If you choose to read the last panel as an endorsement of Gaston, I think you’re missing some key words!
ALSO ALSO I’ll be at Emerald City Comicon this weekend in Seattle! Booth #1008!
Shortpacked! by David Willis
Toys are serious business.
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BotCon San Diego, CA: June 28-30
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SPX Bethesda, MD: September 14-15
Phoenix Comicon Phoenix, AZ: May 23-26, 2013
BotCon San Diego, CA: June 28-30
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80 page GIANT
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Not Invented Here
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nobodie’s as confused as Gaston…
And every last inch of him is covered in puzzlement.
There’s an ointment for that.
And an APP. Probably.
yes, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK3x2DOoJIc came to mind when i saw his picture
Meanwhile, Intensive Gaston Unit is what came to my mind
i only specified b/c the amount of time it took for me to post my comment on http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/residentassistant/ read all of this, and find the video for the song, write this comment, and post it took me 4 minutes. i’m amazed both for that and that it took almost 10 minutes from this being posted to then for comments to be put on this page, simply b/c of how popular Willis’ comics are, and that i was still the first. if your Gaston Unit comment wasnt for that reason then i apologize for the unnecessary & long-winded written reply
Relax, I just wanted an excuse to link to Intensive Gaston Unit.
And nobody takes the blame like Gaston.
Gaston is the villain for the same reason Animated Sentinel Prime is a villain: Because of his chin.
But that doesn’t explain The Tick’s heroism!
Beat me to it by 4 minutes. Well played, Trixter.
You tell him, Thorace-bog! Er, I mean, Whatchamazog? Thorax-and-a-bog? Four-yacks-and-a-dog? Laxative-log? Sapsucker-frog?
. . . Susan?
Now you’re doing it on purpose!
Don’t forget about the Crimson Chin!
Jay Leno is definitely a villain.
Brian Mulroney had a pretty evil chin there himself, and… yeah.
Oh, look; so do I. XD
Because the Tick’s Chin is even LARGER. Just like the Crimson Chin.
You see there’s the “Evil Chin,” and then there’s critical Chin mass which leads to “Heroic Chin.”
For example, Ash from Evil Dead… Wait does the heroic chin mean you’re also a lovable screw up?
Obviously. What would a good hero be without some lovable character flaw?
I can thank my dad’s side for the big chin, and my mom’s side for the dimple. And now I know why I’m a lovable screw-up.
He’s got a superhero suit with an almost full-face mask. That makes all the difference. Same as the difference between Kick-Ass and Red Mist; the latter just has an eyemask.
(and now I’m hoping you don’t ask about (DC) Robin, Zorro, Lone Ranger… OK, I guess the theory needs some work)
The Tick isn’t a hero. He’s just an escaped mental patient in a onesie.
If that’s the case, The Tick should’ve been a villain as well.
ah, but the problem is angle: The heroic chin juts forwards proudly, whilst this evil, menacing pdeudo-heroic chin has the same shape, but juts downwards to try and decieve
This is also the reason why the Internet generally took Conan O’Brien’s side back in 2010.
Nobody can make sense of things like Gaston.
And let’s not even get into the fact that love and Stockholm Syndrome are apparently the same thing.
Well, He fell in love with her too, and that’s what was important.
She was the first girl he’d seen in a decade that wasn’t a teapot or feather duster. Last time he saw a chick he hadn’t even entered puberty yet.
That don’t mean nuthin’. They spent enough time together that they like each other.
Eh, the spell says “Learn to love another, and earn their love in return.” Belle returning the love is crucial to the spell, otherwise it would’ve been broken after he let her go near the end.
The definitions of love used by the spell were set by the crazy witch-lady who caused the whole mess in the first place.
Captor sympathies with captive and sets them free. That’s Lima syndrome, NOT Stockholm.
I think he’s refering to Belle.
ah, but the relationship between belle and the beast is a bit of column A, a bit of column B – since the captor fell for the captive and the captive for the captor
A: Belle only started falling for him once he started changing and STOPPED being a jerk.
B: He let her go at the end, and she only returned of her own free will because he was in danger.
C: Part of that change in him was emotionally maturing beyond being a spoiled eleven-year-old with anger issues. He honestly doesn’t seem to realize what he was doing was unacceptable until Belle runs away, and after that he changes for the rest of the movie.
D: Not quite related, but the stage musical gives him an entire song when she leaves where he’s basically realized how badly he’s fucked up. He thinks he’s totally unloveable and incapable of being loved, so he literally says that if he can’t learn to love her and vise versa, there is no point in living anymore. Dude’s got issues, is what I’m getting at.
It’s at least partially a failure of the Disney movie vs the original story, and unfortunately one that’s persisted in retellings that came after the movie.
In the original story, the beast is very gentle for as long as the Beauty knows him; even his initial interaction with her father is to extend his hospitality to him in the middle of a snowstorm. There are still some questionable things about the beast’s behavior – that he gets so angry with the father as to demand one of his daughters, to be kept safely at the castle, in exchange for a rose that the father took without permission. That he asks Beauty to marry him every day that she is in his castle (though she refuses every time). But, I still like this version better; it carries with it a lesson for the Beast, that a single day of kindness or remorse is not enough to atone for a lifetime of being a beast, but, nonetheless, with dedication and perseverence, one may still atone.
There are still things I don’t quite like about the story, but I feel as though the original has a moral for the Beast that could, at the very least, be adapted to something more palatable than what Disney managed.
Excuse me? Belle broke into the house of a royal to jailbreak someone else who broke into the house of royal. She offered to take his place, paying for his crime and hers. She was rightfully imprisoned by someone who had the authority to do so. She, the lawfully imprisoned captive, was then pardon’d by the royal and LEFT. She didn’t put up with his shit, he started acting kind, opening up to her, they fell for each other. If you mention the part where the beast nearly hurt her, may I remind you that she nearly broke his last chance at regaining his humanity after disobeying the one thing he told her she couldn’t do.
That’s another weird thing…dude’s a prince, right? But he certainly never informed Belle of that fact. How was she supposed to know that his word was law? As far as she was concerned, he was just some monster who owned a castle and a lot of chatty crockery.
Which raises a few more questions. He’s a prince. Who was turned into a monster 10 years ago. And lives within walking distance of the local village. Yet nobody in that village seems aware that there is missing royalty. They seem honestly surprised to find out there is a castle nearby.
Did the spell somehow wipe everyone’s memory of ever having a local royal? How else could they not have noticed that not only their lord and master, but his entire staff vanished overnight. Hell, if Belle’s town is the closest village, the prince probably got much of his servants from there. Did nobody go looking when they all disappeared? Did they not notice that their government was gone and no one was collecting taxes?
