From Tumblr: Ask - How do I reconcile ABoT!Belle's sense of duty with her choosing her own fate?

[nym_wibbly]

How do you reconcile Belle's canon line "No one decides my fate but me" with the overwhelming sense of duty that's in her character? She HAS to save her people, she doesn't give herself a choice about that. True, none of the men she's talking to can decide what she does, but wasn't her fate sealed as soon as the ogres started attacking?
~ Tumblr user kelyon

Having previously resigned herself to marry Gaston, stay at home, and not have the adventures she craves, Belle obviously doesn’t apply that fierce sense of independence to every decision in her life. I saw that line as burning her bridges with her old life - it’s almost hurling an accusation towards them, and it’s definitely a rejection of the role they want and expect her to fill in life. Later in the ep [Skin Deep], she speaks of self-sacrifice, of the hopes she’s given up to keep her bargain with Rumple, but without any bitterness. She’s content because it was her own choice. From that, I concluded that, whatever the bargain Rumple offered her, she’d do her honest best to fulfill her new role. She happens to think of that as a duty, but that’s more a case of her groping for a frame of reference than anything else. I plopped her into a society that’s much more overtly patriarchal than the one that emerged over the run of the show, and made assumptions about her behaviour and upbringing based on that broad outline for the society that raised her. ABoT!Belle has her sense of place as a woman muddled with a much stronger sense of the obligations of the ruling class towards the ruled, the strong towards the weak, the haves towards the have-nots.

Which doesn’t mean that she’s bought into the misogyny on a personal level - just that she lacks experience of living (and mentally describing) the alternative. She doesn’t share the same sense of her place in the world as the listeners (her dad, Gaston, and also, and I think importantly to Belle, Rumple) when she says that line. They’re trying to define for her what constitutes an unacceptable level of personal sacrifice for a woman, with the undertone that going with Rumple is worse than death because Belle’s virtue is at stake (a theme picked up by Regina at the end of the ep when she lies to Rumple about Belle’s fate). For Belle, marrying Gaston was already a personal sacrifice likely to involve sleeping with a man she doesn’t love, so she doesn’t share the mens’ moral outrage at the idea of her going off with a male “beast”. At her choosing that for herself. I didn’t read her choice as entirely selfless - I felt she was glad to get away, grabbing the first opportunity for adventure, for a different sort of life, that ever came her way. Having gone with Rumple, in Skin Deep, Belle cheerfully got on with being his put-upon housemaid to the best of her ability - that was her duty now, because she’d made a solemn bargain and isn’t the sort of person to break one.

We didn’t get any nuances to the situation until subsequent episodes - the weeping and her resentment of the way Rumple treats her in Lacey, her defiance of her father in Family Business and Her Handsome Hero, or Gideon’s later assertion that Belle was terrified the entire time she was at the Dark Castle [The Savior]. I’m still not sure what to do with the latter - it would mean that Belle had to put on almost as much of a mask as Rumple does, the whole time, which I can’t retcon into Skin Deep, in my own mind. She seemed very frank and hopeful, to me. She went willingly and wanted the adventure for herself - but motivated by a sense of duty towards others, a need to prove herself (if only to herself), and the honest intention to do her new job to the best of her ability. I changed the “job” on offer rather than changing my interpretation of her motives for going with Rumple, but the show’s eventual explanation of those motives turned out to be much more simplistic (along with most of the emotional reasoning behind the characters’ decisions). I’d do it differently if I started the same story today; I’d give her the mental vocabulary of independence and a wide-ranging education alongside the profound influence of her mother’s sacrifice, and incorporate the simplistic, show-definition of “heroism” into her thinking, and treat her decision to go with Rumple as typical of her reckless streak.

Belle does a lot of mental gymnastics, in ABoT, to reconcile herself with her decision, and to argue down her fears of the unknown. Holding down a maid job is less fraught with uncertainty and unfamiliarity than being a stranger’s spouse, when said stranger offers no clues. She was prepared for just about anything except Rumple’s vague, “do whatever you feel like, it’s nothing to do with me”. She finds herself in a situation where nobody has expectations of her, and where she has considerable power over others - and she struggles with that because it’s new. She has guilt about the people she left behind, even though her “sacrifice” has saved them - she still feels a sense of duty and obligation towards her father and her people, which she projects way too hard onto Odstone, in ABoT.

What she tells the reader isn’t always the objective truth, not least because she lacks a frame of reference much different to the one suited to a noblewoman marrying a nobleman and making his heirs in a castle somewhere, subordinate to the men around her. Her upbringing assumed that was all she’d need. She’s doing the best she can with the words and concepts in her possession. Her actions in ABoT belie her words, though. I don’t think for one moment that she’d have taken it passively if Rumple had been an unreasonable husband, or that she’d worry about learning how to be a housewife if she wasn’t so desperate to keep herself busy.