While canon!Rumple certainly had been character assassinated with OOC toxicity towards Belle in their relationship from S4-6A due to bad writing, it also was difficult for me to feel all that sympathetic for canon!Belle in their conflicts with how melodramatically toxic she had ALSO become to him in their relationship. The narrative FRAMED Rumple as the OOC cartoon villain for fucking up. I think it also would have helped me to feel more sorry for canon!Belle in their relationship issues if she hadn’t been introduced on the show as a “reward” or “punishment” for Rumple by using emotional blackmail to try to force him to be good (or to bend him to her will to do whatever she said). I’m not saying that Rumple is innocent, far from it, but because A&E and the writers were misogynists Belle’s entire narrative function in the plot was to set him up to fail her expectations of him by saying “Don’t do that, or we can’t be together,” getting fridged to give him man pain, and/or to pull him back from the darkness by saying “Don’t give up, Rumple” and “I’ll never stop fighting for him” to pull him back from the darkness. Aside from a few scenes and moments and episodes in the series, the writers wouldn’t organically allow Belle to be a realistically consistent, strongly rooted strong, flawed, understanding, visibly traumatized, or equal human character with human reactions or relationships with other characters. She was just a plot device to set Rumple up to fail her expectations or to pull him back from the darkness. It was an annoying problem with every good guy or villain creator pet on OUAT post S1, but particularly Belle because she was a morality pet. The entire basis of their relationship devolved so quickly into something wildly OOC, mutually toxic, hypocritical, one-sided, cartoonish, and inorganically black versus white, and with a character as morally gray and human as Rumple and OUAT!Belle were it was annoying how Belle kept getting boxed into this “incorruptibly pure cinnamon roll” morality pet category that she didn’t organically fit to either set Rumple to fall back to the dark side and/or to pull him back from it. That’s why “love redeems” romantic storylines on TV shows so often become cancerous to both characters in canon involved in them sooner or later, even though I’m such a sucker who falls for couples like Rumbelle and Phole every time. That’s why fantasy shows with morally gray redemptive villains and morally gray problematic “good guys” fall so far after they start introducing them for more than a season-and-a-half.

Writers of these shows are so driven by DRAMA that they don’t know what to do with their characters once they are redeemed, so they pull them back-and-forth with contrivances, and make the “good guys” blindly hypocritical, self-contradictory, self-righteous, toxic, unlikable, and annoying to try to counterbalance them with no self-awareness because they can’t organically commit to their decision to do that since then they wouldn’t be able to create easy and lazy conflict to drive the PLOT, even when it doesn’t make organic sense anymore when the “good guys” start getting away with the same shit they condemn in the “bad guys” whenever it is convenient for them.

TV show-runners and writers driven by fast paced Drama™️ plots don’t know how to create conflict without constantly placing their characters into “hero” or “villain” categories, even after they make them all start doing and/or saying blindly hypocritical, manipulative, and objectively fucked up things to each other, regardless of what “side” they are on. They want to be morally gray and realistic, but they also are too afraid to discard their “hero” and “villain” camps once they start trying to treat everyone as equals where no one is really a hero or a villain and make it so their characters have all done and/or said problematic fucked up shit to each by treating them as equally culpable human beings who are no better or worse than each other instead. That’s exactly why Charmed and OUAT devolved into moral wastelands of meaningless, cartoonish, shoehorned, and inorganic heroism and villainy of total wasted potential so quickly after the first two-and-a-half to four ish seasons, and that’s exactly why complex morally gray redemptive villains and morally gray problematic heroes end up becoming such caricatures of themselves after the first two to three ish seasons of these kinds of TV shows.