Disney Fan’s Powerpoint About Why Belle Should’ve Chosen Gaston Goes Viral

Dana Schwartz, a prolific tweeter and best-selling author with a keen sense of how to best grab an audience’s attention, took to Twitter over the weekend and shared her breakdown of why Belle was wrong to reject Gaston in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast…and it has people talking, as you might expect.

Schwartz, a correspondent for Entertainment Weekly who recently staged a budoir photo shoot in support of her book Choose Your Own Disaster (read it, it’s great), laid out 16 Power Point slides that present a compelling argument for why Belle’s life would have been better if she went with the handsome, rich egomaniac rather than the monster who lived in an isolated castle.

You can check out her thread here:

As you can see, a big part of what Schwartz is talking about isn’t even actually just Gaston and the Beast, but also the realities of the world at the time of Belle’s decision to marry a French prince (not to be confused with a Fresh Prince).

Within 25 years, Schwartz notes, the odds are pretty good that Beast will have become a target of public animosity during the French revolution.

This is one of those situations where Schwartz can twist some of the facts of both French history and the movie’s narrative to suit her position, but can only do so because her position is so close to objective truth that it’s funnier to make things seem more one-sided than they actually are for effect.

So you get points of contrast like Gaston “eats many eggs to stimulate the French economy,” while the Prince “eats wasteful magical feasts while his citizens cannot pay for bread.” Which…well…yeah.

But when you throw shipping, Disney and politics into a blender, surely nobody would have anything to say, right?

…Right?

Starting out with some confidence

This guy (and by “This guy” we mean New York Times writer Daniel Victor) seems pretty sure about this.

Bringing math into it

Dan Olson from the popular Folding Ideas YouTube channel (you may remember him from the lengthy video he did about poor editing in Suicide Squad) had to go and bring math into it.

It’s a ‘Community’ effort

The Management Would Like To Apologize For This Joke.

That’s some ‘Cool Hand Luke’ level stuff going on…

This thread about how Gaston likely smells after all those economy-lifting eggs is a funny and charming sidetrack amid a lot of arguing about where villains rate on the hot/crazy scale.

…But think of the animals!

Again, this kind of runs counter to Schwartz listing Gaston’s hunting prowess as a virtue in 18th Century France.

Solidarity

It’s good when people can find friends on the internet, no?

Beautiful in its simplicity

This might be the only one that made us audibly laugh.

More research is needed

This would be a strange follow-up to a humorous memoir about her dating life, but we could see it.

Everyone’s a critic

Of course, you aren’t going to have a conversation like this without some detractors.

And then there’s the chart

Before she launched into the Powerpoint presentation, Schwartz originally shared a chart on which she graphed how compelling a villain’s argument was, and how attractive she found them. 

To the surprise of…well, a healthy chunk of her commenters…she gave a pretty solid score to Chernabog which led to a lot of people raising some eyebrows. In response to the tweet above, she gave a brief rundown of her logic there.