Oh, wait, this is France, right? Do we know the exact year? Maybe the French Revolution occurred shortly after the curse, and everyone just assumes the prince was executed at some point. Explaining that to him would make an interesting scene.
Well, let’s not forget it’s pretty well established the average villager has an IQ of 50 in that town. They’re probably surprised every time they see the fountain in town square, too.
key words: “owned a castle”.
http://adamsforthought.tumblr.com/post/23850101855/beauty-and-the-beast-defense-1-the-stockholm-syndrome
…Because he locked up an old man who was just begging for someone to rescue his daughter?
I haven’t seen the movie in a while.
Oh, no. That was the PRETENSE for locking him up. He wanted to do it so that Belle would come and save him, which Gaston would only allow if she agreed to marry him.
…I thought he was talking about Beast, lol.
Yeah, Maurice only started begging for his daughter’s rescue after she was actually imprisoned, so it can’t be Beast.
What is it with Belle’s love life and guys locking up her father? Maybe next time I’ve got a crush I should kidnap their father…
The argument here is not that Gaston isn’t an asshole, but that Gaston is the second-biggest asshole in the story, not the first as you’re meant to think.
Pretty much this. Gaston is still a terrible person in like a million ways, but the fact that the fairy gets presented as a good guy is pretty messed up.
Noone knows how to point out the unfair circumstances brought upon by magical fairies like Gaston.
Just stick that Gaston panel at the end of every Disney movie.
Yeah; I kinda had this thought a few years back once I pieced the age information together. You have to piece it together, but once you do god that witch is really being unreasonable.
Agreed.
In Cinderella, her fairy godmother shows up disguised as a poor old woman, coming round to beg a scrap of bread. Cinders invites her in and gives her tea and BAM! Here’s your ticket to royalty.
Would be something if they were the same character, eh? Heh heh heh…
–Something that always confused me, though: Why the hell was a prince answering his own doors? Shouldn’t he have doormen and stuff for that?
This has actually come up multiple times in the Cracked workshop. Technically, the film says that the rose will bloom until his 21st birthday, and then the petals will take some undetermined period of time to fall. So by movie rules, he could be any age between 11 and 20.
The musicals they play at Disney parks, however, apparently say that he was indeed 21 at the time, so yea, that’s fucked up. But taking the movie by itself, the argument is not quite as sound.
Except in “Be Our Guest” they say that they’ve been furniture for 10 years.
21-10 = 11.
My bad, I meant he could have been any age between 11 and 20 at the time of the curse. Unless they specifically say he’s 21, the prologue to the film actually doesn’t mandate that he be 21 when the last petal falls. It blooms until his 21st birthday, then petals take however long to fall off.
Of course, there may be some line in the film that explicitly says he’s 21, as well. I haven’t seen it in a while. But I can’t remember there being one.
Well, the raid on the castle I assume is the night of the Beast’s 21st birthday, since the rose has nearly wilted and loses its last petal as Belle is confessing her love for the Beast. Taking the curse at it’s most literal, that puts the scene right at midnight. Either that, or his birthday just ended, but either way the movie does establish that the deadline is almost up.
Oh, it gets worse. Apparently the sequel, set around Christmas, shows that as a young kid Beast (or whatever his real name was) was rude and spoiled, and had turned away the woman on CHRISTMAS.
That’s like setting up Batman’s backstory so that punk rock was what killed Bruce Wayne’s parents for the sake of a one-shot comic book.
Punk Rock killing off Batman’s parents? HA! That’s about as likely as Spider-Man selling off his marriage to save his aunt who’d probably die in a year or two anyways!
Hey, wait a minute…
Punk is nothing but death and crime and the rage of the beast.
For some reason, I always thought Batman would like Jazz….
Well, there is a comic called Batman:Jazz.
What? That’s crazy! Next you’ll be telling me there’s a guy with a hat who reviews comic books and hangs out with a bunch of other guys who look just like him.
Well……
Batman does not like jazz because Batman doesn’t *like* things. Except justice.
Batman likes bats.
He tolerates them, but only because they’re friggin awesome, you know, from an objective viewpoint.
Except when they squeak endlessly while you’re deep in a cave trying to find diamonds, flying around being annoying pests instead of being cute and adorable, driving you to the point where you smash them into particle effects with the nearest battleaxe on hand just to end ‘dem squeaks’.
Plus you do NOT want to know the effect they have on the Bat-puter’s keyboard.
the way batman likes bats is illegal in tasmania
true; in Tasmania it is illegal to like animals in a non-sexual way.
How do you think thylacines died out?
Batman doesn’t like bats. Batman’s first and greatest fear was bats.
Maybe he learned to like them, but I tend to believe that he’s intentionally set up his whole life to be as miserable as possible.
I’m pretty sure that was only in the Nolan!movies. Originally, it was just
“I need a symbol.”
*Bat!Smash*
“That’s it! I shall become a bat!”
This could also explain Batman’s proclivity for smashing through glass openings.
Batman likes nothing.
Batman liked his parents, but now they’re dead.
The moral of this is: anything Batman likes dies.
Batman loved disco.
That was a disney midquel inconsistent with the previous film, its characterizations, and inconsistent within itself. It was made by Disney Toon studios, not Disney’s film animation studio, so we’re better off not counting it.
But in ignoring anything that comes from the Toon studio, aren’t we excluding some good stuff they did as well, like expanding the Aladdin franchise, or Lion King 2? (I’d count Lion King 1 1/2, it was good, but I get it was done for cheesy good fun and question it’s existence in canon).
I think the biggest hole in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is the Beast’s name. Even at the end when he’s human Belle does not recognize him and all he says is, “It’s me” not even sounding like he did in his beastly form. So all that time, at least six months, maybe a whole year she just called him “Beast”?
I remember listening to the creator commentary about this when the B&tB special edition came out a few years back. The director or whoever was like, “We just couldn’t put a name there without it sounding out of place. (pause while watching Belle reach out a hand to pull Beast from the ledge) Tyrone?”
I shall love him and hug him and call him George.
Well, none of the servants use his name. They all call him “the Prince” or “Master”. Maybe he’s ashamed of his real name seeing as he considers himself a horrifying monster?
That is almost word-for-word what I yelled to my friends after the first time I saw the movie. I was sitting in the theater watching that intro thinking, “What in the fucking fuck is this shit? Who wrote this?”
That’s my reaction to End of Evangelion or was it any David Lynch movie for that matter.
What are you talking about? Which parts evoked your ire?
