I think I just solved the puzzle of the portrait in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. You know the one, that's ripped one way in the prologue and another when Belle finds it?

Well, obviously it's two similar portraits. But that's not the thing. "Ten years we've been rusting" in conjunction with "till his twenty-first year" meaning the Prince was eleven in the prologue, and yet both portraits depict a young man very like the Prince in the epilogue?

IT'S HIS FATHER.

...what happened to him and both mothers, anyway?

(I mean, still fond of the idea that Belle's mother worked at the castle, and part of the enchantment was a forgetting outside the castle about anyone inside it as of the enchantment, so Belle's parents had a tearful reunion at the first possible moment after he remembered her. But still.)

Also, Belle and the Beast are both ridiculously autistic.

Also also, why didn't anyone think to fill Belle in on the situation?

Headcanon: Prince Adam was eighteen or nineteen when he was enchanted. Belle was eleven or twelve at that time. I don't feel this is an unreasonable age difference once Belle's twenty-one or twenty-two (see XKCD on Dating Pools). And nobody can tell the difference anyway, because physically Adam didn't age much if any while beastly. This eliminates the Enchantress as villain of the piece, because she is no longer in the position of having cursed a whole castle because Adam was being eleven. (It's more fun to hate Gaston anyway.)

Gaston is the least self-aware ever. Doesn't help that he's got the Busty Chorus hanging on his every word. (I don't recall as those three ever got names, or many lines...)

Headcanon: Autistic!Belle. Possibly Autistic!Maurice, too.

Fic idea: Belle's mother vanished when Belle was eleven or twelve. Assumed dead. She was employed up at the castle...

Still love the cleverness involved in Belle dumping Gaston in the mud puddle, and the implied "and stay out" in her putting his boots on the doorstep and closing the door behind him.

What happened to the castle's existing wardrobes and teacups when the transformation hit?

Le Fou is ludicrously un-self-aware.

I am totally here for queer (presumed bi) Belle and Beast falling in love. There may be something there that wasn't there before!

I have not got the "Human Again" sequence memorized, clearly. I keep forgetting they put it in at all. Though regardless of the age at which Adam was enchanted, and sweet as the "You read it to me!" "...I can't." scene is, shouldn't he have been taught how to read long before being enchanted?

Chip is most adorable.

Dude who escapes Wardrobe wearing a bra and skirt and then panics is not most adorable. Ew. Transmisogyny.

That is totally a magical girl transformation sequence. Except that sadly it is not.

I'm surprised the first thing Adam does when he wakes up human isn't check to see what happened to the stab wound.

The "people don't age [much] while enchanted into another form" theory above explains where Chip (who is not any ten years old yet) came from, too. He was born before the transformation!

It's really amusing watching this movie through an autistic!Belle, toxic-masculinity-is-a-thing lens. Autistic!Belle is best headcanon. And the fundamental difference between the Beast and Gaston seems to be that the Beast learns better and consequently gets the girl, and Gaston, being determined not to learn better, dies.

Though I gotta say, that one gifset on Tumblr to the tune of "enchantress punishes eleven-year-old for being eleven, and all of eleven-year-old's extensive household to boot, and yet Gaston is the villain of the film? wut?" has a point. Not a point I like, but a point.

And the scene where Lumiere and Mrs. Potts are giving the Beast contradictory advice on how to impress Belle is quite reminiscent of a genderflipped version of "be sexy, but modest; be bold, but demure", etc.

No way is Chip more than ten. I'd put bets on he's not more than five. How did Chip come about, exactly? (Do I even want to know?)

Saw Frozen. Much feminist...very white.

( spoilers )

( earlier days )

Day Seventeen: Favorite warrior female character

Define 'warrior'. Depending on how one defines the term, either Anna Milton or Jo Harvelle. Though I have a soft spot for Disney's Mulan and Merida.

( later days )