Why do we never see anything taking place in Belle's happily ever after?
Everything, from the Disney Princess comics to the little stories sometimes found in Disney Princess colouring books to the images on the merch itself, and even the straight-to-DVD sequels from what I hear, all seem to feature Belle interacting with the iconic animate objects in their iconic animate object forms, as well as Beast still in his Beast form, thus all clearly taking place after Belle had come to the Beast's castle, but before she breaks the spell. Except for a very select few I have seen where Belle is still living in her quiet village and hasn't even met the Beast yet, every single story takes place during this period, while all of Belle's life after her happy ending is completely ignored. Every now and then I see an image or some such where the timeline is completely skewed – Belle might be wearing a royal dress she wouldn't have had before meeting the Beast, and she's happily exploring outside the grounds of Beast's castle – but there's also an enchanted object in the picture. Are these scenes meant to be taking place in Belle's happily ever after or during that very brief time when Belle was staying with Beast and his servants before breaking the enchantment??
Because the time would have been brief. How long are we supposed to assume Belle stayed at Beast's castle anyway? All winter? All year?? A quick recap: in Beauty and the Beast, Belle stays at Beast's castle just long enough for Maurice to make it back to the village, ask the villagers for help and be refused it, decide that if no one will help him save Belle, he will go after her himself, and to wander back into the woods and nearly die there, but still be alive when Belle finds him. We know that the distance between Belle's village and Beast's castle can be covered in less than a day, as demonstrated by both Maurice and Gaston's mob. Maurice decided to go rescue his daughter the very night he realized no one would help him – if he hadn't, he would have been caught by the creepy insane asylum guy. And he couldn't have spent that long wandering around in the woods, or he would have died long before Belle's final night in the castle when she checks on him in the magic mirror. So even if time inside the enchanted castle moves more slowly than it does outside the walls (which I suspect it does, just because the Beast was at least a teenager when he got enchanted and the spell lasted until his twenty-first birthday, but in Be Our Guest Lumiere says the castle's residents have been under the spell for ten years now), Belle wouldn't have stayed with Beast for more than a few days, at most a week. So there is a definite limit on how many adventures Belle and Beast had time for while the enchantment was still in effect. Yes, you might argue that Belle was at least supposed to have stayed the entire winter, because when Maurice leaves his home to find Belle there is snow on the ground but by the time Belle brings him home the snow is melting, but I've seen plenty of early winters bring snowfalls that melt away in a couple of days. It doesn't change the fact that when we look at the timeline on Maurice's end, there really isn't any part of the story that could have been stretched out to accommodate endless adventures for Belle and Beast and her new friends.
But just because Beast and his servants are most recognizable in their enchanted forms, this part of the story has been stretched out until, if all the imagery and little stories and such were taken as cannon, it might easily have taken place over the course of several years and included events directly contradicting the cannon. (Surely any time Belle left the enchanted castle during her stay would be significant enough for the movie to mention??) I can forgive this a little more on the Disney Princess merch, because I understand why they would be more interested in showing us iconic imagery from the movies than whether the new scenes they create could have canonically happened. (Case in point, all those images of Tiana holding Naveen the frog while wearing the green dress she only got after they had both turned back into humans.) But if you're going to write a little story about a Disney Princess and her friends, especially if you're writing it officially for Disney (like for the colouring books, the comics, et cetera), shouldn't it be a priority to ensure it could actually fit into her cannon life story?? There's so much room to imagine what Belle's life could have been like after breaking the spell and marrying the Beast, so many adventures she could have had with her newly human husband and servants, so much blank canvas to explore. It isn't fair that Belle is the only Disney Princess whose life after her movie is never so much as touched upon, and for such a superficial reason. I wish the people who make these stories would be brave enough to show us the Beauty and the Beast characters in their true human forms, even if those aren't the forms they're best known as (perhaps taking the first bold step into making their human forms more known to the general public!), and finally allow us a glimpse into Belle's happily ever after.
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