The Ugly Truth

Sometimes I get weird ideas, and Saturday was one of those times. Washing dishes, a truth which has been self evident for most of my life revealed itself to me. In the words of Smee ... "I think I just had an apostrophe." As a child of the 80's I've grown up hook-line-and-sinker accepting the Disney story lines. This Saturday, though, while listening to my 'Show Tunes' Pandora station, I realized that maybe there was more to the story or Beauty and the Beast than met the eye.

Belle's own collection of quirks aside (scroll to #4), her two legitimate suitors in the movie are 1: A megalomaniac who excels at myriad pursuits and is universally revered in town and 2: A ... well ... an illiterate reclusive megalomaniac surrounded by traumatized servants quaking in fear of him and who was cursed because of said megalomania into what can best be described as a bipedal feral lhasa apso. With horns.

Now I'm not saying that Gaston wasn't a douche; he clearly was. All I'm saying is, The Beast clearly was as well. When stuck with two terrible choices, why are we being asked by Disney to applaud Belle for choosing either of them? The more I think about it the more the story seems to promulgate the mephitic belief that if you love your abusive significant other long enough and well enough they will eventually melt into a gooey tub of love and you'll live happily ever after. Seriously, wouldn't Le Fou be a better choice for Belle at this juncture? Or a convent? Or literally anything else?

Just saying ...