And why, yes, we do need them.
Once upon a time, there was a Disney fairy tale starring a kind, beautiful princess/maiden who longed for a different, better life than the one she had. She was surrounded and supported by a number of cute and/or funny side characters, which was good, because a pure-evil, no tragic backstories necessary, villain was out to get her. But she also had the love and support of a brave, handsome man who adored every little detail about her, no matter how unusual she was, and would do anything to protect her – until one day, he stopped being included. The Disney Prince simply vanished, silently erased from the formula as though he had never been.
But why?
This formula, which could describe pretty much any of the Disney Princess films up to the 2010s, used to be the backbone of all Disney Princess-type movies. I would venture to say you can't really have a Princess movie without it. After all, the Disney Princesses celebrate love, hope, dreams, and wishes, and are known for their feminine strength which works with other people (and creatures) to build a better world. They were never meant to support the “don't need no man” movement. And yet, when the Disney Princes first started to disappear for good, the main reaction I could see – when anyone bothered to react at all – was celebration. As if the Princes had never been needed. As if the Princesses were somehow automatically stronger without them.
I admit, as a group of compelling characters we could look up to and learn from, the Disney Princes didn't exactly have the most promising start. Right from the beginning, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella each featured a memorable princess and villain and a fun supporting cast, but the love interests were little more than generic handsome princes. They were the “prizes to be won” as my favourite Disney Princess so iconically put it; they were basically living trophies. The first two Disney Princes were not even important enough to merit names.
But such was not the intention of Walt Disney and his team when they were planning these movies. According to The Making of Snow White, a documentary from Disney Avenue, Snow White's prince was meant to have a much bigger role, involving a thrilling escape from the Evil Queen's dungeon in the style of Errol Flynn. This had to be cut down, not because of any lack of interest on Disney's part in romance plots or male love interests, but because it was the very first full-length animated feature film and it was very difficult to animate a realistic, non-exaggerated human man. Apparently The Prince's role was cut down further and further until all we were left with was the two very brief scenes with almost no dialogue that exist today.
As for Cinderella, it was the movie that pulled Disney Studios back out of near-bankruptcy after World War II impacted their income. I don't know whether that had anything to do with Prince Charming's lack of screen time, but budget cuts did have to be made, and they probably wouldn't have used this project to make another attempt at animating a realistic human man. Prince Charming is in exactly one scene not counting the wedding, and the King and Grand Duke endlessly discuss his feelings and opinions and speak for him, so I do have to wonder if he was initially supposed to have a much larger role and tell us all these things for himself. Perhaps we would even have gotten to see him and Cinderella talking at the ball (although I do need to point out, they were presumably dancing and wandering the garden together and talking for hours, so to say they fell in love “after five minutes” is not a valid criticism). This limitation actually led to one improvement in the story, fixing the plothole of why the Prince can't recognize the face of the girl he fell in love with and needs a shoe to tell him who she is. In Disney's version, it's the King, longing for grandchildren at any cost, who decrees his son must marry the first girl whose foot fits the glass slipper, regardless of whether she is the one he danced with or not. (That actually solves two plotholes, since Cinderella is now presumably not the only woman in the kingdom who could have fit the shoe, and we don't have to wonder how it fell off if it was molded to the exact shape of her foot.) Charming was not even in this scene and had no say in the matter. I admit I don't like how passive that makes him, but I do like how it cleverly absolves our Prince of this very serious flaw. This needs to be a more widely remembered part of the story, because I still see people accusing Disney's Prince Charming of not being able to recognize Cinderella's face!
So, okay, if you want to tell me the first two Disney Princes weren't all that interesting, you make a valid point. But the intention was there; the essence of love was still present in the movies. How do I know? Because if you look at some compilations, clips of Disney couples set to love songs for example (look them up on YouTube, there's some really good ones), the romance shines through just as much in the early couples as the later ones, and from those clips alone you would never know the relationships had been underdeveloped. It was the Disney animator Glen Keane who said all the characters already exist somewhere and the animator's job is to find them (I paraphrase), and as someone who creates characters myself, I believe it. I believe the princesses' True Loves really had been generated, but the animation industry was not yet able to properly show it. But after that, the Disney Princes began a distinct trend of improving with every film.
