I'm perfectly aware that I'm not the target audience for the Descendants franchise. These breezy fairy-tale-meets-high-school-rom-com flicks are aimed at young viewers, specifically teenagers – at a guess, closer to fourteen than nineteen. Nevertheless, I can't help enjoying them.
The original premise of the films is to let the children of famous Disney villains attend the same high school as the kids of famous heroes and see what happens. For this scenario to come about, the creators had to dream up a land (Auradon) where all the heroes hung out, and The Isle of the Lost to which all the villains had been banished. It did not make a lick of sense, but it was fun and spawned a jaunty trilogy centering on the villain kid quartet Mal, Evie, Carlos and Jay and their hero-kid love interests. Mal especially, played by rising star Dove Cameron, was the heroine (sometimes anti-heroine) of this trilogy.
With the tragic death of one of the leads (Cameron Boyce who played Carlos), the franchise ground to a halt for a while. Then it started up again with what seems set to be a new, Wonderland-centered trilogy, where Red, the daughter of the Queen of Hearts, and Chloe, the daughter of Cinderella and her prince, get up to time-travel shenanigans in order to improve the present, and then have to deal with the consequenses. Recently, the fifth Descendants film, Descendants: Wicked Wonderland, premiered on Disney Channel and (fortunately for me) Disney Plus.
To sum up, the franchise contains fairy-tale crossovers, (non-snide) Disney references, romances, bouncy hummable tunes and ongoing riffs on the hero-villain dynamic. It's basically five films' (and counting) worth of "you and I are not so different" storylines. Of course I'll keep watching! Heck, age is just a number.
There are problems, though, when a geek like me troubles her decades-too-old brain with the logic of a franchise that's only supposed to be a fun time for high-school kids. I'm not too concerned with the sloppy world building when it comes to timelines, the way the fairy-tale federation of Auradon is run or the morally questionable choice of assembling all villains and their children in a penal colony. Having the parent generation of villains and heroes attend the same magic high school doesn't add up, but I'll let that pass. I don't question the blending of modern times with fairy-tale narratives. What bothers me are all the missing parents. Who are they? Where are they?
It started in the very first Descendants film: while the hero kids mostly had two parents (as a carry-over from the original stories), the villain kids were only introduced as the kids of Maleficent (Mal), the Evil Queen (Evie), Cruella de Vil (Carlos) and Jafar (Jay). Not a peep about who their other parents were. While we eventually (in film number three) learned that Mal's dad is Hades, the rest of the quartet's second parents remain a mystery. It wasn't just the villain spawn either. Fairy Godmother has a daughter called Jane, and Dopey has a son called Doug. Nice to know that Dopey scored, but with whom?
If it had ended there, I could have lived with it, as it's quite fun to speculate and invent head-canons regarding probable pairings. But each film introduced new young protagonists, and almost every time only one of their parents (a famous villain, mostly) was mentioned. That way, the problem has grown exponentially to a point where even a whole film exclusively dedicated to tying up loose parent threads (which we're never going to get anyway) wouldn't be enough. For crying out loud, even Smee has twins. How did that happen?
What makes me mind this quirk of the Descendants films much more than I should is, I think, all the lost storytelling opportunities. I believe someone somewhere claimed that the films were to be considered as Disney canon, but come on, they're clearly not. Which means they could have gone nuts and fan-fictioned away by pairing Disney villains up any old way, which would then enrich the possibilities when it comes to the villains' offspring. The "VKs" (villain kids) would have two sources of villain genes to worry about rather than one. There could be clandestine villain-hero hook-ups, of the romantic or scandalous kind. Who is Jane's dad – is there perhaps a reason Fairy Godmother keeps her on such a tight leash?
Surely the target audience, consisting as it does to a great extent of teenage girls, has to wonder about this too and bemoan the lost opportunities for even more Disney-related "ships"? I'm at a loss to explain this storytelling nonchalance. Maybe, considering the young audience, the creators have chosen to be a bit shy when it comes to procreative matters. We learnt in Descendants 3 that Maleficent and Hades are supposed to have been married when Mal was conceived, although they then split up. Now, I can imagine the Disney versions of Hades and Maleficent having an affair, but married? It's as if the powers that be don't want to sully their viewers' minds too much with contemplations on the possibly irregular relationships which resulted in villain kids such as Evie, Carlos, Jay and many more.
To anyone progressively minded who feels the need to snigger at this and at Maleficent's and Hades's "marriage", I have a question: Who, exactly, is Bow's mother in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power? I'm not disputing that his two dads are super cute and shippable, but someone must have carried Bow for nine months in her womb, no? Sometimes, progressive media have their own problems with the birds and the bees.
