#like i said i dont wanna like over or understate the ... state of what was goin on

[boycrowned]

                 — regarding : ben, adam & belle. updated as of 06/11/2020. keep in mind during this whole thing that i’m not saying ben lived a bad childhood. he grew up in a castle with everything he could ever wish for at his beck and call and knows how fortunate he was to grow up in auradon let alone in line to be king. however, things within the family themselves weren’t always as peachy keen as i think they led people outside the castle to believe !

adam & belle do not have a harmonious marriage. they do very much love each other and they do love their kid, but adam himself is temperamental and prone to outbursts ( which i’ll touch on specifically later ) and belle, while gentler, is very stubborn and hardheaded just like adam. this meant that the castle was very often home to loud arguments that ben was present for, a lot of slammed doors and dinners spent with only one of them. while this wasn’t in the public eye, i’m comfortable saying some of the families they were closer with witnessed an outburst or two ( audrey, jane, chad, lonnie, namely ) overall, though, they seem a lot closer as a family than they actually are.

adam specifically still has a short temper that makes itself known a lot even though he’s aware of it and tries to keep it under wraps. even though belle calms him down a lot there were still countless times when ben was on the receiving end of one of adams outbursts ( he never purposefully hurt ben, to clarify, he threw things and broke things and yelled a lot and this was often very close to ben’s person. he is in general a rough guy, a couple times via the books ben mentions adam patting his back so hard it nearly knocks him over ) and when ben was younger it made him really nervous to step out of line, and as he got older it sort of tied into him initially thinking he needed to rule the way adam did to be a good ruler to begin with ( which he learns isn’t true, so it’s okay. ) however, as he got older he also just … got used to it, it stopped making him nervous so much as it was .. another tuesday in the castle.

i have a hard time ... verbalizing ben / adam because i don’t want to over or understate the way things were !! as a little expansion on the italicized part in the above paragraph, ben was never purposefully hurt but he had some bruises from being handled too roughly sometimes, though it was accidental. things were often thrown ... not at him, but very close to him and his body, broken right by him, etc.  there was a line that wasn’t crossed but it was a thin line and there were moments where ben didn’t know if it would be crossed ??  

ben rarely talks about any of it, but when he does he also tends to minimize it.  i think ... for the most part in house everyone minimizes it without really ... realizing they’re doing it ?? for ben i think it comes from a point of knowing that things could’ve been and were a lot worse for a lot of other people and having gotten so used to it that even at a young age it didn’t stick out to him very much. enough that he knew he couldn’t ... openly talk about it, but there was a lot they couldn’t talk about. there was an image to keep up, so even that really wasn’t unusual. 

on the parents end, that’s harder for me to say obviously because i do not play them. i think that adam typically apologized once he’d calmed down. belle always apologized if she yelled at ben, though i do think she was more on the side of sometimes ben got stuck in between one of their fights and she said something hasty but nothing further. and that was ... kind of just the cycle of things, and no one put a stop to it because it didn’t seem ... necessary ??  because it didn’t seem that bad ?? because things weren’t always bad ?? all of the above ?? i don’t know, but that’s how it went.

that being said, while ben did get used to living around that in his relationships with other people, angry or not, he’s very very very hard pressed to raise his voice, or anything of the sort. he’ll talk it out or he’ll stay quiet until he’s at a point where he can do that. the few times his temper has gotten the better of him he feels incredibly bad about it, he knows what it’s like to be around someone you sort of have to tip toe about with and that it’s not fun. he never wants to come off that way, and strives not to. he also … does not like being at the receiving ends of behavior like that ! it makes him fidgety.

this is also part of the reason why ben is closer to belle than adam. while, yeah, they have more in common personality wise, there’s sort of an underlying disconnect between him and his dad though they have the whole beast thing in common and ben does take after him a in a few ways ( i.e temper. ) they love each other but don’t have anything close to the same relationship ben and belle do. ben credits pretty much all of his good traits to his mom and mrs. potts. ben also fully acknowledges, obviously since he was the one that changed it, that his dad made a lot of bad decisions during his reign. even on top of the isle, he dedicates a lot of time fixing these things. he knows adam isn’t a bad person or anything, but he’s never going to argue with anyone about the (non) validity of his choices.

throughout his childhood and the rest of his life leading up to descendants three, while of course they have their disagreements, ben really is very close with his mom. they talk a lot. he tells her a lot. after the events of descendants three, his relationship with both parents becomes very stilted because of how heavily betrayed he feels by them pushing the barrier closing. he’s already rarely talking to his dad outside of politics, so he feels it less there, but he does feel it a lot with belle. it makes him sad that he has a really hard time talking to her, for a while, without stirring ugly feelings in his chest. i like to think they eventually repair that relationship, but i’m not sure when or how long it takes.

lastly, when it comes to the reality of their home life, unless they were there to witness it it’s unlikely anyone else knows about it. the scope of people who do are probably those mentioned earlier, audrey, jane, chad and lonnie and their parents. of course everyone is free to make their assumptions based on what they do know of adam and belle, but otherwise. the other people who may know about it are just people that didn’t grow up with but become very very close to ben ( significant others, mainly. ) even then though it’s something he takes .. a while, to open up about.