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     Longevity of hair magic 
  • How long does the effects of the hair actually work? At the beginning of the movie, Gothel tells Rapunzel she is feeling "run down" and uses the hair to make herself slightly younger. But in order for her to have aged, she would have had to have not been using the hair for at least a few years. Either Gothel only uses the hair once she has aged into being an old woman, or the effects don't last long at all and she has to re-up every day. Right?
    • It's heavily implied that the more Gothel uses the hair's magic to delay her aging, the faster she ages between uses. During the events of the film, which take place over a couple of days, Gothel visibly ages. So by this point, yes, Gothel probably does have to use Rapunzel's hair every few days at the very least.
    • Also, the whole point of Gothel's character is that she's both vain and exploitative. She's probably taken any opportunity she can to get a recharge from Rapunzel, regardless of how long it actually lasts. Spots a line under her eye? "How about you sing for mother, Rapunzel?" Feels an ache in her hip? "Let's sing a song, Rapunzel." And so on.
    • There doesn't really seem to be consistency though, as in Tangled: the Series we find out Gothel went from young to elderly in about 24 hours at most. According to King Fredric, Queen Ariana got sick the day of Rapunzel's birth, and Rapunzel was kidnapped the very night she was born (this last part is backed up in the movie by Eugene's narration). From this, we learn the opening cutscene about that incident takes place over something like 18-20 hours. Ariana falls ill in the early hours of Rapunzel's day of birth and the hunt is on for the flower (as it is still dark out in the movie when she's shown to be ill). Gothel uses it (it is still dark out), the guards find it before sun-up and Ariana is healed, Ariana gives birth, and the kingdom celebrates. That night they launch the lanterns into the sky as part of the celebration, and Rapunzel is kidnapped. But when Gothel shows up to kidnap her, despite just using the flower hours before, she's elderly like she was right before using the flower. We also see repeatedly that Gothel usually waits until she's gone full grey and wrinkly before using the Sundrop's power. Her uses in the movie, save the one the day before Rapunzel turned 18, are all when she's elderly so she's not using it for every little thing.
    • Tangled: the Series also adds the complicating factor of Gothel's pregnancy with Cassandra while still dependant on the flower, which at the aforementioned rate of rapid aging would have resulted in her routinely aging past menopause while carrying a fetus. It's all sorts of inconsistent.
     Maximus's sense of smell 
  • Why Maximus, the horse with a bloodhound-like sense of smell didn't recognizes Rapunzel as the lost princess? As basically a member from the elite guards, he must be familiarized with her parents' scent. So, why he didn't recognizes Rapunzel's scent when he meet her? Even before that, he is seeing sniffing the ground, after Eugene free Rapunzel and goes with her around. He must be likely sniff her scent where Rapunzel walked. As he is portrayed as more competent than the guards themselves, I'm surprised that he doesn't even suspect Rapunzel is the lost princess.
    • It is argued in Fridge Brilliance that Maximus does recognize Rapunzel as the lost princess.
    • I don't know why he tried to capture Rapunzel almost biting her hair with agression. He must likely recognize her scent when he's chasing Eugene, by sniffing where she stepped. Was only when she mentioned her birthday to him to stop his Scarily Competent Tracker tendences.
     Pascal's reaction to the thugs 
  • Why is Pascal looking so annoyed, or at least skeptical, when Rapunzel charmes the thugs and lets them tell their dreams in the "I've Got a Dream" song? He was the one originally encouraging Rapunzel to leave her tower and follow her dream. What she is doing can only be positive for her/their mission and help them along. So why is he giving this sarcastic "You have got to be kidding me" look?
    • Interpreting the facial expressions of an animated chameleon might be a "to-each-their-own" matter, but on examining that clip Pascal doesn't seem that irritated or skeptical; he just seems a little surprised that these seemingly rowdy and malevolent ne'er-do-wells are actually such secret warm-hearted dreamers that even the rats are bobbing along to the optimistic musical number they've spontaneously burst into. It is, to be fair, not the sort of thing you see every day. He might also be a little wary of the rats themselves and unsure of their potential policies on eating lizard such as himself.
     Hook Hand's piano 
  • How does Hook Hand knock/tear off most if not all of the white piano keys of his piano and then continue playing on said piano? There couldn't be (almost) any keys left on the piano, which is way more problematic than the fact that, well, he's playing a piano with a Hook Hand...
    • Same way he's paying a piano with a massive hook hand to begin with; he's just that good.
    • Piano keys aren't blocks of white or black, they're mostly wood with a veneer of white (ivory in the era we're seeing) or black. He probably just knocked off the ivory, and kept playing on the wooden keys beneath.
     Tower entrance 
  • You know how Gothel climbs Rapunzel's hair to get back in the tower? Well how did she get into the tower when her hair was not long enough to climb? I know Gothel could have gone through that little passage way but that seems like she would have to do a lot of repairing...
    • By the secret passageway we see her enter. It wasn't blocked off until after Rapunzel's hair grew out and thus Gothel didn't have a need for it anymore.
     Deal backfire 
  • What would Gothel have done if, after making the deal with the Stabbingtons, Rapunzel had actually agreed to come home with her? She'd be left with two ticked off thugs who are now aware of Rapunzel's magical hair and are out of a crown and Flynn Rider.
    • As far as Gothel is concerned, the Stabbingtons will also be getting hanged for their crimes. It's not confirmed that Gothel sicced the guards on them, but they ARE in jail the next morning.
  • To add to this, Gothel's entire plan basically hinged on Flynn being stupid enough not to explain to Rapunzel his situation with the Stabbingtons and what he's doing with the crown. Her plan should have fallen apart much earlier on.
    • Gothel is very smart, very manipulative, very good at thinking on her feet, very good at double-crossing, and the Stabbington brothers aren't exactly the sharpest nails in the bag. I imagine something along the lines of "Now, boys, I'm sure we can work this out reasonablyohMYGOD WHAT'S THAT?!" [whack with frying pan] would have been in order. As for Flynn, he's a thief and a con-man — it wouldn't be incredibly hard or unconvincing for them to make the claim that Flynn had merely been selling her a complete lie.
    • Also, she already knew how much Rapunzel wanted to leave the tower—not only did she ask for it once, then try to bring the subject up again leading to an argument, but when Gothel was listening in outside the Snuggly Duckling, she heard Rapunzel sing "I'm so glad I left my tower!" So she likely knew Rapunzel would not agree to come back, not until and unless something horrible happened to "prove" to her that her mother was right about the outside world.
    • More importantly, she wants to make sure Rapunzel feels betrayed by Flynn specifically. Gothel DID have a Jerkass Has a Point moment in the woods, when she pointed out that Rapunzel's Love Interest is a wanted criminal. He isn't exactly the ruffian/thug type, and he doesn't have pointy teeth, so she had to come up with proof that he was a liar and a thief.
      • In that moment in the woods, Gothel doesn't even sound protective of Rapunzel. It's not even "stay away from that dangerous criminal", it's "the fugitive is the best you can do?" and then it turns into a "why would anyone want you?". Making Rapunzel think Flynn would give her away in exchange for a trinket serves another purpose too, it's yet another way to make her feel weak and worthless.
     Hair growth 
  • Rewatching Tangled, this suddenly hit me, and I'm surprised that nobody on this page has brought it up. Rapunzel is 18 years old in the movie and has supposedly 70-ft long hair. Sounds reasonable right? Let's see. I'm presuming that Rapunzel's hair grows at human speed since she's, you know, human. Also presuming that the healing factor doesn't accelerate hair growth, because healing doesn't cause hair to grow extra fast. If anything, it should grow slower since the healing would keep the hair follicles from dying and getting pushed out. Please consider that before you blurt "magic", or "healing", or "magical healing".
    • The average human hair grows at about 1.25 cms or .5 inches per month. 0.5 inches per month x 12 months in a year = 6 inches per year. She's 18, so 18 years x 6 inches/year = 108 inches. Convert that to feet (dividing by 12), you get 9ft. ....where did the extra 61ft of hair come from? If her hair actually did grow to 70ft in 18 years, it would have to grow roughly 1 inch per week. Four times faster than normal.
      • That "1.25 cms or .5 inches per month" as an average is just that: an average. For some people, it's slower, for others, it's faster. We can safely assume that Rapunzel was not completely average.
    • For comparison, for a normal human to grow hair to 70ft (840 inches), they'll have to live to 140 years old.
    • To be completely fair to Disney, this was actually part of the original fairy tale. If I recall, this is one of the few works to put an exact number on the length of Rapunzel's hair.
    • Your points are considered and well observed, and I know you explicitly countered this, but ... well ... magic. This movie, like many Disney movies, hinges around the existence of magical and inexplicable events that don't function according to a strictly rationalist and scientific understanding of the world. No, it doesn't make any sense with regards to normal or average human hair growth, but then, it's quite clearly not normal or average human hair; it's magic hair that comes from a pregnant woman ingesting a magic flower that grew as a result of a droplet of the sun landing on the earth. Even when we take your observations into account, we're already well out of normality and scientific plausibility as it applies to solar bodies, foetal development and hair growth here. As such, trying to force a plausible scientific explanation onto what is explicitly established to be something extraordinary and magical is a bit like trying to catch an Amazon rainstorm in a tea-cup; a bit futile, since if it operated strictly according to normal scientific principles, it would cease to be magical. Her hair is clearly established to be magic, so while you can point out average rates of human hair growth all you want, there is ultimately nothing stopping anyone else from saying "her hair grows faster than normal because it's magic." Because it is magic. Sometimes, you just have to shrug and accept it.
      • Now that, dear troper, was well said and well argued. If I were wearing a hat, I would take it off to you.
      • Couldn't have put it any better myself. Sometimes things really are as simple as A Wizard Did It.
      • Also, the lock of hair that was cut when she was a baby apparently grew much slower, slower that normal human hair even, with that in mind when can say that in her case, magical hair does grow faster than normal human hair. Yay for internal consistency.
      • That answers the headscratcher I came here to post: If cutting her hair stopped the magic in that lock, what happened when her hair broke from being constantly dragged along the floor, or even normal brushing?
      • It's safe to assume her hair doesn't break or experience damage. It's really doubtful it even needs brushed or washed- Rapunzel just does that because she's bored.
    • Possibly her hair grows at the same rate that the flower's stem grew when it was young like her?
      • Obviously magical hair grows more than non-magical hair. When Rapunzel is a merely a baby, her hair is already over half a foot long. When she's a toddler it's already over half her body length.
      • Or maybe whenever that brown lock of hair began to grow too long, she would cut it to keep it short. Maybe she's embarrassed by it or it brings up bad memories of when someone tried to steal her hair. (Obviously, Gothel would've tricked her into thinking some ruffian broke in and tried to steal her hair, which of course would scare Rapunzel.) Out of sight, out of mind.
     Trust me! 
  • Why is Rapunzel asking Eugene/Flynn to trust her and tells him everything will be alright when she is going to heal him at the end of the movie? Does she plan to cut her own hair?
    • All she wanted to do was heal him, make sure he would live. She was planning to give up her freedom for his life.
    • She's trying to reassure him: You're going to be okay, I'll be okay. I know what I'm doing.
     Concealing the flower 
  • Gothel was shown to have some level of cunning during the film, so tell me why she thought covering up a magical plant with an ordinary old sack would successfully keep it hidden?
    • It's not just a sack; it's evidently some kind of box she's covered with greenery in order to keep it blended in. If you were walking through a forest and weren't looking very hard, you probably wouldn't notice it. In any case, don't knock it since it obviously did successfully keep it hidden until she accidentally knocked it over that one time. Not every act of cunning is overly convoluted; the simplest plan is often the most effective.
    • Don't forget that the only reason it did fail was because she accidentally knocked it over in her rush not to be seen by the soldiers.
    • It worked for what seems to have been hundreds of years (if we're to glean info from the style of her clothing vs. everyone else's - her style looks to be centuries older), so obviously she had no reason to change it up whatsoever in that incredibly enormous span of time.
    • And yet the royal guards evidently knew there was a magical glowing flower out there that could heal the queen, implying that somebody other than Gothel had at least glimpsed the thing in the past. Seems likely that her method of concealment hadn't been entirely foolproof after all, so perhaps she'd been moving the flower every decade or so to ensure it stayed hidden?
      • I figured they took it as a rumor there there was something but not necessarily the flower itself, until Gothel, in her haste, revealed where it was.
     Cultivation 
  • So why didn't Mother Gothel just try to cultivate a whole garden's worth of the Sun Flower?
    • That way Gothel also would have been rich, have a massive supply of magic propertied flowers at her disposal, selling them to the local Coronan residents for a high price (whilst keeping the original in a secret place for herself) and making sure that she was essentially set up for life? Its shown early in the film that she can transfer the plant's magical properties to herself via song. Brew up some magical plant juice, imbue with her magic song, tell the user to sing the song at least once before each drink and she'd never have to worry about poverty again. Where was her business sense?
    • The Sun Flower was created when a drop of the sun landed on the Earth. This is not something Mother Gothel can easily replicate. Presumably the flower does not produce seeds.
      • And given that Gothel isn't likely to know how to asexually propagate it (especially since it's the only one of its kind - mess up with that, then it's gone forever.)
      • This is just a theory, but based on Rapunzel's hair, maybe if she just cut the original flower to take cuttings, it would have died. Not that she knew that for certain beforehand, given her reaction to cutting Rapunzel's hair. Though I think the most likely reason is that her motivations were not money, but eternal youth. If one flower could do the job, and if she could leave it there and not cut it and risk killing it off, why take chances?
    • So why not dig it up and replant it in the hidden glade around her tower? That's not going to physically injure the plant and it would eliminate the risk of being discovered, as happens in the film. Yes, that means that Queen Arianna is going to die (which means that Rapunzel is going to be born by C-section and most likely raised in the shadow of he mother), but it solves Gothel's problem.
      • She almost certainly doesn't want to risk moving the flower unless she absolutely has to — as mentioned previously, what if she accidentally severs a root and kills it? Besides which, she only moves into the tower after kidnapping Rapunzel, when keeping hidden from the authorities becomes especially important to her. Before that, it's just growing in her garden, basically, and she's an old woman who lives in the woods miles from anywhere, so why bother?
    • And it's likely the cutings would have lost the magic, judging by what happens when she cuts Rapunzel's hair. And she is shown to be a greedy bitch, who wouldn't want to share. She kinda has a single-issue wonk.
    • It's really likely she knew exactly what the flower was, and thought Rapunzel would work differently. She obviously didn't try to cut the flower, but tried to cut Rapunzel's hair for a reason. According to the series, she knew exactly what the flower was. Also, we actually see in the movie that cutting the flower DOES NOT STOP IT BEING MAGIC. Because they cut the flower up to give it to the queen.
      • They didn't cut the flower—They dug it up and them boiled it, IIRC. As to why Gothel didn't cultivate it, the flower doesn't exist through typical means, so they probably wouldn't be able to cultivate it anyways.
     Rapunzel's mortality 
  • What was Mother Gothel going to do when/if Rapunzel got old and died? As unseemly as it sounds she should have been happy when Rapunzel met Flynn (a wanted criminal, thus with no ties to Corona to make him want to return). If the magic is retained within Rapunzel, what are the odds that she wouldn't pass them on to any unborn child of hers?
    • Somewhere between 1 in 4 and 3 in 4.
    • There's no reason why Rapunzel's hair wouldn't work on her personally. It's the hair itself that's magic. When it presumably became an issue, she could keep Rapunzel forever young in the same manner. Besides, Gothel was running on desperation in her later years. She hadn't thought that far ahead.
      • Not necessarily. Sure there is no reason it wouldn't work on her personally, then again, humans only live for so long and, while it may only keep her young, it may not prolong her lifespan past the max. When we already met Gothel, she is already old to begin with, thus the flower really delayed death and made her young, but not her aging- actually, I think it was overuse of the flower's powers and, later, Rapunzel's hair was pretty much what did it, rendering her more and more dependent on it. Eventually, the same would have happened to Rapunzel.
      • It's worth noting that the flower itself appeared to be immortal, since Gothel used it for centuries without its dying. She might have thought the same could be true of Rapunzel.
    • Gothel is clearly a selfish Control Freak; introducing a boyfriend/husband into the situation introduces a competitor and threat to Gothel's power and influence over Rapunzel, which increases the chance she loses Rapunzel — and any children subsequently born to her — entirely. Best not risk it.
    • Well, the hair's power is only obstructed whenever it's cut, and hair is made of dead cells anyway, so maybe the hair didn't need to be attached to a living person? I could easily see Mother Gothel carrying around Rapunzel's severed, rotting head in a sack and singing to it to become younger. Specifically in my nightmares. Sleep tight!
    • To answer a point, 1) the hair that's one your head are dead cells, however, the hair follicles are still alive and 2), Rapunzel could theoretically live longer, however, we don't see her using her hair's abilities on herself, though there isn't anything to suggest that she won't age a bit slower.
     The guards must be crazy! 
  • How did that fragile old woman break into a royal castle?
    • Same way she manages to make herself disappear with a swish of her cloak. In other words, probably a judicious use of stealth and clever conjuring tricks. Possibly even a bit of actual magic, if like her storybook counterpart she's an actual witch (there's no direct evidence of this in the story, granted, but a bit of WMG never hurt).
    • Maybe the guards let her in after hearing about what an old lady did to a castle in France after they denied her access.
    • A quote from Mad Hettie of The Sandman could explain how she could perform that feat without being a witch: "I’m not a bleedin’ witch. But you don’t get to yer two hundred and fiftieth birthday without learning a thing or two."
    • When Gothel kidnapped Rapunzel she was already significantly aged due to being deprived of the flower. She could have feigned her way into the castle with the appearance of a middle-aged/elderly woman and, shortly after kidnapping Rapunzel, healed herself to look like a young woman. Noone would recognize her on her way out as long as she kept Rapunzel hidden.
      • Though it's unlikely that the king and queen would've let anyone leave the castle until they were sure Rapunzel's kidnapper had already escaped, or that Gothel could've kept Rapunzel concealed and quiet for that long.
    • Did you not notice the kidnapping took place under the cover of darkness? The King and Queen were woken up by Rapunzel's crying. Maybe the kingdom is (was) so safe that guards weren't seen as necessary. Or even they had fallen asleep on duty.
    • Keep in mind Rapunzel was kidnapped the very night after her birth. It's possible security was lax because of the celebrations during the day. Plus, according to the series, the Guards are nothing to write home about except the Captain.
    • The guards were probably also really exhausted, having spent the previous night frantically scouring the countryside for the flower.
     Staying close 
  • Why didn't Mother Gothel move Rapunzel further away from the kingdom? It's apparently about a day's travel on foot, and Rapunzel could see the lanterns easily from the window of the tower.
    • Maybe she still has to regularly go into the kingdom for food and whatnot.
    • For that matter, why doesn't she assign Rapunzel a new name and birthday? The baby would never know the difference, and wouldn't think to associate her birthday with seeing the floating lanterns.
      • Rapunzel was not the name of the missing princess, so she did assign her a new name. She didn't know the kingdom will be releasing lanterns on her birthday and she could just say the lanterns were stars, and could not have predicted Rapunzel would have some sort of psychic connection to them.
    • Rapunzel doesn't have "some sort of psychic connection" to the lanterns, because they were only launched once while she was with her true parents. Sidebar 
      • There is no mention of Rapunzel's name being changed. No one speaking about the lost princess ever mentioned her by name. And it's not like Rapunzel was likely to hear a word about the lost princess anyway.
      • After Gothel started to see that they were releasing lanterns on Rapunzel's birthday, she could have changed the birthday then. After all, Rapunzel probably wouldn't have remembered what day her birthday was celebrated on when she was 1-3.
      • From the way that Gothel is sleeping when we first see Young Rapunzel sneaking down to watch the lanterns (and presumably if she'd known about them she'd have intervened a bit more actively to prevent Rapunzel from noticing them), it would suggest that Gothel didn't actually find out about them until much later, presumably at a point when Rapunzel both recognized when her birthday was (so too late to shift it) and associated the lanterns with them.
      • Quite possibly when Rapunzel mentioned them in the movie. Notice that she still thinks at this point that Rapunzel can be persuaded that they are stars — she obviously hasn't seen them.
      • That, or she's incredibly condescending and dismissive of Rapunzel's intelligence (itself supported by volumes of evidence).
    • Well you can't just MOVE a perfectly good tower.
      • Besides, she might have lived in that tower for centuries — so people aren't freaked out by an obviously immortal woman — and been safe there.
    • Mother Gothel was so self-centered it probably never occurred to her that Rapunzel would see the lanterns and make a connection on her birthday—after all, Gothel didn't even recall when Rapunzel had a birthday. Also, at the beginning Rapunzel was sneaking away from bed with mama to see the lanterns. She may not have even mentioned it until she was older, and by then it would be too late to change her birthday.
      • Where do you get "Gothel didn't even recall when Rapunzel had a birthday" from? When Rapunzel was trying to ask for permission to see the lights? She was being sarcastic.
    • If Gothel had the foresight to build the tower with the window facing the other way, the whole story might never had happened....
      • And this would be a Downer Ending otherwise.
      • She probably didn't build the tower, just left after Rapunzel was asleep so she wouldn't see the floor exit, then blocked up the door when the hair grew long enough to haul her up through the window.
    • It probably took a lot of time and resources to build an entire tower to trap her in, though; probably not the sort of thing you can replicate very often, particularly not when there's a chance that Rapunzel might go a-wandering in the meantime or someone else might come across her.
    • Or the tower was already there when Gothel moved in and she didn't have any choice exactly where the windows were.
    • As to why Gothel didn't take Rapunzel to some other country, Carona is an island. Smuggling an infant (and one with very distinctive hair) onto a ship would've been difficult even under normal conditions, and the King had no doubt ordered all out-going vessels searched for the missing princess.
      • The same reason why Gothel initially lost the flower: Hubris.
     Keeping the satchel hidden 
  • Where does Rapunzel hide the satchel the whole time?
    • It just reappears randomly during the lantern scene as if she had been keeping it in plain view the whole time. We don't see the satchel at all between Gothel's campfire visit and the lantern scene.
      • It's inside her hair.
      • I always assumed she hid it in Max's saddle, in a pouch or something.
      • She never had it with her, recall that Gothel found the satchel when she found out that Rapunzel was gone. And later she gave the satchel to Rapunzel so she could test Flynn with it.
      • Yes, and this question is clearly about where she hid the satchel between that point and when she gave it back to Eugene.
      • Being a girl myself, I would have just hidden it under my skirts, so I assume that's what she did.
     The bloodless blade 
  • Why wasn't there any blood on the blade after Gothel stabbed Flynn? The wound was bloody and the cut on his hand from earlier was red, at least. What difference does blood on a weapon make?
    • I think showing a bloody weapon is considered worse than showing a bit of blood-stained clothing. However it is in fact possible in real life to stab someone without there being a great deal of noticeable blood on the blade, if your strike is precise enough and you withdraw the weapon quickly enough. The blood vessels reflexively constrict after being cut, which lasts for second or two before the response fails and they really start bleeding. If the blade is withdrawn within that time period there will typically be only a faint wet sheen on it. On a blade like Gothel's, which has a dark tint, it wouldn't be easily noticeable as blood on a quick glance.
    • It would have made the movie have a higher rating so the animators left it out on purpose.
    • Actually, since Eugene wears a silk shirt, it's actuslly more accurate that there is no blood on it. Silk is very hard to tear or puncture, so when an arrow (or knife) goes through it, the silk actually just wraps around the blade. When the silk-wrapped blade stabs the flesh, the blood soaks the silk, but doesn't make it to the blade itself. End result, you have a bloody wound, a bloody shirt, but no hole and no blood on the knife.
     Unlocking the flower's magic? 
  • How did Gothel know how to activate the flower in the first place and how did the kingdom know of the Sun Flower when Gothel had it hidden?
    • Maybe it was a legendary herb everyone hears about but never sees, because its so rare.
    • While that may explain the song, how does that explain the kingdom knowing of the flower's existence?
    • It could be a legend everyone has heard of; normally they'd disregard it was a fairy tale, but then the Queen got very ill and everyone was desperate enough to try and find it...
    • I don't think she did know how to activate it. She may have just been talking to the plant, and it comes as a song because it is a musical. If you listen to the words of the song, it sounds like an all purpose incantation. Give me back what I lost. Heal me. Turn back time. Seeing as the first line is "Flower, gleam and glow", it's more likely the power activates on "Flower" and does what you want until you finish talking. You could probably say "Flower, make me a sandwich", and a sandwich will appear.
      • Or you turn into a sandwich.
      • Actually, the flower's magic appears to be very specific. It's magic that would relate to the sun - healing, restoring, growing. In fact, the song emphasizes "Change the fate's design", "Make the clock reverse" - the flower has powers of a tiny Reality Warper, the power to restore things to as they were in the past!
      • If Gothel is a witch like some fans think, she could have sensed it with her magic somehow. Like hearing the song in her head or something.
    • My personal theory is any song would've worked, but Gothel was the first to find the flower and sing to it, so that song stuck.
      • Then why didn't any, single, other song in the entire movie have even a remotely similar effect?! Is it first come first serve with magical activation? The flower just latches on to the first song it EVER hears, and just ignores every single other one?
      • Perhaps because that was the only song anyone sang in the movie which was explicitly wishing for something. Sure, you could sing the song where Rapunzel's listing everything she does during the day, but since that song doesn't involve Rapunzel making a specific wish about anything, what's the flower / hair going to do about it?
      • Well, we know there was at least one other way to invoke the flower's magic (brewing it into a potion, or whatever it was they did to make the elixir the queen drank), so it's possible there were lots of different ways to activate the magic, and Gothel just worked out one of them. She clearly knows a lot about magic, so maybe she knew that magic can often be activated by sung incantations, and made up a song that described what she wanted. As for why no other songs had that effect: 1) Gothel's song was the only one sung with the deliberate intent of activating the sun magic, and 2) As far as we know, the flower (and later Rapunzel's hair) has the power to heal and to restore. We never see the magic do anything else (except light up, which is more of a side effect). None of the other songs really were wishing for something to be healed or restored.
    • The flower being mythical or legendary doesn't remotely explain how anybody knew which words, or which song, or which anything, activated the flower's magic. It was basically either someone who knows about magic put effort into figuring it out, or it was pure luck. Heck, maybe someone watched the drop of the sun fall from the sky and become a flower, and that person just magically knew the song. Probably not, but magic. It could be satisfactorily explained in basically any imaginable manner.
    • Gothel knew what the words to activate the flower's abilities were because it's one of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality needed for the story to function. We would hardly have a very entertaining tale on our hands if it went "Once upon a time, a drop of the sun landed on the earth and from it grew a flower that could grant eternal youth... but no one ever used it because they couldn't figure out how it worked and that there was a song it needed, so it just sat there forever... The End." There's a song, Gothel has somehow figured out what the song is (because she may or may not be in tune with magic-y stuff or she may have just spent a lot of time singing to it), that's all we need to know.
    • WMG on that but I always assumed when Gothel came in contact with the flower it sang to her and restored her youth. She just kept singing that same song for the same effect ever since.
  • This is retroactively explained in the series: Gothel was once a disciple of an ancient scientist who discovered and researched the legends of both the Sundrop Flower and its counterpart, the Moonstone Opal, and wrote down the incantations for both of them.
     Setting 
  • Oh, what time period is this set in? It looks medieval, but there was mention of Mozart, so...
    • It's not medieval. Gothel is dressed from the medieval time period, but she's hundreds of years old and they intentional designed her clothes to be out of date. Rapunzel is dressed similarly different (she really stands out among the villagers.) The kingdom is a little harder to place, since it's a fictional fantasy realm with its own style. Considering they have Mozart, pianos, and clocks, it would make sense for it to be in the late 1700's and the villagers are dressed generically "old-timey" enough not to contradict that.
    • According to the directors, this movie is set in the 1780s. So Mozart would have been around and successful at the time.
      • To be fair, not everywhere automatically upgraded their style of dress to fit the time. Different areas of Europe (it doesn't seem ridiculous to assume the film is set somewhere in Europe) had different styles of dress, some of which were far more "traditionalist" than others, particularly in eastern Europe. If you assume that the film was set in some remote part of the Hapsburg Empire the clothing doesn't look terribly out of place for the period. If on the other hand you think it's somewhere near Vienna...
      • Considering Disney has Rapunzel and (used to have) Flynn Rider hanging out in the Germany section of Epcot, it's safe to say Corona is supposed to be a Germanic kingdom. So it's somewhere around modern-day Germany/ Switzerland, etc.
      • Seeing as what is now Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and more were all part of the Holy Roman empire until about 1806, it's possible for the story to take place in any of the Germanic countries. Mozart did travel all across Europe, but would've been from the HRE, so he would've been especially popular there, and well recognized.
     Hanging by her hair 
  • So, Rapunzel is able to swing around tree branches suspended by her hair. Wouldn't that hurt? Whenever my hair is pulled, it hurts. It should hurt for her to, considering that her hair is supported her entire body in the air. It happens several other instances, where you think it'd hurt her head for her hair to be pulled like that but she's having a good ol' time.
    • As long as she holds onto it, it won't be pulling on her scalp. There's always some slack in the part of the hair that's attached to her head, so she wouldn't be able to feel it. The same goes for wrapping it around a hook to pull Gothel up the tower.
    • If you look, Rapunzel always anchors or braces her hair before using it. Hence the hook on her balcony. When she uses it to swing, she always firmly grips it about a foot away so the pressure is applied to her arms instead of her head.
    • The only time Rapunzel's hair isn't braced in such a fashion is when Eugene climbs up it to her tower at the end. Then again, Gothel has her tied up, and is totally in her Let's Get Dangerous! mode...
      • Gothel may have been stepping on her hair as Eugene climbed it, if only to prevent the hair from being damaged and/ or to keep Rapunzel from crying out in pain and alerting him. When Eugene steps into the room, there is definite slack in her hair.
      • With both Gothel and Eugene climbing the hair it would have to be secured to the wall- however strong Rapunzel is, and even if she can protect herself from the pain, they're both bigger than her. If the hair wasn't securely anchored, they'd just pull her out of the window.
    • Disney movie. Magic hair, and a lot of it.
     Length of brown hair 
  • Why isn't the brown lock of hair any longer than when it was cut when Rapunzel was a baby? One might say it was kept trimmed, but it appears to have not grown at all.
    • It probably did grow like normal hair, but Rapunzel likewise kept cutting it like normal hair. Maybe she kept it short enough to be hidden because she didn't like the one lock of brown standing out in a sea of blonde. You may argue it was because of all the brushing the lock went from curly to straight, but isn't it weird that the lock looks like it was just cut? Any cut lock stops looking like it was cut with scissors after a while. And (from my point of view) the lock looked a little shorter than when she was an infant.
      • The length thing can be explained by the fact that her head is bigger now than it was when she was a baby. The hair's likely meant to be the same length, but its relative size has obviously been affected. Also, the non-growing fits with the loss of enchantment on it compared to her other hair. The stunting effect on it only goes away after the rest of her hair has been cut. At least that's my theory.
      • Hold on-The exact line is "When I was a baby, people tried to cut it-they wanted to keep it for themselves. But, once it's cut, it turns brown and loses its power." No mention about the hair being unable to grow anymore-it just can't heal any longer. I'd say she probably trims that one strand, or like mentioned above, that one strand will not grow until all her hair has been cut and lost its power.
      • There's no mention that it won't grow anymore, but it's implied because, well, it hasn't really grown. Rapunzel shows Eugene a really short lock of hair that she and Gothel no had to reason to keep short (why risk cutting more magic hair?) that if they left it alone, should be maybe not as long as the rest of her hair, but just about as long. The idea that it won't grow until the rest is cut is plausible, but unlikely. How would the hair know if the rest has been cut or not, especially since it's not magic anymore?
      • Well, there's at least one reason; aesthetics. Perhaps Rapunzel and/or Gothel preferred seeing Rapunzel with a head full of golden hair instead of a head full of mostly golden hair with one out-of-place brunette streak running through it. Especially since the brunette streak would be powerless, and keeping it short would lessen the chance that it might get mixed up with the magically-charged hair and interfere with the spell somehow.
    • Maybe Mother Gothel cut it in Rapunzel's sleep over the years, just to give Rapunzel another reason to fear the outside world.
      • That... while creepy, makes zero sense. "You're safe as long as you're here with me, Rapunzel. Except from that one guy who sneaks in to cut your lock of brown hair every couple of weeks for whatever weirdo reason. Can't protect you from him. Sorry, pet!"
    • It should be noted that real hair does have a "maximum length": each follicle produces a strand of hair for a certain period of time and at a certain speed (determined by genetics) and then "breaks" it to start growing a new one. That's why wild mammals don't go around with yards of fur dangling from their bodies, and some people can't get waist-length hair no matter how much they grow it out. Rapunzel's hair is naturally short and brown; it's the flower's magic causes it to grow indefinitely.
      • But, while that is true, I'm pretty sure that short is not a limit for anyone's hair. No one has hair that won't grow past chin length, the shortest I've ever seen is shoulder-length.
    • Rapunzel worked on every craft project imaginable to keep herself occupied in that tower. Possibly she needed some human hair for one such project (repairing paintbrushes?), and she used her one brown lock of hair because it was the only one she was allowed to cut off.
    • Rapunzel knows her hair is really weird. Perhaps she keeps the brown lock cut to a more ordinary length because she wonders, sometimes, what she'd have looked like with normal hair.
     Why make Rapunzel do the singing? 
  • Why does Mother Gothel make Rapunzel sing to make her hair glow when she can make it glow by singing to it herself?
    • Why not? If she was doing that everyday, Rapunzel probably would have started copying her anyway.
    • It could have been a way to get Rapunzel psychologically attached to Mother Gothel. Like "Oh my dear, Mommy's so tired and ill and you can make me feel better. Would you like to sing and help Mommy get better?" Sort of like a bonding thing.
      • Well in the old fairy tale I believe, the Witch would ask Rapunzel to sing to her and play a harp (or some sort of instrument) when she came to visit. Kinda like the person above me just said, It was another way to keep Rapunzel attached I guess-as well as I suppose a way for her to relax from her trips. She was an old witch after all. But I suppose this is a way Disney is once again showing their being faithful to the source material.
      • It might also be that the healing/ anti-aging works better and/or lasts longer when Rapunzel herself does the singing.
    • Having Rapunzel herself do the singing gives her an illusion of freedom and control in the manner. Gothel doesn't want Rapunzel to feel like she's being forced to do this.
     Who wants to live forever? 
  • So what does Gothel do all day when she's not in the tower? Does she have a job? Where did she get the money to buy Rapunzel stuff?
    • My guess, seduce men for their money. Explains where she got the money for the stuff, and it fits the character well.
      • More likely she would have been a fortune-teller or something similar, since Gothel is fairly explicitly drawn to resemble a Roma/Sinti (more commonly referred to as Gypsy), and, outside of their own society, that was their main stock in trade.
      • Gothel is usually identified as a 'witch', so possibly she did witch-doctoring (her mystique, the fact that she'd looked the same for as long as anyone could remember, would be a big selling point). Her methods might have worked or they might not (though presumably you learn a few things in 400 years or so- there's a reason that wise women and wizards were preferably older people) and people would pay out of hope.
    • More to the point, what in the world does Gothel do with eternity? She's lived for a very long time already by the beginning of the movie, so what kept her from becoming bored? There's a reason there's a trope called "Who Wants to Live Forever?".
      • Possibly tied with the above point about seducing men. One would imagine that someone twisted enough to kidnap and imprison a child for immortality, and later manipulate that child into getting heartbroken and then "rescued" from thugs she hired would have had a really crappy life beforehand. She could have very well been used, abused, and/or neglected, and perhaps taught that her youth and beauty were the only things worthwhile about her. So, she uses the flower to stay young, and uses her beauty to seduce men, because it is the only way she feels like she's worth anything.
      • Or, if we were to take a less sympathetic view of her, she could be shallow and vain enough to consider living forever as a young, beautiful woman to be its own reward.
      • There's also a reason there's a trope called Living Forever Is Awesome, and presumably Gothel's views on the situation fall into the latter. It's not like immortality is this horrendous burden that's been forced on her; it's entirely within her own control, and if she got tired of living eternally she could just stop using the flower / Rapunzel's hair whenever she liked. Presumably she enjoys it and fills the time sufficiently to keep going with it.
      • It's also worth noting that Eugene describes her as a witch, and she's certainly both amoral and magic-saavy enough to be a user of Black Magic. In which case, she would probably be willing to do just about anything to keep from dying and being dragged off to hell.
    • Even if Hell doesn't exist or Gothel doesn't believe in it, fear of death and/or aging is a fairly common thing. One day Gothel looks in the mirror, sees a crinkle at the corner of her mouth, and panics because "I'll be bedridden before you know it!"
    • Vanity?
     Rapunzel does not like shoes 
  • Rapunzel wears no shoes. She is barefoot climbing trees, jumping on rocks, and let's not forget dancing on stones for an entire musical sequence and her feet aren't remotely bruised? Did she use her healing spell in between scenes?
    • Depends, has she never worn shoes? If so than her feet would be incredibly tough and the soles almost leathery and she'd have no problem getting around, but they would also be kind of ugly and possibly scarred, nothing like the pedicured perfect princess we see in the movie.
    • She's always bored and looking for things to do in the tower, maybe she regularly scrubs and gives herself pedicures?
    • She's never worn shoes, but she's also lived her whole life in a tower with sanded wood floors and (presumably) soft carpets.
      • There are actually only a few carpets in the tower, and the floors are painted stone, not sanded wood. Remember, she's spent 18 years running around on pretty much every surface in that tower, she's either calloused or she simply ignores the little stones and things out of sheer joy at being outside. Also, she doesn't spend up time running around on rough rock, most of it is smooth paving stones or grass, which is much easier on feet.
      • Healing Factor? Since the power is apparently inherent in her now.
    • Rule of Symbolism. She was raised in isolation by an abuser who never wanted her to leave her tower, but she wears her heart on her sleeve when she's in the big scary outdoors. Not wearing shoes leaves her vulnerable to all sorts of things that could injure a person, but also leaves her open to actually feel the ground beneath her feet, which is something she seems to like.
     Healing tear 
  • If Rapunzel's tears can bring Flynn back to life, does she still have that power, or was that a one-time thing?
    • It seems that the healing property is just something she has because of the flower. The hair was simply a manifestation of that power. It's possible that any fluid from her body would have similar regenerative properties.
      • Heh.
    • Although, there is the whole single drop of sun thing... Maybe that was the end.
    • Note, the magic in her hair died when it was cut. It was growing like the petals of the flower. She's the stem and the magic is still in her.
    • This is from the Tangled Junior Novel: "Desperately, she began to sing. She wanted to bring forth some bit of magic from her shorn hair to save him. But the magic was gone with her hair. Distraught, Rapunzel could not hold back her grief. She wept, cradling Flynn's limp body. A single golden tear fell on his cheek. Flynn stirred. Though she did not know it, Rapunzel did have one last bit of magic left deep inside her, and it was contained in that single golden tear."
      • Whoever wrote that has clearly never read Grimm's version, which is the first written version of Rapunzel. The moral of the story, as far as the Brothers Grimm saw it, was that the magic is inside her all along, and that having it manifest in her hair was simply a result of vanity.
      • In fact the Grimm version did allow Rapunzel's tears to heal the Prince, just less dramatically. He'd lost his eyes to thorns in escaping the witch, but still sought Rapunzel for two years; when they reunited, her tears restored his sight.
      • ...what. The Grimm version never had any hair magic. It was just friggin' long.
      • Yeeeeeeah, the Disney version and Grimm versions are VERY different, and not just in a "let's tone down the sex and violence" kind of way. In the Grimm version, Rapunzel wasn't royalty, the guy who saved her was. Plus he got her knocked up and then wandered around blind for ten years looking for her. The only real similarities are that there's a Girl In A Tower with extremely long hair.
      • The series revealed it was, but the rocks "re-formatted" Rapunzel's powers so she can form a healing shield instead.
     Proof of identity 
  • At the end, what does Rapunzel have to offer as proof to the King and Queen that she's the lost princess? There's no physical evidence, no more magic hair, and the only person who knows the whole story, Mother Gothel, is dead, turned to dust, vanished without a trace. Not to mention she is actually a brunette now, as opposed to a blonde baby.
    • She looks like the queen and she recognised her by her green eyes. Plus why would a brunette come and claim she's the lost princess, unless she's the real princess.
      • It's also likely Gothel left the cut strands of brown hair behind in the crib, so the king and Queen would know their daughter is actually a brunette.
      • Uh, lots of fame, money, and power?
      • TBF I think the above troper's point was more along the lines of "why would a brunette come and claim she's the lost princess when as far as the rest of the kingdom knows, the real princess was blonde?" It's not like anyone else would know that the princess's hair changes colour when it's cut. In fact, assuming they knew their daughter was actually a brunette, the King and Queen may have in fact deliberately concealed this fact from the public in order to make it easier to weed out possible imposters; if a blonde comes along claiming to be the princess, they automatically know she's lying.
    • I assume witnesses. A LOT of people saw her in the town when she still had her long, blonde hair. Not to mention the thugs and the various guards. And also Maximus.
    • There's also a clear physical resemblance between mother and daughter, and they share a few of the same physical tics (such as their little half-laugh when they see each other again).
    • They decided to do it off screen to save running time — but you notice how the guard, dazed, walks in and nods before the king and queen go off to meet her.
    • Don Bluth's Anastasia is basically this scenario played out with actual realism- there would have been a lot of impostors trying to pass themselves off as the princess.
      • One would expect such imposters to make every possible effort to fit the known physical description of the missing princess, though. There are paintings around the kingdom showing the princess with blonde hair, so anybody pulling a scam would naturally either find a blonde girl to play the role or use hair dye. I seriously doubt they had any imposters show up with brown hair and a face almost exactly like the queen's.
      • Well, that may be true, but it still doesn't mean the king and queen would say, "Oh, well, since you look nothing like how the lost princess is supposed to look, that obviously means you must be the lost princess since you would've tried harder to look like her if you were an imposter." In any case, Rapunzel didn't need proof that she was the lost princess - her mother ended up recognizing her on the sole basis that...she's her mother. Parents know their children, after all.
      • Apparently they didn't just accept her. Rapunzel could and apparently was have been subject to the same barrage of tests and questions that hundreds of other imposters before her had been subject to as well. She just happened to pass them. The guard who bursts in on the King and Queen before they meet Rapunzel is presumably shocked and speechless for a reason, after all. We just didn't see it because it wouldn't have added anything to the movie except to make it longer at that point.
      • Except any questions she could've been asked, she couldn't possibly have known the answers to. Even Anastasia needed Dimitri's help to prove to everyone that she was the Empress's granddaughter - all Rapunzel has to offer is that her birthday is the same as the lantern ceremony. Gothel probably never told her about her hair's powers coming from the sunflower, the king and queen wouldn't have known this, either, and even if they did, her hair is cut by this point and she has no way to prove it to them.
      • Well, presumably Rapunzel did know the answers to the questions they had or passed the tests they made her sit or whatever, because everyone accepted her as the princess, so QED. We just didn't see her sit the test or fill out the paperwork or whatever because everyone in the audience already knows that Rapunzel is the real princess and the filmmakers figured it wouldn't add anything except potential Ending Fatigue. The key difference between Anastasia and Tangled is that the former is all about a woman trying to prove she's a princess, which is why the filmmakers focus so heavily on it, whereas the Rapunzel story (and by extension Tangled) is about other things. The filmmakers arrange the narrative so that we can safely assume that Rapunzel was able to prove she was the princess in whatever way she needed to prove she was the princess, but we don't see how that was because we the audience don't really need to see how that was and it wouldn't really add anything if we did.
      • It's all about the emotional satisfaction, not the realism. After all, dealing with the kidnap-victim-returning-to-parents scenario realistically would make the film Tangled start to look like the second half of Room. Of the two animated movies, Anastasia plays the scenario more realistically, with Grandma being cynical and dismissive until she is worn down by undeniable evidence via Anastasia's detailed knowledge. But what it gains in realism it loses in emotional weight (a shame for the scene concluding the protagonist's emotional arc in an otherwise very well-told movie). It tries to seal the moment with a song to elevate it to emotional catharsis but the problem is, the emotion has come as secondary to the logic and feels lukewarm. Such a big moment drawing to a close a protagonist's entire emotional journey in a fairy-tale needs something big, a surprise, and there are no surprises in the Anastasia moment. For this troper's money it falls so flat actually manages to half-convince the audience that Anastasia is a faker after all, because in a fairy tale the finding of the lost princess should be more satisfying than this... meanwhile, Tangled plays the moment with better emotional set-up and pay-off to give the scene its proper weight: we're nervous about how Rapunzel is going to navigate this meeting, whether she'll be rejected now after all she has been through, what the king and queen will make of their quirky daughter we've come to love. Then, without words, she and her mother (and then father) just know immediately know, accept and love each other. The moment works because we're expecting something more difficult and complex and are delighted by the wordless, cathartic simplicity of it. Such an approach might not work in the aforementioned Room but this is a fairy tale so we can make the leap of faith to believe in the moment. It's a Happy Ending. Not really illogical - we can always infer that questions were asked and explanations offered later - but certainly larger/simpler than life. Exactly the feelings we go to fairy tales for.

