Gaston

Personality

ESTP - 3w2 - sx/so - 387 - SLE - Neutral Evil - SLUEN - Choleric-Sanguine - EF(S)

Physical Appearance

As noted throughout the film, Gaston possesses an athletic build, a double square chin, and a handsome appearance. He has icy blue eyes and his long black hair is tied with a crimson band into a ponytail. He generally wears yellow hunting gloves, although he discards them by the midpoint, but wears them again towards the end of the film. Gaston also wears a red tunic with a yellow collar and a long V-cut neckline, black tights, a brown belt with a gold buckle around his waist, and brown boots trimmed with golden. He mainly carries a quiver of arrows on his back and sports a black cape with two silver buttons during cold evenings and his final battle with the Beast. He also has a lot of hair on his chest.

About (Part 1)

Gaston is the main antagonist of Disney's 1991 animated feature film, Beauty and the Beast. He was an arrogant and chauvinistic hunter who was greedily determined to have Belle's hand in marriage, even by force if necessary. His obsession turned him into a ruthless and traitorous villain, especially upon his discovery that Belle's love was not for him, but for a Beast. Gaston is strong and handsome and exploits these traits to the fullest. While it is not clear if he considers himself as a good person or not (like Governor Ratcliffe and Claude Frollo do), the villagers very much do, considering how popular he is with them (especially the Bimbette triplets), and how they seem unaware of his true nature (Gaston reprise in the original film notwithstanding), and this serves to fuel his already massive ego. A narcissist who sees himself as superior to everyone around him, Gaston is proud, boorish, uncultured, greedy, short-tempered, bad-mannered, narcissistic, and sexist. He is also impulsive and arrogant, as evidenced by his setting up a wedding before he even proposed to Belle under the expectation that she'd approve of becoming his wife, thinking she was in love with him.

About (Part 2)

Convinced that he is powerful enough to defeat the bigger and stronger Beast by himself, Gaston even taunts the Beast, wanting him to fight back as he wants to prove that he can kill him in a fair fight. However, his arrogance makes him underestimate his opponent and revealed his cowardly side, once he realizes his life is on the line, he may have to rely on desperate measures to survive. Despite this, he was not arrogant enough to believe there was no risk of being killed by the Beast, as he freely admits that fighting the Beast does have the likelihood that he or the other villagers might very likely die during "The Mob Song". Despite his belief that thinking is "a dangerous pastime" (suggesting that he is anti-intellectual), Gaston can be cunning, calculating, and manipulative, which is emphasized twice in the story: first when he comes up with a plan to blackmail Belle into marrying him by threatening to have her father, Maurice, thrown into an insane asylum should she refuse. Due to poor management and cruel treatment of inmates, this is a surprisingly harsh threat. When that plan is foiled by Belle showing the Beast with a magic mirror, Gaston simply improvises and quickly turns the tables by manipulating the villagers into forming a mob to kill the Beast, thus eliminating his competition.

About (Part 3)

Gaston is not above using underhanded tactics, which had earlier been implied with LeFou's claim about Gaston being "slick" as well as Gaston's admission about being good at "taking cheap shots", and confirmed when he shows himself to literally be a backstabber in his final moments, showing that he also cheats at things. In fact, his "begging" to the Beast may have been nothing more than a trick: he still had a knife on his person, and if the Beast was as "kind and gentle" as Belle described him to be, then Gaston would have appealed to his enemy's better nature, thus allowing him to be brought back on solid ground before he could get one last shot. Regardless of his cunning and manipulation, Gaston is far from the smartest Disney Villain. Gaston is the kind of person who won't give up on his goals easily; no matter how much Belle evades him or however hard the humiliation he receives, he is determined to make her his wife. His persistence is such that he will go to great lengths and sink so low to ensure he wins. Even when the Beast overwhelms him, Gaston will not tolerate losing Belle to this "monster".

About (Part 4)

This drive will blind him to the dangers of climbing a balcony, which overlooks a deep abyss, causing him to fall to his death. In the film, Gaston's vocabulary skills are slightly inconsistent; when Belle refers to him as being "positively primeval" early in the film, the latter apparently takes it as either a compliment, clearly not knowing what the term actually means, or a joke. However, in the "Gaston" song, he accurately uses the word "expectorating" in reference to his skills at spitting ("expectorating" being a more fancy way of saying the term "spit"). Gaston's view of women is extremely sexist and misogynistic even by standards of the time in which the film takes place. While he appears charming to all the other women of the village, such as the Bimbettes (who, being products of an upbringing in the village, grew up to see nothing wrong with Gaston's behavior, completely mesmerized by his muscles and handsome face), Belle is the only woman in the entire town to be able to see him for who he really is from the very start of the film and dislikes him for it.

