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Baelfire and Once Upon A Time Fic
May. 30th, 2012 09:34 amI have just discovered that there is lots of OUAT fic at AO3. Yay! Even better, lots of it is in the 15k+ word count range. And there is a lot of Belle/Rumplestiltskin, which is a very fascinating pairing.
But, alas, there are two problems with most of this fic.
First, most of what makes the pairing great is the ambiguity. Rumple may be a woobie (though most of his troubles are his own fault), but he is also a thoroughly nasty man. He may not be cruel to Belle, but he is to everyone else. And Belle is a strong, principled woman. That is a large part of why she goes with him in the first place! Unless you are going to have her locked up in his castle the whole time, with no contact with the outside world (or with any of the work he does inside his castle besides spinning straw into gold), you are going to have to deal with Rumple's actions sometime. The fact that he really has done evil things. Things that hurt people, or killed them. If you are not going to deal with that, well, I don't get what draws you to the pairing.
Second is a problem that mostly comes up in fics set in Storybrooke. They forget about Bae entirely! Here is the basic plot: Gold finds Belle, rescues her, the curse is broken, they live happy ever after. But what about Bae, the reason Rumplestiltskin created the curse in the first place? I mean, the whole reason to go to a world with no magic is the possibility that he will find Bae. Breaking the curse and getting Belle back is not going to change that, because if it did, he would have kissed Belle and broken the curse on him when she first offered. At first I thought this was mostly in fics that were written before we learned that Bae went to the world without magic, but several were written after, because apparently Twu Wuv is more important than your children and longstanding obsessions. Gah.
(Also, where is all the Bae-alone-in-the-real-world fic? I have only found one!)
(The other major pairing is Emma/Regina, which, well, I love the two characters interacting together but I just can't see them as lovers even just hooking up with hate!sex. OTOH, if you love femmeslash, this is definitely the fandom for you--lots and lots and lots of it! And very little m/m slash. It is a refreshing change.)
But, alas, there are two problems with most of this fic.
First, most of what makes the pairing great is the ambiguity. Rumple may be a woobie (though most of his troubles are his own fault), but he is also a thoroughly nasty man. He may not be cruel to Belle, but he is to everyone else. And Belle is a strong, principled woman. That is a large part of why she goes with him in the first place! Unless you are going to have her locked up in his castle the whole time, with no contact with the outside world (or with any of the work he does inside his castle besides spinning straw into gold), you are going to have to deal with Rumple's actions sometime. The fact that he really has done evil things. Things that hurt people, or killed them. If you are not going to deal with that, well, I don't get what draws you to the pairing.
Second is a problem that mostly comes up in fics set in Storybrooke. They forget about Bae entirely! Here is the basic plot: Gold finds Belle, rescues her, the curse is broken, they live happy ever after. But what about Bae, the reason Rumplestiltskin created the curse in the first place? I mean, the whole reason to go to a world with no magic is the possibility that he will find Bae. Breaking the curse and getting Belle back is not going to change that, because if it did, he would have kissed Belle and broken the curse on him when she first offered. At first I thought this was mostly in fics that were written before we learned that Bae went to the world without magic, but several were written after, because apparently Twu Wuv is more important than your children and longstanding obsessions. Gah.
(Also, where is all the Bae-alone-in-the-real-world fic? I have only found one!)
(The other major pairing is Emma/Regina, which, well, I love the two characters interacting together but I just can't see them as lovers even just hooking up with hate!sex. OTOH, if you love femmeslash, this is definitely the fandom for you--lots and lots and lots of it! And very little m/m slash. It is a refreshing change.)
