The Problem With The Hunchback of Notre Dame

hi everyone i'm swift and today i'm going to be talking about disney's the hunchback of notre dame it's problematic depiction of the romani people and how it's not the great anti-racism story you think it is full disclosure i am of romany ancestry but was not raised in the culture my feelings do not speak for all romani peoples and are based primarily on the extensive research i have done in an attempt to learn my heritage additionally it must be known that gypsy is a slurred term given by non-roma people and will only be used in this video for clarification purposes or if the reference source material uses the term such as in both the film and novel versions of hunchback but any other time and i will be using either the terms romani or roma that being said spoilers ahead for disney's the hunchback of notre dame victor hugo's the hunchback of notre dame rapunzel's tangled adventure and wizard of the coasts the curse of straud 348 years six months and 19 days ago today the parisians awoke the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city the university in the town ringing a full appeal the 6th of january 1482 is not however a day of which history has preserved the memory based on the novel by victor hugo disney's the hunchback of notre dame was daring to say the least covering darker themes in any disney film had before we see characters struggle with lust jealousy racism and extreme prejudice frogo is a villain who is willing to commit infanticide burn an innocent family alive and kill a woman because she wasn't interested in him sexually all while manipulating quasimodo like clay within the first five minutes of the film we see quasimodo's mother die while desperately seeking help and frollo nearly draw baby quasi down a well the film ends with esmerelda nearly burned at the stake and having what is one of the longest death fake outs i have ever seen needless to say despite the g rating it's not exactly for kids despite the surprising tone there's a lot to like about it it has one of if not the greatest soundtracks in disney history bells of notre dame hellfire and god help the outcasts being genuine works of art the animation is spellbinding and cutting edge being one of the first animated feature films sees repeated cgi models in order to create the massive crowds needed for scenes like the feast of fools due to the success of the movie there's even a darker toned musical adaptation and like many disney renaissance era films it's slated to eventually get the disney live-action reboot treatment the film's no masterpiece though the tone is erratic the pacing is kind of all over the place and it could have done with a lot less talking gargoyles unfortunately at its core it has a much bigger problem than some annoying singing gargoyles it's racist the gypsies pictured in the film are caricatures of the very real romani people hunchback was disney's third wheel film at the time it was made pocahontas and the lion king being produced at roughly the same time with the lion king being released in 1994 pocahontas in 95 and hunchback in 1996 that pocahontas in particular was being made at the same time as important because for pocahontas disney went out of their way to consult the minority peoples represented in the film working not only with the members of the powhatan tribe but also with the real pocahontas descendants they made a point of hiring voice actors of native american or first people's ancestry to voice pocahontas and her people the war dance their homes and clothing were all carefully sourced from the peoples that they came from and while it was far from perfect and the care for accurate representation was not yet on the level of moana disney recognized the importance of representing native americans in a fair and respectful manner one would think that hunchback with its strong anti-racism message would have done the same yeah no in fact back in 1997 ian hancock romani scholar and advocate reported that the producers didn't respond to a single request for fairness and accuracy from romani organizations at least six of which wrote to them while the films were still in production it doesn't help that the source material is already incredibly racist and while the disney version did eliminate some of the worst offending instances of racism from victor hugo's novel disney did the absolute bare minimum disney did not contact any romani consultants they did not use romani or other travel or voice actors and instead continued to perpetrate many harmful and inaccurate stereotypes about the roma while telling a story that is supposedly in celebration of them when pocahontas was released people were quick to be critical of disney's depiction of native americans recognizing both the severity of the topic and that disney was making a profit off of the historical persecution of native americans with hunchback the only controversies that strummed up were concerned about esmeralda's voice actress demi moore having played an exotic dancer in the past and some possible gay subliminal messages that frankly i despite my years on tumblr can't find there was nothing about the representation of the ethnic minority group the film rode on the back of why exactly because unlike native americans very few people know who the romani are especially in the united states and in other parts of the world especially europe there is an extreme stigma against romani peoples my own family hid their identity in order to fit into english society it's quite possible that this video is the first time you've ever heard them referred to as something other than gypsies they aren't taught about in schools and when they do come up it's usually as a set dressing or plot device in a gothic romance with them as dark mysterious mystics or thieves riding about in caravans drinking stealing children and doing palm readings a lot of people i've met don't even seem to totally realize that they are real people one time i actually had a guy tell me that they didn't count as an