BatB was one of the more… impressive… Disney films when it came to logic.
Also, having seen the Beast episode of Once Upon A Time, this becomes 100x funnier.
I originally read that BatB as “Brave and the Bold” and suddenly I’m imaging Batman beating up the Beast now, while Aquaman yells “Outrageous!” at the top of his lungs.
This needs to happen sometime.
The great owl!
Nah it should be Batman and Beast working together to beat up CyberGaston! Gaston’s brain transplated into a mechanical body after his dramatic fall into the ravine!
I can’t help but read that narration in Robert Carlyle’s “Rumple” voice now. Thanks for that.
Why is Gaston the main villian, deary?
Great, now I’m going to permanently associate Rumplestiltskin with Skeletor.
Because you’re still a murderous, sexually harassing psychopath. Asshole.
Plz read the accompanying post note, and also the definite article in Gaston’s speech bubble: not why am I *a* villain, why am I *the* villain. As in the major one, the worst one, or the only one.
While the Enchantress was a more cruel person Gaston was labled villian as he actually lost, Enchantress got away forever in the end.
After all the Beast was a angry little kid, but that doesn’t actually count as villainy it counts as angry kid.
Also, he was actually in the movie. Which I really think is the key point. The Enchantress isn’t really a character so much as Deus ex Machina with a nice dress.
Yeah, kind of hard to have an absent villain.
The part where he threatened to have her father imprisoned if she didn’t sleep with him, among the constant sexual harassment? I mean sure the Beast was also terrible, but that by no stretch of the imagination makes Gaston a ‘good guy’.
Nobody SAID he was a good guy, only the second biggest asshole in the movie, the witch is number one
Because Gaston, you are a chauvinistic asshat who thinks you’re God’s gift to women and can’t take a fucking hint when a female decides she’s not interested in you.
Beast is just a temperamental and slightly unreasonable jerk. Also, he’s never tried to murder anyone out of insane jealousy. That you have no right to. Because again, she’s not into you. *nods sagely*
Um… I think Gaston is implying that the witch, not beast, is the true villain of the story. After all she just kind of toyed with the lives of a bunch of innocent people, almost got them killed and got off scott free. Witches be crazy
In the stage show it’s even WORSE, because it has them all slowly turning into whatever they got transformed into. As in, inanimate objects. So yeah, she gave a little boy a fuckton of issues, AND she condemned all the servants to what basically amounts to a slow death. Also one of them got turned into a brick wall.
Yeah. I don’t know how that works, either, but it happened. Poor dude.
I think it also mentions an actual footman in that scene, though I could be misremembering. If so, I think he’s the one who ends up transforming into a doormat.
That’s because witches are evil. And a good source of firewood. But mostly the evil thing.
@Mr V:
Oh… well, okay then, that’s completely different.
This reminds me of the running gag about how Glenda that Good Witch from the Wizard of Oz is actually a horrible, manipulative bitch.
Still… I think it changes the whole tone if you consider the Beast was only 11 years old. Somehow I thought he was like… in his teens or some shit. And then it seemed relatively fine because Beast was nearly a grown ass man and she’d been watching him all this time being cruel and shit. So she tests him and he fails and there you go.
In the movie he is older than eleven.
And Glinda comes across as manipulative because they merged two different characters into one for the film version, the faries at the begining and end were supposed to eb different people.
At least three, really. Apparently, movie Glinda was watching them the whole time and saved them from the poppies. In the book, the Mouse Queen helped with that one.
Sure, Beast fails the test. That’s fine, smite his princely butt with fur. But including the household staff marks the old woman as one of the cruelest villains in the Disney stables, and the only one to walk away scot-free, with no consequences to her, whatsoever.
Cruelest? She punished them unfairly, granted, but they all picked up exactly where they left off when they changed back, and if she was truely cruel then she wouldn’t have left them a way out. They were inconvenienced for a decade or two, the horror. The Enchantress holds nothing on any of the actual villains you, you know, murder and enslave people for fun and power instread of dealing out life lessons.
Life Lessons for a preteen by enchanting a whole household of innocents for some laughs? Oh such a sweet thoughtful person for leaving them a way out that was darn near impossible but still give that faint glimmer of near impossible hope to be normal and alive once again, all while the world passed buy and forgot all about them.
If the boy was a prince then how come nobody of nobility knew or cared what happened to him? At the very least a greedy relative would have wanted his crown / position as prince at some point.
Every single item in that castle apparently was a transformed servant, from the teacups to the napkins to the ottoman. Did the man just not own anything before the curse?
I’m thinking that each servant replaced a mundane item already in the house, or was merged with it, but that may not jive with what happened on-screen in the de-transformation sequence.
Or, the witch proceeded to loot the joint after she cast her spell.
The Beast trashed the furnature during rages over being transformed. The servants were spared this wrath so they appear to be all that’s left after all these years.
Nobody is a moral relativist like Gaston.
*win*
It always bugged me that the enchantress or whatever never made an actual appearance in the film. I can buy fairies and whatnot in a Disney flick, but here we have the driving force of the whole plot, the source of the supernatural elements in a story that otherwise features none, and we’re just sort of told it happened.
It would be like if Cinderella just showed up at the ball and said “A fairy godmother did this offscreen”, or the Queen in Snow White just arrived on scene as the crone and informed us that she was the same character who used some magic to change.
Sleeping Beauty did it right. You see the good fairies giving their supernatural gifts to the princess, Maleficent appears and spells out the rules of the curse, and then when all that stuff comes into play later on it works.
Imagine if the whole prologue of the story was just explained in narration, and we open on Aurora living as “Briar Rose” with her human aunties, and nothing magical happens onscreen until they fail at making a cake and dress and grab wands instead. Would have wrecked the tone of the whole story.
The fairy who cursed him has more of a role in the original fairytale. It doesn’t make it any less random, since it comes with all kinds of weird shit and “oh, by the way, Beauty was secretly lost fairy royalty this whole time, and no, we’re not going to explain how that works out with her human family!”
You’ve never heard of changelings?
As You Like It actually does that perfectly.
Ganymede/Rosaline tells a false story of a mystic man in the woods that cured her of her lovesick nature. It’s a driving force in the plot. But this man is never seen.
And then at the end, the bad guy is transformed into a good guy because he tells us that he MET A MYSTIC MAN IN THE WOODS THAT CURED HIM OF HIS ANGER.
Not only did Shakespeare perfectly make some offscreen exposition work, but he did it in a way that fit the story.
My running theory has always been that the Enchantress is the Bookseller.
