Disney Beauty and the Beast: Alternate Ending Options

 

(In preparation for the release of my Beauty and the Beast retelling, To Be Loved, I will be re-sharing old Beauty and the Beast posts. So if this post seems familiar to you, you've probably read it before.)

Okay, I'm still on a Beauty and the Beast kick. Still on Disney's Beauty and the Beast, even.

So it's very common, in enchanted bridegrooms stories, for the Beast to release the Beauty to return to her family. This is a very important step in the story; the Beauty ceases to be a hostage, allowing for the development of a relationship that isn't, you know, deeply unhealthy.

Typically, the deal between Beauty and Beast is that she'll go home and visit her family for a set amount of time, then return to him. It could be argued that this isn't really a setting-free, since she's supposed to return, and presumably he could force the issue. But it doesn't seem the Beauty has any fear that he'll do so; she generally stays over the agreed-upon time, ultimately returning because she feels bad, not because she's afraid of repercussions.

The original text of Beauty and the Beast differs from most enchanted bridegroom stories in that the Beast tells Beauty if she doesn't come back, he's gonna die. Which, on the one hand, is one heck of a guilt trip. On the other, she knows he's not going to come collect her if she decides to just stay home. Of course, she does go back, though she's almost too late.

The Disney version differs in that Belle doesn't go home for a temporary visit because she's homesick; he releases her permanently because her father is physically sick.

Which, you know, good job, Beast! Full hostage release is a great move, as far as being a decent person goes. But I feel like, in this particular situation, we could have avoided separating Belle and the Beast at all, if we didn't have to stick to The Plot, established by hundreds of previous enchanted bridegroom stories.

Last time Belle went out into the woods alone, she almost got eaten by wolves. Is it really a good idea to send her out alone on a winter night, again?

Granted, it may also not be a good idea for a monster who recently kidnapped him to participate in the rescue of a sickly old man lost in the woods, but, like, is the Beast really going to think about that? When presented with Situation: My Girlfriend's Dad is Lost in the Woods, will he think "I should stay here, because my presence will be inherently traumatic?" Or will he think "What a great opportunity to help my girlfriend!"?

So. I propose 3 alternate scenarios:

1. We learn Maurice is lost in the woods. Belle needs to go rescue him. Beast accompanies her, for reasons of Safety from Wolves. Obviously the Beast can't go into town, so we bring Maurice back to the palace, where Belle expresses her love. Or maybe she expresses it when they find Maurice, possibly after the Beast fights off some more wolves.

2. Belle goes out alone to find Maurice. Since they're friends now, she's closer to the palace than the village when she finds him, and the palace has all this cool stuff that will probably result in better medical care, she takes Maurice back to the Beast for recuperation. The Beast, emboldened by her willingness to trust him with her father, confesses his love, and she reciprocates.

3. Look, obviously they were in love before she left and came back, they just didn't say it. As soon as he set her free, I'm pretty sure all her doubts about the relationship evaporated. So how about a confession on the way out? Like, "Bye, love you, see you when Dad's better."

Option 3 leaves us with three follow-up options:

1. Beast transforms immediately. This is unexpected, but it's a problem for later. Maurice needs us!

2. She says she loves him, then immediately books it out of there to find her dad. Misses the transformation sequence. Heads back to the palace—maybe an hour later with a sick Maurice, maybe a week later after he's recuperated—to find a completely different palace in its place. Where is her boyfriend? Where are her friends? Where is the building? What has happened? She seemed to find the whole thing a little difficult to believe when she watched the transformation happen; how much harder is it going to be if it all went down off screen?

3. She immediately books it, brings Maurice home, and has the confrontation with Gaston like in the movie. She attempts to show him the Beast. Mirror shows some random dude instead. This is probably going to result in Belle and Maurice both being institutionalized. Everyone at the palace is worried sick—she loves the Beast, she broke the spell, so why hasn't she come back? A few days, sure. She's got a sick dad to take care of. But it's been a couple weeks. The Beast doesn't have the mirror anymore; he can't check on her. What if she never found her dad? What if she never made it out of the woods? What if the wolves got her? What if she's dead? They're going to have to go into town, find out about the asylum, and launch a rescue mission.