eptic minority and he was an archaeology masters student before we continue let me give you the world's briefest history lesson on the romani people because in order to understand the stereotypes about them and why they exist you need some background romanies first appeared in europe at the end of the 13th century during a period of expansion by the ottoman turks and for centuries their origin baffled people who came up with every explanation for them ranging from them being egyptian or turkish set them straight up being european people who colored their skin brown in order to live a life of crime yeah obviously that's not it but they aren't egyptian or turkish either linguistic anthropologists geneticists and investigative historians together in really just the last hundred years have come to the same conclusion the romani peoples originated from india roughly a thousand years ago they left india in mass possibly as refugees or prisoners of war from there they continued to migrate westward facing conflict and discrimination as they went and they were forced to pick up a nomadic lifestyle with no homeland of their own initially they were neither christian nor muslim so in both western and eastern europe they were met with extreme suspicion this is very important there's a stereotype that roma are free-spirited wanderers who drift from place to place free as a bird yeah no they adapted to a highly nomadic lifestyle not by choice but because literally whenever they showed up in a new place people would bar them for mentoring or within 10 years the city or country would make it illegal to be romani or pass other laws that directly attacked their nomadic lifestyle they picked up professions that were portable horse selling tin smithing and fortune telling they would work seasonal jobs on farms moving along pre-established travel routes kept by their families this is the case even up into recent times when very few romani continued to live a fully nomadic lifestyle for example my family sold horses before eventually working seasonal jobs in hotels in the 30s the romani people gained reputations for being thieves and criminals when their crimes frequently consisted of poaching or loitering done as a necessity to survive in the ottoman empire they were kept as slaves until the late 1800s at some points in time they could be branded their children captured and forcefully assimilated into mainstream culture through schooling and any number of other cruelties based on misconception and otherness in more recent times the roma were among those the nazi party committed mass genocide against the majority of which never even made it to holocaust camps gunned down in their own homes after the war they faced further discrimination the german government established that the former government had been taking action against a criminal group and that the mass killings of the romani were not done as an act of ethnic cleansing it wasn't until 1979 that the german government recognized the acts by the nazis as being racially motivated and made reparations for the past 60 years assorted romani and other traveler groups have struggled for representation in the u.n but have failed to do so due to not having a unified cultural body or homeland while today the vast majority of romani people live in houses those who continue to live migratory or semi-migratory lifestyles face oppression as laws bar large groups of caravans from camping together or some campsites span gypsies altogether non-migrant romani suffer from discrimination and prejudice all the same many hiding their ethnicity from their peers it is a tragic history of misunderstanding and prejudice and it is only furthered by the inability of the romani to represent their own identity or to tell their own story one of the greatest tragedies is that this misinformation is not limited to outsiders many romanies don't know their own story due to the lack of franchise over their own identity the unified nature of the people and the lack of educational opportunities real many peoples have not been able to control the narrative about their own people i'll leave some links in the description to some books and other sources you can check out if you want to know more it is from this unfortunate history that a number of unfortunate stereotypes were born a couple of which i've already touched on but as it stands these are some of the most prevalent stereotypes romani are seen as untrustworthy exotic sexual or dangerous with esmeralda being the reigning queen of this trope they are wandering skillless vagrants thieves and conmen who for some reason steal children with mystical or magical powers but are somehow also simple-minded dirty and irredeemably wicked and that just skims the surface you might recognize a few of these already from hunchback or other works of media where you've seen gypsy characters one of my favorite horrifyingly weird recurring tropes in media that features a romani is the one shared by both the novel version of hunchback at emily bronte's wuthering heights in case you're unfamiliar both quasimodo and heathcliff who are both romany men raised by non-romani peoples decide to snuggle up with the corpses of their dead unrequited romantic interests because that's normal like what the actual heck is up with that it's before finally gross and it tells us that the bad in quasi and heathcliff is nature and the nurture just can't fix it like seriously why is this a thing one of the most unfortunate things is that frequently media is the first or possibly only place a person may encounter another culture and media oftentimes copies things from other media assuming it is accurate rather than doing outside research or engaging the source culture which serves to further spread these just awful perceptions most of these source works were written almost 200 years ago or more by non-roma and yet their stereotypes continued to be retold with many modern writers relying on the depictions created by hugo or cervantes which brings us to victor hugo's the hunchback of