Some people put Phillip into the same “underdeveloped early Prince” category as The Prince and Charming, but I don't think this is fair. Phillip is onscreen for much longer, and has many more lines, than either of his predecessors. We see enough of Phillip to know he has actual opinions (“This is the fourteenth century!”), relationships with characters outside of just Aurora, and even a proper name. He even gets to face Maleficent in battle, though he isn't allowed to actually defeat her. (Phillip's happening to have the sword in his hand while Flora enchants it to fly into Maleficent's heart does not count.)
Thirty years later, Eric too has opinions, and we get to see his hobbies and interests: he likes to sail and be on the water; he won't marry a girl unless he feels that spark of “Yes! This is right!”; he's casual and laidback and doesn't want to be forced into a stuffy, straightlaced mold. We see him interact with Grimsby, Max and the sailors, and get a sense of Eric already having a full, complete life before Ariel came into it. We see Eric and Ariel spending time together and bonding. Eric is also allowed to battle Ursula, and in his case he actually defeats her. Oh, and perhaps for the first time in a Disney Princess film, Eric's hobbies and opinions are designed to be compatible with Ariel's. She's wild and crazy, and Eric finds her freeing after all the expectations Grimsby puts on him. He's laidback and easygoing and loves to find adventures on his ship, while she's brave and fun and generally up for anything. Eric loves the sea, and Ariel's family and friends live there, so living by the ocean will work out perfectly for both of them. From now on, a Disney Princess will not fall in love with a handsome prince, but with her handsome prince.
So far, none of the Disney Princes have had any real character flaws – well, Phillip does refuse to listen to Aurora's clear “no” during the forest dance scene, and I did find Eric to be a bit passive sometimes, but I guess those have more to do with the writing than the character development. For the most part, the focus was all on the perfect charming prince.
Enter the Beast.
It would be kind of hard to do a Beauty and the Beast adaptation where the Beast didn't have any major character flaws. He needs to show more of his kind, sweet side as the movie goes on, and less of his gruff, unpleasant side, so that Belle can slowly realize there was more to him than what she saw at first. And Beast could hardly change his character flaws if he had no flaws to begin with! So Beast becomes the first Disney Prince with a character arc. He overcomes his temper and learns to be more kind and gentle. And since the change wouldn't feel at all believable if we never saw Belle and Beast's relationship develop, we get a number of very sweet Belle and Beast bonding scenes. You can tell how these two need each other – without Belle, Beast would have forever forgotten what love and kindness are; without Beast, Belle would have stayed the eternal outcast. By the end of the movie, it would be nothing short of devastating if they couldn't be together.
And then came Aladdin.
