Bonus Post: The Terrifying Totalitarian World Of Disney: Descendants

I have a problem.  It's not really a problem for me, and it's not really a problem for anybody else, either, but "I have a problem with reading too much into kids' shows" sounds a lot better than "I spend a great deal of time thinking about the inner world of kids' shows and trying to figure out how they work".  I have stayed up late wondering, where are Max and Ruby's parents?  Is Mike the Knight actually a prequel to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves?  What exactly was Sir Topham Hatt thinking when he created an army of steam locomotives with artificial intelligence and the emotional maturity of preschoolers?  It's a lot of fun if you ever want to try it, and if you're a parent of young children it's a great game to play with yourself to increase your enjoyment of the programs that are going to spend much more time on your screen than Orange is the New Black.

With this in mind, let me turn my overactive imagination to the world of Disney: Descendants.  Because there is something very wicked in the Kingdom of Auradon.

I may have brought up the subject briefly in my review, but there is a legitimately universe-breaking problem with Cruella De Vil's inclusion among the villains on the Isle of the Lost.  See if you can find it with me.  The core four villains are: Cruella, Maleficent, Jafar and Evil Queen. Ignoring the seething rage I still get over the fact that Evil Queen is not her effing name, there's a real one-of-these-things-just-doesn't-belong-here vibe with these four.  Maleficent, an all-powerful sorceress and queen of the fairies, laid a deadly curse on a royal princess.  Jafar, an all-powerful sorcerer and occasional genie, attempted a violent coup on the kingdom of Agrabah, attempted regicide and imprisoned and enslaved the crown princess.  Evil Queen, as the... evil queen and stepmother of crown princess Snow White, ordered her murder and then attempted to finish off the job herself, and not at all because she was the rightful heir, but because she was prettier.  All three conspired to harm a royal person or persons.  All three are magic users and legitimate enemies of the state for a magical, fairy-tale kingdom.

Cruella, on the other hand.... what did she do wrong? Besides legitimately purchase seventy-four dalmatian puppies?  She kidnapped fifteen dogs.  That's her entire crime.  Planning to kill and skin them is pretty awful, but I'm pretty sure there weren't animal cruelty laws in England in the 1920s, and even if there were, Attempted Animal Abuse is still not a crime.

So we have here a mortal, with no magical powers, whose entire career of villainy was committed against one family of dogs.  Dogs who, in their own movie at least, were incapable of communicating to their owners except in the normal way dogs always have. Which means that even though the dogs' owners may suspect that Cruella was behind their pets' disappearance and harbour that suspicion until the end of their days, there's still no way of proving it.  And yet Cruella winds up shunted off to the Isle of the Lost, a combination prison camp and ghetto, for the crime of alleged dognapping. Without benefit of either criminal charges or conviction, Beast's cartoon gestapo rounded her up with all the other ne'er-do-wells.

If that's the case, then just what does it take to be classified a villain and dropped into permanent exile? There are thousands of people on the Isle of the Lost - whole families, even - and only a fraction of them have any connection to any Disney villain.  What were their crimes? Mail fraud? Tearing the tag off the mattress? 

How about dissent?

We are told that Beast and Belle united the kingdoms into the overkingdom of Auradon twenty years ago (instead of going on a honeymoon, which would likely have been much healthier). You don't just up and decide to unite a dozen sovereign states by yourself.  There had to be some loyalists around who weren't pleased with the thought.  I would imagine that those dissenters make up a good portion of the population of the Isle.  Entire families, women and children and even babies, shunted off to an off coast slum and forgotten about forever, left at the mercy of a new ruling class of power-mad, pissed off sorcerers.  In other words, the United States of Auradon is a terrifying Orwellian nightmare-state.

It really puts a different spin on the whole "Choose Good" moral of the movie, when "I choose Good!" really means "I choose continued acceptance and fraternization with the totalitarian overlords who would willingly exile me again the second I opposed them!" It also, technically, makes Maleficent less of a villain and more of a revolutionary.

And all because they decided to include Cruella De Vil in their Rogues Gallery, a villain who is one of the hands-down favourites for best-animated villain in any of the Disney movies, but who in no other way fits in with their milieu.  They would have been much better off going with Ursula's kid instead.