In Beauty and the Beast, Gaston ate four dozen eggs daily when he was a child. That’s fourty-eight eggs a day. As an adult he adds another dozen, tallying up to sixty eggs a day. This is nothing short of genocide.
My theory for why Gaston is beloved by the townsfolk is that some time prior to the start of the movie, France was overrun with poultry. Helpless at the claws of the chickens, the people of France were preparing to abandon their country, when a lone child stepped forward. “I’ll eat the eggs”, a young Gaston bellowed, “And I will save our homeland”. And so it was, Gaston ate and ate until he was roughly the size of a barge. How the cholesterol didn’t kill him can only be attributed to his inhuman fortitude. This is where the story turns tragic.
What Gaston hadn’t accounted for was developing an addiction to the eggs. As he aged, he ate more and more, and with the chicken-crisis over, his addiction began costing him financially. There’s a scene during Gaston’s song where he motions to a wall full of his hunting trophies. But why are they there? Does he own the bar? No, he sold them for egg money. The fact he never brings up his egg addiction or his prior heroism can be attributed to another one of Gaston’s defining character traits: his struggle to be emotionally open, and his modesty. It’s not easy being the man who saved France.
I think the saddest scene is when Belle shows Gaston the book, and he holds it upside down. See, Gaston seems brutish, but remember - his entire childhood was spent eating eggs. He didn’t have time for an education; he sacrificed his upbringing for his countrymen. He can’t even hold a book correctly. What Gaston wants to say, what he’s struggling to articulate, is “Belle, I’m dying. A life long diet of a quite frankly insane number of eggs has left my body bloated with tumors. Before I shove off this mortal coil, I want children, who might experience a world without the oppression I have suffered”. Belle cruelly mocks him, which goes to make you wonder who the real beast is.
When Gaston sees the Beast in the mirror, two thoughts run through his head. First, he sees his countrymen in danger once more, and despite being riddled with egg-tumors, wants to lead the masses to one last charge of glory since fighting for France is all he knows. Second, he realizes Beast’s head is about a month’s worth of egg-money. So he sieges the castle, and in one of Disney’s most tragic moments, plummets to his death.
Another reason Gaston wants to marry Belle is because, as mentioned above, all he knows how to do is to fight for France and its people. Gaston saw Maurice as a genuine danger, and he’s not wrong; consider the hellish contraption Maurice created. One look at that war machine and Gaston hatched a plan; marry Belle, and get close enough to Maurice to tal