Why does Fiona always choose to remain an ogre? Even if she became accustomed to being one, it doesn't explain why she would prefer that form over the one she originally was. The films suggest she doesn't want Shrek to change who he is just for her, but she seems to be doing the same thing for him, so is it just a double standard? Did people think a human/ogre relationship bordered too closely to bestiality? It almost feels like the Second Law of Gender-Bending is at hand here, but with form-shifting instead of gender-bending.
Because her true love is Shrek, and she took love's true form. She's far better off as an ogre than a princess. She prefers it because Shrek changed her and made her truly happy, something she hadn't been for much of her life. It was what she was meant to be all along, in a sense. In the first film, she's ashamed of it because she thinks Farquaad is her true love, but at the start of the second film, she's clearly shown to love being an ogre and is genuinely unashamed of showing this to her parents. And yeah, it would be pretty uncomfortable, virtually a form of bestiality, if Fiona had stayed human. Especially since she'd be squashed to death during intercourse and even if Shrek did get her pregnant, she'd be forced to give birth to horrible human/ogre hybrids instead of the cute little ogre kids she has at the end of the third film. With Donkey and Dragon, the bizarre pairing and the mystery of how Donkey impregnated her (and the result being the birth of hybrid "Dronkeys") is treated as a joke that isn't meant to be analyzed, but as for Shrek, he's the main character and his romance with Fiona is the central storyline of the franchise, so for him, it's different.
Maybe she just likes being an ogre? She feels more herself in that form.
The later movie's titles. Shrek 2 makes sense and is simple. When the time comes for the third movie they decide not to call it Shrek 3 for fear of confusion with the Shrek 3-D mini-movie. Um, who'd be that stupid? And now with the fourth movie, it's just getting worse.
I guess you missed the era of "3 = 3-D" but it was a trope at one time.
Tentative titles from IMDB for Shrek 4 thus far are:
Forever After: The Final Chapter (USA) (informal title)
Shrek Goes Fourth (USA) (working title)
The Final Chapter (USA) (poster title)
Shrek 4 (USA) (working title) Hey that's not too shabby!
I always thought it was to shake things up and seem more unique than just generic number titles.
You may as well ask how everyone knows modern pop songs and other cultural references, like Starbucks. Shrek's world isn't 100% medieval fantasy, it's an Anachronism Stew.
Shrek's character seems to ping-pong back and forth all over the place. In the first movie, he hated being seen as nothing but "a big stupid, ugly ogre" and wished everyone could see him for his inner beauty. It was his entire motivation. But in the sequels, especially 3 and 4, he keeps going on and on about "Ogres don't do this," "Ogres don't do that," and "I just want to be a plain old ogre again." He switches from trying to defy the ogre stereotype to trying to aspire to it.
Midlife crisis perhaps?
Grass is greener? Looking for an excuse? Wants out?
In the first movie Shrek didn't wish for people to see his inner beauty, at least not consciously. Being not accepted for who he is, he used his "ugly, man-eating beast" status as an advance to at least acquire quiet. He did hate lack of acceptance, but gaining it certainly was not his motivation in the first place. If he ever had a motivation that lasted throughout all the movies, it was "Let me be an ogre and enjoy it and stay away if you don't like it."
Potential answer to the whole Dragon/Donkey pairing - a lot of dragons, especially D&D dragons and those based on them, can polymorph. Dragon has the same power but uses it rarely. In this case, she just polymorphed into a female donkey.
If she could do that, she wouldn't be wearing her "collar" when she meets again with Donkey near the end of the movie.
She put it back on as a fashion accessory?
Not all shape-shifting works that way. She could be able to shift into say, a dog. But when she transforms the collar remains on her dragon body.