About (Part 5)

He believes that women like Belle are not supposed to be smart, think for themselves, or get ideas, and he even tosses Belle's book into the mud in an attempt to get her to focus on "more important things" (namely, himself). Because of this, Gaston's attempts to charm Belle always fall flat because of his chauvinistic, boorish behavior. His sexism and misogyny is also shown by the fact that he does not seem to even consider the possibility of fathering any daughters, as he states he wants "six or seven strapping boys" like himself. Gaston suffers from obsessive love, which is shown by his intense infatuation with Belle. Indeed, he is so obsessed with her that he ignores all the other pretty women in the village who would be happy to be his "little wife", even ironically, those who technically matched Gaston's standards of how women should behave. When Gaston is singing about wanting to marry her in the opening song, he says "Right from the moment when I met her, saw her, I said she's gorgeous and I fell", implying that he fell in love for Belle at first sight. The Marvel Comics serial likewise strongly implied that he had feelings for Belle since they were children.

About (Part 6)

These facts imply that another reason for his relentless pursuit of Belle is to satisfy his pride after it had been hurt by her rejection of his marriage proposal. Gaston is also adulterous (at least in the musical), as he states to Claudette and her sisters that his "rendezvouses" with the girls will continue after he marries Belle, which makes it clear that he does not know or care that marriage is a one-woman commitment or that is it supposed to be based on love and devotion rather than ownership of property. Notably, at the start of the film and musical play, Gaston did not seem truly evil; rather, he was simply conceited, male-chauvinistic, boorish, and rude than a true villain. But as time goes on, his pride, arrogance, and obsession with Belle becomes so intense that it turns him into a twisted, sadistic, ruthless, murderous monster. With his obsession consuming him, Gaston becomes manipulative at this point; his speech to get the mob to kill the Beast in order to protect the village is nothing more than a ruse to get them to help him infiltrate the castle. All he wants is to kill his rival so he can have Belle as his property. By the time of his death, Gaston feels that if he can't have Belle, nobody can. In an earlier version of the story, he was even going to commit suicide after killing the Beast as he knew that no matter what he did, Belle would never love him.

About (Part 7)

Gaston is a professional hunter and the local hero of a small French village. He owns a large tavern where he and the villagers drink and talk. Inside, there is a large portrait of himself along with "trophies" from his hunt consisting mostly of animal antlers. He also says he eats five dozen eggs every morning to help make him "roughly the size of a barge" (even though he earlier mentions to Belle that he would have his latest kills roast over the fire). He starts off in the film using his blunderbuss to shoot down a waterfowl headed south with perfect accuracy (implying that he had just returned from a hunting trip) and declaring his intent to marry Belle after acknowledging from LeFou his popularity with the females in the village. Gaston then started pursuing Belle throughout the village as she returns home after buying a book from the local bookstore. Their meeting starts off well, but Gaston throwing Belle's book into a mud puddle and making sexist remarks about women like Belle reading drive her away from him. When he tries to take away her book again and force her to come with him to the tavern and look at his trophies for a date, Belle takes her book back, rejects his invitation, and continues her way home, leaving Gaston disappointed.

About (Part 8)

In addition, when LeFou mocks Belle's father Maurice after she says she has to get home to help him, Gaston laughs with him at first. But when Belle defends her father against the two men, Gaston scolds LeFou for mocking Maurice (although he does this in an attempt to impress Belle rather than out of any genuine concern for Maurice). The next day, however, Gaston organizes a whole wedding outside Belle's cottage in an attempt to "surprise" her, complete with various decorations, a priest, and a wedding cake. Without waiting for her to open the door first or be given her permission to come inside, Gaston forces his way into Belle's cottage and keeps walking towards her, trying to make her keep her eyes on him and block her attempts to get away. He dirties her book for the second time by putting his mud-covered boots on it before kicking them off, and again makes sexist remarks about women and housewifery (he even envisions the home they would live in as a "rustic" hunting lodge, with his latest kill roasting over the fire and his "little wife" massaging his feet while their children—six or seven strapping boys—play on the floor with their dogs).

About (Part 9)

When Gaston finally makes his "proposal", in which he effectively says Belle will be his little wife (as if he is not giving her a choice in the matter), he attempts to corner Belle and plant a kiss on her. Disgusted by the thought of being his wife, Belle uses her wiles to keep Gaston at bay by slyly luring him towards the door, and when he pins her against it, she takes advantage of him keeping his eyes closed (while he tries to kiss her) by opening it and swinging around behind him. This catches Gaston off guard and causes him to fall forward into a swamp of mud (complete with cat-tail plants) in front of the cottage, where it's revealed that Maurice and Belle's pig (Pierre) is there, too. Once he is completely outside, Belle throws Gaston’s boots on her doorstep before closing her door, effectively rejecting his marriage proposal. Furious and humiliated, Gaston storms off, but not before vowing to make Belle his wife, regardless of her refusals, and throwing LeFou into the mud. Later that night, during a snowstorm, Gaston is in the tavern sulking about being rejected and humiliated by Belle, so the villagers along with LeFou, sing a song about Gaston's greatness to cheer him up. Maurice suddenly interrupts and warns the villagers about a monstrous beast who has locked up Belle as a prisoner in the tower of his castle.

