their own petard (with a bit of nudging and emotional manipulation from him to help things along). His victims always had to deal with the fact that they, in part, had themselves to blame if they didn’t like the consequences of making a deal with Rumple. That’s very ‘fairytale’, that idea of magical justice in operation, that cautionary tale warning against shortcuts and quick fixes, with the mischief-maker/tempter figure being not so much evil as seductive. An agent provocateur.
~ Anonymous
I wanted to play with that, so I worked it into A Bed of Thorns as something Rumple consciously doesn’t do - he doesn’t lie, not because he has any moral objection to it, but because he doesn’t need to, and it’s more fun watching things play out when he doesn’t. He gets off on the, “gotcha!”.
Originally, I wrote it as a sort of magical obligation - part of the contract, if you like. Lying would invalidate his deals. A limitation on what the Dark One can do with their power that Rumple, being contrary and extremely clever, has turned into an art form, a signature, and his own personal entertainment. I’ve reworded the story to soften that idea, as canon!Rumple turned into an outright Lying McLieface who got away with all kinds of nonsense without magical consequences. The people he deals with in ABoT (mostly ‘off-camera’) create their own trap out of desperation, wishful thinking, and selfish bias. Or they outright invite him in, the way Belle and her father did. Rumple cynically exploiting human nature seems more ‘magical’ and ‘fairytale’, to me, than the outright deceit his canon-self engaged in during later seasons.
In the Tumblr tags I added: There was this whole other part [of ABoT] where he couldn't steal using his power, but once Belle became his wife she became part of him so he could steal her ribbons and got off on doing so, because he was just that bored with life before she turned up.