    • Can I state the obvious here? You're literally comparing Apples to Oranges. Here's some differences between Anasitsa movie and Tangled. 1)Anya was an older child (7-8) when her family was killed and 2)the only reason she needed Dimtri's help is that she had a concussion. So if Ayna didn't have that concussion she would have remembered everything (actually she still did once she was being taught " like someone having a yellow cat?" vs. Rapunzel was kidnapped as a baby how many babbies do you know who can name their ancestors?

    • Don't forget one important figure: Maximus. The horse immediately froze when he saw Rapunzel up close, after he tried to drag Flynn away. He figured it out, since he didn't object to Rapunzel begging him to lay off Flynn for 24 hours, in the town square with a lot of guards. Because why would a random girl with long hair show up, looking identical to the lost princess and having the same birthday? It's Occam's Razor. Maximus didn't just break out Eugene to save his life; he also realized that the Lost Princess was right under the king and queen's noses, and the most wanted man in the Kingdom found her! That's partly why he made such a dramatic exit; he wanted the guards to follow within a few hours, so that they'd serve as backup to confront Gothel and rescue the princess before the lady could make a getaway, without turning around too soon with Flynn in custody. (He didn't expect that Gothel would kill Flynn, but horses can't climb towers so all he could do was wait and play guard duty.) As the Captain of the Guard expressed in surprise, Max wouldn't break the rules unless there was a good reason. The guards probably came just as Rapunzel revived Flynn or soon after, and investigated the tower after finding the secret entrance or using the cut hair as a rope. They would find enough circumstancial evidence to prove Rapunzel's identity: the murals, the shorn hair on the floor that is now brown, and who knows how many other knickknacks that Rapunzel kept. Plus, you have the Stabbington brothers in custody, who could tell them an "old lady" had a girl whose hair was magic, and all the thugs who saw her in action. Presumably the king and queen have seen their share of impostors, but not one with so much evidence. You can always trust a horse's instincts about people. Putting all this in the movie, however, would make the ending drag, so they simplify it to the guards confirming to the king and queen that their daughter was found.
    • For all we know, Rapunzel's onesie from when she was kidnapped is still at the bottom of Gothel's wardrobe somewhere. Or Rapunzel might have that old narratively-convenient standby, a distinctive birthmark or mole nobody knew about but her parents and the midwife.
     Magical hair 
  • If Rapunzel's hair is magic, why don't her eyebrows and eyelashes glow too? That would of been, in the words of Willow, nifty.
    • Because eyebrows, eyelashes, and ... shorthairs all pretty much grow to a certain length before they fall out naturally anyway. They're a completely different kind of hair than the hair on your head.
    • Only the hair on TOP and BACK of her head is magical. Probably because it's the only hair on the human body with not so limited growth. I mean the eyelashes are forever the same length and the eyebrows can barely grow any longer whatsoever.
     Flynn's narration 
  • If Mother Gothel was the only one who knew about the flower and its properties... how does Flynn know all this? How is he able to narrate?
    • It's revealed that Rapunzel told him, and presumably was by his side as he was narrating the whole time.
    • Not to mention that Mother Gothel wasn't the only one. The soldier's were specifically looking for the flower ("We found it!" not, "We found something!") to save the Queen and the baby. Seems that the flower was a well known legend and was searched for before, hence why Gothel hid it like that in the first place. Gothel was simply either the first person to actually find the flower or the first to figure out how to use it. Presumably the legend is even older than she is.
    • Also, his first line in the whole movie is "This is the story of how I died". He is obviously narrating AFTER the events of the movie.
     Entering/exiting the tower 
  • How exactly did Mother Gothel get out of the tower when Rapunzel was a baby with short(er) hair? The only door was boarded up (of course, to prevent Rapunzel from escaping).
    • Obviously the door was never blocked to begin with, Gothel obviously was locking the door each time she was entering and leaving the tower. When Rapunzel's hair grew long enough for Gothel to use it as a way in and out, she decided to block the door with stones and hide it under flower hedges, so that Rapunzel would be more secure. Flynn upon seeing the tower, decided to climb it, we can only assume he failed to find the door.
     How's she know how to swim? 
  • How does Rapunzel know how to swim if she has never left the tower? This is not the type of thing she could have learned without a body of water.
    • Some people have been able to swim without having learned before, it's just that most people who think of themselves as being unable to swim are so terrified they panic and sink. Since she didn't have the fear of drowning instilled in her, she could have just kept calm and mimicked what Flynn was doing.
      • In addition to this she probably read a book about swimming teaching her the technique for treading water and to avoid doing the above.
     Gothel's knowledge of Corona 
  • We never really know how familiar Mother Gothel is to the kingdom of Corona and their King and Queen, so would she recognize the crown that Flynn stole to be that of the Lost Princess? If she DID recognize it, why would she ever take the chance to just hand it over to Rapunzel as a means to test Flynn's feelings for her? Wouldn't she think it would jog Rapunzel's memory and cause her to realize who she is?! That's against her own agenda!
    • Well, the kingdom is only a quick horse ride away from the tower, and is clearly decorated with giant murals of the lost princess wearing the tiara. Plus I'm pretty sure she didn't expect her to have her memories of infanthood jogged back from looking at a flag, plus I bet Rapunzel doesn't even know there was a tiara, much less knowing how it looks like.
      • Plus there's the fact that, for whatever reason, the tiara in the mural doesn't really look like the actual tiara. It almost looks like a bonnet or something—a singler semi-circle of white instead of three large gems.
    • Gothel knows she stole the princess so anything that resembles something royalty will shock her if she finds it in the tower. Such stuff happens.
    • "We never really know how familiar Mother Gothel is..." — not in so many words, but the quasi-immortal woman being familiar with the kingdom that is mere days away from her base of operations which she literally lived through the rise of and whose princess she is literally responsible for depriving them of is something that can be reasonably assumed. The viewer doesn't need the details of how every single character came to learn every single item of knowledge they possess to be painstakingly spelled out for them; in this case, they are more than capable of intuiting Gothel's knowledge of the crown from the context and information they have already been provided with.
     Ignoring the thugs 
  • Here's something I don't get. Why weren't any of the bar thugs arrested when the guards showed up? I mean, they're thugs, it's kinda obvious that they've done some terrible deeds (like murder, kidnapping), so...why were there no arrests? Apparently they were all just totally ignored.
    • Because what proof was there that they did any crimes besides "they look suspicious"? That is pretty much the definition of prejudice profiling.
      • No, the hook-handed thug had apparently killed someone ("Violence-wise, my hands are not the cleanest", he says as he points to a chalk-outline.) and there's a minstrel chained up in there. And one of the others would like to "quit and be a florist..." Really, I thought it was clear they'd done some illegal stuff.
      • Maybe the minstrel had it coming...
      • And yet not actual proof. And the guards weren't exactly listening to the song. Besides, did you see them break Eugene out of the prison? I'm pretty sure a handful of guards wouldn't be able to arrest a house full of these guys on the grounds of "They look spooky, there's a guy who plays the accordion in the corner, and they sang a song."
    • None of them were wanted criminals. They were just a bunch of rough looking guys at a bar who, while being unhelpful, were not really doing anything to impede the search for Eugene. Really, arresting them all would have been too much work for no real gain and a large delay in the pursuit of a known criminal who has recently stolen one of the royal crowns.
    • Those guards weren't the most competent examples of the thin blue line out there. They probably would have had their asses kicked if they tried to arrest anyone there who chooses to resist, and they probably knew that. They could have been following the Colon/Nobbs tradition of judicious application of "looking the other way."
      • Not to mention the fact that they were vastly outnumbered. There were only five guards in comparison to all those thugs. The largest of said guards was the Captain, and most of those thugs were bigger than he was. Add that to the fact that they had no evidence against them and they were already searching for someone else, and they could've just decided it wasn't worth the risk (this is one of those situations that makes me suspect the Captain isn't as incompetent as he's often made out to be).
      • Let's be fair, though, you don't exactly have to be a tactical mastermind to realize that not picking fights when you're outnumbered ten-to-one by big burly thugs is a good idea.
      • On the other hand, the pub thugs may have been mercenaries. Not the most moral crowd, but not technically criminals.
    • The guards only show up because the thugs sent for them — presumably to get the reward for catching Flynn. So they may be criminals, but they're clearly not on the outs with the (local) law.
    • The guards also have bigger fish to fry; they're at the Snuggly Duckling pub because they have information that the criminal who stole the royal crown of the missing princess is there. That's their one big priority at that moment, so they don't have time or the interest to worry about whatever petty-or-otherwise crimes the shady characters there may or may not have also committed. It would be like the police officers investigating the Great Train Robbery of 1963 suddenly dropping all of that just so that they could arrest some guy who stole a watch from a jewellers when they were apparently seconds from apprehending the ringleader. Any officer who decided to not apprehend Flynn in favour of arresting anyone else there would promptly find himself being fired on the grounds of staggering incompetence and stupidity (even for them), and also probably kicked from one side of the kingdom to the other by the rather irate king.
     Gothel's death 
  • Why did Gothel degenerate after Flynn cut Rapunzel's hair?
    • Both times Rapunzel's hair was cut Gothel was touching it while it was losing its powers. That explains why she began to rapidly age.
      • Gothel was already really old (Centuries old—Probably around 1,400 years old) and was dependent on the flower to keep her young and alive, so, with her overdependence on Rapunzel's hair, she turned to dust when it was cut .
     "Theft" of the flower 
  • So I have a question. Some people are concerned that the king and his wife stole the flower from Gothel, and that is very bad. But, seriously, how on earth was the King and Queen to know that the flower was hers in the first place? It didn't have a sign that said "Gothel's immortality flower", it wasn't in her garden, it wasn't even hidden - the guards just randomly came across it after Gothel accidently knocked away it's hiding place. Was the flower generally known to belong to a witch? Was the island/place where they found the flower Gothel's home? How?
    • They didn't knew the flower belonged to anyone so it's not stealing if they didn't know it.
      • Yes, it is. The thing is, whether Gothel owned it at all is up for debate: she didn't plant it, she didn't grow it, she just knew how it worked and hid it to keep it safe from... well, pretty much exactly what happened. And then there's the whole issue of whether or not it would have mattered, because the Queen's life would obviously have been deemed more important than the conservation of the sun-drop flower and the eternal youth and beauty of a witch; if Gothel had claimed ownership over it directly, they likely would have taken it anyway. The set-up the movie uses is the only one that could have allowed for the story to be told, moral implications aside.
    • This is the point; stealing or not, they weren't to know at all. It's a flower growing wild in a forest on a cliff at the outskirts of the kingdom with no indicators of her ownership at all, there's no possible way they could have known someone else had already claimed it (except for maybe the overturned box beside it, and all that suggests is that someone else had been there at one point, not that it was theirs by right). Let's be honest here; a lot of the 'concern' about this is fans of Mother Gothel who are a bit too blinded by how much they like her making rather flimsy excuses for her actions.
    • In the original story, the rampion (rather than the magic flower) did grow in the witch's garden, and Rapunzel's father just stole it for his wife's weird pregnancy cravings rather than try to buy it (I'm guessing either because he thought she'd just say no or he had no way to pay her price, money or otherwise). So in that version the witch really wasn't in the wrong (other than in demanding their firstborn) and in fact never mistreated Rapunzel other than isolating her, up until the climax. So to a point the movie has actually given Adaptational Villainy to Gothel—and by making the flower not be explicitly in her garden, they actually did make what the King and Queen did be inadvertent and not dickish, Gothel's reason for using the flower aside. It's possible some people getting mad at the King and Queen are remembering the original story and applying it to the movie, but mostly it's probably the issue mentioned above.
     Birthdays 
  • Is anyone else bugged by the fact that Rapunzel knows when her birthday is? Or about birthdays in general? Since it seems like Mother Gothel is always in a state of flux age-wise, I don't see why she would bring it up. Sure, Rapunzel would age normally, but if she didn't know about birthdays, then...she would never know about birthdays! And even if she found out about them in one of her books, or if Mother Gothel let it slip, or something; why on earth would she give Rapunzel her actual birthday! That's giving her way too many pieces of the puzzle at once, and it seems like Mother Gothel is smarter than that. She is a Disney villain after all.
    • Well, maybe Rapunzel was wondering why she grew older when other people didn't. As for why she got the same birthday... Uh... Look at the pretty bunny! Look at the pretty bunny! (Of course, even Disney villains carry around a Villain Ball sometimes... Maybe Gothel gave Rapunzel the birthday as a way of bonding and further making Rapunzel love Gothel?
      • I was under the impression that Gothel gave her the day that she kidnapped her as her birthday. After all, Flynn only says that it's "the lantern thing they do for the princess", and they never explicitly say that it's for her birthday; Rapunzel is the only one who associates it with her birthday. Perhaps she gave her the date she kidnapped her to celebrate her own success (after all, she is pretty vain). She probably didn't expect that the King and Queen would put lanterns into the sky every year, or that Rapunzel would figure out what they were. She is pretty obviously trying to blow it off at the beginning when she says "I distinctly remember: your birthday was last year".
      • She didn't give her the day she was kidnapped as her birthday. The narration specifically says the kingdom put out the lanterns every year on her birthday.
    • Birthdays are used all the time by parents as a means of controlling little children, especially today. In fact, you can substitute "birthday" with any holiday or special occasion when gifts are given. Haven't you ever been told, "if you be good, you'll get a nice present for [insert occasion]"? Little children are more willing to behave when something desirable or gratifying will be rewarded to them for it. The above poster has it right that Gothel never expected the lanterns or Rapunzel's connections. It doesn't really stop her from trying the methodology behind control through presents, though: she agrees on the three-day trip to get white seashells for Rapunzel's paint in an attempt to get her to forget about the lanterns. And makes hazelnut soup, Rapunzel's favorite... though both times it fails to make an impact. So really, the birthday thing is a moment of Fridge Brilliance that blew up in Gothel's face. As far as the aging thing, Rapunzel isn't bothered by it until she learns she was kidnapped, and it's been explained by other tropers why the healing ritual serves as an important bond for Rapunzel to Gothel.
    • I think Gothel just kept her birthday the same because at first, she didn't think it would matter. The lantern thing probably wasn't very big at first, and hence you couldn't see it from the tower. By the time it did get big enough to see, it was too late for Gothel to change Rapunzel's birthday on her. When Rapunzel sneaks out of bed, she's about five, maybe older? It's possible that Gothel didn't realize you could see the lights from the tower at that point, since she was asleep.
     Loss of magic 
  • Why does Rapunzel's hair loses the magic when it's cut? And I don't mean the cut piece, the one that is no longer attached to Rapunzel, but the part that is still attached to her head. Wouldn't the magic keep flowing through her body and into the hair?
    • Maybe most of the power was in the length of her hair, kind of like a rubber band being stretched. Once her hair was cut, the band/power 'snapped back', internalizing her power - that could also be why Rapunzel was able to heal Flynn/Eugene at the end with her tears- Her power was internalized by then. Yeah...
    • The most obvious answer is that it's just how the magic works, but it's not impossible that each strand of hair is a magical circuit that requires a connection to the very end of the strand to function. If you cut the hair, you break the circuit, and magic ceases to flow through it. Perhaps if one were to pluck out a strand, what replaces it would have the same magic, but who knows.
    • Kind of like those fiber optic wands they sold at Disney World.
    • Cut a leaf off a plant and it dies. The original Sun-touched flower's leaves probably lost their power when cut, and that property carried over to Rapunzel's hair.
     Gothel overpowering Rapunzel 
  • I don't know if anyone has mention this yet, but how come Mother Gothel was able to bind and gag Rapunzel? I mean Rapunzel seemed strong enough to fight her off, as in evidence of when Rapunzel grabbed Mother Gothel's arm after finding out she was the lost princess. She couldn't break out of the grip until Rapunzel threw her into a mirror. So why all of sudden after that display of strength was Gothel able to do that?
    • She snuck up on her and she had a knife. Gothel is a head taller with more meat on her bones than Rapunzel, I think she lost the mirror incident out of shock that Rapunzel was fighting back.
    • Oh, okay. Thanks for explaining that to me. I was confused at first.
    • That, and the fact that Rapunzel probably would not have given her full effort to resist Gothel as much as Gothel was fighting to restrain her. Even though Rapunzel was willing to fight back, she was likely still not entirely willing to hurt the woman who'd taken care of her for 18 years. Only after Flynn was stabbed before her eyes was Rapunzel really determined to fight Gothel with everything she had.
    • You see, I'm not gonna buy that for two reasons; One. Rapunzel at the time knew that Gothel betrayed her. Knew that Gothel was never her mother, and being the strong and smart young woman that she is, knew she was kidnapped at birth. Add alongside that her incredible proficiency with her hair was prominent and well-defined, and she knew the tower's foyer better than her mother ever could-inciting an incredible home field advantage for the girl—she was a Lady of War with the sweet and gentle natures that are imparted by Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold. How was she defeated in this instance?
      • Well, remember when Rapunzel reaches out towards her as she stumbles out of the window while aging rapidly? She still cared about her, because Gothel is kind of the only mother she's ever known, despite what she's done. I'm agreeing with all of the theories that Gothel snuck up on her, seeing as Rapunzel's back was turned and the room was dark after she called the woman out. Also, in desperation, Gothel, could've easily been stronger than Rapunzel, or threatened her with her knife or something.
      • I guess Gothel must've just come up behind Rapunzel and knocked her out (they wouldn't be willing to show a girl being knocked out like that), when Rapunzel woke up she was already chained and gagged.
      • Bingo. That's how she got the upper hand in any situation: she intended to stab Flynn as he came out the secret tunnel, she knocked out the Stabbington Brothers from behind, and that's how she stabbed Flynn when he came through the tower. It was her M.O. when it came to dealing with things of a physical nature. Rapunzel was most certainly stronger, if for nothing else than hauling Gothel up the tower for so many years, but she was so convinced by that point that she had made her stand and there was nothing Gothel could do about it that she let her guard down and was knocked out from behind.
      • ^Probably right. Rapunzel is very smart, but incredibly naiive, and that emotional bond with Gothel hadn't been completely severed yet. I doubt it would have been hard for Gothel to lull Rapunzel into a false sense of security and then whack her on the head.
      • I was hoping the Blu-Ray might have an extended version of that scene where, after Gothel says "now I'm the bad guy...", we see her picking up Rapunzel's frying pan. No such luck, but that's what I'm going with in my head canon.
     Maximus 
  • Maximus the horse: Putting aside the question of why he's so smart, he did some nonsensical things:
    • You might wanna give an explanation as to what those things are cuz I didn't see any.
    • After all his attempts to find and capture Flynn, he lets a pretty girl tell him to stop? For all he knew she was his accomplice (in fact he DID see her aiding him to escape at the mine.) Even if only for a day, that seems very unprofessional of him. Now if she had saved Max's life first or something, it would have been more believable.
      • Well, he is a pretty smart horse - maybe he unconsciously recognized her as the lost princess? (There are mosaics of her in the town after all, and her eye color is pretty distinctive).
      • If Max had realized Rapunzel was the princess, I think he would have obsessed with telling or bringing her to the King and Queen instead of letting her gallivant around town with a thief.
      • He's a horse. No matter how smart he is, he can't talk and thus can't tell the King and Queen anything.
      • Looking at this from a human point of view for a second (or perhaps a horse with clearly anthropomorphized traits, rather), he wouldn't be the first guy to let himself get swayed by a pretty girl acting nice to him.
      • Given how incompetent the guards are, Maximus probably has long been doing most of the work defending the kingdom, without proper recognition. Plus, Rapunzel did say she only wanted Flynn not arrested for one day, and that Maximus could have at him after that. Maximus is careful to keep Flynn in his sight throughout most of the day.
      • Also, although Maximus did see Rapunzel aiding him to escape, maybe he really only cared for catching Flynn and figured since Rapunzel wasn't the wanted thief, she was innocent. He might be more competent than the guards, but he's not going to harm someone without proof of their crimes.
    • Why did Max ask the thugs for help? He barely saw them, and again, only knew they helped Flynn escape — he never saw them get all chummy with Rapunzel. Why believe they would help? In fact, how was he able to explain the situation to them ("Rapunzel is in danger, so is Flynn, you must rescue him from being hung so he can save her.") Kinda complicated to say for a non-talking animal without even hands! Oh and who came up with the rescue plan, was it Max? (He might know the castle's layout and guard schedule, but again, how could he explain all of that?
      • The second part of that (the way he explains it) probably can be explained by Rule of Cool, the first part? He needed some people for help, so he probably went to the only other people he thought would be able to assist Flynn, seeing them as antiguards, if you will.
      • Not sure about the second part either, but the first part is fairly easy to explain. Max knew, because he found the secret passage in the Snuggly Duckling, that Flynn had been there, and the fact the thugs didn't show it to the guards showed they were helping Flynn. He then later later learns Flynn and Rapunzel are traveling together. Ergo, when Flynn and Rapunzel are both in trouble, he goes to the thugs he knew helped Flynn, assuming that once they rescued him, he in turn would rescue Rapunzel. How did he tell them Flynn was in trouble? There were wanted posters of Flynn in the bar. Grabbing one and waving it around while looking panicked and frantically gesturing toward the door would get the point across, and once they understood they could have followed him to Corona—where, once Max had gotten them past the watch, and they learned Flynn was in jail, the thugs figured out a plan? Maybe some of them had been in jail before so knew the layout, or they spent some time skulking and listening to the guards' plans and order of the watch; we don't know how long it took Gothel to get Rapunzel to the tower, after all.
      • My vote is that Ulf the mime translated whatever Max was saying. With mime.
      • Yes that is the definite answer you are awesome!
      • Flynn needs to escape the guards. Maximus knows of some people who helped Flynn escape the guards once before. Enough said.
    • It's also possible that Flynn is making up all the stuff about Maximus, since he seems to be a bit of an Unreliable Narrator. Plus did you forget that Rapunzel and Pascal can communicate with each other without difficulties. If that can happen, anything can happen.
      • Max might be a smart horse, but he's still a horse, which means he doesn't think like a human. There might be something of a Shout-Out to the Unicorn/Virgin dynamic going on, where Max simply can't resist any request from Rapunzel, or perhaps the apple she offered him is like crack to him....
      • Rapunzel never gave Max any apples. Eugene gave him some before the boat scene.
     Cutting the hair 
  • Flynn cutting Rapunzel's hair: This bothers a lot of people because, well, why didn't he let Rapunzel cure him and then cut her hair? Note he did it in one thrust with a shard of glass so it was rather easy! The only explanation I can think of is that he was afraid Gothel would stab her afterwards (which would make sense of when he says "you would die" to her.) Note also that Flynn had no way to know Gothel would age to death instantly as a result.
    • Keep in mind, Rapunzel PROMISED Mother Gothel that if she was allowed to heal Flynn, she'd go with Gothel and never try to escape again. Rapunzel keeps her promises, remember? So Flynn begs her not to heal him, since it would mean she'd be dooming herself. Rapunzel was willing to make the sacrifice, so Flynn returned the favor, fixing it so Rapunzel couldn't keep up her end of the bargain, freeing her from her promise to Gothel. Gothel drying up into dust was just bonus (it's quite unlikely that Flynn knew that would happen, though it's possible he might have guessed that it could be possible).
    • Here are your points, but I decided to split them up so there'd be no wall of text. XD
      1. Why didn't he let Rapunzel cure him and then cut her hair? With the way that Gothel was dragging Rapunzel away, who was he supposed to know that he'd even have time to cut her hair after he was healed. It was a bit of a Heroic Sacrifice on his part — he just wanted her to be happy.
      • Even if Gothel escaped afterwards with Rapunzel (note she had chained Flynn to a wall) surviving to rescue her later is a better plan than dying after cutting her hair (again: what if Gothel killed her out of spite?) Oh and remember, Maximus was down there and he knew it, he would have helped Rapunzel the moment they got out of the tower.
      • Yes, but you also have to remember what's happening to Flynn right at that moment — he is dying, and here's a chance to save the one he loves — to do one good thing before death in a way. Yes maybe it could happen, but does Flynn know that? Also, it would mean the movie would be even longer, and much as I loved it, if the ending had been so bloated with that sort of thing... I bet people would be on here complaining about the ending. ^_~
      1. He wasn't afraid that Gothel would kill her afterwards — he knows Rapunzel's worth as a healer (and as a person), and he probably heard Rapunzel when she said to Gothel that she "wouldn't sing anymore" (slightly paraphrased, sorry), and guessed that Gothel wanted Rapunzel for her healing capabilities.
      • Once she no longer had those powers, she would be worthless to Gothel. And considering she just stabbed him, I'd be worried about Rapunzel's safety then too. Sorry, I meant "He wasn't afraid that Gothel would kill her afterwards if she still had her magical hair properties. Imagine if Gothel did stab Rapunzel, and Rapunzel refused to heal herself? That would not be good...
      1. Flynn saw how happy Rapunzel was at being outside, at seeing all the sights, and being with all the people. However, Rapunzel then promised to give all of that away to save him. If you see Rapunzel as a flower, her whole life she's survived in this tower — then she went outside and really grew and er... Blossomed. Now Rapunzel's volunteering to stay locked away again? He probably meant it metaphorically — she wouldn't literally die, just metaphorically.