notre dame the hunchback of notre dame is one of the most pervasive sources of misrepresentation of the romani and has been used as a template for gypsy stereotypes since it came out published in 1831 the novel has been adapted more than a dozen times the disney version being the most well-known contemporary adaptation believe it or not i actually read the book long before seeing the movie and only saw the movie for the first time this year during my undergrad i took a class on the history of paris where we actually were required to read hunchback making me one of the only people i know who's actually read the book i don't recommend it racism aside it is 940 pages of boring scenery description with the occasional glimmer of plot when victor hugo writes he writes about places and not people hunchback is about the building notre dame itself and the kinds of people who are around it paragraph after paragraph is spent describing the beautiful gothic architecture of notre dame to such a marvelous degree that despite its tedious nature it is also one of the most important books in parisian history the novel's popularity led to the restoration of notre dame cathedral in the 1800s which had fallen into decay following the french revolution and while the restoration of such a historically and culturally significant cathedral is a big deal it's still a really racist story with esmeralda at the heart of it and really should never ever have been considered to be repurposed into a film about combating racism so you may remember that in the disney film frollo was forced to adopt quasi after killing his mother and esmeralda was born romani that's not how it goes in the book like any good disney book adaptation they change things up so in the novel version esmeralda is born agnes and is a beautiful french baby whose mother foolishly brought her to a gypsy camp in order to have her fortune told the gypsy is amazed at how beautiful this little white french baby was stole her in the night and traded her place with the hideous malformed baby quasimodo from there froho adopts him after he's abandoned and left on a church doorstep basically if the child theft wasn't bad enough this opened the door for layer upon layer of problematic yikes with esmeralda starting with her name that her birth name was agnes is no accident victor hugo loves symbolic names the film version drawing attention to that fact by pointing out that quasimodo means half formed and phoebus means sun god esmeralda is almost certainly named after saint agnes saint agnes was an early christian martyr and is the patron saint of chastity and purity according to legend she was a beauty who refused to be married and was in some versions beheaded in part because of this esmerelda meanwhile means emerald and in the book she even wears a fake one that she believes is a magical amulet this means that when she was kidnapped by the dark and dirty roma esmeralda's purity was symbolically martyred and she became an object of value for her beauty and difficulty to obtain but due to her wearing a false emerald of fake magic it is a dirty and untrue value her dark sexual desirability is not only the entire basis of the plot but is also highlighted from the perspectives of no less than four different men and it is her beauty that leads to destruction of herself and two arguably three of those four men apart from esmeralda who shows kindness to the tide of quasimodo during the feast of fools none of the other romanies show kindness but are instead cons and cheats but because she isn't actually romani she actually condemns all of the actual roma people and affirms that her kindness is not just unusual but it's especially unusual for a gypsy this is actually a pretty common trope in media especially ones where the roma girl is positioned to be the romantic interest ian hancock says that one recurrent feature in plots of this type is that the love interest turns out not to be romani after all but a high-born white girl who is stolen by gypsies as a child and subsequently rescued thus making the romantic attraction acceptable as well as admirable so we get a double heaping of the idea that she can only be redeemed because she's actually white and a nice big slicer that might save your angle as well esmeralda slightly subverts this in that she doesn't actually wind up with anyone because you know she dies and she also wasn't highborn but she serves as the trope starter which means that she is what will for many be the first image of a romany woman and she is little better than a sexual fantasy and by making her white it's okay for the white reader to think she's hot the novel also just has heaps of mysticism that sweet sweet european exoticism falsely equates to gypsies with egyptians and just plain manages to depict the roman in a wide variety of awful ways i'm hoping that the child thievery corpse cuddling and incurable inner wickedness is enough to convince you it's a story that shouldn't have even been considered for an anti-racism poster child but since i'm not doing a full book report let's turn our attention back to the disney adaptation now as i already mentioned disney failed to consult any actual romanies when making the film they did do away with some of the worst defending cases of racism such as ditching esmeralda's grand theft cradle origin story and adjusting quasimodos to be that his mother was accidentally killed by the racist frollo who is now a judge forcing frollo to raise quasimodo as his own they also softened the characters to be more likable and gave the story a happy ending so that it became a story about triumphing over discrimination they still messed up the film recognizes that esmeralda and her people are discriminated against but fails to acknowledge why using a blanket they're different style reasoning when esmerella comes to quasi's loft for the first time she says the quasimodo that if i could do this then you wouldn't find me dancing in the streets referring to his ability to make wooden figurines this simultaneously feeds into