I don't need to tell anyone again how much I love Aladdin, or how I think his relationship with Jasmine was the absolute pinnacle of Disney romance. But really, it's not just my opinion that with Aladdin, Disney finally made a movie in which the “prince” (I use the term loosely, since obviously it was a huge plot point that Aladdin is not a prince) was the protagonist. They'd come so far from that first Disney Prince who wasn't able to do much more than stand around and sing! We know exactly who Aladdin is and what his life is like; we know his wants and his fears and that limiting belief he will have to overcome via character arc in order to have his happy ending. And not that this is any surprise since Disney has always known how to handle Princesses, but his vivid character does not come at the expense of Jasmine's. She's adventurous and outspoken and once again, she and Aladdin fit together like two halves of a whole. Jasmine can bring Aladdin to the palace of his dreams, where he will be special and important and never again seen as “just the street rat”. Aladdin can sweep Jasmine into the world she's always wanted to see but knew nothing about. Brave Aladdin, who never shies away from any danger and is resourceful enough to handle anything, can encourage Jasmine to take the next steps into her own adventures and reassure her it'll be fine if she does. Jasmine can remind Aladdin to stay true to himself – is it any coincidence Aladdin, with his character arc, was paired up with someone so unapologetically honest and outspoken no matter what? Aladdin will do anything for Jasmine: go into the Cave of Wonders, confront a very dangerous-looking merchant, return to Agrabah when he doesn't even know how he'll be received to engage in a battle he could very likely lose. Jasmine is incredibly supportive of Aladdin, she can understand him even as he struggles to accept himself – and how many female leads do we see who, when helped out of a dangerous situation, say “I want to thank you” instead of “I had everything under control until you showed up”?? Aladdin is also living proof that “love at first sight” is not mutually exclusive with “proper relationship development”. Aladdin and Jasmine are probably not the first Disney Princess couple to have a conversation before deciding to get married – I maintain Cinderella and Charming probably did talk during the ball, Belle and Beast definitely had conversations during her stay, and it really isn't fair to count Eric and Ariel when she couldn't speak at the time – but they are the first couple to have a conversation we get to see and participate in. We get to follow Aladdin and Jasmine through all the stages of their relationship: from the first meeting to the first conversation to the first date, we watch them resolve their first fight – Jasmine won't walk away even if she's mad; Aladdin won't walk away even if Jasmine has a temper he knew nothing about when he first met her. We get to see their engagement and almost-wedding, and finally the moment where Jasmine and Aladdin at last face each other as themselves, without any secrets or lies between them, and declare they still want each other as much as ever. Jasmine has that beautiful “I choose you, Aladdin” – Aladdin, exactly as he is, and Aladdin finally knows he was always worthy.
And Aladdin not only gives us a fantastic romantic relationship, it also features a hero young boys can look up to and see themselves becoming one day. It shows a strong male lead who is kind, who thinks of others' needs, who has dreams and aspersions and watches them come true, who ends up with several strong friendships, and who is always willing to step up and do what needs to be done. Aladdin is not only the ultimate Disney prince, he's a pretty good male role model too.
So, yes. With every new film, the quality of Disney Princes improved, until the Prince character was able to be the full-on protagonist. And yet, the Disney Prince criticism is still thrown like a blanket over every single character in that category.
I wish I could say Aladdin had launched a new era of Disney romances. But at least, he definitely launched an era of Disney male heroes, which could have ended up being a brother franchise to the Disney Princesses if it had lasted longer than the '90s. Simba, Quasimodo and Phoebus, Hercules – haven't seen Tarzan yet, but I'll hazard a guess he'd count too – all gave the young boys of Disney's audience something to aspire to. And we did continue to see some really good romances: Phoebus and Esmeralda, Hercules and Megara, Simba and Nala – all more secondary plot points, but always between two properly developed characters. Strangely enough, the only two additions to the official Princess lineup gave us some of the least romance from that decade. Mulan barely gets to the point where Shang agrees to stay for dinner, and Pocahontas – well. Let us just say if there is one thing worse than having no romance, it's putting in a romance only to not let the couple stay together in the end!!! If even Disney can't be relied on to give our romances a proper ending.... Okay. I'm calm now. My point being, even though the mid-to-late '90s proved that Disney was more than capable of writing two well-developed love interests, it didn't add much to the official Disney Prince category, which may be part of why the Princes' reputation never improved.
In more recent years, Disney returned to adapting fairy tales. This time, armed with their ability to develop strong male leads and compatible love interests, they gave us what appear to be some of the most beloved Disney couples in all of Disney history: Tiana and Naveen, and Rapunzel and Eugene, the latter of which seem to have become the Most Popular and Beloved Disney Couple of All Time (I still say that honour should be Aladdin and Jasmine's, but my point remains). I think by this point, Disney had more than proven their ability to write a compelling fairy-tale romance. It had been decades since their last even remotely generic Prince.
