Disney Hero Aesthetics // Flynn Rider

John Smith | Quasimodo | Shang | Aladdin | Hercules | Prince Phillip | Milo Thatch | David Kawena | Peter Pan | Prince Florian | Prince Eric | Prince Naveen | Prince Adam (Beast) | Tarzan | Kristoff | Prince Charming

Alex Hirsch is this close to fucking losing it and going on a murderous rampage through Disney’s corporate offices

THE LITTLE MERMAID SERIES (1992-94)

#tw: dynamite gal

Oh wait now I get what triggers are

Yeah, see, THIS is a trigger. Something that prompts a horrible flashback that makes someone go into a literal panic attack. It is NOT something that makes you slightly uncomfortable, so can we all just stop tossing that word around like it’s nothing.

thank you Wreck It Ralph

Reblogging for valuable commentary

Also, can we talk about how Felix dealt with it? He NEVER used that word again (only once in front of Ralph, never by her), there was never any talk about how she could get over it, and in their wedding they all made plans to help her with her paranoia by recognising her fears and showing she was safe by pointing guns at the window and having extra security.

A++++++ on dealing with mental issues magnificently, Wreck-It Ralph!

Will never not reblog this when I see it

also this was the greatest 5 second character development in cinematic history

folks on twitter have already pointed out that Cruella is perhaps the worst possible choice for a protagonist seeing as how her entire motivation is ‘wants to murder puppies for money’ and there’s just. no way to spin that. 

Maleficent worked, okay, she worked because she was a pretty mysterious character to begin with; her goals and motivations in Sleeping Beauty were vague enough that there was room for character exploration. but Cruella? 

the reason Cruella was such a fantastic and fantastically funny villain was just how BASIC she was. 

here’s Cruella: she designs clothes, she thinks a puppy-skin coat would look cool, she kidnaps a bunch of puppies because she’s rich and spoiled and used to getting her way. that’s it. that’s all there is to her. that’s all there needed to be, because a. her voice actress was god-tier b. her design and animation was flawless c. the story was pretty simple and didn’t need a villain with complex motivations and d. she shared the villainous spotlight with Jasper and Horace (who i might actually be interested in seeing a movie about tbh, just because ‘a weird old rich lady hired us to steal dogs from another rich lady and her husband and now the dogs are fighting back why is this happening where did my life go wrong’ is a fucking hilarious premise) 

my point is WHY NOT URSULA

SERIOUSLY. URSULA. 

there’s SO MUCH you could do with Ursula. not only does she have all the charisma and visual flare that Cruella does, her motivations, like Maleficent’s, were always a touch unclear. 

she fucking hates the king of the sea and it’s never really explained why. she fucks around with two monarchies seemingly for the lols. she can do magic but she lives alone in a cave with only her prisoners and her two eels for company AND she actually loves her eels and is legit sad when they die. she’s weird and mysterious and sneaky and badass and there’s just. so many cool paces you could go with her! does she have a reason to hate the king? why is she the only octopus person we see? why do people still make deals with her given that she’s made a horrifying living garden out of those who couldn’t pay up? she turned herself into a human so she’s a shapeshifter, holy fuck, is that something she’s done before? 

ursula movie pls  (but like. someone other than disney make it)

bonus with Ursula: she makes reference to having been ‘nasty’ and ‘they weren’t kidding when they called me a witch’ in ‘the past’

in a way that suggests she used to get up to way more overt and assertive evil-magic action that she can’t spin the way she can her current favor-trading business, which she presents to Ariel as her post-reform public service career.

Ariel has heard of her as ‘the Sea Witch,’ a villainous figure from whose name she recoils, but not so terrifyingly villainous she swims hard the other direction.

there is so much narrative packed into that! what did she do? what did triton do to stop her? why did he stop at restraining her to the extent that he did, so she’s still active in a small-scale way?

(are they related? is she the last representative of a fallen royal house? if so did Triton’s family take that trident from hers, for her to be so fixated on obtaining it? was there a fish-people uprising against the tyranny of the octopodes, or a conquest? is she a representative of a disparaged religion? in what way was ariel’s mother involved in this narrative?)

I like hte point that op makes tho about what kind of character Ursula is. They made this same joke in Twisted (a Starkid musical) years ago.

Holy shit dude

This sounds like... really important? What the FUCK Disney??

They are just straight up not paying loyalties! "Disney’s argument is that they have purchased the rights but not the obligations of the contract."

