Do U Notice Something About The Leads/ Human Characters.....

do u notice something about the leads/ human characters.....

that’s a little different from the characters playing objects/castle servants.....

or even the character who’s offscreen most of the show now......

hmmm let’s review:

EJ

-straight

-white

-man

Ashlyn

-straight

-white

although also

-plus size

(from certain details of her lines in the show it’s become apparent that while julia is jewish ashlyn is not)

Ricky

-straight

-white

-man

Big Red

-straight

-white

-man

(is Jewish but also playing the lackey)

Now let’s look at the other roles

Gina

-black

-woman

We’ve all seen the “not innocent enough to play Gabriela” bs but now we have the very flirty kinda sexual Babette being played by the black girl who people have already previously criticized the show for making her into a Jezebel

Kourtney

-black

-woman

Let’s see if this sounds familiar: plus sized dark skin black woman who’s a servant and often cares for the children (in case it wasn’t obvious im talking about the mammie stereotype)

And if we remove the black part it sounds like Mrs. Potts who as we know is a plus size older woman who is a maternal figure to not only the other teacup children but even to beast as well. So in other words they have the plus size black girl being a maternal servant to the beast and the other kids in the castle...

Speaking of kids let’s talk about one of them

Seb

- gay

One of the only two canon gay characters playing perhaps the least significant of the side characters

Carlos

-gay

-latino

Lumiere is already known for being quite over-bearing and eccentric and LOUD but now we have the loud, over-bearing to the other characters, and eccentric role going to the gay brown latino...

And then there’s:

Nini

-asian

-woman

who’s away for most of the time.

In other words, you know what isn’t in their show? Poc playing human non-servant characters. But you know what IS in their show? ✨Incest✨

Yup. With nothing more than an offhand comment this show is gonna have two literal cousins play love interests. Idc if they change the cast later on like how was hinted at in an interview the normalization and nonchalance attitude about COUSINS playing those roles was already established as just something u can brush off with a “not thinking about it”.

And there’s a lot of servant object roles and also a lot of poc/minority roles so obviously it was bound to happen for a myriad of reasons that some of the white characters get leads and some of the poc get the objects. That’s normal. What ISNT normal is how they could bend over backwards to justify why the plus size white girl getting belle is revolutionary and inclusive but not even attempt to 1. Not have incest and 2. Cast even one poc character as a lead.

They tried to make us out as crazy when people got mad Kourtney wasn’t Belle by trying to be like “oh we were throwing you off” but the reason that excuse fell short was because they didn’t throw us off at all. The case scenario was NOT that one week they dropped something that had us thinking it was one girl and the next week had us thinking it was another. It was that they always had us thinking it was going to be Kourtney. They weren’t throwing us off they were leading us on. In the end it comes off as we rather have a weird incest vibe going on than have the black girl we baited you with be an actual lead.

And Tim would probably see this and say something like “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t think of it that way when I cast this person as this and that person as that.” and it’s like of COURSE you didn’t. Of course you didn’t think of what the black people, and the latino people, or the asian people might think of how you’re portraying the characters that look like them on screen. You’ve never had to. Tim may be gay but he is also white and a man and that awards him privileges even within his own minority group. So of course it’s not even slightly surprising to me that all these things slipped by him without any notice. It’s cuz he can afford not to notice. But it being unsurprising doesn’t make it any less upsetting. It’s still bullsh** that they would literally rather contradict their own plot points than have the minority characters be anything other than harmful stereotypes just because THEY don’t see why it’s so bad.

P.S. this is not for any hate directed towards the actors. All of them are just workers locked under contract trying to do their jobs and get payed. They have no control over the stories that Tim and his writing team decide to write. If you take anything other than that the writers are responsible and try to go after the actors for just doing their jobs then you’ve completely missed the point of ALL of this.