the skill-less gypsy stereotype and places disdain on her reliance on portable professions esmeralda has another uncomfortable line which she says that gypsies don't do well inside stone walls which is a direct callback to frollo saying it earlier only she doesn't condemn the concept and seems to mean it which ignores the reason why her people are nomadic implying it is a lifestyle or cultural choice it panders the idea that she must be free-spirited and wild blatantly ignoring the fact that she legally could not camp inside of the city nor could her people find work there if they wanted to disney also continues to sexualize gypsy stereotype a fact that admittedly it's hard to escape if disney wanted to keep any semblance of the novel's original plot but they went much further with it than they needed to esmeralda straight up pole dances at the feast of fools on a lance that she took from frollo's guards in the making of disney's hunchback of notre dame a short film released alongside the movie they explained that esmeralda is described in victor hugo's novel as beautiful fiery independent desirable and a dream come true with an unsettling emphasis on her being desirable in the same video they explained that she is voiced by demi moore who is further described to be desirable and even typecast for the role more having played an exotic dancer in the past naturally none of the male characters or voice actors were given these descriptors thanks nineties esmerelda is beautiful but impossibly so her conventional dark beauty is marred by her bright green eyes the filmmaker is apparently unable to fully commit to her being a woman of color all the way and having to give her an impossible exotic feature meanwhile nearly every background romani is depicted as hideous chinless with large noses and wearing literal rags for clothes that reveal the midriff esmerelda's clothing is inaccurate to both the 15th century and to real romani historical garb ordinarily i would be more open to historical inaccuracies in historical garmentry in a children's film however showing legs above the calves is taboo in romani culture and esmeralda along with nearly every background romany woman is depicted with shorter skirts with no shoes or hoes under them whereas the white parisian women are shown to have four blame skirts or to wear hose underneath them admittedly esmeralda's dress lane changes with animation magic throughout the film but it is interesting to note that her red performance dress and her standard dress has shorter skirts than her full-length prisoner dress she wears at the end of the film when frollo attempts to burn her at the stake her prisoner dress also has a more modest bodice than her other two gowns fully covering the shoulders and her chest it is also considerably less form-fitting in the top than her other two gowns with a waist-center belt to give definition that her prisoner dress is more modest than her other gowns implies it is covering up her freedom and that the shorter hemlines and revealing bodices were entirely intentional moves from a visually symbolic standpoint even in a disney film that is supposedly about criticizing a man for seeing her only as a sexual object she exists to be an object of sexual attraction the film also greatly plays up the mysticism and supposed magic of the roma esmeralda evades frollo's men by using impossible magic stunts with smoke bombs and playfulness she reads quasi's palm in one heartfelt scene phoebus describes the gypsies as a people of fortune tellers to frollo when trying to understand why frollo hates them so much but the mysticism comes to a ridiculous height with the court of miracles the court of miracles makes me straight up mad in the book and in real life paris the court of miracles is a name for the worst part of the slums it is so named because it is there that supposed cripples can suddenly miraculously walk blind men can see the deaf can hear and so on this is due to them actually all being able-bodied beggars who realized they could get more money begging if they appeared to be cripples than they could if they were seen to be able-bodied men and women only in the disney film it is the secret hidden safe house where the gypsy encampment is hidden and that frogho and his men apparently can't find it is also inexplicably in the catacombs which won't be constructed for another 300 years after the film takes place and is accessible through a secret passageway in a mausoleum and findable with a hidden map disguised as a magic necklace given to allies of the gypsies further still it is not depicted as an encampment of romani families hiding from frollo but rather as a secret society of criminals and vagrants there's like a couple of background children but because we don't interact with them at all and only with the criminals we instead have this enormous missed opportunity to showcase that this is a group of people who have been hurt by the ruling power and are in a terrible situation instead the court of miracles in the disney film is unsurprisingly also ruled over by a crime king who apparently doesn't fear any repercussions which would come from hanging the literal captain of the guard which just continues to smear the idea that these are members of a real ethnic group who were truly powerless and also just serves as a bizarre piece of over-romanticized gothic mysticism it also inexplicably places the romani inside of a dark dirty filthy tomb which incidentally has thick stone walls contradicting the film's previous also problematic statement and just seriously the catacombs are disgusting no one should live there they were constructed because paris cemeteries were overflowing with dead people and they'd put those dead people somewhere and that's without going into the common romany beliefs and customs regarding cleanliness for pocahontas disney made a point of casting voice actors of ancestors of native american or first people's ancestry they took care to depict the style of the homes her people would have lived in in her village and