Created out of subservience (“As you wish…”), Westley and Buttercup’s love is pure. The age-old problem – class – comes between them.
Westley, a simple farm boy, leaves to seek his fortune, thinking that this will help equalise them, so he can afford to marry her. Buttercup gets news that he has died. She goes into mourning, but, years, later, agrees to marry Prince Humperdink, because, if she can never love again, she might as well marry for status and money.
She becomes the titular ‘Princess Bride’. When re-united with Westley, he reveals he has become a pirate. Specifically, the Dread Pirate Roberts, who supposedly killed him. There is an even greater class gulf between them, for just as Westley mocks her devotion to royalty over love, she accuses him of being responsible for all her pain.

This gulf is personified in Prince Humperdink. He wants to kill Westley, marry Buttercup, and then kill her too to start a war. Not only does this show remarkable prescience and political relevancy even today, it makes him quite literally devoid of love. He is a hunter.
When Westley’s in the Pit of Despair, he hangs onto the mantra of “True Love”. It’s this that keeps us through our own pits of despair, and, literally, death, in Westley’s case.
Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.
Buttercup, when, in the seemingly inescapable clutches of Prince Humperdink, never gives up her faith in love. She offers this:
Westley and I are joined by the bonds of love. And you cannot track that, not with a thousand bloodhounds, and you cannot break it, not with a thousand swords.
The film ultimately is a challenge to the audience to live up to these words, this ideal. Is true love possible outside a fairy-tale world?
The film says: try it and see.





















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