Why, exactly, was Fiona cursed to be an ogre at night? What is the origin of the curse? They don't just randomly exist in the fairytale world, they must be cast by a witch or fairies. If it was Fairy Godmother's price for turning the king into a human, why did she create such an elaborate easy-to-meddle-with rescue plot when she could've just demanded that if the king and the queen get a daughter, she would wed his son in exchange? If Harold and Lillian managed to piss off a witch that cast the curse, why was she never mentioned in any of the movies?
In the first film, Fiona DOES say "When I was a little girl, a witch cast a spell on me." She doesn't go into any further detail, but there is that.
It's quite possible that "a witch cast a spell on Fiona" is just something her parents came up with to explain things to her, and that the whole change in day and night was her natural state because of her father's origin.
This can be explained through What Could Have Been. In the original script, Fiona was BORN an ogre to the late King and Queen of Duloc (who were human). They locked her away in the tower, lying that she was "such a rare beauty" she was kidnapped. They died, and an ambitious regent (implied but never confirmed to be Farquaad) took over the rule of Duloc. When Fiona was old enough to assume the throne, she escaped the tower and encountered a witch named Dama Fortuna (which means “Dame Fortune” or “Lady Luck), who is the "witch" Fiona mentions in the movie. Fortuna gives Fiona a potion (rather than casting a spell) to make her beautiful, but warns that she will change between her human and ogress forms (apparently randomly, no mention of "by night one way, by day another") until she finds true love. She was later whisked away by her dragon guardian and returned to the tower. So summa summarum: She wasn't cursed to be an ogre at night, she was already an ogre, and the "spell" the witch cast was to turn her human.
How can an OGRE be born to HUMAN parents? Is it like in Harry Potter, where if there are ancestors in a human family of a different species, then the child of the humans in that family will be a member of that different species, as in, if the royal family of Duloc has ogre ancestry, then that is why Fiona was born an ogre?
The simplest explanation requires a little speculation: Lillian was not aware of Harold's deal with FGM, I don't even remember if it was confirmed she knew about him being a frog but even if she did, perhaps FGM being the transformation agent was secret. Thus, Harold and FGM came up with this little crazy scheme, perhaps involving FGM posing like a witch, perhaps having something to do with Harold's spell, perhaps none of these; since Lillian would probably protest Prince Charming going and marrying her daughter, also claiming the future position of king of FFA, just because.
Going back to the theory that the curse was the FGM's doing as part of her deal with Harold, it may have been to prevent him from backing out of the arrangement and give him extra incentive to get Fiona with Charming.
Maybe ogres in this 'Verse were descended from magically-altered frogs, in the first place. They do prefer to live in swamps, after all.
If that’s the case, would Shrek’s Great-Aunt Ruthie (revealed in Swamp Talk) have become a human to marry a human (like King Harold did?
My guess is, Fiona was born an ogre because she's the offspring of a human and a frog: when Harold used the potion to woo Lilian, she didn't know he was not human. The Fairy God Mother was aware that the resulting child would be a hybrid, which was something Harold didn't know. When they discovered their daughter was turning into an ogre every night, the FGM pretended she was cursed and only a True Love's kiss could turn her human. She convinced Harold and Lilian to send their daughter to the keep, where her True Love would rescue her and kiss her.
What would Charming have done if Farquaad actually had married Fiona? Forced Far Far Away into declaring war on Duloc?
This one's simple - The Fairy Godmother would have bullied Farquaad into divorcing Fiona, just like she tried to bully Shrek into giving her up.
Farquaad declared after he learned of Fiona's curse that he would lock her back in the tower. Most likely that's what would have happened.
Don't remember if something to this effect was said on the site, but FGM bullying Farquaad off the bat probably wouldn't have been her first move. Knowing how materialistic he is, she would have probably bribed him. A kingdom, probably, and with her either her magic/connections (maybe both) as the richest being in Far Far Away, he probably would have snagged the "perfect queen" for himself.
Who's ruling Duloc now that Farquaad is dead?
No one, it's a republic now.
They probably found someone to rule it eventually (someone less egocentric than Farquaad, hopefully).