I think Disney, at this point, had a free pass to not only continue with romance and fairy-tale adaptations, but to defy the common practise of the time, of trying to avoid or subvert certain fairy-tale elements. The Princess and the Frog and Tangled came out during my preteen years, and I distinctly remember how difficult it was to find a good story anywhere with princesses and romance and castles, without every single element I wanted to see being subverted, basically sending me the message that these things weren't good as they were and I was somehow wrong for liking them. This was right in the “not like other girls” era, so every book heroine I encountered went on and on about how much she hated dresses and the colour pink – including when they were princesses. I found so many fairy-tale subversions where the princess was spunky and adventurous, or had impressive fighting skills, or good common sense – but all of this was at the expense of love and kindness. No one was trying to show us the value of our feelings and intuitions, our connections with others, hope and optimism, or any other traditionally feminine strength found in almost every early Disney princess. If anything the message I kept hearing was “love and kindness are weak. If you want to survive in the world as a woman, you'd better be tough and guarded”.
The Disney movies I just mentioned did not, thankfully, fall into those traps, although you can still see the influence of the era. More care than ever is taken to make sure Tiana and Rapunzel have their own goals outside of love and marriage, for instance. But far more disappointingly, one major element of the classic Disney Princess romance was entirely gone. The entire 2000s and early 2010s passed without a single instance of love-at-first-sight, except for couples who would later discover they weren't Meant To Be after all. Instead these couples started out with varying levels of mutual mistrust or even dislike (though I'm not sure any of them could quite be called enemies-to-lovers), and the relationships were built largely on banter.
There are some who believe this change is an unarguable improvement, that love at first sight is a major reason why the earliest Disney romances weren't working. I don't think that was it at all. I know there are people who are uncomfortable with love-at-first-sight stories – maybe they think it will lead to little girls growing up thinking anyone they feel an attraction for and shows them affection must be The One, and end up love-bombed and ultimately trapped in an abusive relationship. I believe the practise of using only enemies-to-lovers, or at least using copious amounts of banter (not just for Disney but for any story nowadays), has less to do with a love of those tropes and more to do with a fear of showing anyone falling in love too quickly. Like the only way it can be safe to trust someone is if we've already seen them multiple times at their worst and hated them for it.
Enemies-to-lovers, of course, can be a beautiful trope. It can demonstrate how two people with differing viewpoints might actually turn out to have a lot more in common than they initially thought, it can show us how we don't have to be exactly like another person before we can love them, it can champion second chances and discourage snap judgments. It's not even a bad thing to have enemies-to-lovers in a fairy tale – we already had Beauty and the Beast, and some fairy tales, like The Frog Prince, probably wouldn't work with any other type of relationship! And this era did give us some of the very best Disney couples ever: Rapunzel and Eugene, for instance, or Robert and Giselle from Enchanted, a really excellent and underrated film that was part satire of, part loving homage to, the earliest Princess movies. Having enemies-to-lovers in Disney movies is not a problem, nor are any of the couples from that era. But there is a problem when a company like Disney decides to give in to the growing scorn and hatred for love-at-first-sight, and eliminate it entirely.
We need to stop acting as though any story that tells us “our initial positive feelings about someone can actually be right” is somehow harmful and damaging. Yes, in real life, there are painful messy relationships that started with a very quick attraction – possibly a very quick one-sided attraction, in cases where the other person had simply pegged their next victim. Yes, in real life, there are couples who never looked at each other twice until, one day, they opened their eyes and saw each other in a whole new light. But those are not the only two options, and to say they are denies us one of our most powerful tools: our intuitions, our ability to sense when something feels “off” and when it feels right – in all situations, not just romance. The whole point of fairy-tale stories, the type Walt Disney championed and built his whole company on, is to show us the world as it could be, not as we see it now; the world that could be possible with a little “faith and trust and pixie dust”.
