In a very lovely and tasteful lifestyle interview, Ben invites one of Auradon’s most respectable celebrity magazines into his senior year castle setup, which is a lovely suite in the Auradon Prep dorms. He’s got a bedroom, a private bathroom, a meeting room, and a sick mini fridge setup that he keeps stuffed full of disgusting energy drinks (Blue Fairy energy drink gives you wings!)
He says, in a polite statement that is a very normal response to the magazine asking if he’s “hoping to impress any special ladies with his workout routine” that he’s actually happy to be single this year. He’s focusing on doing the best he can for his people, and he’s not listening to any old-fashioned critics who think everyone needs to be engaged before they graduate.
This is, naturally, a fuck-you to his parents, who have been throwing princesses at him every chance they get.
(as an aside, the extended Charming family finds the whole thing HYSTERICAL. Chad’s four older sisters are literally on the floor laughing at this interview. Charmington is considered an outlier in the kingdoms, because they’re one of the only ones who don’t routinely marry their royalty off the second they leave school.)
Ben is absolutely still dating Mal on the down-low, but they’re getting increasingly careful about it as his parents get more intense with the matchmaking.
The only solution is to go on more group outings with their whole friend group. Who definitely don’t find it hot to look at Ben and Mal sucking face in the corner, and totally wouldn’t get in on that action if they were invited.
His parents are desperate. They’re aware that they’re losing the senior-year-engagement battle, but they’re going to win the marriage war. They WILL find him a princess. Or a prince! It would be fine if he wants a prince instead, but he was so happy with Audrey, and then with Mal, so surely that can’t be it. They just need to find him the right girl.
King Ben has attended dinner with every eligible princess in the major kingdoms, and every time, he comes back to his dorm room, strips off his coat and tie and gentle, patient king persona, and leaves his door unlocked so that a crew of wicked, nasty villains can sneak in and have their wicked ways with him.
“Wicked ways” usually means cuddling him until he can finally relax, and then shit-talking the princesses that his parents choose for him. They’re all very strait laced young women. Very kind, sweet, easygoing. Exactly what you don’t want in a queen, not when the king is already so nice, and sweet, and accommodating, and—
maybe the wicked ways also include some villains bullying their sweet king into talking about what he really wants in a partner. Which is someone nice, and someone strong, and someone who knows how to read people and isn’t afraid to be a little mean and manipulative, because he’s good at the earnest parts of politics, the part that wins over the citizens, and he’s good at listening and planning, but he genuinely hates a bunch of the manipulative power games that come with the role and he’d love to marry someone who could play those games with confidence and come back to him at the end of the day and help, and….
“You can just say you’d marry Evie,” Mal teases. “I won’t be mad if my boyfriend marries my girlfriend”
