That doesn’t change the fact that it’s “Beauty and the Beast” and not “Beauty and the Ugly Guy”, which isn’t that much of a story, really - after all, back in the day pretty teenage girls would marry ugly, old rich men all the time.
No, a beast isn’t ugly, it’s a danger that needs to be tamed or killed. That’s what the story is about. It’s about power.
Fran Drescher and Timothy Dalton starred in “The Beautician and the Beast”, although Dalton is beastly in behavior rather than in looks.
This is the one I came in to mention.
I suppose the 2006 movie Penelope would count - especially since it even features a curse that can only be broken by true love.
I’m thinking the “crazed, domineering girfriend has superpowers” scenario has been down somewhere else… Maybe anime. Would Urusei Yatsura count?
Bridget Jones’s Diary?
Lois Bujold wrote a gender flipped Beauty and the Beast story as part of her ongoing Vorkosigan Saga. The series title character, interstellar super spy Miles Vorkosigan, is captured by his enemies and dumped in a pit with a failed subject from a super-soldier experiment:
“The huge rippling shadow struck out of nowhere, at incredible speed… Miles first saw the fangs as they bit and tore and buried themselves in the rat’s tissues. They were functional fangs, not just decorative, set in a protruding jaw, with long lips and a wide mouth; yet the total effect was lupine rather than simian. A flat nose, ridged, powerful brows, high cheekbones. Hair a dark matted mess. And yes, fully eight feet tall, a rangy, tense-muscled body.”
Turns out, though, that she’s got human intelligence, and isn’t any more of a fan of being thrown in a pit than Miles is. They team up and (after a bit of fooling around - Miles is basically Space James Bond, so that’s sort of obligatory) escape. Much later in the series, when she’s a guest attending a wedding, she even gets a transformation sequence, courtesy of someone with impeccable fashion sense:
“A stunning vision in hunter green stepped through behind her. Oh, it was still Taura, certainly, but … the skin that had been sallow and dull against the pink was now revealed as a glowing ivory. The green jacket fit very trimly about the waist. Above, her pale shoulders and long neck seemed to bloom from a white linen collar; below, the jacket skirt skimmed out briefly around the upper hips. A narrow skirt continued the long green fall to her firm calves. Wide linen cuffs decorated with subtle white braid made her hands look, if not small, well-proportioned. The pink nail polish was gone, replaced by a dark mahogany shade. The heavy braid hanging down her back had been transformed into a mysteriously knotted arrangement, clinging close to her head and set off with a green … hat? feather? anyway, a neat little accent tilted to the other side. The odd shape of her face seemed suddenly artistic and sophisticated rather than distorted.”
The only way it doesn’t quite fit the “Beauty and the Beast” motif is that Miles is no beauty, conventionally speaking: he’s a scarred hunchback who’s just this side of dwarfism. But a major theme of the series is, “What exactly does ‘conventional beauty’ mean in a post-human society?”
Because the “classic” tale isn’t insulting to men’s bodies. Most gender-flipped “Beauty and the Beast” stories don’t feature actually “beastly” looking women - they feature women who just aren’t particularly pretty. If you hold up, say, Shallow Hal as a “Beauty anf the Beast” story, you’re saying that women who look like this are “beasts.” There’s a lot of real women out there who look like that, and most of them probably don’t appreciate being called a “beast.” Conversely, the “classic” version of the story features a guy who looks like this. There aren’t any men who actually look like that. Calling that a “beast” isn’t denigrating any real person’s body.
Good example! Also, remember that by the time of the wedding, Taura and Miles are no longer an item - instead, she’s started a very sweet courtship with Miles’s handsome, strapping young man-at-arms.
Although I wouldn’t call any of the male characters “handsome” that’s pretty much the plot of nearly every harem anime ever.
Also there’s the whole “femdom” fetish as well. Although it’s fairly obvious the guys in these stories have psychological issues.
Do not look up femdom at work.
I don’t know if it’s been done, but I could see a Star Trek episode where one of the female Klingon sisters or a similar character is trapped in a shuttlecraft (or on a deserted planet) with a wimpy ensign, possibly Wesley Crusher or a similar guest character.
Actually, the beast is beastly in behavior, although he tries to hide some of his more appalling behavior from beauty. He won’t eat with her, because he eats like a wild carnivore, for example. And he was turned into a beast in the first place for being an asshole. He has to change his character, and convince someone that he has changed to the point that she will love him, in order to change back.
The Disney version is way cuter than any fairy tale version, or the 1946 live-action French film, which is sometimes classified as a horror film.
I am familiar with the term.
Gene Wilder falls in love with a sheep in that Woody Allen movie.
The movie She Devil comes to mind.
Absolutely Fabulous doesn’t have any steady male presence, but Edina and Patsy are definitely she-beasts.
Flashman’s Lady has the title character, a handsome charismatic rake, fall into the sadistic clutches of Ranavalona, mad Queen of Madagascar. Flashman also becomes the slave of eventual Empress Dowager of China in Flashman and the Dragon.
Speaking of Fran Drescher, what about The Nanny? She was extremely annoying in the first couple of years in the show, as opposed to Charles Shaughnessy as Maxwell Sheffield.
How about any Gerard Depardieu movie?
In Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines books, the male protagonist Tom Natsworthy is young (15 at the start), handsome, naïve and relentlessly upbeat. The female protagonist Hester Shaw is an amoral murderer who had, when younger, been struck on the face with a sword costing her an eye and most of her nose and causing her mouth to be upturned in a permanent snarl. They are thrown together and forced to co-operate for survival, yadda yadda yadda, love ensues but a lot of people die along the way. So she is hideous, scary AND dangerous, and yet he loves her and she him (eventually).
BTW not to spoil the books (there are four in the series) but at no point does she miraculously transform into a beauty.
That’s not a reversal, is it?
