Ask The Tropers

Huh. I'm sorry if I've somehow offended the troper miraculous (or anyone), that obviously wasn't my intention at all. I just put in those edits (and tried to word them at least reasonably carefully so as not to excuse Frollo's real, actual villainy) simply because I thought they were accurate. This is a movie that's often remarked on for being unusually dark among Disney animated features, and for good reason. The villain, while indisputably villainous, is a very different kind of villainous from the typical witch or bad fairy, and at least some of the heroes are less than entirely pure.

Explaining and elaborating on my claims from the YMMV page:

• The movie has the jester Clopin kidnapping Phoebus (as well as Quasimodo, for that matter) and about to hang them in a sort of public lynching in the Court of Miracles, and except for Esmeralda (when she eventually gets there), no one there objects; on the contrary, the others cheer him on. He even harangues the heroes a bit first, telling them that he knows they are innocent, and this is precisely why they are to hang. This is very deliberate murder; in fact, as it is written you could somewhat easily exchange Clopin for The Joker and still keep literally everything else about the scene the same. Even if he calls it off when Esmeralda complains, any real life judge would approve an arrest for that sort of behavior. I'd go so far as to say, an American LEO in 2018 would be gravely negligent (and facing charges himself) if he did not arrest people who assaulted, kidnapped, threatened and almost killed a police officer (or anyone) that way.

• When Esmeralda escapes from the city watch in an earlier sequence, she personally knocks at least ten of them down unconscious and unmoving by hitting them with heavy metal objects (not counting other injuries inflicted by her accomplices). Especially telling is a metal disk she throws at three guards, which then lands close to Phoebus with such force that it would very obviously have killed him on impact. (Which of course requires Charles Atlas Superpower on her part, but then again her whole series of stunts there does that. More proof for Frollo that she's a witch, I guess?) She also contributes very directly to Frollo himself being hit with a pole in a way that would almost certainly have killed him in real life. Again, this sort of behavior (and even much less) would result in at least a multi-year prison sentence in the US as of today, and certainly wouldn't be accepted in medieval France either.

(For those who are interested, most of the bits of the movie that are relevant for this are currently up on Youtube; two clips I found with a quick search were titled "Esmeralda runs away" and "The Court of Miracles (HQ)" respectively. Should there be anyone who thinks my descriptions are inaccurate, he can check and compare with those.)

In addition to this, when I wrote those entries for Strawman Has a Point I tried rather deliberately to put in the relevant caveats that even if Frollo is just doing his job as a jurist prosecuting people for these real and serious crimes, he is nonetheless still also a reckless bigot against the Gypsies and a creepy stalker against Esmeralda. Those things are obviously not OK, and I think (and hope) I didn't imply that. But if there are objections to the way I phrased my entries, we can of course discuss the details and maybe come up with something better.