How to change a backstory from "not holding up" to "holding up too much" in two easy steps!
| ā | āŖ Just watch and maybe you'll learn something Don't judge a songbird 'til she sings āŖ |
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| ~ Yeah, in retrospect, we may have judged her too harshly. |
As soon as I learned Lydia was doing a part two... yeah, I knew it was certainly going to get her cut. And lo and behold, here we are. And yeah, I'm back now - good to see you all again. Perms given by Rhino over Discord, so let's get chopping.
What's the Work?
Disney Princesses but they're Villains is a series of songs by Lydia the Bard about... well, you read the title. Belle appears in two songs, "Tale as Old as Time" and "Reclaim My Story", in which she is reimagined in a callous manipulator. Or... is she?
Who is She?
Belle is the smug yet incredibly brilliant and effective POV character for both songs. At first, it seemed her past was simply the original Belle's past, which notably didn't make Belle evil, rather, she ended up Pure Good, so this should be no different, right? Well...
What Prevents Her from Being Near Pure Evil?
| ā | āŖ You mocked and harassed and made pass after pass And when that didn't work you planned forceful attacks! āŖ |
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| ~ Lydia seemingly designed Part 2 for the sole purpose of keeping her well off NPE. |
Essentially, we get two notable details that expand her tragedy to a much more severe ordeal that previously believed.
First off, we learn she's the Enchantress's daughter, and her mother had to leave her and her father when she was hunted down and a bounty was put on her head for using magic. We see her actively sobbing over this, so it clearly impacted her immensely. This for a start gives us some context for why Belle went down this path here when the film version didn't, but the next aspect is the real kicker.
Essentially, Gaston did the same harassment he did in the film... until he tried to rape her. This completely recontextualizes her rage from "petty arrogance" to "justified fury", as she is furious at him for being an attempted rapist (and if forceful attacks means anything, more than once), and furious at the villagers for standing by and supporting him in spite of what she went through. It's the key piece of the puzzle that completely changes her entire character, and not only makes her genuinely tragic, but far too tragic.
And no, I don't think it's "too ambiguous" or anything. Lydia has written about rape before ("Feed Us Your Girls"), and I can't really see any other way to interpret this - seconds after she shows what happened in the mirror, Gaston tries to grab her hand, and she looks absolutely disgusted. Even in the most ignorant interpretation... she was nearly sexually assaulted, and so lost all faith in other people, which is still too rough a backstory in general.
If that wasn't enough, she gets several more sympathetic aspects throughout the song. Her father, Maurice, turns on her out of fear, and she is clearly deeply hurt, even hesitating before attempting to attack him, showing clear signs of remorse. We get a whole flashback depicted to her absolutely bawling over losing her mother, paralleled with her current situation as she uses magic to take down the people who allowed Gaston to end up in a position where he could try to rape her. It's hard not to see her as justified in her anger now, with Lydia herself even noting that she's "kinda right".
Verdict?
Pretty easy chop.