I just can’t trust in our Beauty and the Beast ending anymore. Gone are the days of, “Oh, they’re Beauty and the Beast. Disney won’t let them break them up.” I just don’t trust the writers to do justice to it. “Skin Deep” was essentially a masterpiece. The reality is that after that episode Rumbelle characterization has been subpar in comparison. We get scraps and breadcrumbs. They tease and bait fans to keep them interested. But it’s at the point that Fanon is so much better at it than the show will give us.
I agree. I think A&E didn’t quite know what to do with Rumbelle (Skin Deep worked almost too well, and I suspect the show writers didn’t expect its success), and so kept shelving it or giving it perfunctory dialogue and screen time, perhaps with the thought “we’ll get back to it.” In the end, I think the show “aged” at a different pace than the ship did, and so by now A&E are long since disinvested from this particular pairing, and so are awkwardly axing it, sort of as an afterthought.
Then, of course, there’s the problem of methodical character assassination, but I won’t get into that here…