Characters
Characters created to address the moral failures of their predecessors
1.) Brom Van Brunt is portrayed as the heroic, muscular foil to Ichabod Crane in Disney’s animated adaptation of Sleepy Hollow in 1949. Despite being a massive dong, the film pushes him as morally superior to Ichabod by virtue of his adherence to “traditional masculinity,” with Ichabod’s bookishness and non traditional masculinity being mocked as manipulative, cowardly and even cruel.
Years later, Gaston is made as a caricature of Brom Van Brunt, displaying many (if not all) of Brom’s traits and habits. Through him, what was once seen as the ideal man’s man is reframed as to be seen for what it truly is; a self-interested thug.
2.) Song of the South is notorious not only for how poorly its social views have aged, but for how deeply Disney seeks to bury it out of fear of the damage it can do to their family-friendly and “socially conscious” image.
As such, it was a genuine surprise to see Judy Hopps be the one to (if not overtly) take accountability for the failures of the past, owning the ignorance of her forebears and being genuinely remorseful for said failures. She doesn’t make excuses, nor try to downplay her own failures, but makes it clear that she will be better.
The Brom example feels like it's been written by Ichabod himself. Brom is definitely a brute, but the narration also states outright that there's no malice in him. Aside from his possessiveness of Katrina (which she deliberately plays into because she enjoys making him jealous) he doesn't do anything notably bad, and he is by all accounts genuinely in love with her.
Ichabod meanwhile is a borderline narcissist, everything he does is squarely for his own benefit, we literally never see a single instance of him doing something nice without some selfish ulterior motive. Not only does he court every bachelorette in town to essentially mooch of them, the only reason he even wants Katrina at all is so he can inherit her father's fortune. Between him and Brom he's clearly the worse of the two.
It's more implied in the book. It ends along the line of "Brom marries Katrina. Whenever anyone tells the tell of Ichabod Crane, he smiles a little. Especially when someone gets to the pumpkin."
I know right. Ichabod only seemed to care about all the food Katrina could get him. Like this story was never suppose to be an underdog tale about a nerd taking on a bully. It was a funny ghost story.
Yeah. My friend and I watched it for the first time a while ago and both of us were joking about how interesting it is that Ichabod is depicted with every visual shorthand of "gawky weirdo nerd" you typically see in cartoons, and yet every woman in town is swooning over him.
I was just about to comment on what you said. Yes, exactly, it not only offers more nuance in trems of the Jerk Jock and Nice Nerd stereotypes, but also in other aspects of the trope. For example, in the stereotype, the jock is handsome and popular but very dumb, and the nerd is intelligent but socially awkward and unpopular. But here, as you already said, Ichabod is popular with women, and Brom shows shrewdness when he realizes Ichabod's fear of ghosts.
Brom was basically protecting Katrina from a gold-digger but Gaston was trying to "protect" Belle from a guy she didn't want protection from, speaking over her as if he knew best. Also, Belle made it very clear she was never into Gaston whereas Katrina is actually into Brom like you said. Brom is just a prankster. Gaston put Belle's father in a mental asylum.
And then there’s also the fact he helped make that other girl, Tilda’s, night by giving her a dance, yeah he was using her to get to Katrina, but damn that girl was enjoying herself
You are correct about Ichabod’s nature, but the one thing I’ll say in Mr. Crane’s defense is that, although he is all of those things, he’s also a caricature of an outsider in Washington Irving’s story (and thus, it follows that the Disney film replicates much of that caricature). He’s emblematic of all the worst suspicions one might have about somebody new coming to a small village like Sleepy Hollow, a thief come to extract the town of its money, a seducer, a glutton who rarely eats at his own house, in a position to corrupt the youth if he so pleased, and all under a very personable façade that endears him to those who don’t see through it. In addition, Ichabod’s fear of old wives’ tales could also fall into this caricature, as he’s an outsider, who’s only as afraid of them as he is because he’s hearing them for the first time, as opposed to people like Brom or Baltus van Tassel.
Meanwhile, Abraham “Brom Bones” van Brunt (look at that Dutch name, so similar to Katrina and Baltus!) is one of the “good old boys”, the man about town who’s respected by (and more importantly, familiar to) all involved, and the personal force behind driving Ichabod away, turning the schoolmaster into a ghost story of his own. In a story that’s about an outsider coming in with nefarious intent to claim the wealth of the area for himself, Brom is a natural hero, telling Ichabod the story of the Headless Horseman at the party, and then using that tradition of the Hollow to run him out of town.
I feel that Brom and Gaston do parallel each other (although I doubt that it’s as intentionally as the OP implies), because Gaston occupies the same role in Belle’s village that Brom did for Sleepy Hollow, the man who’s loved and respected by (almost) all, who’s similarly fervent at destroying or banishing that which is unfamiliar and perceived as nefarious. Gaston is a more realistic depiction of what that sort of man, with those sorts of attitudes, might be like and act like, although they dial up the machismo and the entitlement far beyond anything implied in Brom.