      • It's OK, this is what most people thought, in fact it probably was what the moviemakers wanted the audience to think, that for Rapunzel life as a slave to Gothel would be worse than death. It's just that there are so many other obvious options -= cutting the hair after being healed, letting Maximus save her, escaping the tower and then searching for her with help from everybody in the kingdom, etc. — that the sacrifice comes across as unnecessary (except for Rule of Drama of course.)
      • No. See above. Rapunzel PROMISED. Flynn knows Rapunzel will always keep promises. That means that if Flynn allows Rapunzel to heal him, then Rapunzel will stay with Gothel forever. If he tried to rescue her after, she would refuse. If anyone else tried to rescue her after, she would refuse. Because that is what she promised. As for cutting the hair after, that changes nothing, as the promise would still stand, because Rapunzel would have already healed Flynn. About the only way Rapunzel could have been freed from the promise at that point would be for someone to kill Gothel. But heroes in these sorts of stories simply don't deliberately contemplate murder, even of fully deserving villains. And even in this case, it's quite possible that Rapunzel would still be bound by the promise (perhaps to stay and tend Gothel's grave, for all time), because she promised to stay with Gothel "forever", no strings attached. Furthermore, at that point, Flynn might not even have known whether or not Gothel was killable at all, thanks to the flower's magic. As far as he knew at that point, she's an immortal who's lived for centuries. (All this is on the presumption that Flynn could not possibly have known that cutting the hair would actually kill Gothel right then and there.)
      • It looks like a possibility until you remember that Gothel is right there in the tower still. As some people above have pointed out, was it even a possibility for Flynn to cut Rapunzel's hair after being healed? Maybe there was - but did Flynn know that? For all he knew Gothel was going to drag Rapunzel away the microsecond she was done singing, meaning that if Flynn wanted to save her he had to act fast - before he could be healed.
      • Rule of Drama, everybody. Rule of Drama.
    • Honestly, the thing that bugs me the most about Flynn cutting Rapunzel's hair for her is that he did it without permission or communication, effectively ruining all the agency that the narrative had built up for Rapunzel up til then. It would have been a much lovelier demonstration of Rapunzel's strength and grit if she'd cut it herself. It's justified, but still a little annoying.
      • All agency? Some, sure (a very, very small bit), but all? Rapunzel's strength and grit has already been established, when she made her promise to Gothel, if not well before. No more demonstration on that point is required. (And if Rapunzel cut her own hair, it means she's letting Flynn die AND possibly deliberately murdering Gothel (there's a much higher possibility that Rapunzel would have known what cutting her hair would mean to Gothel than Flynn would) in order for herself to be free. How's that for Character Development? And it would be hardly any better if Flynn asked first and Rapunzel said yes.) But Flynn's Character Development had to this point NOT been completed — he's still the selfish thief. He's started showing concern for others, but he has not to this point sacrificed anything for another, yet. He has to make this sacrifice to complete his development and prove himself deserving of Rapunzel's love.
      • The potential point of that scene was to show what Rapunzel and Flynn's love for each other meant. It's a series of Heroic Sacrifices on both their parts- Rapunzel gets to show how much she'd sacrifice for Flynn (being locked away, never fighting again) and Flynn gets to show how much he'd sacrifice (dyingnote ). Maybe Flynn should have asked if it was alright to cut her hair, but in this context, Flynn cutting her hair was less of a 'control' mechanism and more of a 'rescue'—his life in exchange for hers.
      • It's my opinion that he cut her hair before she could heal him at least partially because he thought he wasn't good enough for her. He had seen how much she loved the world, and how much she dreamed, and since he had never had a dream like hers or seen the world as she had, he decided she deserved someone who did.
      • Honestly, this whole "agency" argument seems kind of silly. If "respecting someone's agency" requires standing by passively as they agree to a life of indefinite downtrodden indentured servitude to a narcissistic monster who only values them for their hair, then that's not really any form of respect worthy of the name. Generally speaking, preventing harm or abuse from being inflicted upon someone may require overruling their individual autonomy; most reasonable people would agree that, outside of a handful of possible and usually rare exceptions, if a person is allowing themselves to be harmed, mistreated or abused, then it becomes acceptable to overrule their individual agency and intervene in some way to help them regardless of what they say they want. (This is why, for example, the state will act to remove abused children from a toxic family environment even if they say they want to remain there.)
    • I thought he did it because he didn't want her to think he abuses her power, like Gothel did. To illustrate with an example: I did well in school and lent other people my homework for them to copy. A friend of mine who rarely did her homework refused to borrow it from me though, even if I offered her. Why? Because she didn't want me to feel as if she was just using me. And that's how I took this scene.
    • The whole point of Flynns character was that he was selfish and only looked out for himself. If that scene had happened any other way, it would have ignored Flynns character development. If he waited until Rapunzel healed him before cutting her hair, it would have been a slightly selfish act. He sacrificed himself for Rapunzel, which he wouldn't have done before, proving how much he's changed.
    • And also, Rapunzel had been told her entire life how important her hair was to the world, like a gift. And, though I agree it would have been cool if she'd cut her own hair, it would have been selfish, in her eyes, to do so, thus stripping the Earth of her magical healing; Rapunzel's not a selfish person... And she knew how much it meant to Gothel, who she'd just promised to stay with forever (she knows at this point Gothel cares only about her hair) and if she cut it, it would be like she were breaking her promise; Rapunzel doesn't break promises.
    • Why would Flynn ask permission? There's no way Rapunzel would agree because she needs her hair to save him, so if she knew what he intended, she'd have him restrained so he can't stop her from saving him. Also, it's not like he had time to ask, as Rapunzel was moments away from sealing her own fate. Flynn had to act, and he had to act NOW. It's all very simple: She promised herself to Gothel if she were allowed to heal Flynn, so if she heals him, she's trapped for the rest of her life, even if she gets her hair cut afterwards. Unlike us, Flynn didn't have all the time in the world to go over all the angles and possibilities, he had to act on the spur of the moment.
     Inside the flooding cave 
  • The rising water in a cave scene. Where exactly was the AIR going? It actually looked like the water was going to stop rising for a second, then it resumed. There really REALLY didn't look like there were any cracks in the rock or anything where air could escape.
    • Maybe some of the rocks had microscopic cracks between them? After all, it is rather hard to contain air when you are putting things together ~versus~ when you have one thing. It's like lincoln logs ~versus~ a balloon (sort of). The lincoln logs (legos?) can be rather close together - closer then would allow a human being to travel through them, but still enough space for air.
    • There are always cracks in rock and ground like that. If the ground directly above isn't the bottom of a lake or ocean, then there must be enough small spaces for things like rainwater and air to move through.
     Mother Knows Best 
  • I was just watching "Mother Knows Best" on Youtube (again) and I just found something that bugs me in that scene. Gothel is deliberately making the tower appear ominous and dark to fit her means of keeping Rapunzel in the tower by fear, but what bugs me is that is - well, she actually uses a spotlight to focus on her during the last bit of her Villain Song. Where on earth did she get that from? The setting is quasi-1700s, and there is no way that Gothel might have any knowledge of that, and it's impossible to manufacture a spotlight in a closed tower.
    • She could always use burning magnesium note  with a mirror to focus it. Really any light source could be used, she just needs enough focusnote .
    • I think we could use a trope called "Song and Story segregation" - you'll notice that in a lot of musicals, they go through rather elaborate dances and songs only to never mention them again or never pull out those strange abilities, how a bunch of cast members who you previously saw dancing seem to vanish from existence, and how the architecture of the set almost never matches the stuff that happens during the broadway musical number. I always imagined that the songs don't actually happen in story; but they're more of how the character(s) imagine a particular scene, exaggerating certain things. In this case, Gothel was probably just mentioning what a cruel world was, being a bit dramatic to get her point across to the rebellious teen, but Rapunzel was just exaggerating what Gothel was actually doing.
    • Dude, witch here. Illusion magic.
      • Gothel isn't a witch in this version.
    • Because it's not a spotlight. At least, not as we would define it in the modern era. Gothel just opened up the window in the top of the tower. It's a narrow point of sunlight coming down the centre of the tower, which would give the same effect; she closed it at the start of "Mother Knows Best" and could easily have opened it again off-screen.
     Engagement 
  • Rapunzel was the beloved princess/future queen and Flynn was a criminal with no family who just barely escaped being executed for his crimes. Where does he get off making Rapunzel wait several years before he proposes to her? It makes more sense that an engagement would be arranged immediately according to the fairytale convention of the one who rescues the princess being the one to marry her, but with the marriage taking place later. It does NOT make sense that he would wait so long before declaring his intention to marry her. It's not like he'd be her only potential suitor or that he had any better choices or that they didn't love each other. To me, there doesn't seem to be any reason that two people in their position wouldn't state their intentions clearly before the king or someone else took the option out of their hands.
    • They dated a while to get to know each other better. It's also possible that the king offered Rapunzel other marriage offers and she said "No." The king didn't seem like the kind of guy who would force a marriage on the daughter who was stolen from him for years.
    • It was revealed that Flynn was just kidding about the whole "after asking me for many, many, many years, I finally said yes" thing. Plus when I hear "many, many, many years" I think decades, not years. Since it was revealed that Eugene proposed to her and we're not given a time period, it's highly possible he proposed to her, not long time after the princess was returned.
      • Flynn Rider. Unreliable Narrator. Likes to exaggerate. That's all the explanation anyone needs.
    • Disney was trying to subvert their tradition of Fourth Date Marriages, which has been criticized in the past.
    • Flynn was lying. It was Rapunzel who finally said yes. Plus with the announcement of Tangled Ever After which focuses on their wedding, it's clear they're not much/barely any older than they were in the film.
    Flynn: But I know what the big question is? Did Rapunzel and I ever get married? Well I am happy to say after years and years of asking, I finally said yes.
    Rapunzel: Eugene...
    Flynn: Okay, okay. I asked her.
    • Additionally, they saw Flynn with their daughter (so they knew he had been the one to bring her back to them), and she obviously would have immediately told them his part in returning her and that they loved each other, so they'd have plenty of good reason to both pardon him and allow them to be together, however long it might be before they actually got engaged. She's their beloved daughter who had just been returned to them; does it really seem likely they'd be willing to do anything she wouldn't want, without her approval, or specifically that they'd be eager to marry her off to someone else? Isn't it more likely they'd bend over backwards to do whatever Rapunzel wanted (within reason), including allowing her to take her time in dating Flynn before deciding to marry him? Even if they did want her to marry to produce an heir, they'd surely want to give her time and space first, which would allow plenty of time for her to tell them she already has a man (whom she will marry when she feels like it). And since he's already someone they'd feel gratitude to...
  • Rapunzel no doubt told her parents that he'd sacrificed his life to save her freedom! Not just been willing to die for her, but did die for her. Telling them that would include telling them she'd been willing to give up her freedom forever to save him, too. In the face of that, not to mention the fact that Flynn was just a non-violent thief and not a murderer, it would be easy to not only pardon him, but grant him a title of nobility, making him a perfectly reasonable match for a princess of a small kingdom.
     Detained without trial 
  • Why didn't Flynn get a trial? What the hell kind of wonderful kingdom is this? That could have been pretty damn useful in telling the royal family "Hey, I found your lost kid and I can prove it!"
    • He doesn't know he found the lost princess. Only Rapunzel knew she was the lost princess.
    • Besides, perhaps he was already tried and condemned. This is the sort of guy who could easily stage a prison break.
      • Presumably he's had run-ins with the guards before, at least: when Flynn came across the first wanted poster, the closest look any of the guards had got of him was one guard's split-second view of him disappearing out of the roof. Yet they're able (bar the nose) to get an accurate drawing of him, suggesting they've taken notice of him before. Besides, Flynn's response, "they just can't get my nose right", suggests that they've drawn wanted posters of him before...
    • Flynn probably did receive a trial, but the film is compressing things for dramatic effect. But even leaving aside the fact that this a small late pre-industrial monarchy we're discussing and not the legal system of the modern United States, if we're being absolutely honest they do have Flynn dead to rights on this one. He really did steal the crown, was witnessed stealing the crown, was pretty damn smug about stealing the crown, fled the jurisdiction with the crown and was caught by the guards with the crown in his possession. Not only did he legitimately have some kind of punishment heading his way (although execution, granted, was maybe being a bit harsh), but it wouldn't exactly take any half-functioning court long to get to the verdict on that one.
     Values Dissonance 
  • During Gothel's Villain Song, she says the line "And you're gettin' kind chubby, but I say that 'cause I love ya!" Since this is set in the 1700's this was long before the rise of cheap, processed food. Having a fat wife was the "trophy wife" of that era because her husband was wealthy enough to afford all that food. So, Gothel calling Rapunzel "a little chubby" should actually be quite the compliment! Eh, chalk it up to Values Dissonance...
    • Actually this could be a case of Fridge Brilliance — Gothel is deliberately misinterpreting the norms of 'beauty' to further make Rapunzel rely on her. After all, if she's not pretty in the outside world (according to her mother and who else would she trust the most?) then that's one more strike against the 'outside' world.
    • I doubt this was intended but I saw it as a link to the original tale where Rapunzel asks Gothel why she no longer fits into her dresses as she does not know she's pregnant.
      • That makes sense In-Universe, but let's face it, would Disney execs really know that? They were probably just imposing a modern sense of beauty where it doesn't make sense.
      • Are you saying that Disney execs don't do their research and don't know that? Just because they make "kid's movies" doesn't mean they don't know about the more adult version of what they adapt.
      • Take this, then close your eyes for the reprise when Gothel recites, "This is why he's here! Don't let him deceive you! Give it to him, watch, you'll see!" and try to forget it's about a crown. Not too subtle it becomes, eh?
      • So...did Disney just tell millions of girls that their mother warning them a boy is only after one thing, and once she gives it to him, he'll leave her...is something a bad mother would do? Disney sets things up so that the heroine deliberately tests this claim by her mother, by giving the boy what he wants, and that's shown as a genuine good way to prove his love of her. Dang, talk about Unfortunate Implications!
      • Not really. You can interpret it that way if you really want, of course, but that would require ignoring all the copious evidence that Gothel is a toxic, self-serving, manipulative jerk trying to control and exploit Rapunzel for her own selfish interests, and that this is just another way of controlling and undermining her ability to make decisions for herself. And who is Rapunzel's abductor, not mother.
    • Or it was a case of Fridge Brilliance. While most of the times, bigger women were considered more desirable, sometimes, "thin was in". (In the late middle ages, I think.) Gothel is a couple of centuries old. Perhaps she spent most of her youth during that time?
    • What's really implausible is that Flynn's dream includes being tanned. Prior to the 20th century, tanned always and invariably meant poor, because the overwhelming majority of humanity worked in the fields, and so sun exposure pointed to poverty. This was more important for women than men, but even men wouldn't actively desire a tan.
      • Since Rapunzel represents the sun, Flynn's statement could be symbolism for the fact that he wants to be under her influence. Of course, he didn't mean that at the time, but it does make sense.
    • We do kind of have to chalk this up to who the intended audience of the movie is as well; true, an eighteenth century person probably wouldn't place too much value in being tanned or being slim, but a twenty-first century person in the western world more likely does — and since the movie is being made for an audience in the twenty-first century western world rather than the eighteenth, they went with what would most likely resonate with who their audience was actually going to be.
      • Actually, if artwork and dress tells me anything about 1780s (when Tangled supposedly takes place), the ideal figure probably depended more on where you're from, though from the clothing, the ideal body type would be what we, in modern times, call "medium built" (neither particularly trim nor particularly rotund), so, Gothel, being so vain and looks obsessed, is saying that Rapunzel is unattractive by her standards. Interestingly, considering how old she might be, she's probably seen the first corset (which was invented in the 16th century).
     Cartoon physics 
  • Remember when Eugene was tossed high into the air and ended up falling onto the horse? Wouldn't that have hurt the equipment a little?
    • It's an animated movie, not a live-action movie. There's a trope called Toon Physics, which is how cartoon characters like Goofy survive.
    • Pretty much the same can be said for the horse not breaking it's spine with that impact (or breaking his legs on any number of other occasions).
    • It also depends on how far below the top of the arc Max is. The movie shows Eugene approaching the top of the arc, and then cuts to a close of of his surprised face as he is no longer moving. He might have only fallen a few inches into the saddle. Especially given the Thugs were precise enough to land him there in the first place.
     Hidden satchel 
  • When Mother Gothel gives Rapunzel the satchel, how is she able to carry it around all day without Flynn noticing? Did she leave it in one spot and then come back for it when they got on the boat?
    • Maybe.
    • Hammerspace. Or maybe she hid it in her hair!
    • At the campsite, she hid it in a tree stump. The next morning Max shows up. I think she probably hid it in his saddle.
    • In the boat scene, there isn't enough space in the small boat for either Rapunzel to hide the satchel, or for Eugene to hide the two lanterns he suddenly produces, where the other would not have noticed. Hammerspace indeed. (Barring two separate secret compartments in the hull, one of which Eugene knew about but Rapunzel didn't, and one Rapunzel knew about but Eugene didn't...)
      • He could've grabbed two lanterns that were already floating nearby and a shot showing that was not included in the film.
      • Or they could have been collapsing lanterns like they have for some Chinese festivals.
     Maximus's promotion 
  • In the end, Maximus is made in charge of the guards and supposedly, crime "disappears" overnight. However, he is clearly seen taking a bribe from one of the guards and apparently stole all the apples in the kingdom as well.
    • Ah — but that's the good thing about horses — you can only bribe them with apples! (And by it being your birthday and being a beautiful young lady, but I digress). Do you really think that Max would let himself be apple!bribed by people he trusted, even just a little bit? As for the other part, well, you saw how Max reacted when Flynn told him that he had bought "most of" the apples, right? It's more likely that Max is paid in apples, rather than stealing themnote .
    • I saw the decreasing crime rate having something to do with Flynn's change of attitude as well as Maximus's position...
      • Flynn was responsible for all the crime in the kingdom? (Or perhaps, in reparation for his prior crimes, or in exchange for a pardon for them, he had to help the kingdom fight crime, as some version of community service? At the least he should have had inside info on people, places, etc that the authorities would find useful....)
      • And let's not forget that most of the professional criminals hung out at the Snuggly Duckling and are now more or less reformed. Add in the Stabbington Brothers being in jail and most all of the professionals seem to be accounted for. Really, all Max had to do was keep petty crimes down.
    • I thought it was meant to imply that switching from swords to frying pans was the cause.
    • Let's not overstate things here; the 'bribe' in this case is so that Maximus would overlook the guard being a bit slow to get into proper formation. The offence in this case is pretty minor and easily overlooked to begin with; it's not as if he's taking bribes from criminals to look the other way while they make off with the contents of the Royal Treasury.
     Hair vs. tower 
  • Rapunzel's hair seems to vary in length throughout the movie, but it is almost never shown to be much longer than the height of the tower (there's some slack when she lets down her hair to people, but not that much). So how does she rappel down the side of the tower, ending up a little way off the ground? To do this, her hair would have to be looped over the hook at the top, making it twice as long as the tower is high.
    • From what I can tell from this video, she loops it around the hook in a loose knot, then slides down her hair. Then we get a shot of her feet and she pulls it off the hook at that point, so when the camera goes back to her, her hair is on the ground.
    • Looking closely at the video makes the problem even worse. Her hair reaches all the way to the ground. As she slides she seems to be combining the down-going and up-going hair rope into a single rope (without it gaining any thickness). She stops herself just a few feet above the ground, and now her hair is looped up to the tower and back down. It is more than twice as long as the tower is high.
    • Hair is naturally elastic. Healthy hair when dry can stretch up to 20% of the original length without breaking; wet hair has 50% elasticity. Would it really be a stretch to say Rapunzel's magic hair has ultra elasticity?
    • Officially, her hair is 70 feet long, but the creators have said they deliberately made her hair different lengths in different scenes. In some, she can carry her hair in a bundle in her arms. In others, her and Eugene have to carry her hair in equally large bundles. Not to mention that it gets tied up in a 5-foot braid that doesn't break her neck.
      • The creators had a hard enough modeling her hair, so in scenes where shorter or longer hair would be more convenient, they went with that. If they had kept it strictly at one length it would've turned into an even bigger bitch to animate.
    • The hair is magic. Deal with it.
     Where do all those lanterns end up? 
  • What exactly happens to all those damn lanterns every year? Is there some sort of clean-up or is there a field somewhere with them all just sort of there.
    • I would guess they all eventually fall into the surrounding water (so it's less of a fire hazard) and some poor guy has to go around and fish 'em out the next morning.
    • Being mostly made of paper, lots of them would probably get waterlogged, sink, and rapidly decay.
      • The metal rings wouldn't decay though.
      • Of course they would; metal rusts in water. It would take more time, but they would still decay (and thin metal rings like the sort used in a lantern would still decay pretty quickly). In any case, the metal rings would sink to the bottom of the water, thus going out of sight and consequently out of mind; in other words, no one cares what happens to them when they're at the bottom of the ocean.
      • For the past 18 years, the tired residents of "scorched valley" must endure the rain of fire. They have come to hate this day.
     Braided hair 
  • So... her hair is the length of a tower. No amount of braiding would make it to just above her ankle.
    • The girls braided her hair into several braids that were put together to make one giant braid at the end.
      • I used to work at tourist attraction. There was a little kiosk for nifty hair styles. What they did to shorten hair temporarily was to do knots as well as braids, then bunch it under/ in the middle by the nape of the neck to hide it under the final look (braids were easier to get out than knots, so it was normally braid what was meant to be hidden, then knot that by the nape of the neck, or if long hair by the shoulder blades, and for mega long wigs it would often be nape of neck, shoulder blades, and further down). Plus given how these are girls young enough to still be super creative, I would not put it past them to double/triple the lengths just as one would for knitting or crochet. Instead of for thickness, it would also be to shorten. - The Caffeine Chill
     Lack of blondes 
  • Did anyone else notice that absolutely no one in the film but Rapunzel had blonde hair? Wouldn't this have been kind of a giveaway as to who she was, seeing as the only other blondie was the princess?
    • As both the king and queen have brown hair, it could be expected that Rapunzel's hair will turn brown when she's older, rather than staying blond. After all, it happens in Real Life, so...
    • They probably won't accuse every blonde girl that walks in of being the princess. It's likely that blonde hair is just very rare in the area, not completely nonexistent, maybe blonde travellers from other places pass by from time to time.
    • We also didn't see absolutely every person in the kingdom, only a fairly small handful (even in the crowd scenes, we probably only see a drop in the water of the local population); there's probably plenty of blondes, they just didn't make it into shot. In a meta-sense, having no other blonde characters appear means that Rapunzel stands out a lot more than she otherwise would; this isn't to necessarily suggest that she's the only blonde for miles around.
    • Also in the days before hair dye, blondes were pretty rare. Although it has been theorised that Corona is a Germanic kingdom, blonde hair could just not be common in the region. After all, the only reason Rapunzel is blonde is because of the magic.
     Dreams vs. hobbies 
  • Speaking of the thugs, the whole "I Have A Dream" song sequence actually only mentions four dreams: the hook-hander dreams of being a pianist, the stinker dreams of being a lover, of course Rapunzel dreams of seeing lanterns and Flynn of aptly accented riches - but all the other thugs have hobbies, not dreams per se. Knitting and baking and collecting ceramic figures aren't exactly dreams, are they?
    • Because the song needed more rhymes?
    • While I'm not sure about the ceramic unicorns, it seemed that most of the thugs wanted to do those hobbies professionally. It's mentioned one of them wants to be a florist.
      • Ceramic unicorns: Gotta Catch 'Em All.
      • Yeah, pretty much this. You can knit/sew clothes, cook, and do interior design and flower arranging for a living. Even the ceramic unicorn guy, while a bit of a stretch, might be dreaming of collecting and then selling them.
    • You could say he dreams of collecting all the ceramic unicorns.
      • I got the impression that the song was saying "We'd LIKE to do these things in public, but being thugs and all, who'd take us seriously?"
    • Or possibly they want to be the best at what they do?
    • Or possibly they're just getting caught up in the song and listing their Hidden Depths and passions and why they're different people than their fearsome exteriors might suggest, and given the overall good humour of the moment (and the fact that these are still pretty big and scary guys here) no one feels like being a pedant and going "Actually, what you've just listed isn't a dream, it's just a hobby."