Think of it this way: there’s a young prince, rumor is, he’s a douchebag. Go to check it out, and yup, he’s a douchebag alright (by the criteria of turning away a scary stranger and all), so it’s curse time! But the intention is still that he’ll actually learn a lesson and break the curse, not just that there’ll be a Beast-haunted castle right next to a lot of provincial little villages for the next ever.
So, the Fairy sets up camp as a Bookseller, with the intention of finding some girl with “that certain something” and grooming her, through careful application of appropriate stories, to save the day (sort of like a more disturbing version of Fire and Hemlock).
Because seriously, we’re talking 1700′s, printed books are a crazy luxury for rich people. You don’t just set up shop in a crappy village in the boonies where the majority of the townsfolk take a rather dim view toward intellectual curiosity, and if you do, and against all odds, one single person in the whole town comes into your store, you sell her books, you don’t lend them, and you certainly don’t just give them books for free.
But if he was just the Fairy in disguise, well, that explains how he didn’t starve/freeze to death every winter.
Wow. Okay, that’s my new head canon too.
… I like this theory. I like it a lot.
Wasn’t it snowy out when the Enchantress came by? As in, cold? As in, if she’d actually been the poor little old crone she appeared to be, she probably would have frozen to death because he turned her away? I really don’t feel terribly sorry for the Beast-to-be in this. Now, the servants, they absolutely got screwed over, but that’s the Fair Folk for you.
Servents aren’t REAL people. They’re totally disposable, aparently!
I don’t care how dire the circumstances are, you don’t let random folks into your home, especially if you’re a small child and your folks aren’t around. It’s just asking for all sorts of trouble.
Actually, in this time period, refusing Hospitality was considered pretty much something only total jerks did.
Also, if safety is really your concern with a random old woman in the middle of winter, then a house full of guards and servitors should be a pretty good security blanket.
If you’re an enchantress, you can probably keep yourself plenty warm with a spell or something. But ten to one, she drained her power on the curse, and froze to death outside 30 minutes later. Or at least that’s how I picture it. It’d explain why she was never seen in the movie.
The point wasn’t that she could keep herself war. The Prince didn’t know that, he refused a helpless old woman shelter in the middle of the winter in harsh weather. He basically said ‘Fuck you, go and die.’ So she punished him (a punsishment that also nailed his servents, unfortunately, but also left a chance for redemption if he learned to stop being an asshole) and left.
That’s what they get for letting the prince answer the door instead of doing their damned jobs and answering the door themselves.
Seriously, why is the prince answering the door himself??
I’ve always felt that Gaston was kind of rapey for a Disney villain.
Yeah, he’s pretty disgusting. He and Frollo are probably Disney’s creepiest villains for this reason.
Damn straight. His pushing a chair out of the way to corner Belle gives me the creeps every time. I get that people are fans of Gaston in the sense that he has the best musical numbers and is fun to watch, but I can’t with the people who don’t get why Belle turned him down.
But then again I’ve actually met dudes like Gaston in real life.
There are people who don’t get why Esmeralda turned Frollo down. Hell, there are people who find Frollo- Movieverse, completely rapetastic, racist Frollo- attractive.
Don’t ask me how. Don’t ask me why. I do not know. Tony Jay’s awesome singing voice only goes so far.
Sometimes I hate fandom.
But I do love your avatar! I’ve been trying to beat Rekka no Ken all week, but Eliwood and Hector are insufficiently leveled up.
Thanks! Lyn is awesome.
He is, and that’s kind of the point. He’s a big fat “THIS SORT OF BEHAVIOR IS NOT OKAY” sign. Of course, Draco In Leather Pants being what it is, it didn’t work for everybody.
So an eleven year old boy does not let a stranger into his home and was cursed… Forget who’s the villain, I am concern about how this pretty much goes against what parents have been telling there kids about answering the door and letting strangers in. For that matter, if the kid had parent or servants, why didn’t they answer the door?
The parents seem to be missing in the whole equation (which is odd, seeing as he’s the PRINCE). As for the servants, I guess it’s because it’s ultimately his say whether or not she be allowed to stay and not freeze to death? When they let Maurice in later, he gets the poor guy thrown into the dungeon even though he’s freezing and possibly ill.
That is a good point about someone else answering the door and the kid having final say. He could be by the entrance too at the time. Though the absence of parents still very concerning… maybe something happened to them recently which made the beast into the little brat he was.
Turns out he’s not actually a prince. He was just some kid left on the front step of a fully-staffed, but somehow empty castle as a baby, wrapped in some really nice cloth or something. Everyone just made assumptions from there.
He isn’t necessarily a royal son-of-a-king prince. Like the modern Princess of Monaco, Princes can be rulers themselves. Assuming his parents were dead, perhaps the enchantress foresaw the power going to his head and cursed him to ensure he became a good ruler.
The question then is where the regent is.
If he was 11, odds are he’d have a regent.
Unless…. you know, nobody actually notices that the prince is missing. Which is awfully suspicious. You don’t suppose the Lord Regent conspired with the Enchantress to transmute the prince so he couldn’t assume his royal duties?
I like where this is going, it makes sense. I think Beasts kingdom was a kingdom in decline, thats why the villagers didnt miss a whole castle worth of people going away. The servants were incompetent or involved in their own concerns (so you dont feel as sorry for them), the parents were possibly assassinated in a convenient “accident” and boy was next to go but the whole enchantress thing was just the straw that broke the camels back for the whole thing. The Regent and the Enchantress probably laughed on their merry way to some other kingdom to ruin.
I’ve made this same point many time. Among with others relating to this movie.
The prince was telling an old woman asking from refuge from the cold (and snow) outside to fuck off… Fairies tend to be very disproportional on their punishments and rewards, and beast and the fairy shittiness doesn’t make Gaston assholines, posesiveness and mysoginy automatically disapear.
Your take on the Beauty and the beast style is awesome by the way.
Oh and by the way, hospitality laws were serious shit at that time, the prince is lucky he was only turned into a beast XD
Oof, yeah, that’s a big one. Old World takes that Hospitality very seriously.
Hey, for fun, go hang out in the Scottish Highlands and try to check into small bed-and-breakfasts with the last name of Campbell.
I know a guy with the surname Campbell-Macdonald. One of our teachers was a Scotsman and asked him if he beats himself up each night.
For a moment, this made me wonder why the Enchantress never bothered me, since I tended to be pretty detail-obessessed as a kid. Then I remembered I’d been super into classic fairy tales at the time the movie came out. The [Color] Fairy Books, Grimm’s Tales, the whole shebang. There were a surprising amount of stories where something supernatural would show up and be a dick for little to no reason. So, uh, I guess there’s that.
