we're all in agreement that the beast from disney's beauty and the beast (1991) was 11 years old when the spell was cast
it isn't just because of the years stipulated in the movie (the rose stops blooming at his 21st birthday and be our guest mentions 10 years of transformation), this is also supported by the fact that the servants call the beast "master", which is an honorific used for boys and young men
this also explains why mrs potts treats him very much like a mom despite him being a monarch
if the age of the enchanted objects stopped moving forward at the time of the spell and only the beast was aging, it means the beast was, most likely, the same age as some of mrs potts's children at the time the spell was cast
this implies that the 7 kids (according to the movie, the number changes in other media) were stuck as kids for a decade, but also in maturity, not in a sort of "claudia from vampire chronicles type way", since chip behaves the same as a human as he did in his teacup form
they were frozen as kids for 10 years and came back to being human exactly as they were, while their master, who was around their age, is now a 21 year old man
which is wild to think about, because it means they've spent 10 years of their formative time in a loop that they could feel progress in real time but didn't reflect on their intellectual or physical growth
however, the alternative might be worse, though
if the age of the enchanted objects didn't stop during the spell, it'd mean all of mrs potts's kids had to be over the age of 10 by the end of the film and, looking at human chip (and her daughter in other media outside the movie), he would have been a baby when the spell was cast, at the very least, and spent the first decade of his life as a teacup, which idk what would mean developmentally
they would have spent 10 years of their lives learning how to exist as teacups to be thrown into a human body with 0 understanding of how that even works suddenly one day
the enchantress in beauty and the beast 1991 imo isn't as villainous as the fairy who enchanted the beast in villeneuve's tale, but is closer to that than to a fairy godmother or some selfless sorcerer, because even if, in this instance, she did it "as a test" and for him "to learn" how to treat people, she didn't hesitate to throw a spell onto several children, including the beast, who spent his entire adolescence in the body of a beast
it's understandable, I think, that a teenage boy suddenly in a beast's body, without any parents, would isolate himself and surrender to the idea of becoming a beast forever rather than go around looking for people to befriend, which made it much harder of him to fall in love and have someone fall for him to eventually break the spell
and the potts kids basically either were on stasis for 10 years as teacups or spent the early 10 years of their lives living as teacups and have no idea how a human body works
kinda wild when you think about it
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