This is seriously dangerous to creators

Read the letter from Alan Dean Foster:

SIGNAL.

BOOST.

Because you know if Disney gets away with not paying creators, everyone else will want to see if they can get away with it.

First of all, yes to all of this.

But something I think should be highlighted is the difference between the Disney franchise model, and a lot of previous franchise models, and why the Disney model sucks.

If you, say, write an original novel, and it gets published in a traditional publishing house, they will give you a check up front and also pay you royalties, that is, a percentage of the profits the book makes. (If you’re asking “why don’t you get ALL the profit, if you’re the sole author?” the answer is that the editors, typesetters, printers, cover artist, advertisers, and bookstores need to get paid, too; they aren’t producing and selling your book out of the goodness of their heart.) If the book is a flop, you’ll get nothing but the up-front check; if it’s a smash hit that sells a lot really quickly and then gets forgotten about, you’ll get a lot of money in the first year and not much thereafter; if it becomes a classic or perennial favorite you will have a small but steady stream of revenue trickling in for years.

When Disney hires someone to create something for a franchise they own, they do not pay royalties. They never have, to the best of my knowledge. The contract is a strict one off, work-for-hire. You create something to their specifications, they give you a check, and off you go. If the thing you created is the greatest of its kind ever, you don’t get royalties. Disney can profit for the next century, but you don’t get anything. This is legal, because when you signed the contract you agreed to it--you got all your money up front, not tied to the success or failure of your creation. If your creation is a failure, this is a really good deal, because you’ll make more money. If your creation does medium-well, it’s a toss-up, because you might have made more money with royalties, but you might not; and the accounting and business angle is simpler if you get a lump sum vs. dribs and drabs trickling in for the next couple of years. But if your work is a great success ... then not getting royalties for it means the contract was a really terrible deal for you and a great deal for Disney.

But the thing is, Disney has spent the last several years buying up franchises from other people and corporations. And some of those franchises did pay royalties, at least for some authors. See, especially back in the 70s through the 90s, if you wanted a big-name author to write a novelization or tie-in (and thus have a better chance of that book selling well), offering royalties was how you did it. Because sure, there were a lot of mid-list or bottom-list or newbie authors who would write work-for-hire (i.e. payment up front but no royalties) just because they needed the cash. For a newbie or bottom-list or mid-list author, they might actually make more money doing work-for-hire for a major franchise than they would writing their own original stuff. You churn out a novel to their specifications, you take your check, pay your bills, and then go back to writing the stuff you actually want to write. Which is why so many novelizations and tie-ins are mediocre at best. But a major author (who might do a better job, and who would attract readers who otherwise don’t bother with tie-ins and novelizations) wouldn’t take a contract like that because they’d make more money on their own stuff where they would get royalties.

Alan Dean Foster was one of the leading SF/F authors of the late 20th Century. And he had a positive talent for writing tie-ins and novelizations and making them really good. Which is why he got good contracts with royalties to write those books instead of them being work-for-hire, and also why many of those books are still in print and still selling steadily, today, literally 40 years later, decades after most of the other tie-ins and novelizations of that era are out of print.

So even after snaffling up all these other franchises, there probably aren’t too many authors who wrote books that Disney now owns the rights to who are due royalties. And most of the books Disney now owns where the authors are due royalties ... it probably doesn’t matter much because the books are old enough that they haven’t sold many copies in the last decade or so, so it’s a moot point.

I bet that what happened was that Disney doesn’t have anyone on staff who actually handles figuring out who is owed royalties and how much, because ... they’ve never had to deal with royalties because they do everything work-for-hire. So then Alan Dean Foster, one of the few people who a) wrote novels that Disney now owns the rights to, b) is entitled to royalties on them, and c) those novels actually sell enough on a regular basis to generate royalties, starts asking why he’s not getting his quarterly check. And Disney is like, who does this dude think he is, why should we pay him for books that he wrote forty years ago, he’s already been paid, we own the books now fair and square.

Except that’s not what the contract says. And now they’re trying to wiggle out of it.

I hope they get laughed out of court and have to pay not only the royalties but any legal bills Foster may have.

FUCK YOU DISNEY

Anyways, y’all better start saving your fave fanfics and fanart under the Disney labels cause it looks like they’re trying to curb fair use/fanworks and I’m sure there’s going to be mass panicked deletions even though it’s probably unnecessary cause AO3′s legal team will fight for us.

