Disney's Descendants 1-3

[sophia_sol]

I have watched just SO many bad movie musicals in the months since March. After everyone started staying home, each weekend I now spend time with a group of friends watching a bad movie musical in sync and chatting about it on a group chat. We started with the 2019 Cats and have actually managed to go downhill from there. (I think Love Never Dies is the worst one so far but there are options. There are strong cases to be made for multiple other movies.)

Anyway as part of this experience, we watched all three of Disney's Descendants movies. And I must say, they're actually.....fun? Like. Terrible in many ways, but they manage to be enjoyable in a way that, say, the 1967 Dr Dolittle could never hope to achieve. That one is INTERMINABLE.

Descendants is a franchise about the kids of the various classic Disney characters, with focus on the kids of the villains. All the villains and their kids have been imprisoned on an island that has been enchanted to prevent the use of evil magic, but over in the good kingdom of Auradon, King Beast and Queen Belle and their son Ben decide to invite 4 teens from the evil island to come to high school in Auradon to see if they are redeemable!

So the four invited VK's (or Villain Kids, and yes, they do frequently use the term "VK" within the movies, it's weird) are our main characters. We've got Evie (daughter of the Evil Queen), Mal (daughter of Maleficent), Jay (son of Jafar), and Carlos (son of Cruella de Vil). Every single character in the younger generation has a name that starts with the same letter as whatever their most famous parent is known as and it's weird. Oh, except for Lonnie, who's Mulan's daughter, and honestly that name choice is even worse than Evie for the Evil Queen's daughter.

Anyway. Over the course of the series, we discover that EVERYONE no matter their parentage can have GOOD OR EVIL within them, and you can make your own choices about what to do! A surprising moral, I'm sure.

We also discover that the lead VK, Mal, has more sexual tension with literally every single other female character than she does with her designated love interest Ben, and honestly everyone in this movie comes across as extremely queer. Despite the series being textually Very Heterosexual. Prime ship options include Mal/Evie (vibe: BEST FRIENDS), Mal/Uma (vibe: EXES WHO ARE MAD AT EACH OTHER BUT STILL INTO EACH OTHER), Jay/Harry or possibly Jay/Gil (look I kept getting Harry and Gil confused with each other and I still don't remember which is which, I'm sorry!) (vibe: JUST REALLY CUTE), and so much more. Every time a new ship option came up in one of the movies I would hop over to AO3 to look at what the fandom's doing and report the stats back to the group. I was impressed with the sheer variety AO3 has on offer for this fandom, I didn't think it would be as big as it is.

Mostly the songs in the Descendants movies are boring and forgettable, but a couple of them are bops. The best song though is Kristin Chenoweth as Maleficent having an absolute blast hamming it up in "Evil Like Me", and it's AMAZING. Kristin Chenoweth living her best life!

The movies as a whole are overly simplistic, with fairly bad writing and cheap special effects and some fairly uncreative decision making. But I found myself invested despite myself. I haven't read any of the fic yet because I don't know how to winnow the good stuff out of the chaff in this particular fandom, but I wanna. I'm here for this collection of delightful weirdos!

Comments

[skygiants]

Yeah Love Never Dies is ... I'm fairly sure the worst I've ever seen, and I have seen some bad musicals. It just fails really impressively on every axis!

[sophia_sol]

it really is impressively bad in so many ways, like how does a person even go about failing to such a degree on so many fronts at once when they were intending to write a GOOD musical??

[jain]

Youtube was shoving Descendants songs at me for a while when I was on a Frozen 2 soundtrack kick. The aesthetic looked cheesy yet adorable, which I quite enjoy. I assumed it was a TV show, though, and that felt like way too much of a time investment for the probable return. But if they're movies, that changes everything! And the rest of your review certainly doesn't hurt--delightful weirdos with f/f and m/m sexual tension is precisely my jam.

[sophia_sol]

so there IS apparently also an animated tv show in the Descendants franchise so that might have been confusing the situation for you. But the three live-action movies stand alone and they definitely are cheesy fun. I hope you enjoy them! :)

[pauraque]

It doesn't surprise me that the children of Disney villains would be extremely queer, since Disney villians... well. You might say they tend to have a certain theatrical flamboyance. It's one of the paradoxes of Disney, that no matter how hetero the actual storylines are and how ~family values~ the brand is, the movies still always somehow feel completely gay?? I guess a lot of it is just the extensive overlap between "Broadway vibe" and "gay vibe".

[sophia_sol]

It's true! And probably the weirdest part of these movies, actually, is that when Hades finally shows up he doesn't come across as gay at all.

[pauraque]

What!! A non-gay Hades is hardly a Hades at all.

Also, I watched the video last night and woke up this morning with Evil Like Me stuck in my head. My life has been enriched!

[sophia_sol]

Eeeexcellent, Evil Like Me is here to bring joy to everyone!

[lokifan]

This sounds delightful honestly. And omg Evil Like Me is amazing!!! Thanks for introducing me to it!

[sophia_sol]

Excellent, I'm glad you enjoyed Evil Like Me so much! I love it a lot :D