![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nym_wibblyI can see her trying a story-book approach to heroism if somebody needed saving. Belle’s deal in ABoT is that she expects life to go the way stories go, and she’s gradually learning from experience that this worldview is too narrow to work on the ground, and that other people don’t know their lines. To some extent I think that’s true for canon!Belle too, but she has much deeper issues about the Hero and self-sacrifice thing because of her mother (and, I suspect, for other reasons too). She polarises the world in her own mind, right vs wrong, while ABoT!Belle is still well aware that she’s in a learning phase of her life, and doesn’t believe she has the answers. Just a strong sense of right and wrong, and a willingness to confront the questions.
I’d find it pretty hard to divert the story from my own take on what it means to be a hero or a villain, which is that the labels are essentially meaningless, as are intentions; it’s what you actually do and how that actually affects other people that counts.
I’ve always tended to write my fanfic about the darker side of being a self-proclaimed Good Guy, the personal cost or the fallout on bystanders, and I’m doing it to some degree with Belle, even though in my story she isn’t using those labels. Rumple is doubtful about her handling of Odstone – every bit as much as she’s appalled by his handling of it. In this case, their intentions are both fairly decent, and both based on a reasonably sensible interpretation of their own life experiences. Rumple knows that, compared to most ordinary people, Odstone has it good. He’s right, they do. Belle, looking at the people as individuals rather than a group, sees that things could be better. She’s right; they could.
Belle’s not thinking of herself as a hero, or Rumple as a villain, but they are touching on the same conflict that’s come between them on the show. It’s not that one of them is good and one of them is evil; it’s that they each have a different idea of which ends justify the means, and when. That holds true for my story as well, but I’ve chosen a smaller scale stage for the ideas to work themselves out on.
I’d find it pretty hard to divert the story from my own take on what it means to be a hero or a villain, which is that the labels are essentially meaningless, as are intentions; it’s what you actually do and how that actually affects other people that counts.
I’ve always tended to write my fanfic about the darker side of being a self-proclaimed Good Guy, the personal cost or the fallout on bystanders, and I’m doing it to some degree with Belle, even though in my story she isn’t using those labels. Rumple is doubtful about her handling of Odstone – every bit as much as she’s appalled by his handling of it. In this case, their intentions are both fairly decent, and both based on a reasonably sensible interpretation of their own life experiences. Rumple knows that, compared to most ordinary people, Odstone has it good. He’s right, they do. Belle, looking at the people as individuals rather than a group, sees that things could be better. She’s right; they could.
Belle’s not thinking of herself as a hero, or Rumple as a villain, but they are touching on the same conflict that’s come between them on the show. It’s not that one of them is good and one of them is evil; it’s that they each have a different idea of which ends justify the means, and when. That holds true for my story as well, but I’ve chosen a smaller scale stage for the ideas to work themselves out on.