Woah! Slow Down, Maurice!
I’m a decade late to this, but please feast your eyes on:
This so perfectly captures why Gaston is my favorite Disney antagonist. Because he’s not a “villain”, he just an asshole. He’s not summoning the powers of darkness, or setting kingdom against kingdom, or scheming of any kind. His entire program is:
- He wants to hear a lot of compliments
- He wants to bang the hot nerd
And that’s it.
It’s so deliciously low-stakes for a Disney Fantasy movie that also includes, you know, a giant monster man and a singing candlestick. And that’s part and parcel of why I love that movie so much, because the core engine of the plot is that the three mediocre men in Belle’s life collide with each other, and while nothing that happens after is is her fault it all becomes her problem. So even by the end when you’ve got a rampaging mob attacking a castle, the root cause is still one asshole who couldn’t handle that only 99% of the village liked him.
The end result is that two of those dudes get their act together and the third one falls off a roof. And, you know…