And what about Gaston, and the rest of the people in town? Sure, Belle and Maurice were wrong about the Beast, but Belle did still have a magic mirror. And the magic mirror did show a hot guy that Belle seems into, even if she thinks he's a hideous monster for some reason. Is Gaston going to go confront this guy who stole his crush, and clearly took advantage of her shaky sanity? Is everyone going to head out to the palace just to learn more about the magic mirror? Is this whole thing going to end with an attempt to institutionalize the entire palace? Is everyone going to realize Belle was telling the truth, and some magic went down? Are all the other girls going to lose interest in Gaston, now that there's a second hot guy around? One that's actually nice, and also magical, and also not eating way more than his fair share of the town's eggs? Like, sure, the Beast is taken, but he's still proof there are better options than Gaston.

Was there any point at all to this thousand word post? No. But I had fun speculating.

 

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Why Disney's Beast Should Have Been Cursed As A Child

 

(In preparation for the release of my Beauty and the Beast retelling, To Be Loved, I will be re-sharing old Beauty and the Beast posts. So if this post seems familiar to you, you've probably read it before.)

So I saw a live performance of Disney's Beauty and the Beast the other day. I'm going to assume you've all noticed by now that I love Beauty and the Beast, in pretty much all its forms. This was the third time I'd seen it live, and the following night I watched the animated movie.

So everyone has talked about the math. About how the Beast got cursed when he was a child, how it doesn't make sense because he's an adult in the portrait, etc. One change this play made to the original was to take out all the numbers—the Beast wasn't cursed ten years ago, just a long time ago. The rose won't wilt when he turns 21, it'll just wilt when time has passed.

And the play was good! But it got me thinking. And I think this particular version of the story works better if the Beast was cursed as an 11 year old boy, even if that wasn't initially deliberate.

The important thing to understand about the history of Beauty and the Beast is that originally, his shape was meant to be scary and off-putting, but nothing else about him. He wasn't cursed for being a jerk, he was never reported to be a jerk, and curse-related behavioral changes didn't include anything that would make someone feel unsafe.

Disney's Beast is rude, angry, and prone to tantrums. His table manners are atrocious. He can't read, which I maintain is stupid, was rightfully cut out of the original movie, and should never have been added back in, but it was included in this play, so. We're working with what we've got, stupid or not.

The Beast displays behaviors that feel alarming and dangerous coming from a large monster, and would likely also feel that way coming from an adult human in a position of power. He also displays behaviors that would be fairly normal and expected from a spoiled, poorly socialized child.

He was turned into a monster when he was eleven. He was abandoned by his parents at some point, possibly well before the curse, since they certainly weren't in the palace at the time. The only people he's interacted with since he was eleven are servants, who occasionally scold him for losing his temper, toward the end, when their humanity is dependent on him behaving himself, but generally it seems like he's the ultimate authority in the palace, and they take orders from him, regardless of age. There doesn't seem to be anyone else in the palace anywhere near his age range. We've got a lot of people who were adults when cursed, and one child, Chip, who either hasn't aged while the curse has been in place, or was a baby when it first went into effect.

He's had no discipline, no education, no social life, since he was eleven. He has absolutely no emotional maturity, because he hasn't really had the opportunity to gain any. He's throwing the same kinds of tantrums he did before the curse, because he hasn't had any reason to grow out of it. It was naughty ten years ago, it's terrifying now, and he probably doesn't realize how big a difference it is.

Almost as soon as he has someone else in his life who treats him like an equal rather than a boss, and models good, adult behavior, he improves dramatically. He starts making an effort to control his temper, and to be as polite and dignified as possible for a Beast. And he remains sort of awkward in a way that seems consistent with someone experiencing a social life and friendship for the first time—an awkwardness that doesn't make as much sense for someone who was an established adult before his life imploded.

If the Beast was an adult, especially an adult with significant power and authority like a prince, his early Beast behavior is kind of a red flag, and his later Beast behavior is a rapid and confusing shift. If he was a lonely kid, it's all a lot more understandable. Disney's version of the Beast needs to start as a child; it makes his character development and relationship with Belle much more believable.