carefully sourced legitimate powers and war dancers for the song savages esmeralda's people meanwhile are giddy criminals who somehow got their caravans into the catacombs that won't be built for 300 years that these two films were released within a year of each other is astounding but that was 25 years ago surely things are better now unfortunately no while disney has made amazing strides with works like moana and elena of avalor to fairly represent minority cultures they still suck when it comes to romani like for instance on the disney family website where they have baby name recommendations and where i the oc creating fiend that i am stumbled upon this gem friendly reminder that gypsy is a slur and we are not egyptian that's a gross misconception created by medieval white people what's especially baffling is that they got the indian origin correct but still said egyptian i think that the themes are especially telling exotic occupation word not ethnic group you might have wondered where tangled fits into the spoiler warning at the beginning of the video well here we go let's talk about madame freaking canardist now i'm gonna preface by saying that i love tangled the series but that doesn't mean it's perfect and this is unacceptable in modern television so tangled the series features two separate characters who can be identified as roma madame canardus and fernanda pizazzo fernanda shows up in season one episode great expectations which is the science fair episode where varian wants cassandra to be his assistant in the science expo in this episode we meet fernanda who is fraryn's competition in the expo her design is clearly based on esmeralda's with unlikely bright green eyes at a striped underbust top unlike esmeralda she is dressed considerably more modestly and wears tall boots under her long dress this does not excuse the fact that she has a con who intentionally butters up the judge and crowd in order to cheat a win at the science fair she is dishonest shown to not actually know science compared to varian and uses fake words to further emphasize this fact and ran when the going got tough not helping when her invention and variance went boom she is an uncomfortable stereotype and unexpected in 2017 but she is nothing compared to madame canardus madoff canardus is based on a scratch fortune teller character who was intended to appear in the original movie tangled from the deleted scenes we can see that the original fortune teller was presumed to be a con artist by eugene using a monkey in a turban to deliver her fortunes and despite eugene's skepticism was ultimately revealed to be telling the truth her fortunes were real things not being as they seem was a common theme in the movie tangled with the massive bar thugs actually being kind-hearted and mother gothel actually being selfish and cruel this means that the viewer was intended to go in with the assumption that the romani fortune teller is a lying crackpot con artist and then be surprised when it is revealed that she is in fact not about the only positive thing that can be said about her is that while she's depicted of extreme mysticism and wackiness she was at least doing her work with good intentions the same cannot be said of madame canardus the character based on her that appears and tangled the series madame canardus is a recurring character throughout the series appearing in three separate episodes she's a short fat ugly hag of a woman with an oversized nose no teeth a bad right eye and multiple moles her name is a double play on words with canard meaning a fabricated rumor or a falsehood and can artist sounding an awful lot like con artist in all three of the episodes she appears in she attempts to scam rapunzel and her friends out of their money the worst of the three however is unquestionably her appearance in season 2 episode curses in curses rapunzel and her friends find madame canardus selling stolen goods madame canardus attempts to sell rapunzel's mislaid telescope back to her for a ridiculous fee trying to claim it was her telescope all along despite rapunzel's name literally being written on it when rapunzel refuses to pay for her own telescope madame canardus curses her with bad luck rapunzel spends the remaining 15 minutes of the episode paranoid and convinced she's cursed before she ultimately learns that there is no such thing as curses and that she just has to believe in herself madame canardis played no part in rapuzzle's realization appearing only in the first five minutes of the episode to serve as a wildly racist plot device for a disappointing gimmick episode how is it that this character exists in our modern world of racial sensitivity how is it that disney at the same time this show was being made was carefully sourcing ancient mayan script to make a unique magic language and was hiring exclusively latin voice actors for elena of avalor the disney junior show about a latina princess i think the answer is painfully simple ignorance and silence i distinctly remember a hurtful conversation from a few years ago two other students were talking about our school's minority scholarship and i'd piped up saying that technically despite my white skin and green eyes i am also a minority i'm romani i'd said what was the response i'd received i'd floundered trying to explain to them what that meant before i finally gave in and said gypsy the answer the other student gave reverberated through me that doesn't count that doesn't count is the answer as to why the media can depict esmeralda one way and pocahontas another many either do not see gypsies as a real ethnic group and perhaps regard them as either purely historical or fantastical and not real others may not have ever even heard of them and as i have found in my own attempts to do research what is written on them is scarred with bad research practices a non-romanie will have invented something 200 years ago about the gypsies and written it down and for the next 200 years scholar after scholar will copy that over rather than ever going to the source or checking