The Princess Blog

I'd like to expand a little on my  "Confessions of a Grown-Up Princess Fan"  to discuss how getting older has not only affected my perspective on princesses, but also my attitude toward the world in general. Thinking about how a live-action "Snow White" movie  would inevitably be different for a modern audience  sparked some of these thoughts. One of the biggest complaints about the "Damsel in Distress" stigma  that Disney has been working hard to overturn  is that princesses only smile and look pretty while their princes do all the hard work. I personally think that the movies from the Disney Renaissance have the best balance of proactiveness between the male and female protagonists. In today's movies , it's often the men who sit back and do nothing while the women lead the majority of the action for the plot, which creates an imbalance in the opposite direction. It also forces princesses to take on a lot more responsibility , which impedes t...

As we all know, princesses are the most interesting when written as fully fleshed out characters with a wide range of personalities and emotions. However, some sources  claim that princesses, or at least the ones from Disney movies, never experience any feelings other than happiness or sadness. Disney even made this jab at themselves in one of their own movies. In 2007, Giselle from Enchanted  was shocked to learn that she was capable of experiencing anger when she left her animated fairy tale world for the grungy reality of modern-day New York City. The implication was that she needed to be a real person in order to experience real emotions. Do two-dimensional princesses really only experience two dimensions of emotion? Let's explore. To be honest, I find such claims confusing because animated princesses get angry all the time. Ariel's motivation to become human in The Little Mermaid  is cultivated by a heated argument she has with her father over whether or not s...

There are many princesses who come off as introverts. Cinderella , Belle , and Tiana  prefer to keep to themselves and avoid social situations if given the opportunity. Since they were not raised as princesses and lead generally quiet lives, this is not a problem for them during the course of their movies. However, as we get older, it becomes more and more difficult to avoid such situations. An inability to maintain the proper amount of social decorum can make it challenging to show the world that you are a modern princess . Keeping to yourself is often misinterpreted as pretentious, a criticism that even Belle has faced from naysayers. Is it possible to maintain your princess mannerisms in social situations without running away like Elsa ? How introverted or extroverted you are has nothing to do with how much of a princess you are. Yet, there are certain struggles that introverts face that do not affect extroverts as much. A princess must be the face of order among chaos, th...