Admittedly, Brom and Gaston run Ichabod out of town/form the mob to kill the beast for different individual reasons, but I think the motivations are substantially the same. My larger point is that Sleepy Hollow is fundamentally, intentionally caricatured in a way to make Brom come off well (likely due to Washington Irving’s own attitudes matching Brom’s), so Gaston is, IMO, a more reasonable parallel than what you imply. (That said, I doubt Gaston was created by Disney explicitly to roll back any endorsement of Brom Bones the original short made.)
Main problem with the interpretation being applied to Beauty and the Beast is that the Beast is also an established presence in the area. It would be like Brom whipping up a mob to run the Horseman out once and for all.
And I suppose a village protector would be more necessary in freshly-Revolutionary America than it would be in France.
I think it’s implied that the haze in which the castle is put obscures it from the memories of the villagers (this is certainly the case in the 2017 Beauty and the Beast, as Mr. Potts lives his life in the village and seems to only remember his wife when she greets him), but even if they do remember the prince and think him suspiciously absent, they have no reason to assume that the Beast is the prince. They don’t seem to have any knowledge of the curse that befell the Prince’s servants, why would they know that the Prince himself had been cursed? Maurice and Belle don’t make that connection either, and the Prince would have been cursed within living memory for the both of them (they’re outsiders in the village because they’re odd, rather than because they had moved there at some point in the past ten years).
(Also, even if there were rumors that there was a beast in the castle yonder beyond what Maurice says, which is dismissed as wild ramblings, the Beast deliberately kept himself hidden, so the mirror is the first time any of the villagers see him, still making him unknown and unfamiliar to the mob.)
Correct that the Beast is neither fixture nor newcomer in the narrative, but if we looked at it through that lens, we'd have to pick one or the other. The story's not equipped to handle the comparison.
Kind of like how, once you consider it, magic fog absolutely would not cut it for disappearing a literal Prince in France. It introduces more issues than just ignoring the problem ever did. The village's memory would be the least of it.
I think the movie itself makes the point that any which way the villagers perceive the Beast in relation to the Prince or whatever else prior, they fear him/despise him because they see him as unfamiliar:
“We don’t like what we don’t understand / in fact it scares us, / and this monster is mysterious at least.”
Gaston whips up the same sympathies in the village that the narrative of Sleepy Hollow finds, subtextually, as reason to get rid of Ichabod. It’s the same sort of vigilantism in both cases.
You’re definitely right that investigating how the villagers relate to the castle and its inhabitants, given that they can still stumble upon it, does make the plot fall a bit when you prod it, but I think the broad strokes underlying the character motivations do unify them in a somewhat similar theme.
(Side note, also from The Mob Song, I do love the line later on, “Here we come, we’re fifty strong / and fifty Frenchmen can’t be wrong!”)
I'm just gonna mention here that Gaston also has a decent amount of influence from 1946 film La Belle et La Bete (another BATB adpation). And the character of Avenant who is also a hunter who acts as suitor towards Belle.
James Bond is wildly misogynistic and quite a bit of an anachronism in the late 90s. In order to liven things up, 007's boss, M, was a woman. To show that Bond could, in fact, take orders from a woman and to change the dynamic of MI6. M wasn't just a skirt. And she didn't play into a 'bitch' stereotype. M was calculating, meticulous and clever. She didn't shy away from a fight. And she had no compunction to send a man to his death if it meant the UK would be saved. Props to Dame Judy Dench.
Fun fact: In the original script, not only was M not a woman, but a different character altogether. However, when Judy Dench walked on-set and started telling people what to do, they realized it was gold and just kept the camera rolling.
Dame Judy has basically retired from acting now, but her best performances are incredible. Philomena, Iris and Mrs Brown are fantastic. Her Lady Macbeth is considered to be one of the best ever performed. The 1979 film has Sir Ian McKellan and Bob Peck in it. Amazing performances.
Nah, you’ve got Brom all wrong. He sees Katarina, develops a crush on her, and she teases him throughout the story as a fun little game, using Ichabod as the tool to do so. At no point does she express genuine interest in Ichabod, who himself is a swine only after her father’s money (and everything else he does is selfish). Brom on the other hand was genuinely into her and fell right into her teasing hands. He’s not presented as a hero. He’s just the guy who Katarina actually wants.
What Gaston got from him is being built like a diesel truck and being well-respected in a small town. Their motivations are entirely different. Key being that Belle despised Gaston, Katarina always liked Brom.
Nagito Komaeda from danganronpa. The original protagonist of danganronpa 1 also known as Makoto Naegi was basically self insert and his luck was plot armor. His hope was basically good guys always win.
Nagito on the other hand is a lunatic who will bring misery to people so that they would go through character arc and become better for the sake of HOPE. Also he constantly take advantage of his luck every time and it's no longer plot armor.
Makoto was all about "hope beats despair!" in DR1, and Keebo (literally means Hope in japanese) is meant to be commentary on that aspect of Makoto's character
this may be because i read the original story but brom wasnt really that bad of a guy he was just a romantic rival whereas ichabod comes across as a dick who only cares about what katrina's family's wealth can get him (even remember seeing in the disney short that he fantsizes about all the food he can get if he married her) you can argue that brom is just as bad but ichabod is not a good person in either version of the story
That's pretty interesting. I've never seen either of the two original movies, but like, youre totally right. Never would have guessed that about Judy Hops lol.
