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Rumbelle: Well, Rumple is a very difficult man to love and he’s like a drug addict and he’s addicted to power.
Insert Eddy Kitsis once again saying “We warned people back in Season 1 that Rumple is a difficult man to love, and then they get upset whenever we remind them.”
[adrotate group="5"]There’s normal and even high fantasy relationship drama. And then there’s Rumbelle.
lol. Somehow this is funny, in a kind of tragicomical way.
This is more abstract than simply speaking Rumbelle, but it strikes me that one of the problems is that the entire narrative armature of the show disallows for Rumbelle to have a successful end. It’s because, as far as OUAT is concerned, we’re in a sort of post-Cold-War era. Seasons 1-3 were largely about a kind of “Cold War” (that sometimes heated up) between the Emma/Snowing faction and allies, and the Regina/EQ + henchman/henchwoman/relative of the week faction. Rumple was, in that configuration, the powerful, but largely unaligned state that went back and forth, helped and hindered both, depending on what suited his needs, and pulled the strings behind the scenes. This was a perfect role for the character.
Once Regina started down the road to redemption, the balance of power that was compelling in the early seasons got completely lopsided. Because now you have Emma + Regina vs villain of the week, and villain of the week is never all that impressive by definition (because the stakes are honestly low, we know they’re leaving). So to raise the stakes of these episodic villains, they have to have Rumple automatically throw in with them to equal out the odds. Since Belle is an allied state (though most of the time she occupies the historical role of Poland, metaphorically speaking), she is always going to side with the good guys. So there you go, this relationship is structurally doomed.
The only way to solve it is to have Rumple throw in with the good guys, but we can’t have that, since there is no big enough threat to balance out the power players. Or to have Belle go shady.
Rumple’s purpose for 3 seasons was finding his son. The whole show was based on that purpose. Once done and gone, what’s his purpose? I’ve found Rumpel’s role has been diminished since season 3 ended. It’s almost as if they don’t know what to do with him and hence you get the never ending circle of love and hate between Belle and Rumple. It’s like… We need to use them … Oh, let’s them have an argument over good and evil.
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