Disney Debunking 3: How does Chip exist?
I've been seeing this one for years now, so now is a good time to tackle it. Let's break down the arguments:
Mrs. Potts is too old to have possibly given birth to Chip and can't be his real mother.
The castle has been cursed for 10 years, yet Chip is clearly younger than 10. How is this possible?
Okay, so looking at the first argument: we don't actually know how old Mrs. Potts is. I tried googling it, but we *all* know how that always works out for Disney characters...
Yeah, remember this guy?
So this is what came up, and none of the Disney wikias had any hard facts either.
Why do they say she's "clearly in her 50s or 60s"? Sure, she has white/grey hair. But according to webMD (yeah, I know: not the greatest medical source. But this is an informal discussion about Disney characters, so I think it'll suffice) Caucasians typically begin to grey in their 30s, and greying begins earlier in women on average.
Source:
Mrs. Potts has NO visible wrinkles/liver spots too, so all this supports the idea that she's actually <50 years old. The woman isn't even drawn with crow's-feet. Frankly, the writer at decider.com just wanted a conspiracy/conflict to write an article about. And nothing sells like dissing Disney!
Disney Fandom wiki says that Chip is 7. I have no idea if the movie confirms this, but I agree he's definitely younger than 10 (more on that later). I'm going to use that number for the sake of argument 1.5 though (determining Potts's age range). As decider.com pointed out, we do see at least 6 other teacups in the cupboard when Chip is told to go sleep with his siblings. Assuming there were no twins and each kid was roughly 1 year apart, that gives us 13 years. We're talking pre-Revolution France here, so Potts likely married young. Possibly at around 16. This means that Mrs. Potts *could* be as young as 16+13=29 years old. Yeah, that's younger than average to completely grey; but not impossible, especially when you consider the stress from running the castle housekeeping staff and birthing/raising SEVEN children. That takes a toll on the body, y'all. And NO, decider.com, that is NOT "a lot of children for one middle-aged, single housekeeper." In fact, until the last century that was probably the average number of children for a fertile, married woman who hasn't died in childbirth. It is entirely plausible to say Mrs. Potts is somewhere between 30-50 years old, so she would have been 23-43 when giving birth to Chip***. That's completely normal. Unless, y'know, she was a teapot.
Whoop! Perfect transition into part two! So if "for ten years [they]'ve been rusting" as enchanted furniture, *how* is Chip younger than 10 years old? Was he born as a teacup?
No.
So, it has always seemed super uncool that the Enchantress cursed the ENTIRE castle staff for the Beast being a dick. Which is true. They shouldn't have been punished because their 11 year old boss was a turd-human. Maybe the curse wasn't quite as bad for them though.
We know the Beast definitely ages while "enchanted". In the Enchanted Christmas midquel, the preteen pre-Beast Prince is definitely younger than post-Beast Prince Adam at the end of the original. I'm pretty sure I recall all the servants looking the same though (I'd need to rewatch it). Why should we assume that the servants all age as furniture though? The Beast is still a living mammalian-type thing. Everyone else becomes an inanimate object.
I posit that it makes more sense none of the servants age. That's why 7 year old Chip is still 7 when the curse breaks. That's why the stool dog didn't die halfway into the enchantment. Only Prince Adam has to lose out on a decade of his life. Everyone else gets to pick back up from the day that Enchantress knocked on the door. And we're talking magic, so it's not hard to believe that the servants all magically stay the same mental age as well.
Makes sense to me, and it eliminates the alleged plot holes. So final verdict: Mrs. Potts is NOT too old to be Chip's mother, and it does NOT make you cool to hate on Disney. Just let people like what they like.
***EDIT: so I realized that I forgot to add in Chip's age when I did my maths... In no way do I think this destroys my argument, but the 13 years sum would correlate to Chip's birth, not Mrs. Potts's current age. My sum should have been ~20 years. That would give 36 as her minimum age (if she married at 16, which wasn't uncommon in that time period) . I still contend she is anywhere between 36-50 years old at the time of the curse (then 10 years of not aging as a teapot). Just felt the need to point out my stupid miscalculation!