    • Also, you collect enough ceramic unicorns and put them on display, that's a gallery (or even a museum). Vladimir might dream of one day having enough ceramic unicorns to bring people the world over to marvel at his collection.
  • I always figured the "dream" was to be able to do their things (piano playing, baking, interior design) professionally instead of having to cram it into the busy life routine of a criminal.
    • Or more importantly, being able to do them without shame? Notice how the passions get girlier the more the song goes on? Maybe they just want to be able to persue their crafts without being made fun of.
    • Or being dismissed for their looks or backgrounds. It's not like a 1700s ceramic figure collectors' club would be that inclusive someone like Vladimir.
    • In the series, it IS a problem for them. Atilla opens a pastry shop but his competition is Uncle Monty, the sweet old man who everyone in Corona has known and loved for decades.
     Gothel's fate 
  • Gothel's fate: It's a case of "What Could Have Been" for me. It seems like Gothel just got driven by her irrational fear of aging to kidnap Rapunzel rather than actual malice and she eventually grew to love Rapunzel, in her own twisted way. I mean, it's easy to say that her parenting methods are as a result of her living alone for decades. And they could have had it at the end where Gothel, after using the flower for god knows how long, learned to come to terms with her mortality (let's face it, that's a wholesome lesson right there, if not for the kids, then at the very least for the elderly/terminally-ill viewers) and with it the strength to let Rapunzel go.
    • Gothel didn't love Rapunzel that much. Think about it this way: I love you (Mother Gothel to Rapunzel), I love you more (Rapunzel to Mother Gothel, and evidently true), I love you most (Mother Gothel to Rapunzel's hair). Seriously, watch the video the first time she does it. "I love you" is delivered to Rapunzel, but she's not even looking at her for "I love you most". And no, her parenting methods are not the result of bad people skills. Look at her interactions with the Stabbington Brothers. She has spectacular people skills.
    • In addition to the above, Gothel is also a classic example of an emotional abuser. Let's see; she's passive-aggressive and emotionally manipulative, and uses guilt and fear to control Rapunzel; notice how she's quick to play the victim whenever they have an argument and very obviously works to make Rapunzel afraid of the outside world and how she's unsuited for it. This is balanced with the occasional treat, such as hazelnut soup or the paint supplies she agrees to get Rapunzel for her birthday (and note how she makes a big deal of it as well; another common tactic is to play the martyr in order to hold it over the victim and get them to feel guilty for not 'appreciating' them). Most of her interactions with Rapunzel involve her criticizing, undermining, ridiculing and patronising the girl, mostly in the form of condescending 'jokes' or 'concern'; nearly everything she says is designed to somehow chip away at Rapunzel's self-confidence and self-esteem, or establish how much she depends on Gothel. She isolates Rapunzel from the outside world, and from family and friends; most obviously through the tower, but also by reiterating how Rapunzel is unsuited for the outside world, how she'll never survive out there, how she needs to stay in the tower for her own good. Plus, it seems like she uses Rapunzel as a bit of a slave, or at least a servant; there's the singing, obviously, but it also seems that Rapunzel does most-if-not-all of the cooking, cleaning, housework, etc. And even if Gothel did genuinely care for Rapunzel, fact is she's not Rapunzel's real mother and has no right to have her or her love; she's Rapunzel's kidnapper and hostage taker. If she genuinely loved Rapunzel she'd do what was both right and best for the girl, and return her to her real family. The fact she doesn't suggests that even her 'love', if indeed it exists, is based more on selfishness and a desire to control Rapunzel than any genuine feeling. Fact is, any sympathetic motives are more than outweighed by the fact that Gothel is a controlling, abusive and outright toxic presence in Rapunzel's life.
      • Pretty much all this. Many of the "nice" things she does for Rapunzel aren't because she truly loves her, but just ways to make her (Gothel) seem like a good guy. Abusers in real life do it all the time, "I've done all these nice things for you, that's proof that I love you!". It's also pretty notable where Mother Gothel makes a big deal about getting the seashell paints: "Oh, it's just such a long trip!". She puts it that way because it makes her appear selfless so Rapunzel would be less likely to try and rebel.
     Flynn announcing himself 
  • Flynn does pick up a rather big Idiot Ball just prior to the stabbing scene. While it's a Shout-Out to the source material, given what Flynn knew or suspected at that point about Gothel, Rapunzel, and their relationship, it really wasn't very prudent for him to announce his presence by calling out to Rapunzel to let down her hair. Especially considering that he previously got into the tower without climbing Rapunzel's hair. If he had kept his wits about him, he should have looked for signs (discreetly) at the tower's base of two people leaving recently (Maximus would have been helpful here), and then tried to sneak into the tower in secret, perhaps at night.
    • He was terrified for Rapunzel. People in that sort of situation generally aren't very rational.
    • Maybe he was so worried for Rapunzel on that second visit that he couldn't get the Intersect to flash.
    • Actually, the Stabbington brother only tells him that the 'old lady' was the one to tell him about Rapunzel's hair. There's no way Flynn could have connected the old lady to Mother Gothel. After all, why would he think her mother, who he only knows about through Rapunzel, would tell anyone about her magic hair after apparently going through so much trouble to protect her? During the campfire scene, Rapunzel even tells him that people tried to take her hair and use it for themselves because that's the story Gothel told her to keep her in the tower. At that point, all Flynn knows is that someone else must have seen Rapunzel, realized it was the same girl as the baby with magic hair, and rides off to warn her. That it turned out to be her own mother who was exploiting her was not something Flynn could have foreseen.
      • On the other hand, he also knows that Gothel is 'over-protective' and that Rapunzel clearly feels at the very least somewhat ambiguous about returning, thus suggesting a not-entirely healthy or pleasant living arrangement; it's a bit of a mental leap to connect 'old lady' to 'Rapunzel's mother', true, but not an insurmountably impossible one.
      • How is it jumping to conclusions to think that the 'old lady' they were talking about was Rapunzel's mother? Who else would know about Rapunzel's hair?
      • And clearly he does conclude that's who the old lady is, since once he gets free he immediately rides Maximus back to the tower—which only Gothel would know about and take Rapunzel to.
    • He was also worried that Rapunzel hated him at the time. He woke up tied to a boat after leaving Rapunzel with the crown, so he knew it would have looked like he was ditching her. He probably figured that barging into her home after that wouldn't be the best way to ingratiate himself to her.
      • Notice that he starts to climb without it, and then when it comes down, and he climbs, he's smiling — he thinks that Rapunzel is willing to listen to him, which has to be a good sign when he knows how damning the evidence.
    • Though it's a bit tenuous that he's so horrified when he finds out that Rapunzel has probably been reunited with her 'mother'. Sure he's no doubt guessed that Rapunzel's mother is a manipulative bitch who wants to keep her superpowered daughter out of sight from the world, but he's never actually seen Gothel, so while he would probably know that Rapunzel needs to get away from her completely, it's a bit of a stretch to assume she's going to get badly hurt in the near future (and indeed Gothel doesn't try any harm to Rapunzel when they get back, until Rapunzel has her 'lost princess' epiphany, which presumably Flynn never saw coming either. As he's never actually seen Gothel, there's no reason he'd suspect that she isn't Rapunzel's actual mother. People do emotionally abuse their own biological children, after all, especially children who are somehow different.)
      • Still, he does know that Rapunzel has to get away from the dreadful old woman who's messing with her mind, and as he's being taken away to be hanged, if he doesn't act on it now he's never going to get chance.
     Does the punishment fit the crime? 
  • Sooo... stealing merits the death penalty in this kingdom? Granted, it was the king's missing daughter's crown they stole, but still seems a bit extreme.
    • He was a well known, WANTED thief before he took the kingdom's crown to its rightful owner (on accident, sure, but still, the rightful owner).
    • Fair enough, but even for repeated thievery the death penalty stills seems a bit over the top. What happened to imprisonment? Community service? (Speaking tongue in cheek for the last one, but still.)
    • Besides, it was the 18th century. I'm not an expert on the laws of the time, but I bet the death penalty was aplied to a lot more crimes back then than today.
    • Imprisonment for normal criminals is actually a very recent development. Historically, most sentences for crimes were things that were carried out in short order. Dungeons were for people that the Lord had reason to want to keep around. Moreover, this was well before the whole "All men are created equal" thing. Kings and Queens weren't normal human beings, and committing crimes against them personally carried *very* harsh sentences. Realistically, a nice clean hanging would probably be much better than someone who broke into the royal palace and stole a crown could expect.
      • Depended on the country and the application (some countries had effectively institutionalised commuting death sentences for the lesser cases into convict colonization), but overall: yes.
    • The developers say that the movie is set to late 18th century; During that time period and the century that followed it, many real-life countries had the 'Three strikes' policy what came to the justice system. Commiting a crime once warranted imprisonment; A second offense would give a life sentence; Should you be pardoned or escaped and committed a third crime, it would merit a death sentence, no matter if the crimes in question were petty ones such as thievery. Flynn is already a wanted thief: It is easy to presume that he has far surpassed his third offense, and stealing the princess' crown is the final nail to ensure that he certainly won't be pardoned by the King and Queen.
    • Plus which, there's every indication that the crown Flynn stole was the crown of the Lost Princess. It's basically a sacred relic to the King and Queen, and possibly the entire kingdom. The penalty for stealing something like that would naturally be very severe.
    • Flynn stole personally from the King and Queen. As in, he broke into the palace and stole one of their possessions. Stealing from royalty is bound to have a bigger penalty than just stealing food or the like.
    • Flynn is not just WANTED, he's WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE. Which means that anyone could literally kill him, drag his corpse to the guards, and still collect the bounty on him without worrying about a murder charge. He's obviously done enough crime previously to warrant the hanging without a trial when he's caught, even before considering the theft of the crown.
    • Let's disregard Flynn's previous crimes, each and every one of them. Forget about the tiara being the king and queen's only remainder of their missing daughter. He stole a royal family's crown. In the times when monarchs held absolute power and authority, the crown was meant be a symbol of that power and authority. It would've been a most disrespectful form of treason for someone to have the gall to break into the royal house and manage to escape and make off with that kind of symbol - it was much more than stealing anything of similar monetary value, because it was worth so much more than that. So, no, Eugene making off with one of the royal family's symbols of authority and receiving a near-immediate death sentence isn't too out-of-the-question.
    • FWIW, Tangled: The Series partially addresses this by suggesting that the King went a bit deep into Disproportionate Retribution territory when it came to punishing crime out of grief towards his lost daughter.
     Jumping to conclusions 
  • Toward the end where Flynn intimidates the twins into telling him where Rapunzel is. How does he respond so well to "the old lady"? He's never even seen Gothel, and her rapid aging was an unlikely topic conversation through his adventures with Rapunzel.
    • True, but he knew from Rapunzel's freak out that she had a very controlling mother... So it wasn't a major leap of logic for him to presume that the "old lady" who had told the brothers about Rapunzel's powers to be aforementioned Control Freak.
    • Who else besides Rapunzel's "mother" knew she had magical hair?
    • Just finished watching it before typing this, there was no evidence to suggest he KNEW who this old lady was. His immediate response was to yell that Rapunzel is in trouble. Given the story she had told him earlier about others wanting to use her hair, he must have concluded that if someone knew about Rapunzel's secret and told the twins about it, that old lady must have been trying to get Rapunzel for herself, if the twins currently didn't have Rapunzel with them.
    • And yet when he gets free, the first place he goes on Maximus is back to the tower. If he is assuming the old lady has captured Rapunzel, then obviously the latter would not be in charge of their destination. The only other who would know about the tower is her mother. So it is pretty clear he assumed the old lady must be her, because no one else could know about the hair's properties. He already knows about her being overprotective, that she held her in the tower to protect her from the outside world and so would take her back there and never let her out again if she could get her hands on her again. And while this might make him wonder why she would tell the Stabbington brothers about the hair or work with them at all, at that point he's just panicking about Rapunzel being in danger and not thinking about things such as motive.
     "I think he likes me...though I can't really say why!" 
  • If Rapunzel has never had any outside interaction with the world, let alone with a person of the opposite sex, how would Rapunzel know that Flynn liked her when she says to Gothel "I think he likes me"?
    • Woman's intuition.
    • Damn, that's one hell of a woman's intuition. Then how does she know to embrace in a kiss, when she has no idea what a kiss is, or what it means? No amount of intuition will help there.
      • She could have read about it in one of her books.
      • She only has three books (botany, geology and a cook book). Although it does bring up a conundrum as to whether or not Rapunzel is aware about reproduction. As for knowing how to kiss... maybe she practiced with Pascal?
      • She could have read about it in one of Gothel's books. Imagine her leaving some smutty romance novel lying around...
      • Had Rapunzel been among the first people, she would have been one to pioneer kissing. And...well, Gothel did give her some hobbies. She might have gone through the standard "what's happening to my body?" and Gothel picked up some books rather than explain?
      • Also, where's it said that she has no idea what kissing is? Considering how far Gothel went to convince Rapunzel that she was her mother, it's unlikely that she never gave her an 'affectionate' motherly kiss at some point, and it's not really that difficult a concept to pick up; you put your lips to someone else's cheek / lips etc if you want to show affection to them. Kissing romantically, of course, at least initially she clearly hasn't got a clue — notice how when she first kisses Eugene at the end, it's a kind of chaste lips-to-lips smooch that two kids might do, and he's the one who turns it into a more romantic kiss — but that doesn't mean she doesn't have any clue what kissing is at all or what it means as a concept.
    • He's nice to her and doesn't put her down nearly as much as her loving mother does. Considering how little personal interaction she's had, she'd likely interpret any kindness this way.
    • She may not know, she just wants to believe it.
    • This is really a headscratcher? I'm assuming that the OP has never been in love or had a serious crush on someone, then, since this Troper can personally confirm that in that state when the feelings are still fresh, all the other person has to do is briefly acknowledge your existence for you to manage to convince yourself, even if only briefly, that "OMG, (s)he really really likes me!"
    • Not to mention even if she'd never read about love in her books, she can easily extrapolate to Flynn what she is feeling, assuming he must feel the same way she does because of their experiences and the nice way he acts toward her vs. Gothel's abusiveness.
     Rapunzel's mortality II 
  • Okay, let's assume for one second that Gothel's plan actually works and she manages to hide Rapunzel during her whole life. But Rapunzel is bound to die someday; even if her hair is magical, she's not. What was Gothel planning on doing, then?
    • There's no reason to think the magic of the hair wouldn't work on Rapunzel herself in the same way it worked on Gothel, restoring her youth when she got old enough to need it.
    • Just because it never shows us that she had a plan for that doesn't mean she didn't. Even if she didn't have a "plan", she certainly has considered the problem, since avoiding her own death is a huge motivation for her. Who says she didn't spend most of her time trying to find a solution to this very problem? She obviously left the tower, and it never shows us what she's doing until Rapunzel leaves and she's trying to get her back. She's likely looking into all kinds of resources in attempts to figure out what to do if the hair stops working when Rapunzel dies, which we also have no reason to presume it would since hair is already not alive even when it's on the person growing it. Still, I'm sure she's considered the problem, she just doesn't ever show us what she did about it, even if all she did was some hard thinking. Push come to shove, she could use Rapunzel's hair to keep Rapunzel youthful, too. Sneak into her room every year or so, wrap the hair around Rapunzel, sing in a whisper. I just thought of that as I was typing, so I'm sure it's not too far to presume Mother Gothel might also have had a similar thought, eventually.
    • Why does there need to be a back-up plan? Gothel would have died, too, like she was inevitably going to anyway. She certainly wouldn't be happy about it, but two full lifetimes is twice as many as most people get and one of them would have been spent in perpetual youth. From Gothel's perspective it'd make sense to exploit a resource even if it were finite.
     Rapunzel's future hairstyle 
  • Just to be sure, is Rapunzel going to be stuck with a shaggy head of brown hair for the rest of her life? It's shown that the part that was cut never grew again, but then again, she still had plenty of hair left to make up for it. Now that she has no magic in her hair, will it grow out properly or stay the same length?
    • It'll probably stay the same length, based on the cut piece and that the ending seems to take place a while after he cuts it and it doesn't seem to have grown at all.
      • Or it might begin to grow as her body - and especially her hair - begins to adapt to not having a piece of concentrated magic in it (the ending doesn't seem to take place that long after it was cut, so a short delay to the natural growth should give enough margin of error - the time from cut to ending doesn't have to be more than a few days) - hard to say, really.
      • I haven't seen it in a while but isn't the part where you see her with brown hair after Flynn says that "After years of asking and asking and asking I finally said yes", showing that it's sort of a "*blank* years later" epilouge? Her hair definitely would of grown at least a few inches after a few years.
      • Actually, when you see her with brown hair is during the week-long party to celebrate her return.
      • In the wedding sequel, after "years of asking" (allegedly), it doesn't seem to have grown much if at all. So either it's not growing, or she just decides she likes it that way.
      • The kids who braided Rapunzel's hair in the kingdom dance were still kids in the wedding, meaning it takes place pretty soon afterwards.
      • Also, Flynn was lying about it being years and years later for the sake of snark—Rapunzel immediately calls him on it, and there's nothing indicating she wasn't getting after him for more than who did the asking. Especially not when you factor in the Ever After special where it's clear the wedding is taking place only a short time later.
    • I'm guessing it's more likely that she kepy her hair that way out of preference. If you look closely at Rapunzel's hair immediately after Flynn cuts it and her hair during the epilogue (which presumably takes place only shortly afterwards), it goes from choppy and uneven to a fuller, more lush look, which suggests that her hair kept growing and Rapunzel merely opted to cut it short. I'm guessing that after 18 years of being forced to grow her hair out, Rapunzel decided to cut her hair just because, for the first time in her life she actually COULD.
    • If you want to go by the theory that Anna and Elsa's parents perished on their way to Rapunzel's wedding, then it probably doesn't grow on its own since it still looks the same three years later when she shows up to Elsa's coronation in Frozen.
    • Did any OTHER character's hair change in the amount of time you expect Rapunzel's to? Even if it did, I'm pretty sure they had stylists who owned scissors. What, you can only cut hair once, then it's immune? Hair is the Borg?
    • It's hardly impossible that someone might have more than one hair-cut in three years.
     Sickness and health, aging and youth 
  • If cutting the hair took away its effects on Gothel why didn't it make Rapunzel's mother sick again and unheal Flynn's cut?
    • As someone else said above, de-aging is very unnatural. Healing sickness/wounds, however, is. Maybe the flower speeds up natural processes to heal people?
    • Plus, Gothel's use of the hair was for purely selfish reasons. Rapunzel's father used it to heal his wife and save his unborn child and Rapunzel used it to heal Flynn, without his asking. Hey, if the thing is magic in the first place, who's to say it can't distinguish between right and wrong?
    • Gothel was holding the hair at the time, which is why she aged so quickly. Flynn wasn't, and the queen wasn't even in the same room.
    • Rapunzel's mother was healed by the effects of the flower directly, rather than the hair: Flynn being saved reveals that the rest of the magic's applications (including directly from the flower) haven't been affected, only that caused by the hair. As for Flynn's cut, do we actually see the palm in question in the following scene? If not, it's entirely possible that the cut did reappear, only to be healed again at the same time as the stabbing wound. The only other person who Rapunzel could have had the opportunity to use her hair on in the past was herself to heal minor scrapes, and we can assume that the flower's magic, still being a part of her, kept the healing as it was.
    • No Immortal Inertia. Gothel had been using the healing powers of the flower/hair for centuries, so when the source was removed, she returned to the age she would have been without the flower. As mentioned above, the queen and Eugene were healed indirectly, which may be permanent.
    • Well think of it this way: the injury to Flynn and the Queen's illness are like cracks in the wall. The magic mends the cracks, therefore no more problems. Gothel meanwhile is preventing the natural decaying of the entire building by restoring her youth. So rather than solving the problem, she's just keeping it at bay indefinitely. So when the source to that is cut off, the building is so old that it collapses. Or looking at it another way, Gothel's aging was natural while Flynn's injury and the Queen's illness weren't. The flower healed the tear in his skin and got rid of the germs or whatever was making the Queen ill. Also as mentioned above, Gothel was touching the hair when it was cut. If she hadn't been, she would have just rapidly aged over the next couple of days.
    • Think of it as the hair's loss restoring the body to its natural state. The natural state of Eugene's body is unwounded, and the natural state of the Queen's is healthy. As Gothel was hundreds of years old by that point, the natural state of her body is a pile of ash and bone.
     Recurring illness 
  • If Gothel had told the king and queen about how to sing to the flower to use it would the queen (and possibly Rapunzel) be permanently healed or would she need to use the flower regularly like Gothel does?
    • My guess is once, because once you heal from a sickness, you don't go back to being sick, whereas people constantly age.
      • The Queen didn't have that same overdependance like Gothel did.
     Rapunzel's mortality III 
  • Okay, so Rapunzel is essentially a "walking Fountain of Youth" for Mother Gothel, right? Except that Rapunzel clearly still ages...so what would've happened if Rapunzel got old and died?
    • This has already been discussed not too long ago, as seen in the comments above.
     Keeping Rapunzel ignorant 
  • If Gothel really wanted to keep Rapunzel ignorant, why didn't she just not educate her at all, leaving her an airheaded bimbo who can't count to 2?
    • Well she only had three books in that place, and other than chess I don't remember anything that would suggest she was particularly smart, so maybe she did keep her from learning most things and just taught her enough that she wouldn't end up killing herself in some stupid way. Or she may have been trying to do that but she taught herself to do a few things.
      • She mentioned being able to chart stars. That requires a certain degree of intelligence, alone. It's also never said that those were the only books she had, just the only one she happened to be reading that day. People back then (commoners at least) generally didn't do much reading to begin with unless they were scribes or librarians or other professions that required them to open a book. Gothel was at least smart enough to know that invisible mental abuse and love would be enough to keep Rapunzel by her side. If Gothel had been cruel or neglectful to her, Rapunzel would have found a way out of it somehow. This also proves that perhaps Gothel wasn't completely and totally twisted - I guess she didn't want her stolen daughter to be sitting around the tower all day like a stone, knowing nothing else but that hair song.
      • Yes, she charted stars, but if we assume that painting is her star-chart, or is at least based on it, then it's not nearly as complicated as modern star charts. Even still, if we assume they are, she's had 18 years of that tower. The changing sky outside the tower would be the most interesting thing in her life, so naturally she'd spend a lot of time thinking about them, plotting their course. Raw intellect isn't necessary. While she's clearly not stupid, there's also nothing here suggesting she has an incredible intellect. Perhaps above normal, but nothing conclusive about it being higher than that. (Disclaimer: I'm not saying we know she's not a genius, I'm only saying we don't know that she is)
      • They were the only ones on the shelf and she rereads them later instead of just reading new ones.
    • Non-sexual bride grooming anyone?
    • She can read so she could do Gothel's taxes. That or Gothel wanted a good way to keep her distracted/occupied so she would sit quietly at home with a book instead of throwing herself out the window or wearing out the floorboards.
    • If Gothel hadn't given Rapunzel anything to stimulate/ distract Rapunzel with, she would have ran out on her years ago. It also gives her more guilt trip ammo. "I give you all these wonderful things to do, and you still want to leave me?"
    • Entertainment and stimulation. If Rapunzel was constantly bored, she probably would've been more willing to leave the tower and explore.
      • Also, Gothel might have decided that it was better to have a daughter with whom she could carry on a decent conversation, than an empty headed bimbo.
    • It's possible all the stuff we see Rapunzel with in "When Will My Life Begin?" is a collection of various presents Gothel had got her over the years to keep her in line! Speaking as an avid reader myself, if I'm engrossed in a good book then I won't leave my position for hours to get to the end of the story. So books to keep her occupied is a pretty smart idea!
    • Basically, Gothel was stuck once the power moved from the flower to a person i.e. Rapunzel. Gothel simply had to keep Rapunzel in good physical health or else risk the hair power dying with her. However, you cannot easily maintain physical health without keeping good mental-health as well. For instance, suppose Gothel attempted to raise Rapunzel deprived of normal mental stimulation, so that she may be more easily manipulated. What will likely happen is that Rapunzel's mind will still continue to develop, but now into odd and strange directions. For example, in the old days, zoos kept animals in understimulated environments, and these animals tend to develop obsessive and self-harming behaviors such as chewing everything in sight, scratching constantly or over/under eating etc. Gothel surely will not want her youth-restoring person to go mentally nuts, self-harm and eventually die. Even in the Middle Ages, if not earlier, it is well known that prisoners isolated in dark and lonely dungeons tended to go crazy, so Gothel will have known of this over her long life.
    • Rapunzel is smart, clearly, but she's also really naive. Gothel may have educated her in some form or another but she made sure to keep her sheltered for the most part. Note that part of Rapunzel's char development is her learning the difference betwixt how normal people care for each other and her dynamic with Gothel.