That’s kinda how mystic things rolled, they were chaotic and you just had to live with whatever they felt like doing to you. Even when they were nice it often screwed the normal people over.
Oh yeah. About half of the stories were kicked off by supernatural things being dicks and the other half were kicked off by parents who abruptly stopped loving their children. It’s just amusing to me because I had a debate earlier this week with someone who was lamented that Disney had “wussified” fairy tales instead of making them true to the classic versions. Me, I think Disney-fying fairy tales was for the best. I can’t think of anyone who wants to watch an hour and a half of a girl talking to a mounted horse head and bleeding on handkerchiefs.
Because the witch/fairy/whatever wasn’t stupid enough to hang around? And because you’re an asshole?
WTF was an 11 year old doing living essentially by himself in the first place?? Where were HIS parents? Did they become furniture too??
Could have been dead or ruling elsewhwre. He had a castle full of servents to take care of him.
They live in another castle. Responsibility.
I’m sorry, but your king and queen are in another castle.
Kids were more independent back then. You kind of half suspected they’d die on you no matter what you did, so parents must’ve figured, “Ah, what the hell?”.
Clearly Beast and Belle are Bruce Wayne’s ancestors.
I think the REAL question here is why in the name of Walt Disney’s frozen corpse was a 18th Century Prince answering the front door of his own friggin’ castle.
Doesn’t he have like… footmen to do that?
They’re on strike?
And now they are duvets. That’s what you get for unionizing, Renaissance-era footmen!
Let’s see… Cogsworth’s the majordomo, Lumiere’s the… *Looks it up* Maitre’d, Mrs. Potts is the head of the kitchen, Chip is… no clue, just her son (presumably his age was just frozen all that time? Possibly the others could be too, but otherwise WHEN WAS THE KID BORN?!), Babette the Featherduster’s a maid, the Wardrobe was the opera singer (this castle had an opera singer?!), the stove was his chef, the footrest was a dog…
Apparently not. Even if we accept the crappy midquels as canon, they only mention things like the castle’s composer and writer and decorator. No footmen are ever explicitly named.
There are kajillions of mute coat racks, spoons, napkins, pots and pans, chairs that skitter around on their own, etc. He had a fully staffed castle, couldn’t one of the coat racks answer it?
Young Prince Beast was passing through the main hall on his way to dinner when a knock is heard at the door. The footman goes to answer it, and Young Prince Beast asks “Who is that, nameless coatrack?”. Nameless coatrack says “A hideous old woman with a fucking rose, milord.”
“Ah, I see. Bring her in, so that I might kick her repeatedly in the face,” Young Prince Beast says.
“At once, milord.” the coatrack replies.
Kicking ensues.
Yeah, you’ve gotta assume there was one if this castle had an OPERA SINGER of all things on staff.
Maybe it was just a time share thing? Like there weren’t enough opera singers to go around, so all the French castles, I dunno rented him out?
and now he’s a closet.
She, but yeah. And I think she may be literally stuck in that bedroom because she can’t fit through the door, too.
Some of the furniture assignments really SUCK.
She leaves the room to join the battle at the end, doesn’t she?
Yeah, hence why I’m not sure. Guess there she makes it by going through the door on her side and hopping for dear life?
Stuck? Naah. She got out in time for the big epic battle, remember? Forces a guy to dress in drag?
Ragnal, when I was a kid I used to think that was the coolest thing. XD Enforced makeover! As a weapon.
You also have to wonder why in the world the enchantress decided to go all the way to this castle in the middle of nowhere apparently inhabited by the only 11 year old prince with no King, Queen, or subjects of any kind around, who answers the front door himself despite all the servants, just to test him on whether or not he’ll let her in. I mean really, why? I swear the movie makes absolutely no sense.
I guess maybe he was one of those extra princes who wasn’t in line for the throne unless his five older brothers all died or something, so they sent him away because he was kind of a brat and everyone just assumed the entire castle died?
I like the way you think.
It makes more sense than the movie!
The only other explanation I can think of is if the castle grounds were in some weird magical pocket dimension so time passed differently for them, but that still doesn’t explain the lack of parents.
It could also explain why the kid was practically raised by the servants, he just didn’t had any chance at being a power player.
Poor Gaston. A pompous ass but he didn’t deserve to die.
He murdered the Beast! Like, stabbed him. To death.
With a knife.
Over and over.
To be fair, if I saw something that looked like the Beast, I would probably attempt to kill it with guns and fire and pointy things.
Probably because I completely missed the point of “Beauty and the Beast”
But after it talked to you?
To be fair, that’s just more terrifying. Before it was just some kind of weird, horrifying animal God created just to see how far He could push us before we dropped the whole “omnibenevolence” idea. Now it’s some kind of intelligent creature, which still clearly wants to kill me because freakin’ look at it! Everything about it screams that it was designed by evolution to eat me.
Yeah, but he also very clearly showed Gaston mercy right before the backstabbing. Literally, he’s about to kill Gaston, Gaston’s going all “Please don’t kill me!” Belle shows up and goes “No, don’t kill him!”, the Beast lets Gaston go, and then cue the backstab.
Plus, again. Implications Gaston realizes Belle and the Beast have feelings for each other and that’s the real reason.
Right! That did happen, didn’t it? Never mind then! Gaston’s just a jerk.
Pretty much yeah. *Nodnod* Wow, being in a production of the stage show’s really paying off today. Whooo, getting scenes etched into my memory that were minimally changed!
Still better to be safe than sorry. Werewolf movies have taught me that people like The Beast can lose control at any moment; it’s better to preemptively kill them when they have their guard down than wait for them to actually go into a murderous rage.
Apparently the same applies to you…
So it’s better to kill people before they theoretically do something to deserve it than to wait for them to actually do something to deserve it? Well, let’s just kill everyone then since we’re all theoretically capable of it.
Obviously a demon at that point. Kill it to save your soul!
Given the circumstances I would too. A castle full of malicious attacking furniture and a monster that’s holding a pretty girl hostage. What type of nightmare have I walked into!? Plus I have a huge man boner for Gaston. I would’ve at least liked to see him at the end of the movie being a sore loser nursing some wounds with a huge cast covering his leg up to his thigh with his sniveling friend trying to cheer him up.
I love how your icon seems to endorse that.
Except for the whole trying to lock up an innocent, slightly odd but otherwise sane man for the sole purpose of getting his daughter to marry him even though she wanted nothing to do with him thing. Sexual extortion is not good. It’s also at least implied that the reason he wants to kill the Beast is because Belle has feelings for him, not because he’s genuinely afraid like the rest of the townspeople are. During the mob scene he’s got this huge grin on his face. Though that could just be the fact that he likes killing stuff.