I believe what Disney was actually doing at this point in time was sticking to the “safe” way of building a romance, the only way the audiences who loudly spoke out against love-at-first-sight would accept. And, you know, that could have really worked. They could have done this for a while, and then once their romance-shy audience became accepting of the newest Disney couples, they could have branched back out again, into love-at-first-sight and other romance tropes, too. The enemies-to-lovers era of Disney could have been the start of a whole new beautiful era of Disney romance.
Instead it turned out to be the beginning of the end.
I never minded that Brave had no love interest or love story. Merida was technically Pixar's princess, not Disney's – and I actually don't like to count Merida when talking about Disney Princesses, if I'm honest. This isn't any insult against Merida as a character. So long as Merida is a Pixar heroine, she's the first female Pixar protagonist, starring in a touching story about a mother and daughter who must learn to see eye-to-eye. It's complex and compelling, probably to any woman or girl in the world who has ever clashed with a child or parent. Put Merida into the Disney Princess category, though, and suddenly all that is erased. Suddenly we see Merida as a “tomboy” instead of a woman, and she just becomes “Oh boy finally a Disney Princess who shoots a bow and arrow and don't need no man'”.
I never minded when Elsa had no love interest because there is still a love story in her movie, even if it is more of a side plot than other Disney Princess romances have been. Also, no matter what people might say about her, Elsa is hardly stronger for not having a love interest. She was scared and vulnerable the whole movie precisely because she was alone. Elsa is suffering from severe social anxiety, living in self-imposed isolation and unable to even talk to her own sister. No one can tell me Elsa wouldn't be better off letting some more love into her life, and her whole arc is about just that, learning to accept herself so that she can connect to the people around her again. And once she loves herself, and loves the people she already knows, loving new people would seem the logical next step, so she could still have a love interest someday, when she's ready. In the meantime, anytime we step into the world of Frozen we can enjoy Anna and Kristoff!
Elena of Avalor didn't raise any suspicion in not having a love story, because as a TV series, Elena's story wouldn't be unfolding the same way. You wouldn't know for sure, watching Season 1, that she wouldn't fall in love with Gabe or Mateo or someone entirely different down the line. (Although I was pretty disappointed to hear that she didn't. I was kind of thinking she and Gabe would be cute together!) Besides, being from a TV show, Elena was never counted when we looked at how many Disney Princess movies lately have had love interests.
But by the time Moana came around, I was starting to raise eyebrows. Okay, sure, maybe you could argue that Moana was an adventurer rather than strictly a princess; maybe you could argue there were still far more princesses with love interests than without. Maybe you could still argue that Disney was just trying something new, maybe to represent women who don't have a desire to get married (although I never thought someone who didn't want to get married would be into Disney Princesses, so that does seem a little like stretching yourself too thin trying to please everyone....) But the fact remains we had now had three Disney Princesses in a row without love interests (four if you count Elena), and the only one in the meantime who did have a love interest had barely gotten to the first kiss.
By the time Raya and the Last Dragon came out, I had had enough. I was not in the mood to accept yet another Disney Princess with not only no love interest, but with none of the other elements that make the Disney Princesses who they are. Raya's trailers gave me the sense of less “Disney Princess” and more “dystopian but make it Disney”. It didn't help that Raya once again looked nothing like a princess (I mean in dress and mannerisms; I love the way we've been getting more and more international princesses). In spite of not seeming to have any of the elements that draw us romantic types to Disney Princess films, Raya was being advertised as the newest Disney Princess, and the closest her story gets to a hint of a romance is that some people like to ship her with the antagonist Namaari. Which since I haven't seen the movie I have no idea what I would think of that pairing, but if the closest thing Raya has to a villain is not-evil enough that people can see her as a potential love interest, that's a whole other problem for another time.
Encanto was really really good – one of the last Disney films the Fandom agrees was really good. It didn't feel like it was trying to be a Disney Princess movie (in fact it reminded me more of a Pixar movie!), and it was also focused on the dynamics within the existing family, so there were already a lot of interpersonal relationships involved and I didn't think it needed a love interest for Mirabel in order to be complete. But even here, the whole subplot with Isabela expected to marry Mariano while Dolores secretly pined for him was so subtle that, if I hadn't heard fans talking about it before watching the film, I would honestly not have picked up on Dolores having any feelings for Mariano at all.
