Talk:Quasimodo/@comment-5208573-20140406014753/@comment-1672596-20150129004503

Quasimodo is definitely the hero of the film, and frankly, he did a far better job at actually communicating the true beauty from within message than Beauty and the Beast did with Beast (though even he managed to change over the course of the film so he technically applies by the end). And Frollo was definitely intended to be the villain (and I will mention that, dark or not, they really failed in their intention of making him as evil as one can get, as I can name several villains who were far more evil than him, especially in regards to being truly remorseless. Take Red Skull from the Captain America comics, for example. He was intended to simply be a caricature of the Nazi forces, an exaggeration, in other words, yet it turns out that his actions not only were scarily similar to actual Nazi officials [in particular, his espionage exploits had parallels with both SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and SS-Brigadeführer Walther Schellenberg, and his sadism and insanity, heck, even his physical appearance is eerily reflected with SS-Oberführer Oskar Dirlewanger], but he managed to be scarily realistic without the writers even intending for it, and what's even scarier, that wasn't even cutting past the surface of what Nazi Germany has done. Phillipe Augustine from Eternal Darkness Sanity's Requiem played the role of corrupt church official in a horrifying manner and far better than Frollo did. That's actually one of the reasons why I had to propose removing him from the Complete Monster category, as his presence really cheapens the term of actual remorseless characters) even if they really failed the mark of making him as evil as possible. I really wouldn't call Frollo "handsome," though.

That being said, I'm not really fond of "Don't judge a book by its cover" morals (appearances can be deceiving, true beauty comes from within, etc., etc.) since they frankly are not even that realistic or useful. I used to be a believer in it as a kid, to such an extent that I literally thought that those who are externally ugly must automatically be internally beautiful on the inside, and vice versa. I'm pretty sure even you guys can see the insanity in that viewpoint, which I kicked to the curb after Junior Year of High School. I got THAT from Beauty and the Beast (the fact that they explicitly showed or otherwise implied that most of the good-looking people were jerks and likewise the not-so-good-looking people were nice guys doesn't help). That's not the only reason I'm not a believer in it. I'm also not a believer because of the actions of people like Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who despite being so ugly that even Sartre himself referred to himself as such regarding physical appearances, many girls swooned for him and even slept with him, obviously not judging a book by its cover at all with him, and they paid dearly for it by his cruelly throwing them away after the sex was over, treated them like trash, and he even basically wrote about the experience in full crass detail to the closest he has to an actual loved one, Simone de Beauvoir (and he betrays even her at every turn as well), many of these girls being broken and paying dearly for it as a result of Sartre and Beauvoir's sick treatment of them. That's not even getting into some of their... ahem... politics (if it could be called that, like praising a certain Marxist Argentine as "the most complete human being of the century" despite it being obvious he was a mass murderer). For a Disney example of how not judging books by covers is most likely going to apply in real life, just look at Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: Snow White clearly didn't practice judging books by covers with the peddler, and she paid dearly for it by eating a poisoned apple and being landed in a coma. So anyone who thinks not judging a book by its cover is somehow a good moral really should remember what happened to Snow White when she practiced that moral, or what happened to Sartre's various concubines... sorry, female students who placed their trust in him and swooned him. It's actually about as bad as falling for someone solely for their handsome appearance or beautiful appearance.

Yes, I may sound very cynical with that statement about the moral, but considering how many times people use that moral and get backstabbed, I have every right to be very cynical.