>>125093750Your points are all valid, but since I’m in the habit of playing around with mental gymnastics to excuse this kinda shit, I’ll have a go:
>>kid gets cursed, but there's a portrait of his older human selfTwo possibilities: 1) the portrait is actually of him as a boy, and it just looks like him as an adult. The christmas special sequel had a flashback with him as a kid in it, and even though he was supposed to be like 11, he really didn’t look all that different. Also portrait artists aren’t always very good, and a lot of portraits of children done in this era do indeed look pretty fucked up and make children look older than they’re supposed to.
Or, 2) The entire castle is enchanted, so the portrait could be Dorian Grey style enchanted too, and age up with The Beast. It could be one more “fuck you” to him. Like “hey, this is how hot you could’ve been, if you weren’t cursed.” It could even be part of why that’s his special tantrum room
>>nobody takes 2 minutes to explain the situation to BelleThis is the hardest one to excuse. But I guess it could be that the castle staff were worried that if they told Belle about the curse, it could fuck up their chances of getting the curse lifted. It is made very clear that they think the curse will only be lifted if someone falls in true love with The Beast, so maybe they think it’d be impossible for Belle to experience “true love” for him if she knows about the curse. Because then she could be like “Oh you’re actually a hot prince? Well then it’s easy to love you!” And then she wouldn’t really love him for him, and magic rules wouldn’t recognize it, and they’d be stuck as cookware and shit.
I would like it if they coulda had a conversation detailing this reasoning. Like maybe Cogsworth could want to just tell her, and then Lumiere says that’s an awful idea for the reasons above, but oh well, I guess not.
(cont.)
