Princesses are pretty and villains are ugly. Thatās just how the cartoon universe is. Except, thatās not how our universe is. Think of your favorite childhood animated film and see if this hold true. Jafar in Aladdin? One ugly dude. Yzma? Not exactly cute. Does that mean every character is that is less attractive in cartoons is evil? No, but it is the general trend. Children internalize messages of ugly = bad. If we do not want them to learn that ugly people are bad, we have to teach them. We might have to unteach ourselves a bit. After all, these are just appearances.
Have you noticed trend before?
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Real world application: my sister is gorgeous, and people automatically respond to her as if she is a good person. Altruistic, loving, empathetic, all that - and to be fair she does try to be what people want her to be, at first - but she is not any of those things and never has been, so she winds up blowing up every relationship once she gets sick of pretending to be nice. (With me sheās just consistently awful, but at least itās somewhat honest, but we grew up together so she canāt get away with faking anything and it drives her nuts.) So yes, people treat attractive people as if they are inherently good, and they arenāt. Theyāre just people. People who may or may not use that trust to absolutely destroy you bc you want to believe that they care about you. Rambling now but I see it happen constantly and itās absolutely reinforced by media. Even with the āhot villainā trope, the bad guy is always distinguished visually from the good guys in some way, as if we can simply know someoneās character in sight, and we canāt. I donāt think we should be able to, either.
This is also why I take issue with attacking someoneās appearance as a reaction to them saying or doing something awful or problematic, instead of actually targeting the problematic or awful behavior itself. When you attack the appearance as a reaction to the behavior instead of just addressing the behavior, youāre reinforcing that appearance and beauty is somehow tied to character or morality, which itās obviously not, but reinforcing that beauty and attractiveness is tied to morality and character is going to hurt people who donāt meet conventional patriarchal eurocentric cisheteronormative beauty standards.
Itās important to unpack how their āuglinessā is built too. Itās not (just) ugliness itās otherness. Itās being fat, queer coded, visibly non-white, failing at femininity, OLD⦠Jafar is not just neutrally designed to be uglier than Aladdin, Jafar wears eyeliner, Jafar is designed with stereotypical Arab features, his nose, his beard, his turban/hat whatever it was. Gothel isnāt ugly but sheās too confident, she believes sheās hot, she flaunts it, sheās threatening, and we want women who are hot but without trying, gorgeous but unaware of it (till the dude tells her), sheās a bitch, and thus the reveal thatās sheās actually an old decrepit woman is meant to be a satisfying punishment (very similar pattern with the Evil Queen in Snow White). Ursula, the matchmaker or the Queen of Hearts are portrayed as masculine fat women, sometimes with drag queen-esque makeup, not in a way which is empowering where theyāre deliberately defying norms, but in a way in which theyād WISH to be like the thin, delicate, normative protagonist but they fail. I could go on but my point is that the danger of these ideology charged works aimed at children is not so much that kids will assume someone pretty (according to the norm) is good by default, but much more that theyāre actively teaching kids to dehumanise fat and gender non conforming people, and people of color who donāt present and donāt strive to achieve european beauty, and women who donāt align (physically or in their behaviour) with patriarchal values, and that all of these are doubly icky if they look *gasps* OLD (because in general, but particularly for women, looking old must be a tragedy, and everyone knows if youāre ⨠unproblematic ⨠you do not age, so aging must be itās own proof of moral failure. right?)



