This question has already been handled. Also, like the answerer far above said, the Halloween short Scared Shrekless reveals that Duloc is now a ghost town.
Maybe the citizens of Duloc moved to Far far away instead.
Why did Shrek feel the need to try to socialize with people who constantly run away from him instead of trying to make friends with some other ogres, or even any of the fairytale creatures who lived among him, since they didn't treat him with any contempt? It's clear he enjoys the life of being an ogre, so why wouldn't he just hang out with some ogre buddies with the same hobbies and interests as him rather than shutting himself out from the world completely?
It's implied that all ogres, in general, aren't very sociable, and live in solitary swamps as Shrek does (the only time we see ogres together is in the fourth movie, and they are leading a resistance, and Shrek remarks when they use their ears as horns, "I didn't know we could do that..." which implies further that Shrek never had contact with other ogres), and Shrek was comfortable where he was so he never thought/wanted to take the time to search for them. Essentially, Shrek tried to socialize with the people around him when he was likely a bit younger, and since they all treated him with contempt and fear, he assumed it was just his lot in life and made the best of it. It's what makes Shrek so sympathetic, he was treated badly and interpreted in the worst possible way...
In the first film, Shrek can kill fish with his flatulence. Later, when Donkey accuses him of farting, Shrek claims that if the fart were his, Donkey would be dead. However, in the second movie, Shrek farts in front of Donkey and Puss in Boots after drinking the Happily Ever After potion, and while smelly, neither of them seem to be phased by this. Was the deadliness of his flatulence retconned?
You answer your question - in the second movie, it was after he drank the potion. Since the potion turns him human, it likely started working its magic. Perhaps the first thing the potion impacts is bodily functions. If I'm not mistaken, we never see Shrek break wind in The Third (I haven't seen the fourth movie), but if I had to guess, he's probably back to normal after the potion wears off in this regard.
Alternatively, since Donkey and Puss weren't facing Shrek's backside (and weren't that physically close to him) when he farted, they therefore probably didn't feel any lethal effects, unlike the fish in the first film that was in Shrek's immediate vicinity.
In the first film, Fiona says that when she's a baby a witch casts a spell upon her that turns her into an ogress each night, who was the witch? was it Maleficent herself?
Nobody knows, there's been no other references to it and no information released. It's a throwaway line that has no real bearing on the rest of the story and thus has no other elaboration.
Some speculate that it was the Fairy Godmother as an added incentive to get Harold to marry Fiona to Charming, but that's more WMG.
I thought it was implied that it was one of the witches under the command of Rumpelstiltskin (who are his primary henchmen, as well as the main group of people he's living with, in Shrek Forever After).
Why does Rumpelstiltskin look so different between the third and fourth films?
Maybe he used his contracts to change himself. Either that or they’re different Rumplestiltskins, maybe father and son.
How do the producers manage to get the rights for Captain Hook? He's not in the public domain.
Captain Hook is a character from the 1911 J.M. Barrie novel Peter and Wendy which was adapted from the 1904 play Peter Pan. Although the play version is not in the U.S. public domain, the novel version is, and thus they were allowed to use him.
At the end of Shrek 2 and in some of the spin-offs starring Puss in Boots, there are moments where he's near tears. But when this happens, why does he wipe his nose and not his eyes? Is that a cat behavior?
Why didn't Shrek and Fiona tell her parents right away how Shrek rescued Fiona? Better yet, why didn't Fairy Godmother and Prince Charming find out about it?
It can be assumed from the opening of the fourth film that they heard the general proclamation that Fiona had been rescued, which just so happened to coincide with it being around the time that Charming was sent off to get her (why exactly Harold and Lilian decided they couldn't wait for her curse to be broken any longer at the exact time Charming was about to rescue her is kind of confusing). They didn't get any details beyond "a brave knight rescued and married her" as well as the knight's residence being about a day's trip outside Duloc, so they sent the welcoming party to ask around the area and find out where she and Shrek were.
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