But no matter how many times this pattern repeated itself, you hardly saw anyone bringing it up. On the rare occasion that someone would dare to mention the decline of Disney Princess love interests, these tentative remarks were always met by someone else loudly and angrily insisting there wasn't a problem. That it had “only been one movie” so far (no matter how many movies it had already been). Or that this change was a good thing. That they wanted to see a Disney heroine without a love interest “for a change” – even as it became, more and more, like seeing a Disney Princess with a love interest would be a “change”. There was that whole post/meme you'd see online, with pictures of Merida and Moana, saying that the two of them not having love interests was “such a power move”. Very few people seemed to miss the romance of Disney, and those were always overwhelmed by the ones who (it seems) would do anything to get rid of it for eternity. No one wanted to acknowledge how much better at romance Disney had gotten since the beginning, and how much of a shame it was that we barely got to see them exercise this new talent. No one would admit the pattern even existed. (And I don't blame them, if you'd get shut down every time you tried.)
And then came Wish.
Wish, of course, was meant to be Disney's 100th anniversary celebration movie, although based on everything I've heard about it, it sounds like that honour should probably be left to Once Upon a Studio. I was so excited about Wish when I first heard of it, but then felt more and more uncertain the more information was released, until finally I opted not to go see it, mostly because I got this terrible, uncomfortable feeling every time I so much as looked at the poster. (I suspect my excitement was from the time they had all those good ideas for the film, and its dissipation was in direct proportion to the good ideas being taken away.)
I heard a lot of reasons why Wish didn't live up to the company it was designed to celebrate. Some said it was more interested in slipping in Easter eggs to previous Disney films than in developing an actual solid story and engaging characters. (Gosh, I hate when they just slip in Easter eggs and it's super obvious like that. Feels like an undeserved boast, you know?) Others said the only interesting character with an understandable motive was the villain (and nothing makes me angrier than to think Disney, of all companies, couldn't figure out how to write a character who is literally making people forget their hearts' desires so that the consequences were obviously negative and his intent was obviously malicious). And many, many others – myself included, as soon as I heard about it – were lamenting the loss of heroine Asha's love interest, Starboy the human wishing star.
I can't say I was ever surprised to see Wish had no sign of a love interest. I'd picked up on that pattern ages ago. But to know they had written a love interest for Asha, and then decided to take him out... I have no words. For a movie meant to be celebrating 100 years of everything that makes Disney Disney, which took such care to put in a talking animal sidekick (even though most Disney animal sidekicks don't actually talk), a pure-evil villain (even if half the audience didn't find him actually evil), and a sweet idealistic heroine (even if from the trailers and from others' assessments she felt merely “quirky” and nothing else) – for a movie like that to decide the love interest wasn't an integral part of the Disney formula... What, did they say, “Okay, we need to put in everything that is classically Disney, within reason of course – oops, a love interest? Nope, can't have that nowadays, that'll have to be our exception to the rule”? How can anyone look at that and tell me Disney isn't deliberately avoiding romance?!
And yet, there are still people who do. There are still people who get very uptight and huffy, and sneer that Starboy was just cut from the movie to avoid his feeling too much like Genie (yes, in the same movie where the heroine's friend group were shamelessly modelled after the Seven Dwarfs, that makes a lot of sense), or just so they could market plush toys of the admittedly cute Wishing Star (although so many fans have pointed out that this could simply be the shape-shifting Starboy's main alternate form, there's really no way someone at Disney didn't think of that.) The official statement from those who made the movie, so far as I have heard, was that they cut out Starboy because it was “supposed to be Asha's story” and they wanted her to solve her problems all by herself like a Strong Independent Woman. Oookay... So did Belle's story feel less like her own because it was juxtaposed with the Beast's? Did Rapunzel's story suffer from being woven together with Eugene's? Was Mulan any less of a hero because of Shang? If this isn't evidence the people at Disney think women can't be strong or accomplish anything if they have love interests, I don't know what is.
