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Gaston really is the most terrifying Disney villain because he could be anyone in the world. Later he convinces the whole town to set up his wedding with the knowledge that the would-be bride would be thrown into it. Everyone finds his creepy tactics as cute and boys will be boys-esque. So yeah, he is terrifying.
Yeah, the truly scary thing about Beauty and the Beast isn't that Gaston exists, but that society loves him. People who deride the movie by saying it's about Stockholm Syndrome are ignoring that it's actually about the various ways that truly decent people get othered by society. People don't trust the Beast because of the way he looks, which only feeds his anger issues and pushes him further away. Gaston isn't the only one who criticizes Belle for being bookish, either; the whole town says there must be something wrong with her. And her father gets carted off to a mental asylum for being just a little eccentric.
Howard Ashman, who collaborated on the film's score and had a huge influence on the movie's story and themes, was a gay man who died of AIDS shortly after work on the film was completed. If you watch the film with that in mind, the message of it becomes clear.
Gaston demonstrates that bullies are rewarded and beloved by society as long as they possess a certain set of characteristics, while nice people who don't...are ostracized. The love story between Belle and the Beast is about them finding solace in each other after society rejects them both.
Notice how the Beast reacts when the whole town comes for him. He's not angry, he's sad. He's tired. And he almost gives up because he has nothing to live for. But then he sees that Belle has come back for him, and suddenly he does.
In the original fairy tale, the Beast asks Belle to marry him every night, and the spell is broken when she accepts (like the Jean Cocteau version). In the Disney movie, he waits for her to love him, because he cannot love himself. That's how badly being ostracized from society and told that you're a monster all your life can fuck with your head and make you stop seeing yourself as human.
Society rewards the bullies because we've been brought up to believe that their victims don't belong. That if someone doesn't fit in, then they have to be put in their place, or destroyed. And this movie demonstrates that this line of thinking is wrong. It's so much deeper than a standard be yourself message, and that's why it's one of my favorite Disney movies.
Also what really grinds my gears about people that bring up Stockholm syndrome is that it was literally made up to gaslight a woman who sympathized with some bank robbers. ...A woman who got kidnapped as a hostage (there were 4 hostages in a bank for 6 days) found out WHY they were robbing the bank and sympathized with them. Then when she said "hey, actually they're not that bad. They weren't trying to murder or grape or anything, they had a reason."
Some "men" essentially said "poor stupid girl can't keep her hormones under control, she must love him. Poor thing." (Especially when she said she was more afraid of the incompetent police shooting her than the robbers.) Rather than actually listen to what she was saying they literally made up a whole syndrome to claim she was manipulated.
The former hostages said straight-out that they didn’t want to cooperate with the police afterwards because they were angry with the police’s actions during the robbery, then some dickhead psychologist who had never even interviewed them came up with the idea that they had actually refused to cooperate afterwards because they had “fallen in love” with their captors.
It's the exact same thing here. Rather than see how Belle ONLY started liking the Beast AFTER he started being kind to her and the fact that they built a friendship that eventually turned into romance people claim it was "poor stupid girl can't keep her hormones under control."
It's disgusting.
(And as a side note, we are entering a time when a Gaston-like "man" is in the White House sending people out to terrorize and destroy anyone not WASP like him.)
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