     Leaving the tower 
  • Gothel has a secret entrance into the tower that Rapunzel apparently doesn't know about, which is why Rapunzel lets down her hair every time to let Gothel up. But it stands to reason that Rapunzel's hair wasn't always long enough to let down in that manner, so did Gothel use the secret entrance back then? Of course, Rapunzel would have been very young, and it'd be inadvisable to leave her alone for long periods of time. OK... how did Rapunzel find the secret entrance at the end? It stands to reason that's the only way that she and Eugene could have left the tower after Rapunzel's hair was cut and Gothel died.
    • A couple people have theorized that Gothel snuck out through that entrance when Rapunzel was sleeping, at least until her hair was long enough. As for how they got out at the end, they could have either looked for the secret entrance (since Gothel getting in on her own made it clear there had to be one), or they could have climbed down some other way (like how Flynn/Eugene originally got up).
    • Even if they didn't find the secret entrance, there's still large amounts of extremely long hair inside the tower (Gothel doesn't take it with her when she falls). Okay, it's not magical anymore, but worst-case scenario it'd still probably do as a serviceable rope.
    • After she stabs Flynn, Gothel has the secret entrance open and is trying to drag Rapunzel down it. I assumed after that it was pretty obvious to them how to get out.
    • I always just figured they used the entrance to get back into the tower when Gothel brought Rapunzel back.
     How old was she? 
  • Just how old was Rapunzel when she was kidnapped? She had to be at least a couple months if she could have her eyes open. Oh, and all that hair would have taken at least a little while to grow. Subconscious memories aside, the age could help with the Suspension of Disbelief on No Infantile Amnesia making more sense than the 1 day indicated by the current entry on that trope page.
    • No Infantile Amnesia, I'll give you that one but, keeping her eyes open? The hell are you talking about? Humans aren't born with their eyes shut. Newborns are perfectly capable of keeping their eyes open when awake. Hair- It's MAGIC. And babies are usually born with some hair, and sometimes even a lot of hair that they may or may not lose.
    • Ok, so before I wrote this, I was unaware that infants can see almost immediately from birth. Sorry about that. And I suppose then for everything else you could always say A magic flower did it. I guess when you look at fairy tales you don't come for realism.
    • Weirdly, the OP actually does have a point- not about baby Rapunzel having her eyes open (a misconception a lot of young people have for some reason) but that her eyes are green- fair-coloured Caucasian babies are nearly always born with blue eyes and take a few months to develop their adult colour; furthermore Rapunzel can hold up her head and smile, possibly even laugh (not normal for at least 3 weeks and usually more like 6 weeks- and about 4 months before smiling and laughing is for emotional reasons- such as seeing her mother- rather than a random reflex). She also is seen grabbing her foot and sucking her toes, typical for a baby of about 5 months- and her general size is of about 3-5 months, not just born.
      • Either Flynn's 'just for a moment, everything was perfect' is an exaggeration, or just possibly it took a few months for everything to be at a moment that could be described as 'perfect'- perhaps the birth was still difficult and it wasn't until a few weeks later that they were fully confident that the Queen was completely well, the baby was well and they could go out in public to celebrate (actually historically this would be the case- very seldom in the 18th or early 19th century would mothers actually leave their room for several weeks after having a baby, longer if they hadn't been well- not that it's likely the filmakers were observing historic 'lying in' customs, but still.)
    • We're maybe taking Flynn's narration a bit too literally here. He doesn't mean it was only one day or one moment that Rapunzel and her parents were happy; just that it was a too-short period of time.
      • The series actually says it was the day of her birth she was kidnapped. This tracks considering Rapunzel looks exactly the same the day they launch the lanterns (which was the day she was born) and her kidnap, coupled with how rapidly her hair grows. As to Ariana being up on her feet, I blame the magic flower, as she consumed that the very day Rapunzel was born, also according to the series. So she was maybe 12 hours old.
    • Three-Month-Old Newborn
     Potential workarounds 
  • Is it just me, or could Gothel have avoided this entire thing by saying, "Sure, I'll take you to see the lanterns this ONE time, but that's all we can risk. And we'll need to hide your hair so nobody notices it." I mean, Flynn took her to see the lanterns and gallivanted all over town with her in broadass daylight and no one figured out who she was. One more mother and daughter in the throng of people in town for the celebration wouldn't have made anyone blink twice.
    • Yep, and she could also have avoided the entire thing by not flipping out at Rapunzel and actually giving her a chance to reveal that she had Flynn stuffed in her wardrobe early on in the movie. Which would have been very bad for Flynn, no doubt. With regards to taking Rapunzel to see the lanterns, though, Gothel was completely paranoid about anyone even finding out that Rapunzel existed at all, so even if no one would have had any way of guessing that there was anything out of the ordinary about her (aside from her incredibly long hair, which is bound to kind of stick in the memory even after it's all braided up), Gothel didn't want anyone so much as laying eyes on her. That, and if she takes Rapunzel out for a nice evening to see the floating lanterns, that kind of undermines her whole "the world outside your tower is a horrible, scary, dangerous place" line.
    • She also didn't want to give Rapunzel a taste of the outside world, because she knew she'd get hooked.
    • Mother Gothel was an extremely paranoid character. When Rapunzel went out with Flynn nobody recognized her as the lost princess, but Mother Gothel had no way of knowing that no one would recognize Rapunzel. Better to be safe than sorry, Mother Gothel wasn't going to allow even the slightest chance for risk.
    • Also, if they had been able to walk around unnoticed, it would belie all the propaganda that the world is a dangerous place. Rapunzel would have wanted to visit more because everyone was so nice, and no one tried to steal her hair.
    • Yes she could have, but this would have required her to not act like a paranoid, selfish Control Freak who stole a princess and locked her in a tower in the first place. In other words, it would have been completely out of character for her to do so.
    • Gothel also doesn't believe that Rapunzel would dare sneak out of the tower to see the lanterns herself. So at the point she leaves on the three day trip, she assumes that Rapunzel has been scolded out of wanting to see the lanterns, and will stay in the tower like a good girl until she gets back.
     Credits 
  • Why in the credits does it call Zachary Levi's character Flynn Rider, when halfway through the movie, it reveals "Flynn's" real name is Eugene Fitzherbert? Don't you think they could at least put that in parenthesis since by the end of the movie, he even says he started going by Eugene again? Why permanently state in the credits that Zachary played Flynn rather than Eugene?
    • Name recognition. Flynn is the name he goes by for the majority of the film. At a glance, you know who this guy is playing. You say Eugene, it takes longer for the brain to draw the connection. Not much longer, mind you, but enough that it detracts from the reading.
    • I kinda wish they'd listed it as Flynn Rider/Eugene Fitzherbert, though.
    • ...as Eugene "Flynn Rider" Fitzherbert
     Glowing hair 
  • How come Rapunzel's hair glows for so long when they go under water, despite all the other times it's done it, it stops the minute she stops singing? It doesn't even start glowing until after she stops singing, and then stays glowy for long enough for them to escape.
    • Notice that depending on how fast Rapunzel sings, her hair shines that quickly. Hence how she could do a speed sing for "mother" at the beginning, and a nice slow mood sing for Eugene when she was healing his hand later. My guess is, she was just singing nice and slowly while she was underwater to herself, giving them enough time to remove the rocks, and fall out to their safety. Perhaps it was also Rule of Drama in terms of it not lighting up immediately.
    • Plus she was only singing to create light. Her intentions may have some affect on exactly how the magic turns out.
    • Basically, this is "because magic". We don't know the rules by which her hair glows, but we do witness how long it glows. Whatever reason it glowed that long, we witnessed that it did, thus it must have managed to do so.
     Rapunzel defending herself 
  • Rapunzel is shown to be resourceful and more than capable of defending herself if needs be. So how did Mother Gothel, clearly aged and probably less physically powerful than her, manage to restrain her, gag her and tie her up at the end of the film?
    • Simple—we never really saw any evidence that Gothel wasn't able to take down Rapunzel. She doesn't do much physically over the course of the film. Sure, she played the part of the old lady sometimes, but that was just for show so Rapunzel would feel sorry for her poor old mother.
      • And Rapunzel would probably be hesitant to fight against the one who raised her.
    • She probably just came up behind Rapunzel and knocked her out with her own frying pan.
    • Also, where are you getting the idea that Rapunzel is capable of defending herself? The only time in the entire film where she manages to overpower someone is against Flynn, and that was only because he thought he was alone in the tower until she hit him on the head from behind - by the time he came to, he was already tied up. She clearly didn't think she could hold her own against the pub thugs, the kingdom guards, or the Stabbington brothers. (Granted, Gothel's probably not as strong as any of them either, but even if she wasn't able to overpower Rapunzel through strength alone, she's been alive for who knows how long, and so has probably picked up more than a few tricks during that time.)
     What became of her dear frying pan? 
  • What happened to Rapunzel's frying pan? she had it at the campfire, and then it just disappears from the movie. Did she just forget it? Wouldn't something like that really have helped in a fight with the Stabbington Brothers?
    • It was probably in the boat, and I seriously doubt she could have knocked them out.
      • In the scene where they are entering the town, I think you can see the Frying Pan's handle sticking out of Maximus's saddle bag while he's fighting with Eugene.
     Getting back into the tower 
  • Maybe this is just really obvious to everyone else and that's why no one else has asked, but given that Rapunzel didn't know about the secret entrance, how exactly was she planning on getting back inside the tower after seeing the lanterns, since she couldn't exactly let down her hair to let herself back up?
    • Well, Eugene had gotten up into the tower, hadn't he? So maybe she was assuming she could get up the same way. Or she found his arrows, and figured that she could send an arrow and a rope over the top of the pole where she balances her hair, than climb up that way.
    • Well part of their deal was that he return her to the tower safely. How he got her back in was entirely up to him. But at least she knew that he had gotten into the tower on his own, without having to climb up her hair. So she knew it was possible.
    • We witness her swing around on her hair, from things far away which she whipped her hair onto, like Indiana jones. I presume she had the same basic plan for re-entering the tower.
    • There are arrows stuck into the tower walls that Eugene used to help him climb up. If Rapunzel couldn't get back in via her hair then there was another option.
    • Or a bit of Alternate Character Interpretation - Rapunzel didn't really want to come back to the tower and she knew it would be hard to get back in. So subconsciously she was never planning to go back, and making Flynn promise to return her was her way of denying that. She pretty much says "I'm never going back!" as soon as she's out.
    • We also don't know that Rapunzel doesn't know about the "secret" exit. It's unlikely that she never saw Gothel using it to leave the tower when she was growing up.
     Singing the incantation 
  • Why is Rapunzel required to sing the incantation once the flower's power is inside her? She was still a baby when she was kidnapped, so surely Gothel must have sung it until Rapunzel developed full speech?
    • She didn't have to, as demonstrated at the beginning of the film. As noted above, it's just another method that Gothel uses to keep Rapunzel under thumb.
    • Also, try keeping a kid from mimicking what their parents do. Gothel probably didn't put any effort at all into getting Rapunzel to sing as she aged, she did it because her mother did, and then she just kept doing it as part of a 'combing-you-hair' ritual.
     Rapunzel's morning routine 
  • Let's see the "When Will My Life Begin" number. Rapunzel states that she starts her day at 7:00 am. She cleans the tower in 15 minutes and then she starts to do her insanely long list of activities... In the next scene, Flynn steals the crown, according to him, at 8:00 in the morning. Does that mean that Rapunzel reads three books, paints, plays guitar, knits, cookes, paints again, has lunch, makes puzzles, plays darts, bakes, makes paper maché masks, dances ballet, plays chess, makes pottery, ventriloquism, candle making, stretching, scketching, climbs her hair, makes a dress for Pascal, rereads the three books, paints once more and brushes her 70-feet hair... IN LESS THAN 45 MINUTES?!
    • I wish girls won't take over 45 minutes just to clean their shoulder-length hair sometimes...
    • This troper imagines it takes a few hours to get from the Kingdom to the castle, plus Rapunzel was narrating what she did every single day. It could still be midday when Flynn arrives.
      • This is probably it. Assuming both characters told the time more-or-less accurately, the chase scene was likely time-cut for the drama, and they were already deep in the woods when the guards caught up anyway. We really have no idea what time it was when Flynn got to the tower, only that it hadn't started getting dark yet.
    • Although 45 minutes is a stretch, a lot of these activities could probably be done fairly quickly, especially if they were done every day. If you clean the house every day, there's not going to be a lot of mess for you to have to deal with, and so.
    • Also, the scene change doesn't necessarily mean that Flynn stealing the crown comes afterwards, it could be happening at around the same time.
    • Maybe the song takes place on the previous day.
    • We are perhaps over-thinking this and taking what we're being told a bit too literally. The song is basically establishing that although she tries to put a positive spin on things, there's not actually a lot to do in the tower, and she gets through her daily chores quite quickly and so has to fill the time in other ways. Since song lyrics and montages are not exactly statements delivered under oath in a court of law, we can perhaps safely assume that all of this doesn't literally happen within the same hour or so, it's just a brief summary of the general sort of things she gets up to to amuse herself or pass the time during her captivity rather than assuming this all takes place within the same short span of time. Some days she reads, some days she plays music, some days she sows a dress, and so on.
    • Also, since one of the things listed in the song is having lunch, then obviously all those things couldn't take place just within one hour early in the morning. And since she obviously couldn't have had lunch yet when Flynn showed up (Gothel was going to make her hazelnut soup for lunch), then she must not have done all the things listed in the song either that particular day before Flynn showed up.
     Precautions 
  • So, if Gothel decided to raise Rapunzel as her own daughter and not a prisoner or slave, why did she have a dagger in her nightstand? Where did the chain and manacles come from?
    • Mother Gothel was extremely paranoid that someone would come and try to kidnap Rapunzel, it makes perfect sense for her to have a weapon. She was also paranoid about Rapunzel trying to leave on her own; she did her best to keep Rapunzel in the tower but she's obviously not above using force if she has to. Physical restraint was a last resort.
    • She's Crazy-Prepared. She's going to raise Rapunzel as a daughter so she'll stay in the tower willingly. If she one day refuses, then out come the chains to keep her there.
     More potential workarounds 
  • When Gothel realised that Rapunzel was falling for Flynn, why didn't she instead tell Rapunzel that she would let Flynn stay with Rapunzel if she agrees to return back to the tower immediately? With the lack of company Rapunzel has, it's very likely she's going to rather having her crush around for years to come than see the lights for one measly night. And it's not like Rapunzel would have any reason at this point to think Flynn wouldn't have agreed. So if Gothel asked and Flynn said no, Rapunzel would be heart broken, realise "mother is right", Gothel would be all motherly and supportive and then take Rapunzel back to the tower. If Flynn had said yes, Gothel could probably have Flynn around for maybe a few days, then ask Flynn to go out with her on the pretence needing help to collect food for Rapunzel and then kill him when he's not looking. She'd only have to tell Rapunzel some BS story that "as soon I turned my back he immediately dashed off after the first pretty girl he saw, I'm so sorry about this dear" and Rapunzel wouldn't be the wiser.
    • That only works if Rapunzel wants to stay, and she really doesn't. Flynn represented the outside world to her. Asking him to stay put kinda invalidates that whole idea.
      • Especially considering the paranoia Mother Gothel would have that Flynn would try to betray her, either killing Mother Gothel or helping Rapunzel run off again. Rapunzel said she would never fight Mother Gothel if she let Flynn live... But Flynn never made such a promise.
    • Flynn is clearly not going to stand for either Rapunzel or himself being imprisoned inside a tower for the rest of their lives, and introducing him into the situation introduces a potential threat to Gothel's power over Rapunzel. Gothel in turn is clearly not going to stand for someone who might try to lure Rapunzel away from her being around Rapunzel for very long. So she rejects that approach out of hand.
     Merchandise 
  • The current merchandise and artwork featuring Rapunzel wearing shoes. Why?
    • The live actresses for Rapunzel at the Disney theme parks wears shoes, probably because walking barefoot on concrete grounds is a liability and/or extremely uncomfortable. The merchandising just follows suit. Conversely, the people in charge of the merchandise dislike bare feet.
    • Although I'm no artist, I'd also imagine that shoed feet are a bit easier and quicker to draw or sculpt onto action figures than bare feet.
      • She did start wearing shoes after she got back to the kindgom.
     Birthdays II 
  • If only Gothel had lied to Rapunzel about her birthday, she likely would have never been so curious about the lanterns, and hence wanted to leave the tower so badly. Also, the fact that someone so old and experienced had Rapunzel make a promise that was BEGGING to be treated with Exact Words.
    • Gothel couldn't lie to Rapunzel if she had come to associate the lights with her birthday, and even if it wasn't on her birthday, that oddity might have been enough to grab her attention anyway. Rapunzel isn't an Exact Words type of gal, either; if she made a promise, she'd honor it to the spirit, not the letter.
    • She probably didn't anticipate such a noticeable public display at the time of the kidnapping, keeping the same birthday was probably just easier for her to keep straight, and by the time she realized what was up it would be too late to change it.
    • Also, if we were to go by this logic, the only people who would be interested in seeing New Year's Eve fireworks would be people born on December 31st. While it might not have the exact same connection if it wasn't on her birthday, it's not hard to imagine that the girl locked in a tower 24/7/365 might still develop an intense interest in going to see the lantern festival in the nearby kingdom that she can see happening out of her window every year like clockwork, simply because it's something different from her everyday life in the tower. The wish to see the lanterns was linked to her overall desire for freedom, not just her birthday.
     Flynn warning Rapunzel 
  • So why didn't Flynn scream for Rapunzel to run when he realizes what the Stabbington brothers are up to? I would have thought him greatly inspired, and noise carries really well over water. . . and as an added bonus, it would have foiled Mother Gothel's plan.
    • The next we see of Flynn is him unconscious and tied to a boat. It's likely they simply knocked him out cold after they alluded to what they were planning before he could react in any meaningful way.
     Stabbington brothers' plan 
  • What exactly did the Stabbington Brothers think they were waiting for after Gothel gives the tiara back to Rapunzel? If they moved in then, they could capture Rapunzel (the really valuable thing), get revenge on Flynn Rider and get the tiara as well? They could still have their "revenge" however they wanted it - send Flynn off on a boat back to the castle (if that's what they really want to do), torture him, kill him, or perhaps try and claim the reward (at least by proxy).
    • They don't exactly appear to be the brains of the operation; they're big, scary muscle, basically. Gothel probably had them off doing something else at the time and met up with them again a few minutes later. When she first met them, Gothel also stressed how valuable Rapunzel's hair was, and presumably got them on board by saying they'd sell Rapunzel to the highest bidder and share the loot. Given how disreputable they were, they were probably planning on double-crossing Gothel anyway, but she got the drop on them. It's not like she waited for them to actually capture Rapunzel after all, she set it up so that she managed to 'rescue' Rapunzel from them.
     Even MORE potential workarounds 
  • Why didn't Gothel alter her gameplan when Rapunzel went missing, and — more importantly — she found the princess's stolen crown? Using it as leverage to recapture Rapunzel and drag her back to the tower (one way or another) is all well and good, but she could have been set for life if, at that point, she had made a few... minor changes to her tactic. Let's see what she could have done:
    • So the princess has been missing for the last eighteen years. You, in the "guise" of a highly aged woman sporting a malevolent black cloak and hood, stole her in the middle of the night and disappeared. You raised her as your own and used her as your personal youth battery, showing the child adequate (if twisted and manipulative) affection to pass for love. One day, circumstances led her to reunite with her royal crown, and be spirited away by a wanted thief. For Gothel, you'd think there wouldn't be any going back from that... but for a certain type of person, these circumstances would not have been insurmountable. Indeed, they may even be prosperous.
      Gothel could have decided to make a power play. She has the crown, and with a little searching, she has the princess, who's been brought up to believe she's simply Gothel's gifted daughter. As with all good lies, this web would need to be sprinkled with a lick of truth: Gothel would find Rapunzel, and come clean about the fact that she's not her daughter... but only that. Gothel would tell the child that she found her bloody, lost, and aimlessly wandering through in the woods as a baby, and logically deduced that she had been abandoned. She took the child back to her tower, and raised her as her own. When it became apparent that her hair was magical, she feared that the world would abuse her for this power, and her efforts to protect the child's sanctity became detrimental to Gothel's quest to someday find her true parents. The two having lived in complete isolation is a key point here: it's the alibi to have supposedly kept Gothel ignorant of Rapunzel's royalty. After all, who would ever mistake a child lost in the woods for a princess?
      Now, this is the key part. Instead of bursting into song, Gothel gives her daughter the crown, speculating that fate, destiny (a horse?), or whatever had brought it to her along with the thief. Coinciding with the princess's birthday, she urges Rapunzel to try it on... and bam, Gothel proclaims her beloved daughter to be the lost princess. With the princess and the crown in tow, Gothel (who burns her black cloak and hood...) completes the rest of the journey and presents the lost princess and her matching crown to the king and queen, tearfully revealing that she had lovingly raised the child when she found her abandoned in the woods. Nothing Rapunzel or Flynn knows could possibly contradict or debunk Gothel's lies — neither of them have any idea. Even if Rapunzel's early memories come back, it makes no difference at all — everything (well, almost everything) she would remember has been deliberately twisted and invoked by Gothel here. The timing is also perfect: not only does Gothel have the princess and the crown (this essential detail, which Gothel cites as the "proof" that alerted her to the child's royalty, should also serve as a believable enough lie for the king and queen to believe Gothel's version of events, which Rapunzel will naturally echo and back up), but it's also the princess's birthday. Everyone will be over the moon... Gothel most of all.
      So, assuming the royal family buys it (Rapunzel would obviously vouch for her beloved "mother" figure; after all, Gothel would invoke Rapunzel's experiences to coincide with her falsified version of events), Gothel, the hero who saved the princess from certain death and raised her to be a kind and loving young woman, is set for life. All she asks in return for rescuing the magical princess and raising her as her own child would be frequent access to her beloved Rapunzel. In other words, frequent access to her eternal youth battery. Gothel now has it all: royal favours, Rapunzel's eternal and unquestioning adoration, frequent access to her pool of youth, and to top it off, she's now hailed as a hero. The good life awaits.
      A little more prestigious than hoarding Rapunzel back to the tower, eh?
      • There's alot of 'if's in there. Alot of things would have to go Gothel's way to keep from ending up dead either through execution or slowly withering away. The plan she seemed to have in the film, while probably not the best thing she ever came up with, had a good chance of working.
      • It also kind of depends on Gothel not being an obsessive selfish Control Freak. As she clearly is. She doesn't give a toss about royal favours (and really, why would she? She's been alive for centuries — how many royal lines has she seen come and go in that time?); all she wants is Rapunzel's hair.
    • Well, Gothel wanted to keep Rapunzel for herself, and not share her immortality with anyone. Had she given Rapunzel back, the young woman likely would have blabbed about her healing hair and thus caused everyone else to try it. And the plan you've outlined above requires Gothel revealing that Rapunzel has magical hair as the reason for keeping her safe.
     Gothel's age 
  • So just how old was Gothel in her beloved age stasis, anyway? She looked about... I don't know, in her late twenties maybe, if that. Which is bizarre since the Stabbington brothers describe her as an old woman...
    • The Stabbingtons met her while she was already graying again, so that's why they referred to her as old.
    • They also seem to know that Rapunzel's hair is magic (they refer to her as "the girl with the magic hair") so they could assume that Gothel has been using it to keep herself younger - as she ages quite a bit from when she meets them to when they kidnap Rapunzel.