But okay. You want more evidence they're deliberately avoiding romance? You aren't convinced yet? Okay. What about the way they apparently handled the only established couple in the entire film?
If you remember the movie trailers, King Magnifico and Queen Amaya pretty much looked like the Ultimate Healthy Couple poster children – which is a huge deal, since most Disney couples are only taken as far as the wedding and we don't really get to see them building a strong, healthy marriage afterwards, which is probably a huge part of the reason why these couples are so widely doubted. I was a little disturbed, right from the beginning, to see that one of Disney's first-ever portrayals of a long-established, loving and supportive couple had a villain in it, because now there's no way these characters can be relationship role models. Well apparently, Magnifico and Amaya were originally supposed to both be villains, and many fans are also upset at not getting Disney's first-ever villain couple. That's one idea I'm less sure about, because traditionally what separated the good guys from the bad was the ability to love, and if the evil duo really love each other, that would have messed with the idea of what it truly means to be evil. But I would have loved to see a woman who knows her husband is evil, and simply does not care and supports him anyway. You want female empowerment, let's have female characters who are allowed to be more than sweet and nice and nurturing and responsible! (Disney used to make some of the best, most powerful female villains – of all time, never mind just in their own canon.)
Or if they were both evil, it would make so much sense to have the Queen betray her husband at the end (which, spoiler alert, she apparently does). That would show us how evil can never truly love, especially if it were juxtaposed against a good-guy romance like Asha and Starboy. The two romances could even have reflected the two opinions about the people and their wishes – control versus trust, keeping the wishes prisoner and claiming everyone is happier when they don't remember what they want versus letting people be free to pursue whatever they want most, even when that means the kingdom will experience other emotions than complacent contentment.
So I was hoping for a supportive wife for this evil king, and wondering how any of this could work if this ideal, loving, healthy couple, one of the first long-established marriages Disney has ever shown us, is tainted by evil, and then I heard the lyrics to the song “Knowing What I Know Now”, where apparently Queen Amaya sings about her decision to turn on King Magnifico and help Asha's group take him down. And she says – I quote: “I was blinded by the love I felt.”
Blinded by the love she felt.
Really.
After all these years, after movie after movie clearly showing love as an all-powerful force with the ability to break curses, push people to finally go after their dreams, build communities even when these are just made up of little animals, and yes, to bring out the best in people who were previously at their worst – after all that, now suddenly love is a weakness. Being a loyal, supportive wife was where she went wrong, the character flaw she had to overcome in order to be on the right path. Love isn't the force which would give Amaya the strength to find a new support system and rebuild her shattered life. Love isn't what causes her to know she has to stand up and defend her people. Now suddenly love is equated with the same attachment that causes a victim to stay with an abuser. She didn't see before that her husband was bad, and she blames her weakened sense of perception which caused her to stay with and support a bad guy on love.
Now do you believe me?
Now one good thing about all this is that people have finally started noticing the romance is missing, and more and more voices are heard saying they want it back. But even now, for every person who says they want another romance again and point out that Disney is unwilling to give us any, there will always be some angry comments vehemently denying any problem. So to those people I say:
I get it. You don't like romance, and you're happy you're seeing less of it. Please go find some franchise without romance, that was not built on romance, and by all means enjoy it as much as you like. Leave our discussions of what Disney needs alone.
For everyone else, let us continue.
