cardassiangoodreads:

countesspetofi:

kaelio:

kaelio:

in Beauty and the Beast: Belle’s Magical Christmas there’s an evil pipe organ voiced by Tim Curry. many of you will remember this. however, i think many of us (including, embarrassingly, myself) overlooked that he is a magic pipe organ. huh. none of the other servants got magic powers. why does that guy have magic powers now? did the enchantress like him? did her magic interfere with his own pre-existing sorcerous powers? was the existing pipe organ magical and when he was meshed with that pipe organ he got some part of the powers it already possessed? i ask this because he also has my favorite motivation of any DTV disney villain: he wants to stay an evil pipe organ that can do magic. i fuck with that honestly.

everything about this makes sense. it’s a midquel. given the structure of the existing movie, it’s hard for the villain to be someone from the village. it would also be a bit awkward for it to be a stranger because the whole story is predicated on it being wrong to turn strangers away (the enchantress). so you have to have someone inside the castle, i guess. disney writers sitting around thinking, ok though. but if it’s someone in the castle, they’re all on the same team, right? they want Beast and Belle to get together so they can be human again. the reason they’re working together even with meaningfully different personalities is because they are united in common cause. So, you need someone who doesn’t want to return to their former form.

this is how you get Forte, explained elegantly thus:

alright so his motivations check out. If he’s just an organist he’s going to get old and he could easily be replaced. there’s no security in his world. thanks to the enchantress, he now IS the pipe organ. by the way the internet summarized this to me as a man who wants to “remain in organ form”. we recognize this as classic pervert behavior.

anyway though! magic! what’s that about

i get being a weird organ pervert who wants to stay an evil pipe organ forever. anyway with the addition of magic this is an easy choice (evil magic pipe organ voiced by tim curry; ideal lifestyle and absolute jackpot win). but WHY!! why is he also a witch! did you make a saucy little face when the Prince threw out the enchantress and you two locked eyes and she was like can you Believe this guy and you were like Oh i Know, like Don’t Even Tell me About It and she was like yeah you can be telekinetic!! evil pipe organ

anyway hashtag #lifegoals!

Full-time court musician, part-time pervert and magician; sounds like your average Enlightenment-era intellectual to me. Probably writing a picaresque novel or two on the side and keeping up a lively correspondence with Benjamin Franklin.

Exactly, this 100% checks out with the way that the musical patronage system in Europe at the time Beauty and the Beast takes place (18th century) works: your entire livelihood was based on getting money from royalty and nobility, which included commissions, but ideally meant being one particular titled VIP’s “court composer” since that had the greatest stability. Falling out of favor could mean losing your livelihood. (All of this was about to change in a few decades as the Industrial Revolution created an urban middle and non-titled-rich class and also established music conservatories, so we got the composer-as-job model that we have now of being either a professor or running a municipal orchestra, but obviously nobody knew this; the winds of change in the music world wouldn’t make themseles known until the 19th century.) It’s really easy to envision some Salieri type (as in the character in Amadeus, not the real historical guy) getting turned into a pipe-organ-who-does-magic and being like, actually, this is way better! I don’t have to worry about young upstart stealing my thunder and my commissions and my court composer job. I can fulfill my sacred mission from God of serving him by making music, forever. Also, a lot of musicians in general are weird little freaks and would probably enjoy being transformed into an immortal music-producing vessel, especially in the form of an instrument with a gigantic range that is prized for its ornateness and for its historical importance (organs are one of the modern instruments with the longest histories in Western classical music, being used in churches even long before any other instrumental music was permitted) and that has a history of being carefully preserved over centuries. To paraphrase a famous Ralph Vaughan Williams quote: why just write music when you can BE music?