     Letting down her hair 
  • So, in the scene where Flynn yells at Rapunzel to let down her hair, was it Rapunzel or Gothel who flung the hair to Flynn?
    • Given that Rapunzel is bound at the time, it's safe to assume that Gothel was the one who tossed the hair down.
     No body left behind 
  • During Gothel's Disney Villain Death, she turns to dust, but the cloak remains. If the cloak remains, why didn't the rest of her clothes and boots remain as well?
    • Rule of Drama. The empty cape fluttering to earth by itself is a more striking visual image.
    • Well this is a long shot but say Gothel's clothes are the ones she wore hundreds of years ago. And you could suggest that they're affected by the hair's magic too - i.e. the fabric is strengthened so it doesn't weaken. Remember that clothing in museums is preserved and kept away from anything that might damage it. So when Gothel starts to rapidly age, the clothes suddenly weaken and crumble to dust as well. The cloak could just be new, which is why it doesn't decay as well.

     Kingdom Dance cutaway 
  • In the middle of the Kingdom dance sequence there's a snippet in which Rapunzel and Flynn are in a library, poring over a map of the world. What's that about? It doesn't seem to be connected to anything before or after. A remnant of some deleted scene?
    • No, just a continuation of near the beginning when she only had three books to read. Now she gets to read all she likes, and learn more about the outside world. Obviously she couldn't spend all the festival day dancing.
    • If I had to guess:
    Rapunzel: "Eugene, what's that building over there?"
    Eugene/Flynn: "Oh, that? That's a library. It's full of books."
    Rapunzel: 8D *super excited* "BOOKS?!"
    Eugene/Flynn:"...How about we take a look?"

     Gothel vs. the Stabbingtons 
  • How on Earth did Gothel manage to knock out both of the Stabbington brothers? I can understand her knocking out one but the other would surely hear this and have time to react, especially since swinging a heavy club requires a few seconds and the brothers are taller than Gothel (and thus harder to swing at).
    • The element of surprise. She sneaks up behind them, POW, one of them's down, the other one turns around to see what's going on, but before he has a chance to fully react she's had time to regroup and POW, the other one's down.

     Potential workarounds, for the win! 
  • Why was Mother Gothel so obsessed with keeping Rapunzel from the outside world? It's not like Rapunzel is going to do anything bad to her ridiculously long hair. Rapunzel just wanted to see some lights, and Gothel was against that?
    • Gothel wants to keep Rapunzel's healing and age-defying power to herself, in the same way she hid the magic flower so that no one else could discover it. She's paranoid about letting Rapunzel interact with the outside world because she doesn't want to take any chance that she might have her opportunities to use Rapunzel's power limited or cut off entirely - if anyone else knows about Rapunzel's power, they might try to keep it for themselves (exactly as Gothel wants to do), or Rapunzel might get ideas about deciding for herself when and for whom to use her power, instead of using it for Gothel whenever she wants.
    • And at the point the story starts, look how rapidly Gothel ages when she's only gone a couple of days without the healing. It looks like she needed daily touch-ups with the hair, something that can't happen if Rapunzel is waltzing off on her own somewhere else.

