“What’s the matter, Gaston, too kind hearted?” snarled the beast.
Yellowed fangs shining in the dim moonlight, the terrible monster closed in on our hero. Gaston glanced over to Belle and knew immediately what he had to do. He sprang to his manly feet, swung his masculine arm through the air and connected with a testosterone-fueled rocket of a punch. Broken teeth filled the air as the beast fell to his well deserved doom on the jagged rocks below the balcony where they had been fighting.
Belle threw herself into Gaston’s rippling arms as he walked back inside the castle.
“Gaston!” she cried. “You and your biceps have broken the spell that horrible creature put over me! Please don’t think me a fool for not falling for your slab-chested charms the first time around, I wasn’t in my right mind.”
“Shhhhh…” he said, pressing a finger to her lips. “I know. All is forgiven.”
As they walked back to the tavern to celebrate with a riveting song of Gaston’s awesomeness, the evil castle exploded in the background to the sound of a sweet guitar riff.
I didn’t get to finish my far better version of “Beauty and the Beast,” because it was at that exact moment that the police finally broke down the door and removed me from the Starbucks where I was educating the ignorant masses. However, I think you get the gist of it, just as my captive audience did. It’s a crime against humanity that Gaston wasn’t the hero in “Beauty and the Beast.”
For right now, we’ll ignore the fact that according to the song that was named after him, the man was invincible. There’s a much better argument here than “Gaston was awesome.”
Why did Belle reject Gaston in the first place? Because he was self centered? If that’s the case, then the beast wasn’t any better. He had more angst than a 13 year old girl’s Facebook timeline and threw a fit when he didn’t get his way. Sure, as they started to fall in love he got all cleaned up and learned how to eat properly and took her dancing. The beast wasn’t really responsible for any of that though. For every sweet little nothing that the beast managed to half heartedly mutter, his magic furniture had to spend ten minutes nagging him to stop being a jerk.
The beast didn’t even bathe himself before the big ballroom dance scene. Gaston loved being Gaston (can you blame him?), but the beast was a child. In fact, the only person in the entire movie that wasn’t self centered was the talking candle stick, and he got friend zoned faster than he could organize an on the spot musical number.
The big turn around for the beast was when he saved Belle from the wolves, but even that wasn’t that spectacular. What was he going to do? Let an innocent, smokin’ hot babe get eaten by wild animals? It was his fault that she left. On top of that, those wolves may as well have been walking protein shakes if Gaston had gotten the opportunity to save her. He’d have been snapping necks, going for rad throwing knife kills and walking off without a scratch. What the beast did was nothing special.
The beast being a bad choice doesn’t make Gaston a good choice though. What does make Gaston a good choice is the fact that Belle would’ve had a fantastic life with him. When he laid out how everything was going to be, it may not have been what Belle had in mind, but it would’ve been better than what any of the townsfolk could’ve given her. Plus, Gaston was the one reaching up for Belle. She could’ve told him how she wanted it to be, and he would’ve had to compromise on at least a few things if he wanted to marry her. He would’ve actually had to change for her to win her over. Unlike the beast, who just used his unlimited resources to put on a flashy show for her without doing anything hard. Don’t even say that Gaston wouldn’t make the effort. He ate 48 eggs in one sitting every day just to get jacked. Go eat 48 eggs and tell me that he wasn’t willing to wok for what he wanted. As far as the whole threatening to put her father in an asylum if she didn’t marry him thing goes, that was just anti-Gaston propaganda created by hippies and liberals.
To top it all off, the beast could’ve never beaten Gaston in a fight. Gaston had been hanging bear heads on his wall for who knows how long, while the beast was just moping around in his castle listening to Linkin Park and screaming that he was totally getting a nose ring when he moved out while his talking furniture wondered where they went wrong. Gaston was ready for a fight, not to mention the fact that he tore a stone gargoyle clean off the side of a castle with his bare hands and could shoot a muzzle loading shotgun three times without reloading it. As soon as he got to the beast, the writers just decided he wasn’t a genetic super mutant anymore, which is inconsistent.
No one fights like Gaston. It’s in the song, so it’s automatically true.
It’s not hard to enjoy going on dates with a girl that has Barbie doll proportions, literal “Disney princess hair” and is your only hope of not being cursed anymore (although I don’t see the problem with being a werewolf and living in a castle straight off of a heavy metal album cover). In half a year, I guarantee Belle was longing for that rustic hunting lodge with Gaston. The moral of this story is, if you’re going to be a jerk, be a jerk with a castle. Chicks dig that.