He wants that pelt for his interior decorating.
No one can be a villain like Gaston!
It’s so true, that fairy was a total bitch.
Sorry, I mistook this place for the YouTube comments section. Won’t happen again!
The thing about the real, original tale is it’s a French story told to 19th century girls getting paired with old men in arranged marriages. It’s not about who’s the real villain. It’s whether they suck it up and deal in hopes the codger turns out to be a nice guy and they survive to inherit his fortune. This is why the enchantment makes no sense. And it made worse sense in Disney’s hands because they wanted the hero to be close in age to the heroine and made up that ridiculous back story.
Oh, yeah, and no Gaston, either. Nobody knows how long the Beast has been enchanted but he did something very stupid in his past. Daddy does something stupid with the Beast’s property, the Beauty switches places with him, and the Stockholm/Lima syndrome two-fer goes on from there. No deadline to meet, either. He’s just cursed until true love’s kiss yadda.
In some versions, hasn’t he been cursed for hundreds of years already?
In the actual original original there is no backstory at all for why Beast is Beast. That was added, 16 years later, in the retelling that popularised the fairtale.
Oh whoa doh I meant that the other way around. The shorter popular version is the one that leaves out the extended backstory for both Beast and Belle.
There’s a minor typo in panel 4. You say “his his twenty-first…”
Beauty and the Beast 2: The Hunt for the Enchantress
It’d probably be a better hardcore adaptation than “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” or “Jack the Giant Killer.”
(Seriously, what’s with all the “hardcore” Grimm fairy tale movies lately? I didn’t even mention the various Twilight style knock-offs either.)
There kinda already is a Beauty and the Beast 2. It’s set during the first movie and reveals that the Beast (Adam I think is what Disney claim’s his real name is) left the Enchantress out at christmas while he was being a spoiled brat about presents.
I think to work as a saving throw now that I really think about it.
Christmas midquel? What Christmas midquel? Clearly you’re talking about that lousy fan animation that someone released a while ago. There is no official sequel.
That’s an insult to decent fan animations. Let’s go with saying it was an animated snark of a badfic.
There is no way I can start watching Beauty and the Beast now due to all the logic that has being brought up about it.
because you hung around to get your ass kicked, whilst she moved on straight away.
and you where still a dick – not as much of a dick mind – but still a dick nonetheless.
Chip is like, five or six, right? They’ve been cursed for ten years, right? So either Chip has been frozen with the emotional and mental development of a six year old boy for TEN YEARS (aaugh!) …Or he was born a teacup. BORN A TEACUP. Either was he has literally been a ceramic object longer than he’s been a human, that cannot possibly be good for your brain.
Mrs. Potts had a lot of tea cup kids. It’s kinda disconcerting if you think of it that way
Were they all born after the curse? Did she just get bored during the years of the curse and have as many kids as she could to fill out their tea set?
But GODS, who was the father? WHO WAS THE FATHER. Also the candlestick has been messin’ around with the feather dusters and…well I just hope he has kept his magical fire in check. I bet there’s at least one pile of ashes hidden somewhere.
Quagmire: Clackity clackity clackity clank!
Willis, wtf dude? I… I just said this EXACT thing to someone only yesterday! (yes, I know you do these things in advance. JSYK, that just makes it more freaky to me.)
But I love it!
There can be more than one villain in a story, and they don’ need to be working together either.
But yeah, I have made myself the same reflection, this is definitely an evil which who didn’t know better what to do on Sunday. Let’s say it was Malificient, who had decided to get a hair color change that day, and we never heard of her again because she was killed by Prince Phillipe in the meanwhile.
Yet the fairy godmother in Cinderella does the EXACT SAME THING, only Cinders invites her in for tea and stuff.
I think in my personal head-canon now, they’re the same person.
Well, that’s odd. My brother just played Gaston in a modernized version of The Beauty and the Beast yesterday, and it was pretty clear that Gaston is the person that the Beast used to be. But while the Beast is changed by the curse and learns how to be a better person, Gaston just gets worse and worse, to the point of attempted murder. So it could be argued that Gaston and the cursed prince are actually just two versions of the same character – and that the Beast has to defeat his former self in order to lift the curse completely.
Yeah…that’s not the point. Of course Gaston is a villain. What this comic is saying is that the Witch is the bigger villain.
You’re not really expected to wonder why fairies are such assholes. They’re fairies, inflicting disproportionate punishments on mortals is like, all they do. It’s like getting mugged – there’s no point bitching about how you didn’t “deserve” it, it’s just bad luck.
BECAUSE:
No one plots like Gaston!
Takes cheap shots like Gaston!
Plans to persecute harmless crackpots like Gaston!
So his marriage we soon’ll be celebrating,
My what a guy!
Gastoooon!
Yes he’s endlessly, wildly resourceful,
As down to the depths he’ll descend!
He won’t even be mildly remorseful,
Just as long as he gets what he wants in the end-
Who has brains like Gaston?
Entertains like Gaston?
WHO CAN MAKE UP THESE ENDLESS REFRAINS LIKE GASTON?
So his marriage we soon will be celebrating,
My what a guy!
GASTOOOON!
… I was in that scene in the stage musical. The lyrics stick in your head.
This is from the stage musical? Oh geez, here I thought you came up with it yourself. I was about to applaud you your awesomeness!
The first post was in the movie, they expanded it on Broadway so Gaston got to sing more of his own villain song. So no, all awesomeness applause goes to Tim Rice.
Yes, that includes the glory that is “Who can make up these endless refrains like Gaston?”, which may well be my favorite lyric ever.
Oh, I know the first post was.
But whatevs, it’s still awesome. I’ma still applaud you for sharing it.
This entire summary sounds to me like Robin’s reading it.
And now the most adorable thing I can think of is Robin reading bedtime stories to Donna.
“…so the princess kissed the frog, and they lived happily ever after doing, like, SUPER-crazy amphibian bestiality porno.” (Well, maybe not that adorable. And at first I thought ‘prank’d’ read ‘punk’d’. All supernatural beings are Ashton Kutcher.)
Yeah, Gaston get’s to be the bad guy by being a dick.
Moral?
Don’t be a dick.
All debates on the enchantress’s morality aside (though yeah, I think “she was seeking shelter from a winter storm” is kind of important when considering the prince’s actions), I’m not quite sure I get the point of this. Gaston, you’re the villain because you are the guy doing villain-things in the main part of the story. Whether somebody else did worse stuff in the story’s prologue is beside the point. It’s like the Riddler demanding to know why he’s the villain of a particular Batman story when there’s some guy out there who shot a kid’s parents to death in an alley.
