fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3665 ]

[ SECRET POST #3665 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3665 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 41 secrets from Secret Submission Post #524.
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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Rehabilitate him? Lollll.
Being a perfect basic princess Mary Sue doesn't mean personality. She never actually grows or is challenged in the movie. If she had been shown calling the Beast ugly or otherwise acting vain, then loving him by the end might have coUnited as character evolution. But being perfect the entire time isn't a trait. She's not really the protagonist, the Beast is.

DA -- This, pretty much. The Beast and Gaston are the only two characters in the entire movie who have actual character arcs. They're the ones who have defined goals, challenges to overcome, etc. Belle's main function in the plot is to challenge Beast and Gaston's assumptions about themselves. As a result, Beast grows as a person, finding his humanity, and Gaston devolves into a villain and loses his. And Belle falls in love. That's the only character growth she gets.

Well said. The Beast and Gaston are the actual characters here, not Belle. She's their quest and that's it. Considering the movie made her out to be the protagonist, she could have at least done something at the end that was epic and climactic to the fall of Gaston or saving Beast - which seemed to have been her goal, which she failed at. But all she gets is a chance to declare her love, and it's the Beast who has learned a lesson, not Belle.

That's why Belle's character would have been more interesting if she had been portrayed as vain, because then at least she could've really learned a lesson for loving people on the inside rather than outside. But it's never suggested that she struggled with that at all.

Wait wait wait. I'll admit it's been a solid decade since I watched B&tB, but *didn't* Belle save the Beast from falling off the damn roof after Gaston stabbed him? I swear I remember her clinging to his cloak as he started to collapse.

Yeah just what I was thinking. She saves his life in this scene.

I don't remember the details, but she was too late since Gaston already stabbed him, and Beast was the one to actually kill Gaston.

She did save him, but only by declaring love for him and triggering his transformation.

DA. Her development was that she learned to involve herself with those around her more instead of living purely in her own head, as well as learning to actually fight for the things she wanted instead of simply dreaming about them. That aside, she survived selling herself to a monster for her family's survival and being held captive by said monster for months more or less intact, which is an achievement in and of itself. She wasn't hardened or scared into obedience, and she held onto enough of her personality to force her captor to change around her instead of vice versa. In her circumstances, you can view her relative lack of change as a strength in and of itself, though she did develop as a character as well, as per the above.

I mean, you don't have to like the girl or think she's an excellent character or a paragon of virtue, but she did develop as a person over the course of the movie, and she also kept herself from being overly damaged by very adverse circumstances. She did fine.

I don't think that's true. If anything, it's the opposite. While reading her character as not having many friends at the beginning and being stuck in her head is possible and COULD count as a flaw, how is that addressed? She goes and lives in a magical fairyland castle. That's not connecting with people at all, that's living a book fantasy. And at any rate, she is never once portrayed as being asocial or having trouble with people, she's just not interested in Gaston and turns him down - with perfectly developed social grace, I might add. It's not a flaw.

Furthermore, you could say saving her father from captivity is self-sacrificial and a virtue, sure. But her virtues aren't interesting because she's perfect. It doesn't propel an actual personality, because all she does is perfect things. If she had struggled with captivity or been afraid to exchange herself for her father, we might see something resembling an actual human being, but we really don't.

She also learned that fantasy isn't all it's cracked up to be. That there's negatives with the positives.

But maybe I'm old fashioned and don't think that there needs to be a drastic change. You seem to think she's perfect, but she refuses to engage with anyone. All people seem to see is her beauty, and she scoffs and looks down on their lifestyle. There's an entire scene about it, and how she talks with her father about not having any friends.

She also learned

Direct me to a scene where this ever happens, anon.

DA. From the start, really, since magical castles aren't all they're cracked up to be when you're a prisoner in one, but the tower scene where she finds the rose most dramatically, where find the mystical object in the monster's tower doesn't result in the solution to her captivity, it results in the monster freaking the fuck out, tearing apart the room, terrifying her so badly that she tries to flee. Which then promptly goes wrong itself, leaving her almost certainly about to die before the first monster shows up and saves her, only to keel over himself, leaving her to pull herself together, get him home, fix him up, and start actively both helping him and standing up to him.

nayrt

I really don't think your point goes over very well when it results in her going back with her captor after he saves her in the woods. That's not her pulling herself together. That's her choosing the fantasy, or experiencing mega Stockholm Syndrome.

nayrt

Or knowing that saving someone's life is an important thing, regardless of what they've done in the past?

Err.. maybe it's okay to not go out of your way to save your violent kidnapper, or at least not go back to his dungeon castle with him?

It's pulling herself together in the sense of actually making a decision what to do and acting on it, rather than letting the Beast decide for her. I think she saw him saving her as evidence of something in him worth working with, and to be fair she wasn't wrong. He does change by the end of the movie, and in large part because from this point on she more or less forces him to. She yells at him to his face, she talks to him, she shows him how to act like a human again. Literally, in some cases. Choosing the fantasy would have been pretending he wasn't what he was, but she didn't do that. She faced him instead, and after this he's the one shaping up for her.

I like you. You state everything about Belle that makes me love her.

It's not that she has trouble with people, it's that she was never interested in them. Which, I mean, fair enough, I'm not interested in people either and I don't plan to change that, but it meant that she seemed to have very little attachment to anything outside of her own head. Even her dad, she loved him enough to sacrifice herself for him, but despite the fact that he apparently semi-regularly blew himself up she never tried to stop that. She supported him and defended him fairly unconditionally, regardless of whether or not that actually helped him. The Beast forced her to have to actually interact with someone, be affected by their behaviour, have to fight with them and struggle with them to find a median they could both live with. He forced her to come away from her books and the adventures in her head and have to deal with the here and now.

