Mother Gothel is the main antagonist of Disney's 2010 animated feature film Tangled. She is a wicked crone who had retained youth for hundreds of years through the healing properties of a magic golden flower. When the flower's powers were unintentionally transferred to the hair of Rapunzel, Gothel kidnapped the princess and locked her away in a secluded tower, where she hoarded Rapunzel's healing magic. To keep the princess under her control, Gothel posed as Rapunzel's loving, albeit overprotective mother with a mission to protect her daughter from the "cruelty" of the outside world.
Gothel presents herself with a theatrical flair, often flaunting her beauty and curvy appearance with much enthusiasm and dramatics. This ties into the fact that she is a phenomenal actress, a dangerous manipulator, and is very intelligent, while it also indicates that in her actual lifetime before discovering the flower, she was indeed an actual stage actress and performer before she retired due to her aging. Aside from the magic golden flower Gothel selfishly uses to prolong her life to live forever, and her life alone, she lacks magical attributes, relying solely on her intellect to achieve her ambitions. She is also very possessive and selfish, evidenced by the fact that she had been hoarding the magical flower for hundreds of years all to herself, which could have instead been a gift to share with other ailing beings of the world. Aside from manipulating Rapunzel herself, she also manipulated the Stabbington Brothers by seemingly giving them the chance of getting revenge on Flynn Rider as well as Rapunzel's gift to make themselves rich, only to betray them without keeping the latter half of her promise as she no longer needed them.
Gothel was a lazy mother, as evidenced by her treating her four-year-old daughter Cassandra as a maid by forcing her to do all household chores in their cottage by herself while Gothel spent all her time looking at herself in her mirrors and talking about the compliments she got by men, which also demonstrates her vanity.
Gothel was also negligent to her biological daughter Cassandra, presumably having to be an unintended result of an affair with an unknown man. Gothel often left her alone in their cottage to restore her youth with the flower and gave her gifts only to keep her away from her, rather than by motherly affection, much like she later does with Rapunzel, and finally abandoning Cassandra to escape with the baby princess, not caring about what would happen to her afterwards.
Throughout the story, Gothel's goal is to keep Rapunzel in a hidden tower forever in order to take advantage of the healing powers within the lost princess' hair. To do so, she cleverly poses as a kind, yet overprotective mother figure, that simply hopes to keep her daughter away from the outside world which, according to her, is filled with people who would abuse Rapunzel's power (which makes her somewhat hypocritical since she is one of those people who is doing just that). However, she is still extremely abusive despite her caring façade; she constantly insults Rapunzel, purposely lowers her self-esteem, avoids familial contact with the princess, and riles up her anxiety with warnings of exaggerated dangers she could run into if she'd ever leave, all for her own selfish gain. Gothel is also known to victimize herself and enjoys it, blaming Rapunzel for any sort of conflict or unfortunate event that befalls their lives and relationship, be it an argument or even someone's death.
Despite all of this, Gothel has several methods of furthering Rapunzel's dependence and loyalty to her; these include making her favorite meals, gifting her with paint and other luxuries to keep her occupied within the tower, and most notably, posing as Rapunzel's only protector in a vicious and unforgiving world just to manipulate her. However, this is all for a deeply selfish reason and comes at the expense of Rapunzel's happiness and dreams of experiencing life outside the confines of her tower. The illustrations even state she implanted scary and corrupted views of Christmas in the girl.
Gothel's burning desire to retain her youth for all eternity has notably driven the woman to complete madness, to the point where she was more than willing to force Rapunzel into slavery for the rest of her years when she figured out the truth of their relationship. Not only that, she was also driven to a murderous state, evidenced by her immediate decision to kill Flynn Rider, upon deducing he somehow led to Rapunzel's eventual leave from the tower.
Though this could be attributed to her wishing for Rapunzel never to leave her, Gothel seems to be a misanthrope and has true hatred for people because they took away the magic flower she wanted all to herself, even though it could help the sickness of others. She even advises Rapunzel to hate people, saying; "the world is dark, and selfish, and cruel. If it finds even the tiniest bit of sunlight, it destroys it".
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