You know that 400K yall were so fucking mad about OTW raising? Yeah, its gonna pay for the travel expenses and court costs that the legal team at AO3/OTW when they protect your shit from getting C&Ded. DO NOT DELETE YOUR STUFF! IF YOU GET CONTACTED BY DISNEY - GO TO THE ORGANIZATION OF TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS , CONTACT THEIR LEGAL ADVOCACY DEPARTMENT! ASK FOR HELP!! THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE IS *WHY* *THEY* *EXIST*

Note that Disney would have one Hell of a time serving C&Ds to authors at AO3 - because there is no “contact author” option other than leaving a comment.

They’d have to contact the SITE, which is to say, the Organization for Transformative Works, to deliver a C&D order or a DMCA takedown order.

And the OTW is not going to remove fics because someone sent a letter that says “actually those characters belong to me and you can’t use them that way.” The OTW was created to FIGHT that kind of claim. They are ready. 

Don’t delete your fics out of fear. WE OWN THE SERVERS. They can’t threaten the hosts into deleting anything.

And if Disney thought they had a strong legal case against fanfic, they’d’ve shut down the archive a decade ago, when it was penniless and unknown, instead of waiting until it had won several battles in Congress and got worldwide acclaim for a Hugo Award.

This is important!

disney | aesthetic | poc characters

Elsa 

It’s almost like she’s moving

I’m tired of hearing people say “Disney’s Cinderella is sanitized. In the original tale, the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to make the slipper fit and get their eyes pecked out by birds in the end.”

I understand this mistake. I’m sure a lot of people buy copies of the complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, see their tale of Aschenputtel translated as “Cinderella”, and assume what they’re reading is the “original” version of the tale. Or else they see Into the Woods and make the same assumption, because Sondheim and Lapine chose to base their Cinderella plot line on the Grimms’ Aschenputtel instead of on the more familiar version. It’s an understandable mistake. But I’m still tired of seeing it.

The Brothers Grimm didn’t originate the story of Cinderella. Their version, where there is no fairy godmother, the heroine gets her elegant clothes from a tree on her mother’s grave, and where yes, the stepsisters do cut off parts of their feet and get their eyes pecked out in the end, is not the “original.” Nor did Disney create the familiar version with the fairy godmother, the pumpkin coach, and the lack of any foot-cutting or eye-pecking.

If you really want the “original” version of the story, you’d have to go back to the 1st century Greco-Egyptian legend of Rhodopis. That tale is just this: “A Greek courtesan is bathing one day, when an eagle snatches up her sandal and carries it to the Pharaoh of Egypt. The Pharaoh searches for the owner of the sandal, finds her and makes her his queen.”

Or, if you want the first version of the entire plot, with a stepdaughter reduced to servitude by her stepmother, a special event that she’s forbidden to attend, fine clothes and shoes given to her by magic so she can attend, and her royal future husband finding her shoe after she loses it while running away, then it’s the Chinese tale of Ye Xian you’re looking for. In that version, she gets her clothes from the bones of a fish that was her only friend until her stepmother caught it and ate it.

But if you want the Cinderella story that Disney’s film was directly based on, then the version you want is the version by the French author Charles Perrault. His Cendrillon is the Cinderella story that became the best known in the Western world. His version features the fairy godmother, the pumpkin turned into a coach, mice into horses, etc, and no blood or grisly punishments for anyone. It was published in 1697. The Brothers Grimm’s Aschenputtel, with the tree on the grave, the foot-cutting, etc. was first published in 1812.

The Grimms’ grisly-edged version might feel older and more primitive while Perrault’s pretty version feels like a sanitized retelling, but such isn’t the case. They’re just two different countries’ variations on the tale, French and German, and Perrault’s is older. Nor is the Disney film sanitized. It’s based on Perrault.

      “May I speak freely?”       “You can’t seem to help yourself.”       “You’re not as bad as you think you are.”       Annoyed, she waves her hand to transform him. “Be a bird!”       But this time, he catches her hand and holds it. “Every time you don’t like what I have to say you transform me back into a bird.”       “I thought you liked being a bird.”       He looks at her with more feelings than he can share. “Not as much as I used to.”

                                                                             — from the Maleficent script by Linda Woolverton

LET’S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS

Yesss character designs by Meg Park. (x)

so yknow how some people are calling Elsa in frozen 2 butch even though she totally isn’t

man like what if huh

oh wait I’m an artist

I don’t know if this is butch so much as something that’s closer to my personal style but anyway here’s Gay Elsa with long and short hair flavors cause I couldn’t decide