[ SECRET POST #5145 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5145 ⌋

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


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03. [SPOILERS for Yashahime]



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04. [SPOILERS for Higurashi/Umineko]



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05. [SPOILERS for The Invisible Man]



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06. [WARNING for mention of suicide]



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07. [WARNING for non/dubcon]

















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #736.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[meadowphoenix]

I'm definitely being a little facetious since its a kids movie, but there is some form of base attraction, imo. while beast's library is key sexiness to belle, beast is more ripped than gaston physically (and frankly emotionally adam and gaston are similar enough that it's not beast's maturity that attracts her...that curse does a lot of psychological work imo), and i do think physicality is part of what is desirable about beast in the movie (note the wolves scene where he doesn't just fight them off, but actually dominates them and which changes the Belle/Beast dynamic into something less hostile, and then there's the fact that he scares her off with the same physicality. the only change is who that physicality is directed against). from a meta view, the darker versions are implicitly or explicitly sexual, which i think it makes sense to read into the dynamic.

[(Anonymous)]

DA - Now this I could get into.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that what you're talking about is going on - the themes are definitely there. But, if we're going to take Beauty and the Beast seriously like this, I think Adam and Gaston are fundamentally different, and their difference is really important to the narrative.

To be clear, when I talk about this, I'm talking in basically cultural, narrative terms. The ways that we talk about and define our relationships are influenced by the deep structural cultural narratives that we often fall back on to tell stories about ourselves, represent ourselves to each other, use to interpret our lives. Basically, the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves and that recur in pop culture.

The basic structural narrative of Beauty and the Beast (it seems to me) is a young woman being simultaneously attracted to, and frightened and repelled by, male romantic (and, implicitly, sexual) relationships. In that context, Adam and Gaston are totally different character types, and they represent two extremely common and very different narratives of het romance (at least in a society with fundamentally patriarchal gender expectations). Both are immature and threatening men, but the narrative role of the Beast/Adam as a character is the uncivilized, uncouth, wild beast-man who is willing to be tamed by the charm of the woman, or to put it another way, agree to a relationship basically on what is understood to be her romantic terms. On the other hand, the idea of Gaston is that he rejects this and demands a relationship basically on his romantic terms.

I think those are two really basic, fundamental narrative structures for heterosexual romances (narratively speaking, you could use the analogy that Gaston akin to Gilgamesh and the Beast is akin to Enkidu) and for romantic fantasy. There's nothing wrong with one or the other. But Beauty and the Beast is in the wild-man genre. So the Beast turns into Adam and Gaston is a boor and ultimately turns into a raging lunatic.

But - to take it back to the meta, implicit view, and interpret this in terms of sexual relationships, not just romantic relationships - the kind of erotic fantasy OP is talking about fits way more naturally with the Gaston character-type than it does with the Adam/Beast character type. So, Gaston is on the narrative path of least resistance. You can still tell that kind of erotic story with the Adam/Beast character type, but the differences in the characters are pretty significant and relevant.

[meadowphoenix]

Oh man, I get where you're coming from but I just can't agree from the structure of the story that there are in fact character differences. There are a great many circumstantial differences, that are relevant and significant and that engenders different decisions between the two. The main one, the curse, is doing a great deal of psychological work, as I said. Beast/Adam must learn to be conciliatory to live. The second one, which is also tangential the curse as it's implied that this was not a difference to begin with, are the supporting cast (the servants and LeFou). Because of the curse the servants are under duress to make Beast/Adam act conciliatory, which is additional pressure. LeFou is under no such duress, and exerts no such pressure. And, also tangentially to the curse, Beast/Adam is starved of conciliation in return in a way Gaston simply is not. And even with all that it takes the succor of one of those, Belle giving Beast that conciliation of aiding his wounds (which she only deigns to give him after he exerts his physicality for her benefit, and despite the fact that he is still exerting it against her). In other words, you can absolutely get the dynamic OP wants if you set it before Beast sees that there's a reason to be conciliatory to Belle. Before then, there really isn't a difference between the two except that Belle is a captive audience to Beast in a way she isn't to Gaston (barely).

For the rest, I understand why you see this story as a dynamic of two relationship types. But I don't think this composition is meant to explore relationships except as a consequence to ideal or non-ideal character (I do think that's the point of the many older versions which are explicitly making the point that visible ugliness is better than shallow beauty). Gaston is what Adam would be without the curse (and in this you can see why the witch decided to curse everyone else in that the narrative doesn't believe that Gaston would simply be Gaston without everyone else blowing smoke up his ass, and also that Gaston has as much capacity for change as Adam since Gaston too is drawn to the one person who isn't conciliatory. In both cases if you twist the selfishness into survival just so much as they care about at least one person besides themselves, you would probably get a different person.

The fact of the matter is that Beast is not willing to be tamed by the charm of a woman. He's willing to be saved, but he only accepts this when he sees that there is a chance of that salvation being successful (he's literally the Marilyn "if you're not willing to love me at my worst" meme). This isn't really romantic fantasy in that regard, although the moral about character is done through Belle's romantic desires. I think that's a different cultural narrative about romance, in that it's less about which is attractive to the uneducated woman, the narrative never behaves as if that's a question, but about how ideal community engenders ideal character which allows for ideal love, i.e. love as a social construct, which on a doyalist level makes sense considering the screenwriters.

I should say that I'm definitely a "this all falls apart if Adam doesn't get medieval therapy" because of the way Adam's character transformation is set up and the circumstances which allowed for Adam and Belle's relationship being primarily captivity, which is also why I don't think this is merely a matter of het romance types.