#t:bea

BEA: I’m about to get real soft so bear with me.

Forgiveness...can you imagine?

Dario: Hey- had a great date. Wanna go out again sometime soon?

Varian is doing a lot of really bad things and he should definitely be held accountable for them and face judgement/punishment. But even in real life, when children commit crimes, they aren’t tried as adults, and are held to a different standard than adults. It is because children are not fully developed and do not always have the most nuanced sense of morality or critical thinking skills.

And the real issue is that Varian is being held to a harsher standard of morals than his adult counterparts.

Varian is by no means innocent, but he is a victim. He has faced neglect and loss and betrayal and had to deal with that all on his own. Even an adult wouldn’t handel that well, but Varian is a child and children behave and see the world very, very differently than adults do, and so they cannot be judged by the same standards. Especially when they don’t have help to guide them down the right path.

Handling grief and trauma as an adult with support is hard, handling it alone as a child is so much harder. 

And even then, the King and Rapunzel are shown as being worthy of forgiveness when they make mistakes that hurt people, that was one of the main morals of the episode, and they are adults. They also faced little to no real punishment for their actions, so why should Varian, a child who has nothing, not be offered the same consideration?

So no, Varian being a child does not mean he should not be punished for what he did, he did BAD things and even children should be held accountable for their actions. But it seems unfair to judge him harshly when and the bottom of things he was a lost, desperate child who wasn’t thinking clearly, and when the two adults are being forgiven easily for doing bad things in their desperation. Varian deserves a second chance as much as the King did. Denying it to him is hypocritical at best and practically unforgivable at its worst.