their facts additionally there is no one romani people rather there are many peoples of a common historical background not all of them speak the same language but may speak variants of it not all of them tell fortunes or work tin or sell horses they developed unique cultures and forms of expression my great-grandmother was romani chao an english romani there is good reliable information written on the romani out there but that information is hard to find especially for someone without any prior anthropological background or access to scholarly journals and that just leads the spread of further misconception and ignorance especially when the media continues to perpetrate harmful stereotypes in the 90s there was a push by roman academics to try and reclaim their identities unfortunately it did not leave the realm of academia and at the same time they were doing this disney's hunchback and stephen king's thinner were both made without any consideration for the people they were supposedly about when hunchback first came out there was no outcry about racial stereotypes and just a few years later and esmeralda was almost made into an official disney princess she would have been permanently set in place as a profit-producing racial stereotype forever representing a racial group that disney didn't care to include in her conception however whenever a commonly known ethnicity is represented by disney it has always met with extreme scrutiny by the audience pocahontas tiana elena and moana have each had their media gone over with a fine tooth comb more than a hundred times by both the creators and the critics this was not the case with hunchback with hunchback people were more concerned about either the inaccuracies from the book or the sex and religion angle the differences between the making of the films for both hunchback and pocahontas tell a very telling story pocahontas's own voice actress leads us on a tour through historic jamestown and emphasizes the care and respect taken to make this movie for hunchback the voice of the talking gargoyle hugo meanwhile makes joke after joke with great emphasis on how desirable esmeralda is there's no mention of the real people she's based on or even on quasi having been born with disabilities and what that means for a disney hero learning that they may be making a live action reboot of the film with possibly josh gad as quasi sends a chill through my bones this is a story that should not be pursued or if it is it needs to be reworked almost in its entirety the soundtrack and animation may be beautiful but that does not excuse the reality that hunchback is a racist story that has only led to pain for the romani people change is possible i have seen major media producers make changes to pre-existing media in order to make amends with the romani people in 2016 wizards of the coast the people who make dungeons and dragons released the module the curse of straud a castlevania inspired gothic adventure about trying to kill straud who is basically dracula unfortunately in this adventure an entire chapter is spent on the vestani a race of wanderers for thinly veiled fantasy counterparts for the romani the vassani are described as drunks chiefs thieves and nearly every single one of them is labeled as evil or chaotic they have access to unique spells that allow them to rob curse and hypnotize their enemies they even steal children somehow wizards of the coast managed to check off virtually every negative stereotype about the roma and tried to sell it off as an original fantasy race complaints were made to wizards of the coast who in 2020 announced that they'd be releasing a rectified version and working alongside a roman consultant in order to make up for this failing that you have to pay a hundred dollars for the non-racist revamp special edition if you want a physical copy and not a digital one kind of sucks and i personally haven't seen what the changes are not wanting to shell out the cash for it but wizards did release a sneak peek though it's a little bare bones mentions of drunkenness are gone and the word gypsy has been erased altogether but otherwise it looks pretty much the same it's not perfect but it's a start and it provides large-scale recognition of the romani to the general public who may now start to wonder about the madame can artists of the world overall hunchback isn't the anti-racism movie it pretends to be it's possible that hunchback is your favorite movie or esmeralda your favorite disney heroine and that's fine for you what i'm hoping is that you stop and reconsider the depictions of romani people you may have seen in hunchback or other media maybe hope that when disney actually gets the wheels spinning on that live action reboot that they call up a romani consultant or two we all love the idea of esmeralda crying out for justice against frollo let's encourage media creators to do better by her people and actually give justice demand that minority peoples are given consideration and a voice when major media depicts them it's okay if you didn't know who the romani were before this video now that you do know speak up only by speaking up do big changes happen and madame can artists stay off the writing table i hope you enjoyed this video don't forget to like comment and subscribe for more see you next time when i'll probably be talking about who i think should be the true mandalore

Channel: Swiftstart

Views: 11,474

Keywords: Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Esmeralda, Romani, Disney Romani, Disney Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Problem With the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Swiftstart, Notre Dame Bad, Notre Dame Problem, Hunchback Problem, Disney Hunchback, Disney Hunchback Problem, Disney Racist, Hunchback of Notre Dame Racist, Hunchback Racist, Racism Against Romani, Notre Dame Racist, Esmeralda Racist, Esmeralda Justice, Hunchback Justice, Disney Racism, Disney Anti-Romani

Id: 2kW7XkgIjp4

Length: 31min 30sec (1890 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021