WESTLEY: I told you I would always come for you. wish! My sweet Westley.īUTTERCUP: Move? You're alive. Never do it again! I died that day! You can die, too, for all I care! When you found out he was gone did you get engaged to your prince that same hour or did you wait a whole week out of respect for the dead?īUTTERCUP: You mocked me once. WESTLEY: Faithfulness he talked of, madam, your enduring faithfulness. You should bless me for destroying him before he found out what you really are. Westley (Brandon Routh) and Princess Buttercup (Courtney Ford) make their way through the Fire Swamp. These two unlikely men have shown corresponding personalities, but can define themselves in their own unique way. Inigo is a master swordsman who is seeking revenge against his father’s murderer. RELATED: Recap The Princess Bride Home Movie Chapter 5, Life is Pain Here THE FIRE SWAMP. Westley is a young farm boy who is motivated to reunite with his true love, Buttercup. The Dread Pirate Roberts is actually Westley. He spoke of a girl of surpassing beauty and faithfulness. Buttercup then made another shocking discovery. He simply said, "Please, I need to live." It was the please that caught my memory. This would be, what, five years ago? Does it bother you to hear?īUTTERCUP: Nothing you can say will upset me. I remember this farm boy of yours, I think. Anyone who says differently is selling something. ![]() Once word leaks out that a pirate has gone soft people begin to disobey you and then it's nothing but work, work, work all the time. WESTLEY: I can't afford to make exceptions. And the Dread Pirate Roberts never takes prisoners. Perfect with eyes like the sea after a storm. Who was this love of yours?Īnother prince like this one ugly, rich, and scabby? It's meant to challenge the reader not to overlook Westley's faults (or the reader's own) just because he's the hero (the way young-Billy did), but to grow up and be a better man than the cynical, cheating man he portrays fictional-grown-up-Billy as.WESTLEY: Hardly complimentary, Your Highness. ![]() The hero doesn't always get the girl, most of the time you're not as different from that guy you love to hate as you think you are, and no mystical entity called "Fairness" is going to reward you for thinking you're the good guy in your own story. The author steps out of the narrative repeatedly to remind the reader that life is not fair. This is literary irony doing what it's meant to do: showing the audience that Buttercup is wrong Westley is as human and breakable as anybody else. Buttercup raises Westley's pedestal higher and higher (spewing psalms about his perfection, declaring that her patron god Westley only cries over babies and funerals, and even PRAYING TO HIM for her rescue), all while the audience watches Westley's body and spirit being broken by the Machine (he even, gasp, cries because it hurts). The Princess Bride follows Westley (Cary Elwes) and Buttercup (Robin Wright) as they fall in love and are continually pulled apart, but they also continue to fight and find their way back to each. Once the reader (remember: the target audience is young men just like the author's fictional alter-ego Billy) starts feeling pretty good about this guy and decides to idolize him, Westley starts showing some less-heroic character flaws (like abuse and gaslighting), but it's easily justified because she made him mad, right? Riiight? It all pretty much spirals downhill from there. (It's essentially the geek-gets-the-captain-of-the-cheerleading-squad wish fulfillment.) He goes off on some adventure and levels up and comes back as an absolute boss, besting the world's greatest masters of sword, strength, and mind (even though they've been working at this at least seven times longer than he has) because he's a prodigy. The underdog-guy goes from being picked on by the most gorgeous girl ever to having her swoon at his feet in a declaration of love, then gets to live out his fantasy of slamming the door in her face and letting her stew for a while. ![]() After Westley goes missing Buttercup is forced to into an engagement with the odious Prince Humperdinck who plans to kill the. Played by House Of Cards’ Robin Wright, Buttercup is the Princess Bride of the title. The author deliberately started out the story as an every-knuckle-headed-young-man's wish-fulfillment kind of thing. Luckily for Buttercup the heroic Westley will stop at nothing to save his one true love. That means it's deliberately meant to take a broadly appealing and accepted topic/trope and push it to its most extreme limits in order to make the reader stop and think critically about it. The first thing everyone needs to understand is that The Princess Bride is a SATIRE.
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