     Death by uprooting 
  • Why didn't Gothel die when the flower was first unearthed from the ground by the King's soldiers? It would have been technically dead and, similarly to cutting all of Rapunzel's hair, should have caused Gothel to rapidly age and die on the spot. Even if there was time for a transplant to occur, surely boiling the flower would have been considered killing it.
    • The movie makes it clear as it goes along that the older Gothel gets, and the longer she uses the magic, the less time there is between uses and the more often she has to use it. So at the start of the movie, the magic would have lasted longer, thus allowing her to escape rapid aging and death long enough to slip into the palace, kidnap Rapunzel, and use her hair. And she is indeed older again during that scene.
    • When Gothel actually did die, she was touching the hair as it lost its power. So then it had the reverse effect: making her rapidly age. If she hadn't been, she would have aged at a slower rate. And then eighteen years previously, she might not have aged as fast when the flower was damaged.
    • The flower wouldn't have immediately died on being unearthed. You can clearly see they take all the roots out of the ground, so the plant was still alive, and still magical for as long as it took them to return to the Palace. Then they used the flower to make the magic potion. The flower/plant is now dead, but the magic still exists, only now it's in the form of the potion they give to the Queen, which then goes into the unborn Rapunzel when the Queen drinks it. At no point is the magic itself destroyed, it's only transferred from the flower to the potion, then to Rapunzel and her hair. Hence Gothel still remains alive, if slowly aging until she manages to sneak in and steal the child. (In this view of events, Gothel reverts to her actual age of several centuries when the magic is destroyed by all the hair being cut. Her touching the hair at the time is incidental. Of course, the view in the above entry might be true as well.)
    • As mentioned above, taking a plant out of the ground doesn't immediately kill it if the roots aren't damaged. The soldiers are clearly treating it very carefully in order to ensure that it's not damaged, at least until it gets back to the castle.
    • Note that we only see the blossom used as part of the Queen's medicine. Could be the rest of the plant survived for some time afterwards in the Royal Gardens, but simply never produced anything but normal flowers again, same as Rapunzel only grew ordinary brown hair after she was "trimmed".

     Why didn't the Queen gain any magic? 
  • Why were the flower's powers transferred to Rapunzel and not the Queen?
    • Because the flower's fluids apparently left her body upon giving birth, as it also nourished Rapunzel.
    • A popular theory is that some of the flower's magic did get transferred to the Queen. If you look at the parents, the King shows grey in his hair and beard while the Queen still looks pretty youthful.
    • And here's an example that has a wee bit of Squick involved: the Queen would have urinated and passed out the tea with the flower's magic in it. But some of it went to the baby growing inside her, which is why Rapunzel was born with the powers.
    • Think of it as the same way that alcohol affects the unborn baby worse than the mother if a pregnant woman drinks too much.
    • Or possibly the magic got split between Rapunzel and the Queen, but the part that went into the Queen was expended to heal her from the sickness.
    • Let's assume the flower's magic acts kind of like anything a person might eat or drink. Basically, food and drink is full of various chemicals and nutrients which affect the body in different ways. For sake of example, let's also say that the flower's magic contains two special types of nutrient not found in anything else; Type (A), which can heal the person who consumes it of any illness, and Type (B), a weaker one which can allow someone with the right type of cellular makeup to transmit more of Type (A) through, say, the hair. By the point that the Queen consumes the flower, she's a fully-developed adult and her body basically knows what kind of nutrients it needs. When she's sick, her body is basically crying out for as much of Type (A) (or an equivalent) as it can get, but even in her weakened state the Queen's body is sufficiently developed enough to know that she doesn't have healing hair, and so knows that it doesn't need any of Type (B). So the Queen's body absorbs Type (A) but considers Type (B) as "waste" and disposes of it the same as it does any nutrient it consumes but doesn't actually need (as sweat, pee, you get the idea).

      However, since the Queen is pregnant at the time, anything she consumes is also going to be shared with and absorbed by her unborn child. And while we don't know exactly when in her pregnancy she fell ill, we can safely assume it was at a point that the fetus was still developing. At which point, the fetus is essentially just greedily sucking up anything the mother's body sends it because it doesn't fully realise exactly what is and isn't supposed to be required yet, which in turn is affecting how it develops. So where the Queen's body rejects Type (B) because it's unnecessary, the fetus is soaking it up, and in turn it's bonding with her cells and DNA. So by the time the fetus that will be Rapunzel is fully developed and ready to be born, Type (B) has been infused into her cells and convinced them that actually, she is supposed to have healing hair. So Rapunzel is born with healing hair.
    • The healing power of the plant was concentrated in its blossom, which is a plant's reproductive part. That it would concentrate in the womb of the Queen is a justifiable extension of this. Chalk it up to "life-giving" symbolism playing out.

     Chamber pots 
  • Where did Rapunzel and Gothel go to the bathroom in the tower? Yeah, I can understand chamber pots and bedpans but how were those disposed of? I somehow can't see Gothel undertaking the laborious task of hauling pots of excrement down a secret passage every night- and given the exterior of the tower I highly doubt she poured it out the window. The dam indicates some level of plumbing was available in the time period but the tower doesn't seem to have any.
    • We've really only seen one room in the tower, Rapunzel's, but know Gothel's is up the staircase. It's reasonable to assume the restroom is up there.
    • Same way most people in the eras before internal plumbing — do the business inside a chamber pot and then chuck it out a window. We really only see one side of the tower, so it's not impossible that they just chuck it out of a back window on the other side of the tower (so that Gothel doesn't risk stepping in something unpleasant as she's entering / exiting the tower or clearing) and forget about it. It's not like the two of them would produce that much waste between them, and if nothing else it's biodegradable so it would gradually break down over time. There also appears to be a little stream or lake beside the tower, so if they throw it into that then it just gets carried away. Heck, doing that would probably be infinitely more pleasant and convenient than using whatever passed for indoor lavatories at the time.
    • In "When Will My Life Begin?" Rapunzel mentions pottery as one of the activities she does in the tower. So you can assume that she makes chamber pots to pee in.
    • And the first place she hides the tiara is in a pot - so chamber pots are definitely in the tower. Whether Rapunzel tosses the waste out the window, or Gothel takes it to the river herself to dump.
    • Could be there's a garderobe built into a nook in the wall of Rapunzel's room, that she keeps covered by a wall hanging or panel to control odors.
    • Or, failing these, the other primary pre-indoor plumbing method; find convenient window (ideally not one used for entering and exiting), hoist up skirt, stick bare bum out window, hold on to window ledge, let whatever may come. Not ideal, perhaps, but it does what's needed and it's not like they need to worry about potentially hitting someone underneath.

     What to do with the stolen crown? 
  • Since no one has mentioned it (I think) what exactly was Flynn planning on DOING with the crown of the missing princess? I mean, it's a distinctive piece of jewelry, its owner's disappearance was enough of a national tragedy that it would be well known throughout the kingdom and possibly into neighboring lands. How do you fence something like that? True, you could melt it down and sell the jewels and raw gold, but surely in this (apparently pretty wealthy) kingdom there are better options for stealing gold and jewels than the single most high-profile artifact the palace holds.
    • Like you say; melt it down and sell it. There's always going to be unscrupulous types who are interested in that kind of merchandise. As for better options, there probably are easier jewels to steal — but on the other hand, for a fairly audacious crook like Flynn Ryder, the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.
    • Not to mention it's good for his reputation, which matters more to him than money. The challenge and fame for stealing one of the most prized artifacts in the kingdom is its own reward.
    • Or, it might have been a commission, from someone who just wanted the crown for their private collection.
      • Possibly selling it on the black market?

     Those dam support beams! 
  • So knocking down one of the many support pillars and springing a tiny leak was enough to completely destroy the dam? That's one unstable construction.
    • Dams can and often have to be pretty intricate and precise constructions, with little room for error or failure; knock one support beam over, or a leak appears in the wrong place, and the whole lot can come crashing down. This one also looks to be something of a work-in-progress.
    • This is before the exact principles of dam-building were rediscovered by Western Europeans. In retrospect, how were wooden beams supposed to hold up a wall holding back thousands of tons of water? One overspill and the soil in which the beams are planted in washes away, bringing the wall down. Or rot/decay weakening them too much. As for the collapse in the film, it's a cascading failure: Once Maximus kicks out one of the beams, the ones remaining can no longer support the weight and start collapsing, sending the water into the mine.

     Eugene's fate 
  • How did Rapunzel consent to having Eugene tied up? Of course, she was not in a position to negotiate, but how would a relatively quick death from the knife be a worse fate than slowly starving to death in the tower, where most likely nobody would find him? Unless Maximus fetched the thugs or something, I guess...
    • Mother Gothel has a knife, has already overpowered Rapunzel once before, and by this point has clearly demonstrated that Rapunzel is coming with her whether she wants to or not. Presumably Eugene not being tied up was not a point subject to negotiation. Since Maximus is probably waiting outside once they're gone Eugene can yell out the window for help.
    • Flynn being a thief, one could hopefully presume that he knows how to pick locks and has the required tools on him at all times. Rapunzel and Gothel presumably assumed this too. Chaining Flynn up was likely only going to buy them an hour or two (more than enough time for Gothel).

     Memories of infancy 
  • No really, Rapunzel has No Infantile Amnesia? She had to have been only a few months old when she was kidnapped, and never saw that sun symbol again until she was 18. But she just somehow remembers the symbol enough to paint it all over her room, and 18 years later figure out she's the lost princess when she sees the same symbol on a flag?
    • Apparently she doesn't. Perhaps her magic hair gives her really good subconscious memory?
      • "Turn back the clock. Restore what is mine."

     Inconspicuous Gothel 
  • Sooo...Mother Gothel has been kept alive and youthful for centuries, and not a soul starts getting freaked out when they see her walking around, like, "Oh my god, that woman hasn't aged a day in the 70+ years I've known her, not to mention my grandparents were in their teens when they met/did business/got somehow acquainted with her! BURN THE WITCH!" Hey it's medieval times, right?
    • Gothel is a recluse that ages rapidly when she's apart from Rapunzel and lives in a tower far from civilization. She's gone to great pains to hoard her immortality and it is quite unlikely she goes anywhere with such consistency that the residents would recognize her at a glance, especially when her appearance can vastly differ within a few days time.
    • And in those days, life expectancy wasn't that long. Getting to 70 would be quite an achievement, especially for the lower classes. And if you want to stretch it, you could suggest that someone sees Gothel out before she's had a touch-up and then after. Magic doesn't seem to be known in this universe, so the average person would just assume that the more youthful Gothel was her own daughter, granddaughter or some other relative.
    • Gothel also has a cloak that she wears when she's out in public. As she doesn't appear to have any friends or acquaintances, she probably only gets seen when she has her hood up.

     Inconspicuous Rapunzel 
  • How it is that not even one person in the city seem to connect Rapunzel to the lost princess, when she is dancing around with Flynn? There are apparently dozens of pictures of the lost princess around, Rapunzel looks very very similar to her child self and is the right age. These are celebrations designed to guide the lost princess home no matter where she may, so you'd think that people would actually expect that by some fairytale like twist she would wonder in at the right time. Also when she enters the city she drags 70 feet of hair behind her, which alone should bring at least some attension to her.
    • There are pictures of the lost princess around when she was a baby/toddler, not pictures of her as an eighteen-year old; you ask a total stranger to recognise you as a grown-up in a crowd based solely from your baby photos, my guess is they wouldn't find it so easy either. As for the long hair, why would they assume the missing princess hasn't, you know, had a hair cut at some point in eighteen years? As far as they're concerned, she's just another stranger in town for the carnival which, really, probably isn't that unusual; it's a fairly big celebration in a trading city, they probably get a lot of tourists in town from all over to see it.
    • I think the point about the long hair is that it would bring attention to her. Sure, they couldn't know for sure, but she looks similar enough that anyone who really looked at her more than simply in passing - as they would be likely to do, given her unique hair - would at least think that she looked similar, or that she could be the one. Also, it's a festival about her, so she'd be on people's minds.
      • But there's little reason for people to make the link between a girl with long hair and the princess. Yes, the long hair is distinctive, but it's a long leap from that to "this is the missing princess!" It's not like it was common knowledge that the princess was kidnapped for her hair or that her kidnapper would make a point of growing her hair out very long, after all. And since people would be distracted by the hair, they'd be even less likely to remember or notice her face (which, again, is eighteen years older). Most people would just remember a pretty and friendly girl from out-of-town with unusually long blonde hair.
    • Both sides to this are understandable - in the real world, if you take a picture of someone as a baby and compare with them at age 18, you aren't likely to see many similarities, and those that are visible would probably just be brushed off. However, in the animated reality of Tangled, the mosaic of the lost princess and Rapunzel look exactly alike. Only a real idiot would look at them side by side and say they're not the same person, or at least close enough in appearance to turn her over to the king and queen, and the fact that Rapunzel studies the mosaic for several seconds, after having tried on her tiara, mind you, and still doesn't make the connection does stretch one's suspension of disbelief just a little too far for comfort.
    • This also falls under Willing Suspension of Disbelief; Baby Rapunzel and Grown-Up Rapunzel look similar enough so that the audience clearly and easily recognises that they're supposed to be the same person for the purposes of irony and drama (just so they're not thrown out of the movie for the few seconds it might take them to work out it out if the baby was realistically different). However, said audience is also supposed to accept that, just as in the real world it's hard to make an immediate connection between someone's baby photos and that someone as an eighteen-year-old, the characters in the animated reality have the same difficulty in recognising Rapunzel based solely off an idealised mural painted of her when she was a few months old at most. Basically, it's an artistic choice, and you're expected to just deal with the discrepancy and move on.
    • If Rapunzel was kidnapped as soon after her birth as the series suggests, then it's extremely unlikely that the artist who created the mosaic would've seen her in the flesh as a baby, anyway. All they could really be sure of getting right would be the blonde hair and eyes the same color as her mother's.

     Realization 
  • How are childhood paintings of suns and realizing hours later that your coloring matches the lost princess' make you realize you are the lost princess? That's not really substantial evidence to go on that you're a missing princess and your mother is not really your mother.
    • Thinking long and hard enough about anything, aka overthinking, can cause anyone to come to some rather odd or insane conclusions. It's not much different than people who manage to come up with some wild theory based on a tiny detail in a show.
    • It's more a case of putting everything she'd learned in her journey together. The sun symbol she realized she'd been painting all her life was merely the final piece of the puzzle that let her see the full picture. She'd probably also learned the reason why the Kingdom lights all those lamps, so she'd know she shares the lost princess' birthday. Not to mention she has a flashback to seeing the symbol on her babyhood mobile. Putting it all together is not hard from that point on.
    • Rapunzel is implied to feel something familiar about the kingdom when she actually gets there. The kingdom's colour includes purple, and she favours purple dresses. The painting of the lost princess - whose birthday is the same as hers - has beautiful long blonde hair that doesn't seem common in the region. Rapunzel might also start questioning why - if Gothel is really her mother - she doesn't look like her?

     Accent 
  • Why doesn't Rapunzel have the same speaking accent as the only person she's heard talk in all her 18 years?
    • The same reason why none of the Viking kids in How to Train Your Dragon have Scottish accents like their parents; because animated films prefer having recognizable voice actors over period authentic ones. You could even argue that they're all supposed to have German accents, yet they all lack them.
    • Also, please note that they tried fixing this in Brave by giving Merida her own thick Scottish accent, and I've heard some people complaining that they couldn't understand what she was saying a lot of the time.
    • Also because it's a film, not a psycho-linguistics lecture.
    • Sometimes, accents aren't, well, hereditary. There many people who have 1st-generation immigrant parents but don't have their parents' accents.

     Eugene escaping his shackles 
  • How did Flynn manage to get out of his wrist shackles when the Snuggly Duckling gang comes to save him? Right after the main captain gets taken out, Flynn's in chains. Then seconds later, he's running down a hall with no shackles.
    • Flynn is a sneak thief, so it is not at all difficult to believe he'd know how to pick locks. As to how he did it in the short time he was off-screen, he's just that good. Or even more likely, he got the key off the unconscious captain.

     Stabbingtons at wedding 
  • In Tangled Ever After, why did the Stabbington brothers - who almost got Eugene killed and tried to kidnap and sell Rapunzel - get an invite to the wedding? It's like George McFly having his car waxed by the guy who once tried to rape his wife.
    • Maybe between the movie and the short, they made amends with Eugene? What they almost did was a lot more heinous than stealing a crown, but they were also jailed. Who's to say they couldn't do a Heel–Face Turn of their own?
    • I could imagine that the king and queen were in such a good mood over their daughter's return that they could've taken the hint about the "old lady" the brothers gave to Eugene as a basis for allowing them out of prison to attend the wedding. They were still wearing handcuffs, weren't they?

     Hypocrisy 
  • Why does Rapunzel go along with Gothel's claim that leaving her tower would result in people trying to use her for her hair's powers when all the while, by letting Gothel emotionally abuse her throughout her life yet still using those exact same powers to keep her young and healthy forever...that's pretty much what Rapunzel's going through anyway?
    • Because Rapunzel has no way to know that Gothel is abusing and exploiting her. Gothel claims to love her and want to protect her, and since Rapunzel has absolutely no other model by which to judge how people are supposed to treat each other, how is she supposed to know any different? It's not until she gets out of the tower and starts interacting with people other than Gothel that she gains enough perspective to realize that Gothel has been deceiving and manipulating her.
      • That's true...but it still doesn't sit right with me. If you had something like that, something you thought everyone in the world would only use you to get their hands on it...If that were me, I wouldn't let anyone use my hair's power. Even if Rapunzel wasn't able to see that her mother was emotionally neglectful, don't you agree that there's something extremely strange in her saying, "Everyone else in the world will only want you for your hair, but since I love you, you should let me use it as much as I want."?
      • The emotional abuse and manipulation overrides everything else. Most real life children are actually the same way. They believe their parents are right for no other reason than they're their parents. Even if it is questionable, they'll drop it because they believe their parents are always right or, in the words of many parents, "know better than them because they're children". It's obvious to someone on the outside of such a situation, especially someone who's dealt with manipulative people, but it's harder to see from the inside. That may not make it any less frustrating, but speaking as someone who was raised by an abusive person, the bottom line is you do not question it. At least, not out loud.
      • Additionally: using the healing powers of her hair does not, by itself, cost Rapunzel anything or harm her in any way. If you have a beneficial ability, why wouldn't you use it for the benefit of someone you care about? Especially if it's someone you rely upon the way Rapunzel relies on Gothel. Considering that this has been going on since Rapunzel was an infant, it would be a part of their routine going back as far as Rapunzel could remember. It's normal to her, so there's no reason for her to examine it until she gains a new perspective by experiencing the rest of the world.
    • That's exactly why Gothel created the routine of brushing Rapunzel's hair while having Rapunzel sing the healing magic. It gives the illusion of a bonding moment. the illusion that Rapunzel is the one with control over the magic and the illusion that Gothel cares for her. To Rapunzel she's not being taken advantage of, she's making her dear mother feel better, assuming she even notices and connects the dots between the brushing and Gothel's youth which she might not considering Gothel seems to use the magic as often as possible even when she hasn't been gaining, and enjoying a tender moment with mother.

     "Where will she go?!" 
  • Near the end of the movie, when Rapunzel discovers she's the lost princess and declares her plans to leave the tower, Gothel's first response is to ask her where she's going to go and to remind her that Eugene won't even be there for her. But if Rapunzel is the lost princess, and her real parents own the single most accommodating household in the kingdom...why would this even pose as a problem? This is the girl who managed to charm an entire pub full of thugs just by singing to them about her dream. Why would Gothel think that she wouldn't have anywhere to go if she left? Rapunzel could've probably even gotten Eugene out of his criminal troubles if she wanted to.
    • She's been telling Rapunzel all her life that she (Rapunzel) can't go anywhere or do anything without being supervised. (And Rapunzel must have believed her, seeing as she didn't need any physical assistance to get out of the tower, she just needed someone who would 'take' her outside. The writers stated that they added the whole 'emotional abuse' dimension to explain why Rapunzel doesn't just leave, something that the Grimm story never really explains.) Her strategy is to trick Rapunzel into thinking that her magical condition makes her incapable of living independently. She could probably have carried on making it work if she'd had time ("Princess? You? Like anyone would believe that! Look at you!"
    • Gothel has been undermining Rapunzel for 18 years and it's hardly surprising if she's talked herself into thinking that Rapunzel is completely lost and helpless in the outside world. She doesn't see Rapunzel's moments of charm and physical competence and she's absolutely shocked when Rapunzel not only realises she's strong enough to throw her (Gothel) down the stairs but also that Rapunzel is strong-willed enough to defy her.

     Leaps of logic 
  • Forgive me if this has been asked already, but how did Gothel know that the flower's healing powers would have been transferred to Rapunzel's hair? It seems like a pretty huge risk to sneak into a castle in order to sing to a baby's hair when you really have no reason at all why it would heal you in the same way the flower does.
    • She probably didn't know for sure, but Gothel likely figured that either the queen or Rapunzel in general would have similar powers to the flower. She just tried singing at Rapunzel, and figured out it was specifically her hair from there.
    • Gothel's desperate to keep her eternal youth. At that point, she's willing to try anything.
    • And there seems to be something unnatural about Rapunzel's hair. Both her parents are brunette and blondes don't seem common in the region. Gothel may have seen the young princess paraded in front of the kingdom, and noticed that she had some unusually beautiful golden hair - that also appeared to be growing very fast for a toddler. She's working on a trial and error basis, which is why she sings to test the hair before stealing the baby.
    • Gothel knows how to activate the flower's magic by singing to it. When she sings, the petals glow with a bright gold colour. So she sang to the baby, hoping for a sign that she had the magic too. So when the hair glows, that tells Gothel where the magic is.

     Hidden tower 
  • How is it that none of the members of the kingdom guard managed to find the tower in 18 years? I can understand it's probably well-hidden and out of the way enough for some generic person not to come across it, but to the castle guards, who similarly went out looking what would have to have been a legend by that point in hopes that it would heal their queen, were ready to execute a criminal for stealing the lost princess's crown, and specfically "searched and searched" for Rapunzel after her kidnapping, it sounds like a bit of a stretch. There seems to be nothing particularly special about the tower that would keep anyone from finding or knowing about it, especially someone who would be looking for something like it.
    • At most the castle guards would have found the tower, seen a grown woman there who didn't match the appearance of the old woman they were looking for, and dismissed her as some hermit.
    • A young woman living in an isolated tower at the edge of a forest? One that no one in Corona could possibly have any permanent record of? (I know they wouldn't have had those kinds of records like we do now, but I can't imagine Gothel becoming that attached or acquainted with anyone without risking them becoming aware of her secret, so it's not like anyone else could've known her that well.) Also, Gothel, while younger, still does very much resemble her elderly self more than just a passing resemblance, and wouldn't the guards have specifically searched the tower for the baby if they'd come across it? Where would Gothel keep her that was secure enough to not be found yet still safe to keep her there in the first place?
    • The guards didn't see her elderly self, and even if they did it was pretty dark at the time and they didn't expect an old woman to escape that far and that fast.
    • Worth noting that the only way into the tower (aside from a very well-hidden secret door) is through a very high window. Even if a search party does stumble upon the tower, if they can't reach the only entrance and can't find an alternative, they can't get in to search. All Gothel has to do is keep very quiet until they conclude that the place is an abandoned ruin that no one could possibly access, give up and leave.
    • Or alternatively; Gothel didn't go to the tower straight away, but hid out somewhere else until the heat died down and then made her way to the tower. She's been living in that place for centuries, she must have all manner of hidey-holes that even the most dedicated of searchers would have difficulty finding. She wouldn't need to go straight to the tower until Rapunzel's hair grew long enough to make it worth using as a rope anyway.
    • You also over-estimate guards. You think they literally searched every square foot of every hillside to find the only entrance to the little valley the tower was in? As far as the tired foot-soldier who's on the search is concerned, he found a hill that's too difficult to climb, and no criminal would go there because they also couldn't climb the hill. You think they poke and prod every part of every hill they come across for secret entrances? No, he just looked at it, saw he couldn't climb it, then moved along.

     What a witch! 
  • Why do people seem prone to referring to Mother Gothel as a witch? We never see her doing any sorts of magic, only things like sneaking into and out of a castle, sneaking up behind and stabbing a guy without him noticing, and having knowledge of the powers of a magical sunflower...While not exactly ordinary abilities, any of these things could be easily accepted coming from someone who's been alive for hundreds of years. Do we ever have any solid proof that she's actually a witch, and if she is, couldn't she have found another way of maintaing her eternal youth? Some sort of potion, or something?
    • It's just a lingering relic of the old fairytale, in which the character that Gothel is based on explicitly is identified as a witch, which people are probably confusing with the movie. Although, while she might not be an actual witch in the movie, she is in several ways coded with the classic look and role of a fairytale witch, especially when she's aged (a crooked old crone dressed all in black who dabbles in magic-related stuff), which one way or another makes it easy for people to make that assumption even if she's not technically casting spells or hobbling around a boiling pot throwing newts' legs into it or whatever.
    • Tangled: The series addresses this. Gothel is shown to be sorceress, who studied under Zhan Tiri.
    • A witch is someone who knows how to cast magic spells, and Gothel does: by singing a specific song while touching a certain flower, they can heal injuries and reverse the aging process. It's just this seems to be the only spell Gothel knows, making them a rather highly-specialized witch.

