Fictional character ask: Belle (Beauty and the Beast)
For @sunlit-music.
Favorite thing about them: Well, for starters, there’s the fact that she’s a dreamy, introverted bookworm who doesn’t fit in with her neighbors – that makes her an especially relatable Disney Princess to so many of us. But even more than that, I love the way her character blends warmth and sweetness with strong will and witty intelligence, courage and dignity with emotional openness, and selflessness with healthy self-respect. It would have been so easy to highlight only one or a few of those qualities in her, but she blends them all into an infinitely endearing whole. Also, just to be shallow, she’s the only Disney Princess to have brown hair and hazel eyes like me.
Least favorite thing about them: A very meta one: I envy her. She’s too much like the person I want to be, while my real self is too much like the Beast.
Three things I have in common with them:
*I have brown hair and hazel eyes.
*I love books.
*I have few close friends, but they mean the world to me.
Three things I don’t have in common with them:
*I lack her elegant grace.
*I tend to be more self-doubting than she is.
*I doubt I’d be brave enough to stand up to the Beast.
Favorite line:
From the songs...
The climax of the “Belle” reprise:
“I want adventure in the great wide somewhere
I want it more than I can tell
And for once it might be grand
To have someone understand
I want so much more than they’ve got planned”
From “Something There”:
“New and a bit alarming
Who’d have ever thought that this could be?”
True that he’s no Prince Charming,
But there’s something in him that I simply didn’t see”
From the stage musical’s “Home”:
“Home should be where the heart is
Never were words so true
My heart’s far, far away
Home is too”
From the dialogue...
“Gaston, you are positively primeval.”
“I’m very sorry, Gaston, but, but... I just don’t deserve you!”
...and my favorite line to quote whenever people speculate that Shakespeare or some other famous author didn’t really write their own work because their life had too little in common with the characters’ lives...
“Well, some people use their imagination.”
brOTP: Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs. Potts, Chip, and (if parents count) Maurice.
OTP: The Beast/Prince.
nOTP: Gaston.
Random headcanon: The painting of her as a little girl with her mother in the “Enchanted Tales with Belle” cottage at the Magic Kingdom is canon. Even though the mother subplot in the 2017 remake is poignant in its own way, and I understand that they didn’t want to rehash the “little Ella and her mother” scenes from the 2015 Cinderella, Belle having never known her mother was still a bit of a wasted opportunity. I imagine that the animated Belle was about eight years old when her mother died, that they were close, and that her mother was a big influence on her, especially by teaching her to love books.
Unpopular opinion: She and the Beast are both partly in the wrong at the beginning of her time in the castle. The Beast is much, much more at fault, of course, but Belle isn’t fully in the right either. In her righteous indignation at his behavior, she doesn’t notice the small hints at his better nature: e.g. his guilt when he sees her cry, his genuine efforts to make her comfortable before his insecurity and anger interfere, and his servants’ genuine loyalty. Instead she makes a snap judgement and decides “I don’t want to get to know him!” While I disagree with most of the flaws some critics attribute to her (e.g. that she’s a snob, or that Gaston and the villagers are right about her needing to get her head out of her books), I do think she has two real flaws: (a) impulsiveness, and (b) overlooking nuance at first. She arguably makes the same mistake with Gaston, by thinking of him as “brainless” when he’s really all too cunning and not realizing just how dangerous he can be.
Song I associate with them:
"Belle”
“Something There”
“Beauty and the Beast”
And from the stage version,
“Home”
“A Change in Me.”
Favorite picture of them:
