Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-11058666-20141228031222/@comment-5106672-20151001171320

Well, we have three very distinct layers of interpretation between versions and neither applies to the next.

The original BatB is a cautionary tale about accepting in good will an arranged marriage which may boost a woman's social status or wealth. Even if he's ugly and older and you barely know him and you only had a pro forma say in the matter, you should try to make the best out of your situation and in time you might learn to love him.

Disney's BatB is a completely different take. It's not about how to change your abusive boyfriend with your love, but how learning to love might bring out the best in someone and make them lovable in return. The Stockholm syndrome thing is plain bullshit: first off, Belle falls in love with the Beast after he starts behaving as a decent person (until then she does not want to have anything to do with him, except saving him and tending to his wounds out of gratitude for having been saved herself); second, their goodbye after the ball sounds pretty definite and she wouldn't have probably gone back if it weren't for, you know, an angry mob and a murderous suitor. She calls him a “friend” (very affectively, indeed) when she shows him to the townsfolk and only explicitely states she loves him after he's almost dead. So the point is really, you might meet an unpleasent person, but you might actually find out they're different than they appear and then find something to love in them. Don't rush your judgement, but change opinion when you see actual evidence you were wrong.

Rumbelle pretty much follows suit from the Disney version, but not exactly and only in FTL: at first she's afraid and wants as little as possible to do with him. Then she tries to know him more because he's the only person she'll ever meet again. Only after she starts to see he's not the monster everyone makes him up to be, she starts to take a liking to him. And she's got a pretty solid ground to change her opinion: not the Robin incident, but the fact he shows himsef somewhat vulnerable in certain moments, or that she can actually stand up and outsass him without being turned into a snail and stepped on. Of course, not being killed is not something that would qualify someone as a potential partner in real life, but however disneyfied the show might be getting, the FTL society is on average a violent, murderous one with a very good vs evil-prone mindset: the most violent, murderous person in the world shows a kinder side, that sets him apart from most of the rest and shows he cannot be totally a villain. That's different from Disney, though, because she only sees a little potential for goodness in him and decides to work on that, falling into the "change the bad boy" loop.

Conversely, post-Curse Rumbelle falls into a manipulative, abusive relationship from the beginning. In FTL, Rumple is aware that he can't have both power and Belle, so he gives her up to keep his power. In Storybrooke, since the wishing well scene he tries to have both. That wasn't so evident in S2 and S3 because Belle was always either incapacitated, amnesiac, cursed, not there and then he was puppet-mastered by Zelena, but once there were no obstacles between them it escalated quickly throughout S4A. Rumple keeps making the same mistake as Skin-Deep over again, in choosing power over Belle, but while she is quite adamant in leaving him when his choice is most evident, for the most part she clings to her hope to redeem him through her love and he keeps doing things behind her back not to shatter the illusion and lose her. And he does so in absolute bad faith with no possible excuses, because the easiest way out of the danger of being controlled by someone evil after the Zelena ordeal would have been to let TLK do its work, get rid of the DO powers of his own will and live a normal, peaceful life with Belle without any magic. (Of course, as we learned the Darkness would have sent everything downhill anyway, possibly by being released by TLK, but that's beside the point).

To sum it up, in this case, the change does not start from him, as in Disney's BatB, but Belle is the one trying to make it happen. This is why, while Disney's BatB happy ending works and does not make Disney!Belle look like a weak, Stockholm syndrome-afflicted girl easy to manipulation, this can't apply to Rumbelle, in which the dynamics are far darker. Of course, Rumple has the rest of the show to prove himself worhy of Belle's love and redeem himself, but at present time that's just not feasible.