About (Part 10)

Thinking he is talking nonsense, the villagers, amid Gaston ambiguously affirming that they'll "help [Maurice] out", throw him out of the tavern into the snow. Gaston then realizes that he can use Maurice's outrageous claim to his advantage. In a surprising display of animalistic cunning, he bribes the owner of the local asylum, Monsieur D'Arque, to threaten to throw Maurice into the asylum in order to pressure Belle into marrying him. While D'Arque realizes that even Maurice's nonsense about a beast and his odd inventions do not make him dangerous, he is willing to accept the bribe, mostly because he liked the despicability of the plot. However, just before Gaston and LeFou barge into Belle and Maurice's cottage, Maurice leaves for the castle on his own in order to save Belle so Gaston orders LeFou to stay outside the cottage and wait for their return. When Belle and Maurice eventually return to the cottage, LeFou immediately informs Gaston, and he sets his plan into motion. With the villagers gathered outside the house, D'Arque has his men drag Maurice towards their carriage, while Gaston slinks out of the shadows and slyly makes Belle his offer - he will clear up the "misunderstanding" if she marries him.

About (Part 11)

Horrified and disgusted, Belle refuses, and a smug Gaston allows Maurice to be dragged away. Belle, however, manages to prove her father's apparently insane claims about a beast inhabiting a huge castle in the woods to be true by using a magic mirror that the Beast had given her, showing him to Gaston and the entire village. Gaston grows even more frustrated after his plan fails and is shocked that Maurice was indeed telling the truth, but becomes increasingly jealous when Belle begins referring to the Beast as "kind and gentle," realizing that she prefers a "monster" over himself. The final straw is when he refers to the Beast with this insult and Belle angrily retorts back that he is the real monster. In his jealousy and pride, Gaston furiously snaps and snatches the mirror from Belle, spitefully declaring that she is just as crazy as her father. He then successfully convinces the villagers that the Beast is a threat to the village and therefore must be brought down immediately, for if he couldn't have Belle then no one could. Shocked, Belle tries to stop him, but perceiving that Belle is against him, Gaston has her and Maurice locked in the basement to keep them from warning the Beast. Mounting his horse, he leads a lynch mob to attack the Beast's castle and leave no one alive while declaring that he himself is to take down the Beast.

About (Part 12)

They even carve a battering ram from a tree in the woods to use for breaking in. As they enter, the rioters are attacked by the castle servants. Gaston bypasses the ensuing battle and confronts the Beast alone in the West Wing. He fires an arrow into him, tosses him out of the window before kicking him over the balcony and onto a lower section of the roof and taunts him. His expectations of the apparent “monster” in front of him were met with a sympathetic creature more noble than his hunter. In spite of Gaston’s continuous attacks, the creature remains silent and unwilling to fight back, due to having lost his will to live since Belle's departure (to rescue her lost ill father, who was searching for her) much to the hunter's delight. Gaston then breaks off a nearby castle statue and uses it as a makeshift club to try to kill the Beast. Just as he is about to deliver the first blow, Belle arrives outside the castle (she had escaped from the basement with help from Chip, who stowed away with her) and calls up to Gaston, urging him not do this terrible thing, but the jealous hunter ignores her. Seeing Belle regains the Beast's strength and determination to keep fighting for his life as he grabs the club, viciously using strength and animal ferocity and stands tall to his full, imposing posture, towering above his attacker and growling like a dangerous animal, much to Gaston's sudden surprise.

About (Part 13)

The color drains from Gaston's face and a look of shock and horror phases him once he sees the opponent standing before him is more dangerous than he first thought. Though roughly even with his adversary, Gaston soon realizes that he cannot rely on brute strength alone to kill the Beast, as he is faced with a powerful creature of great animalistic strength, skill, speed and agility, motivated by love. The two struggle atop a tower roof before the Beast roaringly leaps forward and drags Gaston with him. The two eventually land and Gaston kicks him off. He then swings down his club on what he assumes to be his enemy, only to discover it to be a gargoyle statue. Gaston then walks cautiously while aggravating the Beast, who utilizes the surrounding statues and darkened rain clouds as cover. The hunter begins taunting him in order to infuriate him enough to let his guard down, pushing the final button by claiming that Belle could never love a monster, which prompts the Beast to come out and resume his attack. After another struggle, Gaston finalizes his goading by saying it's over and that Belle belongs to him.

