It’s important to unpack how their “ugliness” is built too. It’s not (just) ugliness it’s otherness. It’s 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 isn’t ugly but she’s too confident, she believes she’s hot, she flaunts it, she’s threatening, and we want women who are hot but without trying, gorgeous but unaware of it (till the dude tells her), she’s a bitch, and thus the reveal that’s she’s 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 they’re deliberately defying norms, but in a way in which they’d 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 they’re actively teaching kids to dehumanise fat and gender non conforming people, and people of color who don’t present and don’t strive to achieve european beauty, and women who don’t 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 you’re ✨ unproblematic ✨ you do not age, so aging must be it’s own proof of moral failure. right?)