 

 

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The Disney-fication of Folklore

 There's this new thing now where people aren't just retelling stories, they're retelling the Disney version of stories. I mean, okay, it's been going on for several years, but a new thing within, like, the last generation or so, which is pretty new considering the very long history of fairy tales. There are at least two separate Disney-authorized book series like that. And some of them are decent, and some of them are terrible, but all of them are just—just—

Those aren't fairy tale retellings. Those are Disney fanfiction. And we've talked, before, about the relationship between fanfic and folklore, but this is different. When the bookstore is full of retellings of Disney's Cinderella, instead of just Cinderella, we're losing important pieces of our history, our culture.

The way we tell folktales changes with time and region; that's normal and expected. But the way it's changed over the last 90 years or so, specifically—people tend to think that there is one correct version of the story, and the version they think is correct  belongs to someone, and we need his permission to retell it. That's not a normal relationship to folklore. That's not a healthy relationship to folklore.

We’ve got Disney’s Twisted Tales Series. We’ve got Disney’s Villains Series. We’ve got Disney’s Descendants, which is allegedly about the children of specifically the Disney versions of characters, even when it doesn’t always make sense. We’ve got Once Upon a Time, which started out as a show based on fairy tales in general, with some familiar references because it was still being produced by a Disney-owned company, which over the course of a few seasons transitioned to be more and more Disney-centric. We’ve got Disney’s live action fairy tale movies, which had a promising start with things like Cinderella, which was just its own Cinderella movie, before they started copying their own previous movies line for line.

And it’s just so frustrating because Disney’s versions of these stories are a drop in the bucket of a several hundred year history, and somehow we’ve gotten to the point where so many people don’t seem to be aware of anything else, and the market is being flooded with more and more Disney-centric fairy tales.

I love many of Disney’s animated fairy tale movies, very much. But there’s so much more out there. I’m so sick of trying to look up a three hundred year old story, and having to put fifteen qualifiers on my search in an attempt to avoid Disney, and then somehow still having to sort through six pages of Disney-related results before I can get to anything useful.

I don’t have, like, a point or anything. I’m just frustrated.                       

There are so many good stories that have nothing to do with Disney. So many good stories that Disney has done stuff with, but you should still read the non-Disney versions—some of them are better, and some of them are worse, but all of them are different, and worth your time.

 

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Beauty and the Beast Reviews: Liz Braswell's As Old As Time

I reread Liz Braswell’s As Old As Time on Wednesday, and it’s not a great work of literature or anything, but it sure is fun! This is a little different; it’s published by Disney, and is a retelling of Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast, not of the original fairy tale.

The premise, as advertised on the cover, is that the Enchantress who cursed the Beast is Belle’s mom. A good chunk of the story is comprised of flashbacks to when Maurice and the Enchantress (her name is Rosalind) were young, before Belle was born and when she was a baby. We have two big things happening in this back story: there’s a plague, and anyone remotely magical is being persecuted. The king and queen aren’t doing anything about either issue. So when they both die of the plague, Rosalind goes to test their son, to see if he’ll be a better ruler than his parents.

He fails. It’s possible she overreacts.

This is where a lot of the things I really love about the story come in. It addresses all the questions and concerns I had about the movie. The Beast is a 10 or 11 year old child when the curse is placed. The story and all the characters in it acknowledge that the curse was absolutely not an appropriate way to handle the situation, and was deeply unfair to both a child and a house full of servants who had nothing to do with anything. Which I really, really appreciate. The picture in the West Wing of an adult Prince is explained, too; it’s some really mean-spirited Dorian Grey crap, enchanted to show him what he would look like if he hadn’t been cursed.

Also, the Beast can read. We see him reading. I always hated the way the musical version made him illiterate; at 11 you should have learned to read. Especially as a prince. The only acceptable exception is The Whipping Boy.

So. Back to the story. Rosalind never returns home after placing the curse. She’s grabbed by the story’s Big Bad, who’s been kidnapping anyone with magic. We’ll come back to that subplot later. Her last act as she’s taken away is to set a spell that makes all normal people—including Belle and Maurice—forget about the existence of magic, to protect any of her people who are still free. Unfortunately, the Big Bad also has magic, so he remembers.

And I think that’s enough on the back story. Belle gets to the castle like usual. The change comes in the West Wing, when she manages to actually grab the rose before the Beast stops her, destroying it and any chance at breaking the curse.

