The beast doesn’t need to transform to be loved. He doesn’t have to turn into a boring fucking prince to be loved. Or renounce to the essence of who it is. To me love is not transformation, love is acceptance and understanding.
Guillermo del Toro
This man gets me like no other
I still don’t feel like Del Toro gets it. The Beast doesn’t change to be loved. He changes because he is loved. Totally different.
I’m gonna say something controversial here.
I get that there are a lot of monsterfuckers who insist that the Beast in these stories doesn’t need to become a Prince in order for there to be a happy ending. But that is not true. It’s important to remember that in most versions of the story the monster is not who the Beast really is. He’s under a curse; one that prevents him from expressing his true self and from interacting with others. Beauty’s love for him is what breaks the spell because by piercing through the false form and seeing him for who he really is the curse loses it’s power. It’s a story of love triumphing over ugliness and loneliness, of how anyone can become beautiful and worth knowing if they are given love and are seen for who they are on the inside.
The Beast was never really a Beast. He is a Prince. The only thing that love really does in the end is turn him back into who he always really was, and I find it ironic that a lot of the people who insist that they love the prince for “who he really is” can’t accept his true self. They couldn’t have missed the whole point of this fairy tale any further if they were doing it on purpose.
If you think about it, Belle saying, “I want you to stay in this cursed form that you clearly hate because I personally find it hot” would actually be kind of awful. Like, imagine if you were horribly ill or something and your partner kept discouraging you from trying to get better because they had a fetish for whatever was wrong with you.
Or, from an entirely different point of view, the people saying that the beast isn’t the Prince’s true self are only half right. The beast *is* who he is, not as in he just happens to look like that, which is the angle that the “Belle should accept the Beast claws and all” idea is going off of; his beastly form is the externalization of his character flaws. So within the context of the story’s themes, if Belle were to love the Beast *for* his beastliness rather than in spite of, it would be symbolic of enabling his worst tendencies rather than encouraging him to better himself.
Actually that might be an interesting story idea. Say that the Beast meets a girl who accepts him *exactly* as he is and loves his beastly traits, and the story starts out looking like it’s going to be your typical fairy tale deconstruction where the thing that was bad in the story is *good* now, actually. Then it turns out that the Beast giving in to his Beastly nature is not a good thing for anyone, and the whole thing could be a metaphor for how accepting someone doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be on board with anything they do, and that calling them out when appropriate does not mean you don’t love them, and in fact can be an expression of love when done kindly, since you want the person you love to be the best person they can.
