Follow up thoughts on this:

• I rewatched Disney’s Hunchback while mentally replacing every instance of “gypsy” with “Jew,” and immediately noticed it made the story 100x more compelling. It seems obvious that the gypsies (and Esmeralda in particular; Clopin is more authentically gypsy but he is also cooning) were deliberate stand-ins for Jews. Eisner/Katzenberg/Mencken were either doing this on purpose or they simply found it impossible not to project Ashkie sensibilities onto medieval Romani, which look sort of similar to Jews through the jaundiced eyes of PC libtardism (we can mb think of them as what Jews would be like if they had an average IQ of 90).

• This becomes especially apparent when you compare the Disney film to Hugo’s version, where Esmeralda was A) secretly White (I think at the time and prob even today most high status French guys would never consider it plausible to become so deeply infatuated with a Gypsy; they’d see her as cheap pussy at best which is how Pheobus treats her in the book) and B) kind of a tedious unagentic little girl who sets off the story purely by making guys horny and retarded. Compare that to the Disney Esmeralda, who’s basically Rebecca of York in brownface: hyper-agentic, idealized / intellectualized (and this is taken up to eleven in the recent Broadway show), and honestly kind of a sanctimonious yenta.

• If you’re skeptical of this I suggest you listen to God Help the Outcasts, which is easily one of the most Jewish songs I’ve ever heard… and not just in taking up the broad role of “outsider” but in very specific things like the weird love-hate relationship with Christianity and Catholicism in particular (Jews have always looked to the Church as a protector against pitchfork hobbits), the random declaration of agnosticism in a Medieval setting, the intellectualized moralism coming from a woman who overtly weaponizes sexuality in a way that’s portrayed as heroic… none of that applies to Hugo’s Esmeralda, who is more the uninteresting passive object of an American Beauty narrative. The creators used a gypsy framing to tell a classical Belle Juive story in a world where Jews are no longer sufficiently exotic / marginalized for that to make sense.

• Also worth noting that the hatred of gypsies in the Disney version feels a lot more similar to antisemitism than IRL hatred of Romani, which tends to frame gyps as disgusting criminal pests but doesn’t afford them much agency and isn’t particularly ideological.

• Frollo’s lust for Esmeralda is similarly Bois-Guilbert coded; it’s waaay too intellectualized and dialectical to be about a Gypsy. In the book Frollo had a similar conflict but it was mostly internal—he hated Esmeralda for arousing impure thoughts in him because she was Just Too Sexy. And that’s ostensibly also what goes on in the movie if you read things very overtly, but subtextually Disney’s Frollo is clearly drawn to Esmeralda for deeper and more sophisticated reasons tied to power games involving rhetoric and moralization. And that’s what “Hellfire” is actually about—not just Frollo being horny. I’m quite certain no high status Frenchman would ever feel the need to “burn down half of Paris” over some gypsy he wanted to fuck. But I’ve felt that way about three different Jew broads this past year alone!

• One final observation: there’s clearly a significant olfactory component to Frollo’s infatuation. Noting this I reflected on my own experiences and concluded the venerable Robert Stark may have been onto something major. When I consider all the girls I’ve seriously loved Rebecca from Women Don’t Have Agency was the only one where her scent actually stood out to me as a contributing factor. With other girls I might have thought about it in either a good or bad way but it wasn’t important per se as something that stood out. Now we all know one of the biggest barriers to interracial dating is smell—I am inclined to hypothesize that Jews occupy an “uncanny valley” relative to white goyim where they smell just different enough to be exotic/spicy but not different enough to enough to seem repellant, and that for novelty-seeking autistic wordcels like me, Robert Stark, and the subtextual reading of Frollo this contributes to the “Philosemitic Toxoplasmosis” i wrote about below. Truly this is a fascinating area of HBD research that merits significant further analysis.