In the spirit of the holiday season, this is a series of short blog posts covering random things I have learned while doing Salesforce development, one for each day of Advent.

Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite Disney movies that I will watch every few months or so. Something that always bothered me was the idea that the curse on the castle would be permanent after the prince turned 21:

Which would bloom until his twenty-first year. If he could learn to love another, and earn her love in return by the time the last petal fell, then the spell would be broken. If not, he would be doomed to remain a beast for all time.

But during Be Our Guest Lumiere let’s us know how long they have been cursed:

Ten years we’ve been rusting, needing so much more than dusting, needing so much more than dusting…

So an 11 year old child was transformed into a beast for not letting some random stranger into his house in the middle of the night? If I don’t recognize you or you are not coming out of a delivery truck, I am not answering the door even if it’s the middle of the day! Seems a little unfair.

The live action remake tries to remedy this by making the prince an adult before he is transformed and changing the lyric in Be Our Guest to “Too long we’ve been rusting,” which makes me think that Disney realizes the ridiculousness of this idea.

But recently I saw a clip from Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas in which we get to see the scene where Prince Adam transforms (yeah that’s his name! Stop calling him “beast”, Belle. That’s really rude).

Ok, the Prince is a real asshole, maybe he did deserve this curse. But if we consider this canon and Prince Adam was a kid when this all happened, then what about Chip? When the Prince transforms back into a human he is is an adult. But Chip is still a child, and he looks like he is 4 or 5, tops.

Since he was transformed into an inorganic teacup, did he not get to age? Is he now a 14 year old trapped in the body of a 4 year old? He’s may still act like a child, but he also has 10 additional years of experience.

Also why did the witch transform the children and the dog? What the hell did they do wrong? Even the argument that the staff let Prince Adam get spoiled doesn’t hold much weight - he’s their employer and his title implies he is also has power of their lives. Come on now.

Speaking of the children, who are all these children in the cupboard?

I counted 22 cups in there. Are they running an orphanage in this castle? Were these children working as servants? Or were they born as cups and later transformed into humans? Either way, they spent a majority of their lives as teacups. Do they long for their cup form days?

These are really important questions and unfortunately I don’t think we’ll ever get the truth.