I would love to write a TTS essay explaining why Gothel isnât Cassandraâs mother and Frederick and Arianna arenât Rapunzelâs parents and the showâs insistence on pushing parent/child struggles into those characters is kind of really forced so thatâs exactly what Iâm gonna do:
(Disclaimer: this got really messy and is kind of a bunch of nonesense glued together, so read it with a bit of patiece lmao)
Rapunzel grew up for the first 18 years of her life with Gothel, when TTS starts she has been living with Fred and Ari for 6 months and itâs wild to me how Raps already calls them mom and dad, but I wonât judge this part, she wants to be their daughter and wants to be a family so it makes sense that she would call them that way regardless if it feels natural or not, but I think where the series really fails is when it starts (by the very first episode) to give Rapunzel and Frederick father-daughter struggles, which is complete bs if you ask me, those two donât know each other. Rapunzel shouldnât have a âoh, I canât disobey my fatherâ train of thought because she doesnât even know him and therefore he isnât her father, at least not yet. She shouldnât be so trusting of his judgement of love for her because they donât have intimacy and the fact that they are fighting and disagreeing so much after having just reconnected is wild. Arianna is not that important for the plot, but her relationship with Rapunzel being so unapologetically perfect also rubs me the wrong way. Rapunzel was ruined by her mother, she was abused her whole life and I donât think she would just let anyone fulfill the role Gothel did without getting some therapy to unpack everything wrong that her mother, the one that actually raised her, did.
Rapunzel had a narcissistic mother, an awlful one who never loved her, but that doesnât mean that she didnât love Gothel. Raps lived her whole by that womanâs side, she loved her more than anything in the world and realizing the manipulation and abuse wouldnât just immediately stop a person as kind and forgiving as Rapunzel to still love her like a mother, because like it or not Gothel raised her for 18 years. She wasnât a good mother by any means but she was her mother nonetheless.
Another point is that at the end of season one Rapunzel goes away from Corona to explore, learn about the world and her own powers. I am not exactly sure how much time passes from the beginning to the end of s1 but Iâm pretty sure it wasnât more than 6 months, so Rapunzel lives with her bio parents for about a year and then goes straight into a one year long self discovery journey and youâre trying to tell me that she missed them? Not even just missed, but when she got hold of an artifact that showed what you waned the most what she saw were her biological parents and the people of Corona who in the first episode she claims to not remember the names of? Thatâs some real bs right there and I have no idea how the show runners thought this made any sort of sense. She doesnât fucking know them, maybe she respects or care about her folks, but she couldnât have possibly built this life long parent/child relationship that the show treats like she did.
Now, with Cassandra itâs a bit more complicated. She lived with Gothel for about four years of her life before being abandoned, but she very obviously didnât remember any of this, either because she was too young or because she repressed those memories. Gothel didnât seem to love Cass in the slightest, but because Cass grew up with only a emotionally distant father she longed for this reassurance that she was loved by a parent figure at some point in her life, she blames Rapunzel for everything that went wrong with her life, which can make sense but also is a bit awkward to sustain once you analyze the actual facts. Yes, Rapunzel and Eugene killed Gothel, but she didnât mean to do that, it was Eugeneâs plan and he only did it because Raps had literally agreed to be used and locked up from the real world for the rest of her life. Cass isnât dumb, she would know better than lashing out at her friends for accidentally saving her from living with a narcissist who didnât care about her. Gothel isnât Cassandraâs mother, Cass doesnât have a mother because she didnât have anyone to actually raise her.
If I was to rewrite Tangled weâd have a very different approach to how bio parents are handled, especially Rapunzelâs. I donât think she should be close to Arianna and Frederick at all, heck, I donât even think she should call them mom and dad. Cause bear with me, if you randomly found ot you are adopted by the time you were 18 and actually went to live with your biological family for about a year do you think youâd even have this sort of intimacy and bond with them?