She was able to turn kids into beasts with magical roses and talking teapots and crap. Is magicing up a house such a big deal for her? She was just “Testing” the Prince.
Of course she could have, but the prince doesn’t know that. Which is why I said it’s relevant in considering his actions.
Uhh…because you’re a narcissistic macho prick who thinks of women as trophies?
It’s funny I just happened to watch this the other day and the time frame thing bugged me too. Especially as the torn up portrait sort of looks like an adult.
Now that the servants all turned back, they’re going to have to replace all the furnishings, utensils, and accessories.
Time to go to Ikea
Nobody questions designated villainy like GASTON!!
I don’t think that’s really what he’s questioning…
…That is literally exactly what he’s questioning.
No, that would be if he were claiming not to be a villain. He’s only claiming not to be the villain.
…no, he’s questioning why he is designated a villain and she is not. In what way is this not questioning designated villainy?
Because he’s not claiming to not be A villain, just question why he was THE villain of the movie when the Enchantress is responsable for everything that happened. Why focus on an asshole when there’s a sorceress running around whop ruined dozens or hundreds of lives o0ver the prince being a dick?
What I never got, was the entire town has no idea what’s been going on in the castle that’s just up the road. It’s been 10 years, did no one ever say “Hey, what ever happened to that little prick prince who lives in the castle. I haven’t seen any of his staff come into town for a while. Maybe the mayor should send someone up there to check on them?”
I was just thinking this, and just reached the conclusion that his regent probably conspired with the Enchantress to set up the whole thing so that he could rule.
That, or the Beast was basically Joffrey from Game of Thrones pre-transformation, so nobody minded when he went silent.
That’s a very good theory. I feel like there’s a lot of extra material to explore around the story but to do so would detract from the fairy-tale essence. Maybe Disney could do a line of young-adult novels based on their classic stories that go a bit deeper into the politics and characterizations for kids to graduate to after they’ve grown up with the films.
My other theory is that if he really was such a little pompous ass, his parents sent him to live in the country at their summer-castle; taking him away from the royal court to humble him. They and the townspeople probably figured the castle fell to the wolves or disease, so no-one ever went up there for fear of the same fate.
See the show “Once Upon a time”. While its not completely adult or political, it hugely fleshs out the backstorys, giving much better motivation to the “villains” and presents things in far less black and white terms.
So how many have parents that teach them that they SHOULD let an absolute stranger into the house without their parents’ permission?
Ha! Yeah my wife and I had this exact conversation when she showed me this movie originally. He’s spent a good portion of his formative years as a beast, so yeah…real helpful magical lady. You teach that little kid a lesson! And his servants. ‘Cause I dunno…maybe the kid would be more likely to change if the rest of the class is irritated at him?
And GEEZE – all those years! Not a single one of those servants have seen thier families. I imagine they have got to be REAL sick of each other.
The servants probably all lived at the castle beforehand. That said, they’re probably pretty fucking sick of the kid who’s been 6 for 10 YEARS…
He’s the villain because he’s a misogynistic dickhole that thinks Belle is just something to win as opposed to a genuine human being with dreams and aspirations of her own.
Also he thinks books are for weirdos, which is terrible.
If you actually watch the behind the scenes stuff, you find out that the “ten years we’ve been rusting” line is left over from a different prologue they ended up not using. After all, the prince in the prologue that ended up in the film certainly looks older than 11, not to mention that Belle finds a torn up portrait of Beast as a human when she goes to the west wing. He’s definitely older than 11 in that portrait, more like 18.
H so that is why he looks like an adult in the slashed portrait when the left over line makes it sound like he was 10/11 at the time.
Thank you for clearing that up.
I think I remember hearing that the castle grounds are in an alternate dimension during the movie, too, and so the time flows differently (and also none of the transformed age during that time). I can’t remember if it was a deleted scene or just an attempt to make sense of the fact that it seems like more time’s passed in “Something There”, and yet Maurice was apparently wandering in the snow the whole time.
Willis! I hate to ask this, but is this in response to rumors that ‘Black’ in RWBY is modeled after ‘The Beast’? Because as awesome as the first two trailers are, I didn’t think you’d be making a webcomic about it…
Or that you even heard about it.
I’m gonna go out on limb here and say Willis probably doesn’t follow Rooster Teeth production. Also there’s a second trailer for RWBY?
Yup, Red is the first White is the second.
How is it that these comments never devolve into off topic nonsense? On topic nonsense yes, but not off topic. Also, since Gaston fights the Beast and what not, he is guilty of animal cruelty. That makes him the villain… Right?
Because unlike a thread in a forum, where threads stick around on a page that is visible to everyone for a while, all of the threads basically move off the page everytime there is a comic update. It usually takes time and multiple pages of responses for forum threads to derail. The threads on here are essentially short lived and one page’d. It’s like the hand of the forum god is coming down and killing all of the threads several times a week while simultaneously providing new and interesting conversation topics.
Also it’s really hard to tell who is responding to who when a thread gets long. Hard to make them completely derail and follow everything that’s going on. Thing needs lines!
@ Willis, how come Ken isn’t in th banner picture but the new girl hired to replace Amber is?
Because save for Ethan (Who was the main character for so long) and Galasso (Who runs the store and everyone loves his antics), they’re all female. Putting Ken on there would make it dangerously close to be equal gender in the header.
Or Ken isn’t considered as main of a character. Either or.
P.S. The first part of this is entirely a joke.
Because nobody cares about Blanka.
You clearly have never seen a bastard kid ruin people’s lives:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUS2LSJR22k
Seriously tho this comic is pretty great
Damn it Willis I never thought about any of this stuff before. Donald Duck was right in Kingdom Hearts II they should have been focusing on getting the Enchantress not screwing around with Orginization XIII mind controling Beast.
I thought that Gaston and the Beast were competing Byronic love interests rather than villains.
Gaston is not a love interest, Belle pretty much hates him. He’s stalking her.
But the Beast forces her to stay in his castle as a hostage and he gets to be a love interest.
She chooses to allow him to be one. She doesn’t hate the Beast and he doesn’t force himself on her. Also, she offered to stay in exchange for her father, it’s not like he kidnapped her.
Also, if you don’t want to get locked up, don’t break and enter.
YES And also I’ve always wondered what happened to all the furniture too? Like He had a dresser before he was cursed right? So then what happened to that dresser? Did he just burn all the furniture because hey why have a dresser when you can keep all your clothes in the footman’s chest cavity? And why don’t they sleep in their rooms anymore? Somewhere there are a bunch of rooms in the servants quarters that no one sleeps in because suddenly it’s ok to keep children in cupboards?
