Inktober 24: 30. Beauty and the Beast

Used to like and more importantly trust Belle when I was a lad (though even back then, Ariel was obviously my favorite, and still is, Belle would have qualified as second favorite). And like you and Belle, I also used to love to read. Unfortunately... my joy for reading was shot in the spine and eventually brutally murdered by various things I had to experience (and no, people mocking me for my love of reading had absolutely nothing to do with my loss of bibliophilia. Actually, a lot of my peers were actually very impressed with my ability to read especially at my age, if anything, so I never experienced bullying for loving to read. Bullying for my Aspergers, maybe, but not necessarily my love of reading.).

The first element dealt with classwork. Namely, early in Elementary School, I think third grade, probably second grade, the school insisted that any books we read had to be written up as book reports to verify that we had in fact read it. Since I had dysgraphia, which really made it uncomfortable to write for long periods of time, that crippled my love for reading for obvious reasons. If I have to write book reports, even when writing in itself made me physically uncomfortable and needlessly so, just so I've proven to the teachers that I've read the material, why even bother liking to read.

Eventually I recovered enough of my bibliophilia up to College to begin to start enjoying reading again, but then I lost it again, and this time, I fear it's permanent, and the reason I lost my love of reading had partially to do with who was occupying the literature departments (let's put it this way, at least one literature professor at Georgia Perimeter College's Dunwoody Campus by the name of Matt Dolloff, plus two professors occupying Chaucer as well as American Poetry at Oglethorpe University, thought that because they had a degree in teaching literature, that gave them the right to push liberalism/leftism [that's American leftism, obviously, though it may qualify as European leftism if you wish] and cram said agenda down our throats, and they obviously had to have been bibliophiles, since why choose literature over, I don't know, math, computer programming, history, or science to push their agendas on us? One of the professors even tried to incorporate the Equal Rights Amendment and the free love of the 1960s into Chaucer as well as claiming that Christianity, I kid you not, invented misogyny, despite the Greeks and Ancient Romans long predating Christianity in terms of misogyny.). Another reason I lost my bibliophilia is because of reading up on history, and namely learning that bibliophiles like Belle tended to really advocate for horrendous actions. Like, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, and Sade loved to read and write, and they ended up advocating for the French Revolution and ultimately the Reign of Terror that slaughtered countless of my fellow Christians. Likewise, Maximilien de Robespierre, Louis de Saint Just, Joseph LeBon, and Jean-Paul Marat were bibliophiles, and they ended up buying the Philosophes' garbage wholesale and tried to remake society to match their literary works, leaving a massive body count within four years as a result. There's also Marx and Engels, who definitely spent their times in libraries and making poetry while brainstorming Marxism, a horrific idea that was intended to rival the French Revolution in terms of body count. Also Jean-Paul Sartre, who definitely loved to read and write, even consuming his grandpa's library, and was one of the people who came up with Existentialism. And he acted as a cheerleader to Soviet atrocities even AFTER Stalin was exposed as a genocidal crook, sang praises for Che Guevara, that mass murdering terrorist, as the world's most complete human being of the century, having a hand in the murders in Algeria AND Cambodia, called Mao Zedong's murders, which outranked even Stalin's murders, as "profoundly moral," and even having the gall to imply after the Munich massacres that the French Revolutionaries probably didn't kill enough people, not to mention treated women far worse than Gaston or Judge Claude Frollo EVER could. Jeez, no wonder Gaston had distaste of reading, getting ideas, thinking, etc., etc., since if those were what I have to emulate and consider intelligent people, I'd hate intellect as well.

So far as Belle herself, again, I used to like Belle, and more importantly, trust her (in fact, I used to carry around a Belle toy as a treasured object). However, for pretty much the same reasons why I lost my bibliophilia, while I do to some degree still like Belle, I stopped trusting her. That, and I overall had a very bad experience in College starting with 2011 (I started College in Fall 2009), as I've had a string of bad luck regarding professors starting then, generally getting at least one very bad professor who more often than not tries to push left-wing agendas, some overt, some covert. The starting professor of that string basically pushed, among other things, that Christianity was terrible (despite being a returning Catholic), that males just named objects out of lust, and that women didn't even get any education at all or any literacy until the 1960s (and I know that bit was a clear falsehood because my own grandma knew how to read well before the 1960s came about, and besides which, she briefly worked at IBM during World War II while my grandpa was off fighting in Germany, and my maternal grandma worked as a secretary as well.), and also cited her favorite rulers as being women who crossdressed as men (and believe me, she's not the only bad professor I had to deal with, as I also had to deal with Matt Dolloff in American Literature, Thomas Anderson for Film, Waylon Smith for Anthropology, Richard Barton Palmer for Chaucer, Anastazi for Education, Linda for American Poetry, etc., etc.). It also doesn't help that Linda Woolverton, the woman responsible for creating Belle in the first place, practically admitted to pushing that very same agenda in the film. The fact that some supplemental material implies that Belle may be a misandrist also doesn't help matters either. I'm actually disturbed at the implications that Belle might actually drink the Kool Aid regarding Voltaire, Diderot, Sade, and Rousseau and become a Jacobin due to how her love of reading is depicted (namely, we don't even see her practicing discernment in books). It probably wouldn't have been bad in itself if it weren't for Glenn Keane claiming the setting of the film was in the mid-to-late 1700s, or the prelude to the French Revolution. Maybe if John Lasseter didn't kill off the DTV sequels and Disney when doing their sequel phase actually made sure to make a BATB sequel that covered the French Revolution and Reign of Terror in a manner similar to The Killing Fields and specifically addressed that issue regarding Belle, I probably wouldn't have as much distrust for Belle as I do now. It's bad enough that I actually place more trust in the triplets right now than Belle, and I don't necessarily like them, that's how bad it is. It also doesn't help either that, for a true beauty comes from within morality tale, they actually did a pretty terrible job at making Belle and the triplets actually match up their intended roles (and to be honest, right now I'm not particularly impressed with Belle's literacy level especially as-is in the original film, ignoring supplemental materials and/or special editions, since she only read fairy tales in the film. If you're going to have us be convinced she's a prolific reader, at least have her reading something like, I don't know, Descartes, or Shakespeare even, not limit herself to fairytales which are literally child's play. At least the musical, that comic I linked you to, and the special edition song Human Again did give her more advanced material to prove she's definitely an advanced reader, like Romeo and Juliet or the legends of King Arthur and his knights of the round table). And to be fair, with the exception of Aurora, most of the DPs didn't necessarily look for love either, at least, not solely (which your comment at the beginning seemed to imply). Snow White and Cinderella just wanted to escape their awful stepfamilies, and Ariel wanted to experience humanity face to face. And that's not even getting into Belle's successors.

Anyways, that's my input on Belle. Sorry if it comes across as offensive to your favorite character or overall very bleak, but that's where I'm at with the character right now. Hopefully things change for the better regarding Belle and my views of her, because once upon a time, I did really like and especially trust her. Besides, at least she has more of a chance to be redeemed compared to the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars, now THAT one I doubt I'll ever be able to like or root for again, as much as it pains me to root against them, after what George Lucas revealed regarding who they were inspired by (and, for that matter, who the Empire was inspired by).