     Promise 
  • Are we really supposed to buy that Rapunzel never would've tried to escape Gothel again, all because she promised she wouldn't if she healed Eugene? I know that Honor Before Reason is certainly a thing, but for such an independent, strong Action Girl, that seems pretty idiotic for her to hold herself to her word and give her life away all for someone that she owes nothing.
    • That depends on how one views her. On one hand, she knows full well now how terrible Gothel really is, would really want to see Flynn and the world again, and understands how huge a loss being locked away from the rest of her life is. On the other hand, she's spent years being conditioned into submission and fear, has only had two days to undo that psychological damage, isn't really an Action Girl in the fighting sense, and still has a small part of her left that loves Gothel, to the point that she cried and reached out in vain to catch her when Gothel fell out of the tower. In my opinion, I think it's plausible that Rapunzel would mean it when she said she wouldn't fight back if she got to save Eugene, but she'd have plenty of time afterward to come to regret her decision and so try to escape. And who knows, maybe she was even counting on Eugene coming back with some soldiers and arresting Gothel.
    • I'm not so sure...I know Rapunzel would've tried to save Gothel if she could have, and I understand the emotions behind it, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that she cried for her when she died - she certainly was more concerned about Eugene at the moment, and no one seemed eager to mourn the loss in the end, so I don't think anybody was really going to miss Gothel too much.

      Also, this opens to interpretation the issue of why Eugene cut her hair before she could heal him - all this time, I thought it was because he didn't want Rapunzel to hold herself to her promise to Gothel - if she couldn't heal him, then the deal was broken. (And Gothel was dead, anyway.) Now, though, you're saying she wouldn't have held herself to her word even if she had been able to heal him. So what was the rush for Eugene to cut her hair right away?
      • I think they meant "cried out", not "wept".
    • I'm not saying she wouldn't have kept her promise. I'm saying she might not have. But neither we nor Eugene could know what would happen, so he went with the option that would've explicitly freed her, rather than crossing his fingers and hoping she lied.

     Plan B: Kidnap the Queen? 
  • Hypothetically speaking, if the flower's power had remained inside the Queen instead of being given to Rapunzel, what would Gothel have done then? Kidnap the queen? Or would this finally have convinced her to give up her plans of eternal youth?
    • Even if kidnapping the queen would prove unfeasible, Gothel likely wouldn't change her priorities so easily. If she couldn't snatch her immediately like she did with Rapunzel, she might try again with a tougher plan or search for another way for immortality.
    • Well a grown adult is much harder to abduct than a baby - especially as they'll be trying to escape from the beginning. Gothel's only clue that the magic was in Rapunzel at all was her hair being blonde - and the Queen's isn't - so she might not know that the Queen has any residual magic in her. They wouldn't notice until a few years have passed and she hasn't aged.
      • Except a grown woman who has just given birth to a baby, if they find someone holding a knife to that baby's throat. That grown woman might be very easy to kidnap. (Keeping her might have been harder, or not, depending how cleverly it was done.)

     You thugs seem pretty judgemental... 
  • Why do the thugs at the Snuggly Duckling all seem to hate Eugene because of his dream? The guy just wants money and a place where he can be alone...Yes, it's not a very altruistic goal to try and strive for, but then again, neither are those of any of the other thugs, and it's not like him achieving this dream of his would be harmful to anyone...would it? Unless he made his fortune from stealing from them, I suppose, but the point is that even after they all bond with each other during a song number, the only thing the hook-handed thug can say to Eugene as he leaves is "Yer dream stinks!"
    • The thugs at the Snuggly Duckling have bonded from having dreams that would make use of their unusual quirks and make them happy from a simple joy. Eugene's dream is only materialistic and deliberately wants everyone else out of his life, so they find his pretty selfish, especially in comparison to Rapunzel's.
    • Plus, 'hate' seems like a bit of a strong word; Hook Hand's a bit scathing about his dream for reasons mentioned above, and they force him at sword point to join in the song because he's being a bit of a smug killjoy about things, but other than that once everyone starts becoming friendly they don't seem to have a huge problem with him.
      • He did screw some of them over, so....

     Empty guardhouse 
  • Why doesn't the King of Corona put any guards at the mainland end of the causeway? There's a nice little guardhouse there, but the Stabbingtons, and Flynn (twice for him!) blow right past it! Security 101!
    • Even if there had been guards there, it probably wouldn't have changed anything At the beginning, the guards didn't have much to go on - all any one of them saw was a passing glance at one of the thieves, and there was no way they could've gotten word of the theft out to the guardhouse on the bridge before Eugene and the Stabbington brothers got away. As for later, once again, the guards at the guardhouse wouldn't have had any possible way of finding out Eugene had escaped about 30 seconds after it happened; even if they had, he was riding their captain's horse, urging it to go as fast as it could. It's unlikely they would've been able to stop him. Also, I think the film goes out of its way to convince us that the guards of Corona are painfully underqualified, compared to both the heroes and villains.

     Misplaced wildlife 
  • Where did Rapunzel manage to find a chameleon while she was locked in the tower? I'm just assuming the film takes place in Germany or somewheres...Could chameleons be found that far north, especially in the late 1700s?
    • It is a Disney fairytale kingdom, not a strict historical reconstruction of eighteenth century Prussia. It's inspired by that time and place, but it's heavily fictionalised. If a droplet of the sun can land on Earth and create a glowing magic flower in this world, then we can probably allow for a particular species of lizard to be found further north than might otherwise be the case.
      • Common chameleons (which is what Pascal seems to be) do exist in Europe, though mostly around the Mediterranean. Since we don't know exactly where Corona is in Europe, they could be somewhere near where these little dudes are found.

     Angst? What angst? 
  • Why doesn't Rapunzel seem to show any signs of being a sheltered victim of emotional abuse? As soon as she leaves the tower, for the most part, she's pretty bouncy and springy and outgoing, and she's able to charm a whole pub of thugs into singing about their dreams in one sentence...Not to mention, leaving the tower at all seems like it should've taken a lot longer for her to do, considering she has no idea of the world that lays outside it. Wouldn't someone who's lived 18 years like she has be a lot more quiet, mistrustful, and introverted? (And if you're going to say it's because it's a fairy tale, then why was her leaving the tower before Eugene came even an issue?)
    • It took her 18 years to work up the nerve to actually leave the tower, she's clearly been wanting to for a long time and simply thought it was just a matter of growing old enough before Gothel would let her. Once she does it she's spends a big part of her first day out swinging between excitement and crushing guilt over disobeying Gothel, showing even when she has what she wants and likely won't get caught Gothel's conditioning is taking it's toll. After that she's mostly riding high on what she's always wanted and things actually going well.
    • Also, a popular bit of head-canon for these kinds of questions is that much of Rapunzel's 'sunny' nature can be put down to the fact that she literally has a magical droplet of the sun swirling around inside her body. Thanks to this, Rapunzel is a naturally bright, cheerful and outgoing person who can't be contained no matter how hard Gothel tries.
    • That might make sense, except she does display hesitance and self-doubt at some points in the film...It's just that it only pops up at certain points instead of being something she gradually gets over. She's hesitant in the beginning, then charms the thugs, then visits the kingdom and seems to charm everyone there as well, then finds herself falling in love with Eugene, then is tricked into thinking he's left her, at which point, Gothel takes her back to the tower and convinces her once again that the people outside are evil monsters who would destroy her sunlight. If she's supposed to have this unyielding sunshine and optimism inside her, then why does she take the betrayal of one guy who she forced into an adventure as evidence that the entire world is a dark, evil place? (Especially when everyone else she's met has instantly taken a shine to her.)
    • Because she's also a thinking, feeling human being with more than one dimension and a broad emotional range. The "sunny nature" headcanon above suggests that she's fundamentally optimistic and irrepressible in that she bounces back quickly from adversity, hardship and set-back, not that she's a Stepford Smiler automaton with only one emotional setting. No one ever said she's incapable of doubt and uncertainty, just that she naturally gravitates towards being quite cheerful, optimistic and capable of recovering her good humour fairly quickly. Most of those examples listed above clearly show her adapting quickly to situations or recovering her usual good cheer fairly quickly after a brief set-back. And as for the betrayal example, she's most likely sad because she's had her heart broken; nowhere is it said that she's completely broken and accepted Gothel's cynicism and nihilistic worldview, she's upset because she thinks the guy she's fallen for has run away from her. And even that's pretty temporary, all things being considered; notably, she recovers her usual spark quite quickly once she thinks about the matter for a few minutes and realises that Gothel's been lying to her all this time.
    • Rule Of It's-A-Disney-Film-Not-A-Drama-About-Surviving-Abuse.
    • Rapunzel shows plenty of signs. When she leaves the tower, she has a full on freakout about disobeying Gothel's orders - worrying that she's a terrible person for simply leaving. Although played for comedy, her repeatedly knocking Flynn out with a frying pan is a sign - her first instinct is that someone she doesn't know is a predator and has to be attacked. When she leaves the tower, she's paranoid that danger is lurking around every corner. She also proves very quick to trust people who show her the slightest bit of kindness - the thugs in the Snuggly Duckling. And when Pascal trips Gothel out of the tower window, Rapunzel still instinctively throws her arms out as if to save her - even after discovering that Gothel kidnapped her from her real parents and never loved her.

     Rapunzel's name 
  • I'm pretty sure this was answered in the film's intro, but just to be sure...Was Rapunzel's name given to her by her parents, or by Gothel? I'm pretty sure it was stated to be the former, but if so, and considering Gothel had to have known that's what it was, why didn't she give her a new one after abducting her.
    • Since Flynn, the only stranger to hear her name, doesn't react to it and the lost princess is never referred to by name, it seems Gothel gave it to her.
    • Tangled: The Series reveals that her parents gave her the name Rapunzel. Frederic called it out when Gothel kidnapped her, so that might be how she knew. Why she kept it is another matter entirely.
    • She might have just found it easier to use that name rather than thinking of a new name (especially if Rapunzel was at an age where she was already reacting to the name she'd been given). They're going to be living in isolation anyway, and it's not like Gothel really cares about Rapunzel beyond her hair, so it doesn't really matter to her.
    • Gothel also seems to know that it's best to get Rapunzel to trust her and then she'll go along with what she wants - so using the name her parents gave her makes the girl trust her that much quicker.

     Explaining to Flynn 
  • During the cave flood and subsequent healing, Rapunzel shows that she's aware of her hair's magical properties and the song's connection, so she must know that she's de-aging Mother Gothel. But why doesn't she think it's strange, if not outright suspicious? Okay, so maybe she was taught it's normal. But why doesn't Flynn question Rapunzel's knowledge about the hair? A "How did you find out about your powers?" would have led to her innocent explanation about rejuvenating her mother and he would be able to put two and two together and talk to Rapunzel about the truth of her situation.
    • Even if he had gotten her to open up and explain the dynamic, the most he would've learned is "Oh, I just use this power of mine to help my mother from time to time, but I keep it secret because I don't want anyone else to know." He'd still have had no idea that she was actually the kidnapped princess, and it's not really his place to tell her how she should or shouldn't be using her powers.
    • Here's a more mundane option; maybe Rapunzel didn't notice that Gothel was being de-aged by the magic. In real life, we often don't notice if someone has aged unless we have a photo from a long time previously to compare it to. Rapunzel might not have had opportunities to think about Gothel looking much younger than she ought to.

    Gothel spotting Rapunzel in the Snugly Duckling pub and then... doing nothing and walking away? And later somehow finding her again
During "I've Got a Dream", Gothel happens to walk up to the pub's window and she sees Rapunzel. Gothel reacts to this with an expression of shock and horror, because of course she had no idea that Rapunzel just left her tower.

Now from the point of view of Gothel you'd think that as soon as she sees Rapunzel there, she'd want to take Rapunzel back to the tower immediately. So why doesn't she walk into the pub, grab Rapunzel by the wrist and say "We're going home now, young lady!"? That would seem in character for Gothel. Instead, Gothel apparantly walks away. Why doesn't she make any effort to get Rapunzel back to the tower right then and there? Gothel literally needs Rapunzels power to stay alive!

Also, Gothel then disappears for a while and then later re-appears when Rapunzel and Flynn camp for the night. Now, between Rapunzel's presence at the Snugly Duckling pub and her making camp for the night with Flynn, they escaped through a secret passage, were being chased by the royal guards, almost drowned, broke a dam, etc. etc.... It seems impossible that Gothel followed/chased them through this all. Which begs the question of how Gothel managed to bump into Rapunzel a second time. It seems a contrived coincidence that she walked into Rapunzel at the Snugly Duckling, but later, at night, bumps into her again? How could that happen?

  • Gothel does want to get Rapunzel back home ASAP, but at that moment, Rapunzel is surrounded by big burly guys whom she has made friends with and who might react defensively towards her if Gothel just storms in and tries to make a grab for her. Gothel, on the other hand, is at that point working alone. One person vs an entire tavern of tough armed guys does not equal a balanced fight. And there's not much time between Gothel showing up before the Palace Guard — whom Gothel also has a pretty compelling reason to avoid — show up. If anything goes wrong, the odds are not in Gothel's favour. It'll take longer, but it's better odds for Gothel if she can catch Rapunzel when she's alone or surrounded by less company (and also if she has some minions, like the Stabbington brothers, to back her up). It's also very much in character — throughout the movie, Gothel clearly works best with manipulation and stealth, and she tends to think tactically to achieve her goals rather than just barging in and being blunt and direct. The logical thing for Gothel to do given her character is to observe, see what how the situation plays out and plan accordingly rather than just charging in full steam ahead and possibly getting herself into trouble.
  • Also consider that from what we see, Gothel has spend most of her life up to that point actively avoiding people. She tends to keep to the shadows. It's not necessarily in her instincts to leap into a position where she's suddenly the centre of attention.
  • As for finding Rapunzel, Gothel doesn't just "bump into her"; she's actively tracking her. Gothel knows (or, at least initially, suspects) where Rapunzel is going. Admittedly, finding her at the Snuggly Duckling perhaps has a hint of Contrived Coincidence (although since the tavern is presumably on the way to the city, it's a logical place to start looking and asking around if anyone's seen Rapunzel). But everything after that happens because Gothel is actively trying to find Rapunzel, and everything we see Gothel do from that point on is in some way connected to this goal. It's made clear that she sees Rapunzel and Flynn escape into the tunnel. The very next thing she does is hold someone at knifepoint to find out where the tunnel leads to. Next logical step; go to that point and, when there's nothing left, try and find some trace of them. The next thing we see Gothel do after that is to hook up with two of the last two people to see Rapunzel and Flynn went, and who are also actively tracking them (or Flynn, at least). Their final destination is also a place with only one real main entrance and exit, so all Gothel really has to do is head there as quick as she can and she has a reasonably good chance of either finding them or finding their trail. Either way, while the exact details of how Gothel manages to find them can be left to the viewer's imagination, the movie makes it incredibly clear that Gothel is actively looking for Rapunzel.
  • Additionally, Gothel hears Rapunzel singing in the Snuggly Duckling about how glad she is that she left her tower. If Gothel had marched in and dragged Rapunzel back to the tower during the emotional high point of Rapunzel singing and making new friends, Rapunzel's newfound love of the outside world would be fully intact, she would see Gothel as the bad guy, and there would be a high risk of Rapunzel trying to leave again. Gothel's a pretty calculating character, and figured that it would be better to wait and catch Rapunzel in a more vulnerable moment. Note that she speaks to the Stabbington brothers before her first confrontation with Rapunzel at the campsite, so has probably planned everything out to arrange Rapunzel's heartbreak, consolidate Rapunzel's dependence on her and further impress on Rapunzel the dangers of the outside world so that she'll never try to leave again.
    • At that point, Rapunzel is also surrounded by a group of admirers who are thugs, ruffians and criminals. If Gothel stormed into the tavern and tried to take Rapunzel home, she'd have that crowd to deal with. Gothel relies on sneak attacks and manipulation, so a crowd of thugs would easily overpower her.
  • Not to mention that Gothel doesn't know for sure at this point that nobody in the tavern has realised that Rapunzel is the missing princess, or whether they might put two and two together later. If they did, and Gothel had very conspicuously dragged her away from a public place with dozens of witnesses, she'd have been exposed as the kidnapper and executed (remember that Flynn was going to be executed for stealing the princess' crown, God alone knows what they'd do to the person who stole the princess herself) quicker than you could say "Flower, gleam and glow".
     Swimming, Part 2 
  • When Rapunzel and Eugene are in the water after the dam breaks, Rapunzel can swim. Having lived in a tower for 18 years, she couldn't have known how to swim. It would have been the last thing on Mother Gothel's mind to teach her, she couldn't have learned it from a book since her only three books were on "cooking, botany and geology", and most importantly, there couldn't have been a body of water big enough in the tower (she possibly had a bathtub—but that doesn't work to learn to swim in). Strangely enough, in Rapunzel and the Lost Lagoon this is later touched upon but completely handwaved: Rapunzel remarks she learned how to swim because "it's amazing how fast you pick up something when your life depends on it" (implying that she never had learned in the tower, but somehow was instantly able to during the aforementioned moment with Eugene). Uh, that's not how it works—people who can't swim, drown when thrown underwater...
    • IIRC, a lot of the time drownings happen not necessarily because the person can't swim but because the person panics. It's not so much the inability to swim that causes the problem as it is the fact that they're terrified, they struggle, and their panicked, flailing movements are uncontrolled and don't help. A basic stroke, however, is quite simple and intuitive to pick up (you basically push the water 'back' with your arms, so to speak) — if you're calm enough to focus. Note that whenever we see her swimming, Rapunzel is fairly focussed. Plus, it's not like she's swimming the English Channel or anything; what we see her swim is maybe a few dozen feet at most. For what we see her do a little bit of focus, adrenaline and instinct would probably manage to get her through.
    • That, and she did watch Eugene do a swimming manuever first, and then followed his lead. So it's not as though she didn't have a single inkling of how it worked, which might've been the case more if she were alone.
    • Remember also that Rapunzel is not thrown underwater. She's immersed in water that slowly rises, and she has plenty of time to clear her head and adapt to the situation as necessary. If she had been chucked into water by someone, she would probably have been in a lot more trouble.
    • And maybe she read a story book that had a character who was in a similar situation and swam out of danger - and the book would have described the arm movements. So maybe Rapunzel just guessed what to do and got lucky.
     Like Everybody Else, I've Got a... Hobby?! 
  • In "I've Got a Dream", Gunther, Ulf, Attila, Bruiser, Killer, Fang, and Vladimir's "dreams" were things they did already (interior design, mime, making cupcakes, knitting, sewing, doing puppet shows, and collecting ceramic unicorns respectively) and there was no mention of a desire for that to be their job (such as the piano guy), therefore, shouldn't these be considered hobbies, not dreams?
    • Look in the above folder titled "Dreams vs. Hobbies." This topic has already been discussed at length.
     Cupid Guy's Dream? 
  • What was the dream of the guy dressed as Cupid?
    • Maybe to act as a matchmaker for people, sort of like Cupid is. I don’t think there’s ever been a canonical explanation, so that’d be my best guess.
    • Maybe just to keep drinking? Not everyone has a fun glamourous dream like the other rogues, some people are just content to live a simple life.
     Pascal killing Gothel 
  • Why have that shot of Pascal pulling the hair taut so Gothel trips over it? It seems superfluous, not only because she was already dying anyway, but with her aimlessly stumbling about like she was, it would’ve been perfectly plausible for her to have tripped over the windowsill and fallen out of the tower of her own accord. Why put in that extra step of having Pascal do it? It just makes him seem kind of spiteful.
    • He is spiteful against her, because she was an awful abusive person.
    • Spiteful to kill the woman who abducted a baby, emotionally abused her for eighteen years and tried to kill just to avoid losing said baby? She deserved every bit of that comeuppance.
    • Maybe he didn't want Rapunzel to have to see someone withering and dying right in front of her?
    • Well, we assume she was already dying. None of them knew for sure, so presumably Pascal just wanted to make absolutely certain. And yeah, any "spite" on Pascal's part is more than justified and outweighed by Gothel's overwhelmingly horrible actions throughout the film.
    • Not to mention this is a Disney movie. If they were to have Gothel dusting away onscreen in the tower, it probably would have scared the children, and to avoid that, they used Pascal to trip her over in a Disney Villain Death style fall to make it less frightening.

     Flynn avoiding arrest 
  • Someone raised a similar question about Rapunzel earlier, but how did Eugene manage to keep from being arrested whenever he and Rapunzel returned to the kingdom and revealed she was the lost princess? Assuming it would've taken time for them to verify her identity, and Eugene was already a wanted criminal who had escaped custody on the verge of being executed, it seems doubtful that they would let him remain free just on the off-chance of him saving the princess turning out to be true. Even granting him a stay of execution would seem odd, considering there's almost no tangible evidence that Rapunzel was the lost princess.
    • Flynn is pretty silver-tongued; I assume he was able to talk himself out of being thrown straight back into jail, at least until Rapunzel's identity was confirmed or denied. Furthermore, I also assume any deal Flynn was able to negotiate came attached with a pretty strict clause along the lines of "Alright bucko, you're not going back in the cell just yet, but we're keeping a pretty close eye on you and if it turns out you're screwing us around you'll wish we were just cutting your head off." And since Rapunzel eventually managed to convince everyone she was the princess, presumably there ended up being sufficient tangible evidence after all.
    • Also, Flynn was facing a sentence of death. Flynn actually was killed at one point, with Rapunzel as a witness. Therefore, if you were so inclined a case can be made that he's already served his punishment. Okay, he came back to life, but still.
    • Maybe there was a brief period where he was arrested or kept supervised but because it would have ruined the flow of the ending, the movie doesn't show it.
    • Flynn also had both Maximus, the chief guard's own steed, and Rapunzel, potentially the long-lost princess and their future Queen, vouching for him. I doubt Rapunzel would sit quietly if the guards were threatening to take him away from her!

     That rock bit Flynn's hand! 
  • How does that stone wall injure Ryder's hand while on a flooded cave?
    • What do you mean, exactly? He just scraped his hand on it.

     Cutting the hair II 
  • Why didn’t the king and queen cut her hair as a baby? I mean at least a trim if they wanted to keep it long. Then they’d see her hair turn back to brown and keep Gothel from kidnapping her.
    • The timeline is a bit vague as to how long it was before Rapunzel was kidnapped. Fan theories range from a few weeks to a couple of years. Even if Rapunzel was as old as three, it's plausible she might not have had a haircut (especially in the movie's time period, where women didn't generally get them except for health reasons). The king and queen didn't know the hair was magic or that Gothel was after it, so they didn't know they had to protect her from wicked witches.
    • The series explains that Rapunzel was abducted the very night she was born, which makes the timeline absolutely bananas, since that was also the day the flower was taken and given to the queen. Meaning Rapunzel was born with long hair. Flynn's narration at the start backs this up, stating that Rapunzel was born with her hair like that and that the time spent with Rapunzel was barely a moment. She's also obviously a baby when kidnapped, as she looks the same as she did when they were "celebrating her birth" so there's no way she had "years" with her parents. So plain and simple, her parents didn't cut her hair because she wasn't even a day old when she was kidnapped.

    Rapunzel's birthday 
  • How did Rapunzel know her actual birthday, anyway? It makes sense that Mother Gothel probably celebrated her own birthday, leading Rapunzel to ask when hers was, but are we supposed to believe that Mother Gothel not only knew what it was, but would bother to present it accurately, as opposed to just being like "Oh, it's [insert first day she can think of]"?
    • It's possible that she couldn't think of any other day, and simply decided that it was easier for her to claim it was on the same day of the lanterns.

    Rapunzel and puberty 
  • Did Gothel ever teach Rapunzel about the birds and the bees, or explain what puberty or menstruation were?
    • The latter, at least, would've needed an explanation of some sort. Rapunzel is 18, after all.
    • Rapunzel probably got the facts of life from a book. After all she loves to read (specifically to learn, as we see), and the three books we see in the movie can't be her first books; if she has one on "Botany" now, as shown, she probably had one on basic Biology before which at least covered the basics.

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