(Afterwards, she points out rather callously that judging by the state of the rose, he didn’t have much time left anyway. Did he really think a girl was going to fall in love with him in the next couple months? She then proceeds to fall in love with him over the course of the next THREE DAYS. Also, the entire story, aside from the Maurice and Rosalind flashbacks, happens in three days. It’s a lot.)

This is when information about Belle’s mom starts coming out. They go through a bunch of old census records and fail to find anything about her, including her name, but they discover in the process that the local bookshop owner was in the census a few hundred years ago, and therefore probably knows something about all the magic stuff.

They head back to town to talk to him, and find him missing, with the book store burned down. We find out later that Gaston did it, and this was how he defended himself:

(A fire hazard, Gaston? Really?)

So they go to talk to Maurice next, and Belle has the Beast wait outside when she goes in the house, considering how their last meeting went. Except she never comes out; the big bad has her and Maurice now, too. The Beast sees where she’s being taken, but there are too many people for him to overpower.

He goes home for help, and finds that everyone is gone; the furniture and knick-knacks are just furniture and knick-knacks. The Beast himself has been struggling with animal instincts since the rose was destroyed; the curse is progressing.

With no other options, he goes to recruit the villagers for a rescue mission. He has the mirror, so they can see that Belle is in danger; they decide to deal with the whole Beast situation after rescuing Belle.

Meanwhile, Belle has gotten away, rescued her father, rescued her mother who’s been held her for a full decade, and released dozens of other prisoners.

And we’re into serious spoiler territory now, so I’m just gonna say the good guys win, Gaston kills the Big Bad, and everyone present is horrified, because he deserved a fair trial, Gaston!, which for some reason I just find hilarious.

Rosalind is seriously weakened by her decade of captivity. She says that the Beast isn't in danger of giving in to his animal instinct anymore because of his love for Belle. (Three days, guys!) But she has only enough power to either restore the Beast’s humanity or the humanity of all the servants. He chooses to restore everyone else’s humanity, of course, but it’s implied at the end that he and Belle are going to go on an adventure to find all the other magical people who went into hiding, and maybe one of them will be able to fix him.

Adorable awkwardness of Beast: Yes! He really gives off strong I-try-hard-but-my-life-basically-stopped-when-I-was-10 vibes. I love him!

Stand-Up-For-Herself-iness of Beauty: Good.

Human at the End: Nope.

Who Learns and Grows the Most? About equal.

Also, one more thing; have this conversation I thought was hilarious. Idk how the stove is drinking, exactly.

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Sex vs. Romance: The Cultural Shift in Folklore

I think it’s fascinating, how we simultaneously sexualize and sanitize our fairy tales. What we’re ultimately doing, of course, is romanticizing. We move all of the sexual elements to a part of the story where they have a point.

Fairy tales aren’t, at their core, romantic. There’s a certain practicality to folklore—these are stories spread and shared among poor, working class people, often women, and they’re about success and survival, not love.

Well, familial love, perhaps, but the unions with royalty are seldom about anything as impractical as romance. Which is why the princes and princesses often aren’t likeable people.

Marriage in modern American culture is inherently romantic. Which is why these stories seem so bizarre to us. He’s going to live happily ever after with the chick who decapitated his brothers?

No! He didn’t win because he got the girl. He won because he got one over on the girl. He outsmarted the snotty princess, and now he has money and power. There’s no love here.

In earlier versions of the story, Snow White may be a prepubescent object of lust and jealousy. But she is not kissed awake—the apple is dislodged by a bump in the road. In earlier versions of the story, Sleeping Beauty is raped, but it is not this that wakes her; it is a splinter being dragged from the finger by a suckling child.

No women, in today’s variants, lose their virginity when asleep or, worse still, dead. No children are lusted after. But we’ve added a new component to the story—true love’s kiss. There’s no more senseless sexual violence. The romantic element serves an actual point.

Understanding the original cultural context is important, sure, but it is in the nature of folklore that the cultural context is constantly shifting, along with the details of the story. I think it’s stupid, frankly, to complain about the Disney-fication or whatever. Oh no! The protagonist gets money and power, AND she gets to spend her life with someone she actually likes! No one even got raped. How terrible! What a betrayal of the great tradition of storytelling!

Get over yourself, man. After four hundred years, these characters deserve a real happy ending.