- Are King Beast and Fairy Godmother really as good as they claim to be? They had brought the villains back to life just to banish them and turned a blind eye on their children, whose only "crime" was being related to villains. Not only that, but they also had "casual" magic banned even in Auradon. Also from what little we see of them the regular inhabitants of the Isle of the Lost don't seem bad and certainly not evil at all, just your garden variety working class trying to make the best of a bad situation.
- Resurrecting villains just to send them into exile might seem to be cruel and serve no purpose until we remember that the dead won't necessarily stay dead. Jafar himself became an example of this in "Hercules and the Arabian Night". Of course, leaving them dead is still safer than bothering to revive them yourself.
- Were the villains' kids really Good All Along or did they just benefit from Moral Luck? While they do get bullied for the actions of their parents, their own villainous actions, which include plotting to free their indubitably evil parents, tricking Ben into taking a love potion, and cheating in science, are all brushed off or resolved with no effort on their part.
- More specifically, Mal: Did she choose Good because she truly came to understand the harm in her actions and wanted to align with a different set of morals, or did feeling love for the first time cause her to change her allegiance for the sake of her own emotional benefit? While the first film implies the former, her actions in the second film make it more ambiguous.
- As soon as she encounters hardship in her romance with Ben, she reverts to her old ways. This could have been a frightened knee-jerk reaction. Still, her treatment of others does not change very much when she is Good, and she does not take the high road with her enemies (namely, Uma) until the very end. All of this, though, can be attributed to her being a confused teenager.
- Ben, on a couple of counts:
- It's implied that he either suspected or knew about their plan to steal the wand for their parents and why they tried to go through with it even though they didn't want to. He's not surprised when Mal takes it, is quick to talk her down and defend her and reminds them that their parents can't get to them in Auradon, implying that he knows their parents are abusive and knows it's that fear that's keeping them from being good.
- He knew Mal put him under a love potion from their first date and still showed zero remorse over Audrey being caught in the crossfire, even at the end. Considering that he's pretty obviously not happy with Audrey from the start, he might have used the love potion as the excuse he needed to break up with Audrey. That still isn't a very kind or kingly thing to do to someone. In the third film, Audrey wastes absolutely no time making him pay for it.
- Uma: Did she throw away Ben's attempts at giving her a better life in Auradon when she held him captive because she knew Auradon is full of cold, hypocritical "heroes" that would have made her surrender her crew or because she liked being evil? Or, like Mal, was she just a confused and angry teenager who didn't want to take belated, afterthought handouts from the people who imprisoned her?
- Audrey, in the first film. Did she genuinely mean it when she worried about Mal using magic and thus, making people "prettier than her"? Or was she covering up a bigger fear- that the daughter of the woman who'd cursed her mother into a hundred year sleep was practicing magic- magic Maleficent had taught her- on her peers and friends, whom she has known since childhood?
- Some of Audrey's actions in the third movie during her villain song are suspect. While it was clear that she intended to steal the crown, it seems to be with the intention of breaking it. Seeing Maleficent's staff changes her mind, as it calls to her. Leading to the question whether her later actions were her choice, or were they influenced by staff.
- Lady Tremaine: Was she always a "wicked grandmother" and happened to mellow out inbetween the last two films, or were we the audience only ever getting a glimpse at her from Dizzy's perspective? In Descendants 2 we only hear her off-screen as she's described as "wicked grandmother", giving Dizzy the "Cinderella" treatment making her clean the family shop, all while Dizzy manages to remain an optimistic, cheerful person. However, by the time she appears in Descendants 3 she's shown to actually care (albeit stoically) about Dizzy, supporting her dream of going off to Auradon and her designing aspirationsnote , neither of which benefit herself or the shop, and Dizzy openly shows love for her back. Also, look at how her daughters Drizella and Anastasia turned out never needing to do any household chores, as well as Cinderella's son Chad who likely had many servants in the castle. Was making Dizzy do all the shop's menial chores just a continuation of Lady Tremaine's old ways, or was it so Dizzy would recognize hard work and turn out better than her own daughters did?
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