Once Upon A Time

(Marissa)

Homecoming was this week. And because I have absolutely no school spirit I went on a walk with Katie and and watched The Pelican Brief with my family rather than sit in the football stands and let a scream of the truly devoted tear at my throat. Despite my lack of school spirit, I do hope we won. And that our field lights didn't go out this time. The excuse this is all leading up to, though, is now I am on fall break and I have no inclination to do anything even remotely productive. And writing a blog post is kind of productive.

So I've been procrastinating. But the biggest reason I haven't written is I don't have very much to say. Which, believe me, is unusual. Usually I can go on and on. I drone with the best of them. If talking was an Olympic sport, I might actually have a chance at meeting Kim Yu Na

and telling her how amazingly awesome she is. The point being, I usually don't struggle with posting.

This weekend, however, all ideas have deserted and left me high and dry with a soggy handful of words.

So...

I'm going to make fun of early Disney fairytales! That seems pretty foolproof. If you are one of those people who holds Disney sacred then now might be a good time to stop reading.

I did not grow up with Disney. In fact, my mom did almost everything in her power to make sure that I did not identify with Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. (She also dressed me in the scratchiest pink overalls in all of history from which I'm still recovering, but that's besides the point.) I couldn't tell you what exactly went against her grain about the Disney Princesses, but I can tell you about mine:


1. Their voices. Think

"Some day my prince will come..." Shivers, people, and not the good kind.

2. General motivation. Let's consider Ariel. She has everything. She's beautiful. Her hair is red. She can sing (much, much better than Snow White), everyone loves her and her best friend is a fish (which might not technically be a good thing, but it seems to work for her). This is not enough, though, and after one fated encounter she has to be with

our prince charming (oh, believe me, we'll talk about him in a minute). And now the only thing in the whole wide world that she wants is to have legs. So she puts at risk not only everything she owns, but also pretty much everything under the sea so that she can go hang out with her buddy on land for a bit.

And apparently karma doesn't apply to princesses, so despite all of this she still gets her happily ever after...

This is obviously the kind of show that we want our young children to find morals in. (Like Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer. Run that song through your head. You know what the main idea is? If you're popular everything is good.)

3. The prince charmings are generic. For a while I thought they were clones, but then I went to see Into the Woods and I figured it out. In Into the Woods you get two princes who are brothers. In the first act one of them marries Cinderella and one of them marries Rapunzel. In the second act both of them, in the midst of marital problems that they blame on their hormonal wives, they wander away from the castle... and stumble upon Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and begin to occupy themselves with them.

I was extremely angry. The feminist in me was throwing rotton fruit. And then I realized that all the princes from the fairy tales seemed the same because they were all the same. It explains everything. Except

4. Love at first sight. It bothers me. A lot. It's like the storyteller couldn't think of any reason why someone would fall in love with their character so they passed it off to Cupid. Argh.

Sleeping Beauty should have punched the prince. That would have made so much more sense. Plus it would have been much more funny.

5. Lastly, the girl never saves herself. They whither away combing their hair, entombed in a glass casket, sleeping in the highest tower, etc. It is the most obnoxious thing ever. They're not even smart. They don't follow basic sense. Like Snow White. Did she miss the part of Stranger Danger when they said not to take food from people you don't know? Why didn't Repunzel cut off her own hair and climb down it herself? And why, in heaven's name, was Cinderella wearing glass slippers? High heels have enough potential pain without putting glass into the equation.

I like strong female leads. I'll take Elizabeth Bennet, CJ Cregg, or Olivia Dunham any day. They're witty and smart or save the world from alternate universes on a daily basis. And they don't go for love at first sight. And you know what? I bet if Olivia woke up to someone kissing her she would punch him.

Over.