About (Part 14)

The plan works, but immediately backfires with the Beast lunging forth, overcome by animalistic urges and emotion, head-butting him in the chest, grabbing him, and then holding the terrified hunter at his mercy by the throat above the castle moat. With his life at stake, he abandons his pride and pathetically begs for the Beast to spare him; the Beast accepts, ordering Gaston to leave immediately and never return. In spite of this, when Gaston recovers his strength, he looks up to see the Beast climbing up a balcony to embrace Belle, which makes him more jealous than ever. Refusing to accept defeat, determined to kill his rival once and for all, and still wanting Belle for himself, an ungrateful Gaston follows and stabs the Beast in the back with a knife while dangling somewhat precariously from the balcony. He tries to stab the Beast a second time; however, this final cruel deed proves to be his ultimate undoing when the Beast swings his arm backward at him in pain, causing Gaston to lose his balance when he tries to dodge it, fall off the castle, and plunge into the deep, dark moat far below to his death. Despite laying a deep stab on the Beast, Gaston's last-ditch effort to kill the Beast proved to be in vain; just as the Beast nearly succumbed to his own wound, Belle confessed her love for him just before the last petal of the enchanted rose that kept him bound to his beast form fell, breaking the spell, healing his injuries, and above all, returning him and his servants to their human forms. All in all, Gaston had learned the hard way too late that pride literally comes before a fall.

Abilities (Part 1)

Enhanced Strength: While lacking in agility, Gaston is shown to possess a tremendous amount of physical strength, evidenced by his effortlessly lifting a bench with three adult females (the Bimbettes) on it, as well as holding it up with only one hand. He later effortlessly rips off a stone ornament from the castle to use as a makeshift club during his battle with the Beast. The fact that he can fight and knock back the Beast is also quite impressive, given his size. Still though, compared to the creature his strength is inferior. Skilled Marksman: He is also able to fire his blunderbuss with pinpoint accuracy, noted by LeFou proclaiming, "Wow! You didn't miss a shot, Gaston! You're the greatest hunter in the whole world!" This, however, was briefly contradicted in the Marvel Comics, where he manages to miss a rabbit despite it being fairly close by. In addition, he has proved that he is a skilled archer during the climax at the castle. Stealth: He is also shown to be skilled at stealth attacks, as implied in the song "Gaston" with the lyrics: "No one's slick as Gaston," and confirmed when he manages to stab the Beast in the back while the latter was distracted with joy that Belle returned, even though he had to climb up several areas to reach him.

Abilities (Part 2)

Skilled Tactician: As noted above, despite his otherwise revulsion to the concepts of reading, getting ideas, and overall intelligence and intellectualism (specifically for women), he is shown to be a somewhat skilled plotter, having come up with the blackmail idea. In addition, he also had decent enough observation skills to pick up the hint that Belle may have had feelings for the Beast just from a few subtle clues late into the film. Skilled Manipulator: He is also very good at manipulation; after discovering that Belle is in love with the Beast, he uses the villagers' ignorance and prejudices (as well as his own popularity) to rally them into killing the Beast. Despite this, however, he ultimately shows himself to be very reckless regarding his planning. This is especially evident in Gaston's reprise where he loudly divulges in a crowded tavern enough key details about his blackmail plan to have all but ensured that everyone knows his true nature (though most of them still went along with it anyway).

Residence

The Tavern (called Le Pub in the blueprint concept art and the Inn in the Disney Princess Visual Dictionary) is a location in Beauty and the Beast, located in the unnamed French Village. It is a hangout for Gaston (who presumably acted as the owner) and the villagers, and where Claudette, Laurette, and Paulette (a.k.a., the Bimbettes) find work as waitresses. It was located at the edge of the village near a bridge, at one of the town's fountains. The main building from the exterior was three stories tall. Inside, the only room we directly see is the main dining area, which is rather rustic-looking with a stone fireplace, all of Gaston's trophies mostly of animal antlers on the walls, and a large portrait of Gaston above the fireplace. It also has various wines as well as a brew barrel. Near the fireplace is a bear-skin rug (presumably done by Gaston) as well as a "throne" of sorts that is made of various animal skins and antlers. According to Gaston at one point, the antlers were the primary decoration of the tavern. The Tavern had "saloon" doors as well as a bar area. In addition, there were six circular tables, with at least four chandeliers, and a bench independent of the tables. It also had tankards for beer. Any meals it serves besides beer, wine, and presumably eggs is never revealed in the movie or comics.