He trashed his furnature during his temper tantrums during his time as the Beast.
I always wondered that too. I was like “wait, was the castle just unfurnished or did the servants somehow merge with the existing household stuff?”
To be fair, a ton of people thought the Beast was an asshole anyway before realizing that part about him. Oh man, the property part made me smile, haha
WoW.
This comic is gorgeous. Dang.
How long did it take to make this thing?
I now want to see the Beast waiting by the bus stop with Aslan
So apparently there’s 2 midquels??? I’ve only seen the Christmas one. The other one reveals the castle had a writer living there named Webster who punningly is transformed into a Dictionary. Also talking papers named Crane?? Really?? TALKING PAPER… WTF Disney!
There are two shitty sequels. Not one deals with them hunting down and slaughtering the Enchantress with anti-Faerie weaponry. Dammnit, Disney.
Plot holes, yes, but also a whole heap of Values Dissonance:
As someone noted above, the obligation of Hospitality was a Big Freakin’ Deal (all sorts of myths about bad things happening to people who turn away or are bad hosts to gods, angels, etc etc); and yes, servants were pretty much considered property, for a very long time.
They couldn’t have aged 10 years, because Chip, the teacup, was only a toddler after the curse was lifted. Either it wasn’t more than like a year since the curse, or more likely, none of them aged while cursed.
Either way, the prince would have been an adult, not 11.
Prince was an organic beast, so he aged. Chip was a cup, so he didn’t.
Perhaps Chip was born as a teacup.
…
And there’s the moment where you picture kitchenware sex.
And the magical blonde lady scores herself a Karma-Houdini.
So you got a 11 year old prince answering his own door in the middle of the night. Where’s the servants? He didnt let in the old woman which was a no no at that time of sharing beds. He gets turned into a beast, and everyone wonders why the kid has anger issues? So what does the old woman prove, she’s magic, she don’t need a bed anyway. And then you got the old boy who locked up a teenage girl because she didnt want to marry him. And then you got Gaston, the backstabber. So yeah, Disney sticks in some dancing teapots and a bunch of songs and its all sunshine and lollypops. Yeah, right.
BTW, did you draw that last panel or is it a screen shot?
That is most assuredly drawn.
I’m a little curious Willis, have you ever thought of making the Walkyverse as an animated series, like Shortpacked? How I sometimes dream of hearing Mike with Nolan North’s voice telling your mom jokes!
Wait, Shortpacked is animated somewhere? What?
It’s was just a question for Willis dude, there isn’t any.
It read like you were saying there was a Shortpacked animated series.
“…And Snow White said ‘No! I will not open the door, and I will not eat your apple, frighting old woman, because I’ve been warned that the Queen’s assassins are after me and the dwarves told me not to open the door to anyone until they come back!’. And the old woman said ‘PSYCHE! Actually a young powerful sorceress! For not eating my apple, I curse you to be as though dead until a necrophiliac shows up and violates you!’ And that is what actually happened…”
The thing is that the original story really didn’t have a villian. It was the situation that was meant to be overcome, not any character. Gaston was added for the purpose of having a villian. The only other character who could be thought of that way is the crone/fairy/enchantress who turns the prince into a beast. The thing is that such characters in European folk and fairy tales aren’t really characters as much as forces of nature (some would say “plot devices”). Their purpose is to set up the situation or in some cases to give a little bit of help to hero or heroine (another good example: the guy who sold the beans to Jack in “Jack and the Beanstalk”).
I never thought about that. Why the hell would a guy who had a path to a giant who had a magic harp and a goose that laid golden eggs trade all that for a cow? (Then again, the magic harp and golden eggs thing may only be there in the pantomime version.)
The version I know best has a harp and a hen (not a goose), but they are in every version I know of. Well, not the Appalachian version, but that one is highly localized. It’s not the only example, though. The woman who punishes and rewards girls in turn from “Diamonds and Toads” comes to mind. Also, the crone who gives the soldier the invisibility cloak in “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”. Heck, some characters who are now considered villians once fit this role. The fairy who curses the princess in “Little Briar Rose” (German version) or “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” (French version) disappears for the rest of the story in those versions. Disney turned her into the villianess Maleficent.
I should probably mention now that folk and fairy tales are kind of my thing. Like Transformers and Batman are Willis’s. I’ve read a million of them and even do some oral storytelling (that’s telling a story from memory, sans book).
What always disquieted me about the Disney adaption of this story was the way Ms. Potts doted on Chip, while locking the rest of her children in a closet. This is NOT healthy parenting.
Don’t forget, he threw Belle’s book in the mud. This is the part that girls who loved Belle ’cause they were bookworms deem villainous, because it’s something they can relate with — you probably won’t actually meet someone who’d turn an entire castle full of people into inanimate objects, but there’s a good chance of meeting some jerk who’d toss your book into the mud.
Disney’s version of Beauty and the Beast changes a shed load of stuff compared to the traditional version.
Um… are we all forgetting that this was supposedly set in the Middle Ages? You know… when the age of accountability was /seven/? We have longer childhoods now than back then. That eleven year old would have been the maturity equivalent of about an 18 to 20 year old now. Still think he’s so innocent?
Of course, I don’t think the fairy is super innocent either. But then again, supernatural creatures usually aren’t in mythology. No matter what Disney says in other areas.
Actually, I doubt it was the Middle Ages. Gaston and his big muzzle-loader rifle seem to suggest a later date. I’m thinking some time in the 1700s. It’s a funny thing, we tend to “medievalize” fairy tales but most of them were first written down in the 18th and 19th centuries and had been passed around by peasant folk for all that time. I think we link them to medeival times in our minds because that’s a time that was being romanticized around the same time as the tales were being rediscovered. Really, the only benchmark we have is the technology used which suggests any time pre-Industrial. Basically up to the mid-19th century maybe. In other words, these tales can conceivably happen in any time before it would become common to hear a child say “Spinning wheel? What’s a spinning wheel?”
Middle Ages is also a handy term to refer to pre-Industrial near history. I’d personally guess given the technology demonstrated that it’s an idealized version of mid-1700s. Which would be appropriate, considering the story was first published around the 1740s or so afaik.
However, you still have to admit that the maturity levels of a modern teen/pre-teen is significantly different than a teen/pre-teen of the 17th to 18th centuries. The age of responsibility being seven lasted into the 19th century and not living much past 35 was still very prevalent into the Industrial Revolution.
I’m so glad you put this one on tumblr, a bunch of my friends liked it and reblogged it ^_^