It's interesting that even though he gives her the gift of a massive library, we don't actually see her reading as much after she comes to live with him. Some of that is that she doesn't have time once things start going wrong at the end of the movie, but a lot of it is that she's now interacting much more with the people around her, the servants as well as the Beast. The combination of isolation and antagonism forced her to deal much more with what was happening around her instead retreating further into her head. That fact that it was a magical castle probably helped with that as well, since that and the fear of the Beast flipping his lid all the time did sort of make it into a real 'adventure' to be experienced instead of imagined. But once she was living the adventure, she did actually stand up and deal with it, up to and including making mistakes, trying to fix them, and standing up to her captor when he tried to terrify her.

As for her not being afraid ... the whole 'come into the light' part didn't count for you, huh? The fact that she made her choice without much in the way of hesitation didn't prove she wasn't afraid, it just proved that she was more afraid of watching her father be hurt/taken away than she was of some as-yet nebulous threat to herself. Plus the whole crumpling into a heap thing immediately after didn't exactly speak of a lack of fear or despair either. She just dealt with it as best she could, because by that point she had to.

But, okay. I get that you're looking for a more radically dynamic character. This is a fairytale after all, and she has the misfortune of standing right next to the Beast, who has a massive and dramatic character arc that drives the movie. She looks relatively flat next to him, this is a fact. However, she does change over the course of the movie, and I don't see where you're getting this whole 'perfect paragon' thing from her. She makes several mistakes over the course of the movie, she's dismissive, angry and afraid, and she doesn't always realise when she's really not helping people, good intentions aside. She snaps at people, she stupidly runs out into a wolf-filled winter forest at night (though, to be fair, survival instinct, I'd run from the Beast at that point too), she has a tendency to ignore problems until they blow up in her face (which she seems to have inherited from her father). She isn't perfect, or even necessarily all that good. She's just brave when circumstances mean she has to be.

NAYRT

Your mention of the library reminds me that I was SO jealous of Belle getting that when I was a kid :p. I wanted a library like that (still do, tbh :D).

Nice post, too, by the way. Well argued.

I think you are inflating perceived flaws with Belle that aren't actually problems for her in canon.

You say she's not interested in people and has no friends. That may be the case, but she's friendly with several village people (including the librarian), and all of her peers are portrayed as vain blockheads - culminating of course with Gaston. The fact that she isn't friends with Gaston or his groupies isn't a problem.

Everything you said about her being too much in her head also seems like something you're sort of inflating rather than a problem in the actual show. Again, she is NEVER portrayed as having personal issues. We, as the audience, don't WANT her to marry Gaston because we know he's a misogynist and an idiot. The fact that she reads books is canon giving her the hero treatment, that she wants more than just the day-to-day village drama and doesn't see herself content being just a housewife.

And sorry, no I don't buy that I saw any kind of real humanity that extended beyond "perfect Mary Sue" when Belle saved her father or asked the Beast to step into the light. Her fear was not developed, nor the sense of what she might have been sacrificing.

I don't need a radically dynamic character, but I also don't feel the need to grasp at straws to try to make Belle out to be an interesting person when she just isn't. Hey, to each one's own. I'm not saying I hate Belle. But her character arc still reaches its peak when she falls in love with her captor, and that's it.

I would say that her ignoring Gaston most definitely was a problem that blew up in her face when he had the charisma and following to both ruin her father's life and then rile the entire town into baying for the Beast's blood. Not that she should have had to pander to him, hell no, but maybe pay attention to the fact that his extreme popularity makes him a very very difficult person to go up against? The Beast is an obvious danger, but Gaston is a much more insidious one, one she didn't see coming until it was already too late, mostly because she'd already dismissed him in her mind as an idiot and no threat. Which, even if the Beast had never happened, was not a smart move. Her father always had a fairly precarious position in the town, and Gaston proved more than willing to take opportunities as they came to get rid of him and leave Belle with him as her only option. He doesn't take no for an answer, and dismissing him out of hand wasn't ever a good idea.

I don't buy that I saw any kind of real humanity that extended beyond "perfect Mary Sue" when Belle saved her father or asked the Beast to step into the light. Her fear was not developed, nor the sense of what she might have been sacrificing.

I don't think they felt the need to expand on what she was sacrificing when it was fairly explicitly everything. How much more explicit or developed does it need to be when the Beast up front demanded that she sign herself over to him for the rest of her life? I mean, a kid watching that maybe isn't going to read some of the darker interpretations into it, but everyone else sure as hell managed. Maybe they didn't feel any need to further show her fear than her flinching from the sight of him and then collapsing in tears when he leaves either, because who the hell isn't afraid when a monster basically buys them in exchange for their father's life? I mean, I didn't think that was particularly subtle, but okay. More cringing and screaming next time, got it.

As for her falling in love with her captor ... she saved the Beast. Several times over in fact, both physically and magically. When he was wounded saving her from wolves, she saved him back by getting him home again and helping heal him. She saved him magically by forcing him, by actively standing up to him, to become someone who can love and be loved by someone else. That was his arc. He changed because of her. Because she fought him, and healed him, and came back for him, and gave him hope again. She saved him at the end of the movie by reaching out to him when he'd already lost everything, making him fight back long to pull himself back over the parapet. It wasn't like she was a doll for him to fall in love with and passively fall in love in return. She fought, every step of the way, she changed him by challenging him and by being someone worth changing for, she literally saved him both from his curse and from physical death. That was the peak of her arc. Becoming someone who can do that, becoming someone even a monster would feel worth changing for.

You don't like her, fair enough, you're allowed not to. Calling her flat, static or perfect, that I will argue with.

Fucking bravo, man!!

But she was disturbed by the Beast's appearance when she first met him and was surprised to fall in love with him (see: Something There).

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #3665 ]

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