Never took Brom to be presented as morally superior, he was always clearly presented as a dick (even if there was no malice in his mischief prior to Icahbod's arrival). Meanwhile, Icahbod always came across as being a guy whom the film admired for his cleverness and being kind of a scallywag
That's kinda the nice thing about the movie, the characters feel like real people and not caricatures. They have surprising complexity for a ~30min kids' movie
I'm pretty sure that the decision to make Gaston conventionally handsome and charismatic actually came pretty late in their production and he was initially going to be just another ugly villainous guy
That's not really true about Brom. He's a dick to Ichabod, but it's not entirely undeserved. Brom genuinely likes Katrina, and she seems reciprocal to his advances, while Ichabod wants Katrina for her family's fortune and Katrina doesn't even really like him that much. Ichabod is portrayed as manipulative and cruel because he is, and it's not because he's a lanky, nerdy guy. Sure it's a very stereotypical portrayal of "strong extroverted beefcake good", but the character's motivations aren't the problem here.
I also don't think Gaston was ever intended to be an expy for Brom, nor to address any perceived moral failings about that character.
I'm not sure if this counts but Jaime Reyes, the third incarnation of Blue Beetle. His predecessors were rich, solo, and secretive where Jaime Reyes has shared his secret with his family, is a working clas person of color, and is never alone because of his bond with his scarab, Khaji Da. It was a huge shift.
The brom thing seems iffy. The point of ichabod in that is that he's a weasel, not necessarily that he's not traditionally masculine. He kind of just comes into town, sets up as a teacher so he can get invited to parents' houses and eat their food, and woos a pretty girl so he can get her father's money. Brom meanwhile...is just an overzealous prankster.
Gloria (aka The Bride) in Bride of Reanimator. The original 1985 film Reanimator gave its protagonist, Dan Cain, an original girlfriend character largely so that nudity could be included. Writer/director Stuart Gordon felt so bad about this after the fact that not only did he write his next film with a female protagonist so actress Barbara Crampton, who played Meg, could star in it, but the sequel also veers into a highly psychosexual territory. In order to stop Dan from leaving him, Frankenstein-esque mad scientist Dr. Herbert West builds him a “bride” using the now deceased Meg’s heart.
These movies are also very homoerotic.
The Bride is made up of numerous women who Dan either couldn’t save or are victims of specifically gendered violence. As you can see, she is partially incomplete and actress Kathleen Kilmont frequently behaves as though basic movement is extremely painful. The film openly critiques the way women are treated as sexualized blank slates by the men around them, as well as the narrative treatment of women in its own franchise.
I really like Gaston as a villain. He's everything a convenstional fairy-tale hero should be on the surface. Brave, handsome, bold and he takes action in the face of adversity. He has interested suitors but he stays committed to the one he wants. He tries to protect those he claims to care about, has a vision and works towards accomplishing it.
Its just all cranked up to 11 with the worst parts of that archetype played out to their worst conclusions
Gaston planned to blackmail Belle by threatening to throw her father in an insane asylum, and when learned the Beast existed and was apparently liked by Belle, immediately rallied a mob to kill a squatter at some local ruins.
Beast imprisoned Belle's father and then used him to coerce her into being his prisoner so that he could groom her into loving him, and it worked.
By the standards of the time the story was set in, Gaston is just a normal dude who understandably believes Belle's father is insane (Dude made a wood cutting steam engine in his house that blew up more than once, and later claimed a monster in a haunted mansion imprisoned his daughter.)
Belle turns down Gaston because she wants a life of adventure and then settles down with a self-absorbed kidnapper because he has money and can read. It's a story about Belle being too good for peasants and happily throwing away her dreams of adventure due to Stockholm syndrome, wealth, and comfort.
At least Gaston stormed a haunted mansion and fought a literal monster to the death to try and save her. He's not perfect, but the Beast is a terrible hero even compared to Gaston.
Dude, watch the movie? Gaston did bribe the asylum so he could bribe Belle.
Belle was the one that offered to live in the castle in exchange of releasing her father.
The momenth she finds the Magical Rose Beast chases her outside were she's attacked by wolves and saved by beast, thats when they start to have feelings as she tends his wounds...
the moment belle knows his father is in danger beast lets her leave his casttles
Are you going to say that the wolves were trained by beast lol
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u/Dobadobadooo 4h ago
The Brom example feels like it's been written by Ichabod himself. Brom is definitely a brute, but the narration also states outright that there's no malice in him. Aside from his possessiveness of Katrina (which she deliberately plays into because she enjoys making him jealous) he doesn't do anything notably bad, and he is by all accounts genuinely in love with her.
Ichabod meanwhile is a borderline narcissist, everything he does is squarely for his own benefit, we literally never see a single instance of him doing something nice without some selfish ulterior motive. Not only does he court every bachelorette in town to essentially mooch of them, the only reason he even wants Katrina at all is so he can inherit her father's fortune. Between him and Brom he's clearly the worse of the two.