Morgan Rowland @mjr182@uakron.edu
Descendants is an American movie franchise revolving around the descendants of classic Disney villains and heroes. The main four of the story are Mal, Evie, Jay and Carlos who are the children of Maleficent, The Evil Queen, Jafar, and Cruella DeVille respectively. All the villains in the world have been banished to the Isle of the Lost until Ben, son of Beauty and the Beast, decides that he wants to make peace and bring some of the villian kids to Auradon, which is where all the hero kids live. The VKs (villian kids) are very ant-going to Auradon but their parents convince them to go as a part of an evil plan to take over the world.
The plan is that the VKs are supposed to go to Auradon, steal Maleficent’s wand and make Ben fall in love with Mal so that he’ll drop the shield around the Isle so the villain parents can be released and they can storm Auradon. The biggest obstacles for this plan are than 1. Maleficent's staff is in a museum kept under lock and key, though they quickly find a solution to that problem and that 2. Ben has a girlfriend, Audrey.
Audrey is the granddaughter of Sleeping Beauty meaning that Mal is the daughter of the woman who tried to kill her grandmother. Audrey from the get go is incredibly distrusting of the VKs, which she has every right to be given that the VKs are the children of the people who tried to kill their parents for no reason but greed and bloodlust. But Ben tries to give the VKs the benefit of the doubt which includes hanging them out with them and getting them to join school activities like Lacrosse. This also means he spends a lot of time getting to know Mal who bakes him cookies that he eats, unfortunately for him the cookies had love potion in them that make Ben dump Audrey and fall in love with her.
What happens after that in the movie isn’t very important except for the fact the barrier comes down, the VKs revolt against their parents, the villains are defeated and then Mal and Ben live happily ever after, but that leaves the question, what about Audrey? Audrey has been told her whole life that she’s going to be the next queen of Auradon once Ben becomes king. She’s sweet and everyone at school likes her and when she rightfully distrust the VKs (who it’s later shown did have evil intentions) she’s treated as crazy. Audrey and her family also seem to be the only black people in Auradon which brings to light certain racial connotations that can’t be ignored.
Audrey has everything she had worked for her whole life and the person that she loves snatched from her in a matter of weeks by the offspring of the woman who tried to end her bloodline who does this via a love spell that is never broken on screen. That alone means that Audrey had every right to become the villain for how Mal and Ben treated her but to add insult to injury in the next movie, Descendants 2, Mal just throws it all away. The pressure of being queen, at this point Ben has taken over the position of King from his dad, gets to her and so she grabs her mom, who has been turned into a lizard, and runs back to the Isle and her friends and Ben go to get her which is how we get introduced to the only other Black character, Uma, who is the daughter of Ursula. Uma and Mal are positioned as always being rivals with Uma hating Mal because Mal has always been better than her and antagonistic of her. This means in canon Mal has a problem with every black girl that she comes across.
Now, at this point in the story things go from being microaggressive racist to also Misogynistic. Mal’s desire to not be queen, to not be ornamental and under constant scrutiny is positioned as a character flaw, as something that she must grow from, and she does, but the thing is, that’s not a character flaw. Wanting to be the fully realized person you were when you were on the Isle is something that can transfer to being queen if given the chance but Mal is given that chance. Her “growth” is her learning to be content with being an arm piece, and arm piece to a man she drugged. This is at the expense of Audrey, who loses everything she’s worked for her whole life and Uma who is villainized unlike the other VKs. When Uma learns about the fresh fruit, and tv, and general luxuries on Auradon she gets rightfully pissed that she's been deprived of these things and that while the other VKs have them she gets pissed and wants those things for the other VKs.
This makes her different from Mal, Evie, Jay, and Carlos who originally went over there to their parents' bidding and consolidate power amongst their parents. Uma wants these luxuries for all the people of the Isle and is villainized for doing it the “wrong” way even though she has been pushed under the boot of not only the Auradonians but also the other VKs. Her resistance as a black person who wants to spread the resources to her community is villainized even though she has much better motives than the VKs. To make matter worse at the end of the movie she’s defeated b Mal and when given the opportunity to join their ranks, shocker, shocker, the magic of friendship can’t fix all and she instead decides to flee into the ocean and everyone wants to act shocked and confused that she doesn’t want to align with the people who oppressed her whole life the same way these same Auradonians act shocked and confused in the 3rd movie when Audrey becomes the villain after everyone made nice with the daughter of the woman who tried end her bloodline and stole her life from her.
In the 3rd movie Audrey steals Maleficent’s staff and put a sleep curse over all of Auradon and the VKs have to find a way to stop her and save the day. What happens in between isn’t that important, all you have to know is that the movie ends with Ben being King with a dutiful Mal at his side and Audrey apologizing. The thing is Audrey shouldn’t have had to apologize, she did nothing wrong. Her whole life she gave everything to Auradon and Ben, she was promised the queendom and it was stolen from her via drugging by a main character who seems to just have a problem with black people. Said main character then throws it away and proceeds to get into a fight with another black girl who is also villainized. And then when Audrey snaps, when she finally has enough people taking advantage of her and making nice with someone she has every right to hate she is made into some grand evil when she’s not, she’s hurt and angry and the simple way to appease her is to make her queen. She wants to be queen, Mal doesn’t, Ben loves Mal, the solution is simple: let Audrey become queen, let Mal be with Ben and teach magic and rehabilitate other Vks, and Ben remains king.
Everyone gets what they want but the people at disney are wusses who even in a movie about how people aren’t just good and bad, that rehabilitation is possible, refuses to not have to give everything a perfect fairy tail ending so Mal has learns to love something everything about her personality says that she’ll hate and Audrey is unable to do the job she loves and can do well. This is to not even get into the fact that Uma magically makes nice with the VKs and Auradonians who have been tormenting her her whole life. All of the non-black character’s are given happy ending at the expense of the black characters and the rest of the VKS who rather than the Isle being fixed up their only choice for progression is to move to Auradon which reflects the real world problem of a few select black kids in the poor neighborhoods are given opportunities to progress and encouraged to leave their communities behind while doing such.
Descendants attempts to be a movie about the villainous nature of prejudice and putting people in boxes and while doing this replicates these same prejudices and boxes, it’s sad to see but not surprising.