So, the first question is why Disney is suddenly so unwilling to give us any romance, and I don't think we need to look too hard for the answer. The whole idea that girls cannot have love interests, that if we want one we're weak, that women should “want more out of life than just a husband” (which somehow never leads to anyone saying we should want both) – all these are very prevalent in popular culture today. And the Disney Princesses have been accused many times of teaching young girls that all they are good for is attracting a husband. People repeat these accusations over and over, without checking to see if the movies are actually saying these things, until the damage is done. I believe the people at Disney are frightened. Frightened of chasing away their viewers by giving them something offensive. Frightened of angering the vocal minority who speak out against their Princesses, whether they believe these are their main fan base or not. Frightened of being insensitive and controversial.
Which, ironically, causes them to become exactly that.
Some say the problem started with Elsa, that when she became as tremendously popular as she did, Disney tried to recreate the formula over and over again, by not giving any of their princesses a love interest since. I don't know to what extent we should blame poor Elsa for this, because seriously, there are a lot of other things they could have chosen to focus on when recreating the Elsa formula. They could just as easily have created more Princesses with magic powers, or more Princesses modelled after fairy-tale villains but who are good guys (and they actually stopped adapting fairy tales immediately afterwards), or more Princesses who become Queens early on in their movies, or more Princesses bonding with their sisters, or more Princesses with obvious mental health issues. And, I have to say, I think one of the things that made Frozen so popular is that it still did contain a love story. Because, whatever the popular narrative would have us believe, people still like that sort of thing. Why else would fans have been so anxious for Elsa to get a love interest in Frozen 2 (which I'm pretty sure she didn't)?
Of course, there were still people saying they wanted romance to be left out of stories, especially Disney's stories. I don't know whether this was more a case of Disney listening to criticism which did not come from their actual target audience, or whether it was more a thing like the “complex villain” dilemma. You know, there was a lot of talk going around that story villains are too one-dimensional, and in order for them to be well-written, they need more depth and redeemable features because no one is all good or all bad. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was why, in some of the more recent live-action remakes, Disney started changing a bunch of their villains to have complex backstories – and surprise, surprise, everybody hated it. I've always preferred the straight-up evil type of villain myself, for many reasons which would take too much time to go into here. But more to the point, Disney has had incredible success over the years writing just that pure-evil type of villain that was being condemned as a poorly written character no one would like. And it's that very type of Disney villain – the Evil Queen, Maleficent, Cruella DeVil, Ursula, Jafar – that are still wildly popular today.
Sounds a lot like the Princess situation, doesn't it?
Was the lack of any new Disney romance caused by a similar situation? People clamouring to see something in their stories, only to realize once they got it that it wasn't what they wanted? I don't know. I think it might be a case of the loudest voices belonging to the detractors. Disney thinks they're appealing to what their fans want by writing heroine after heroine with no love interest (because we do want strong heroines, and of course “no love interest” has become synonymous with “strong”). But meanwhile there are countless more of us out there who love the Disney Princesses for what they always were: romantic, fairy-tale stories with True Love and pure goodness saving the day against evil. There has to be a reason the Disney Princesses are so enduring even decades after their movies were released, and even in the face of all the controversy surrounding that type of heroine. There has to be a reason people still remember and love Snow White and Cinderella and Aurora, while someone like Raya is almost never talked about and barely appears on the merch. The only explanation is that the true Disney Princesses really do have something special, something that appeals to our innermost hearts and speaks to us in our daily lives, something that goes far beyond the current ideals of what a strong heroine “should” be. No, they don't appeal to everyone – nothing in the world does, even without the added factor that some people were triggered by their messages and worried they were toxic. That's no reason to change everything you do in hopes of appealing to the few people who loudly criticize your brand (which continues to be wildly popular in spite of that, I might add). The Disney Princesses didn't need to be fixed.
But it's not enough to say Disney should just ignore the criticism against their Princes, is it? I'm certainly not going to just say that everyone who criticizes the Disney Princes is wrong and leave it at that. Here I've listed some of the most common arguments I've seen against Disney romance, and we're going to look at all of them and see whether, in light of facts or even a slightly different perspective, they still hold up.
The Disney Princesses were weak and could only sit around waiting to be saved by a man.
Sure, I'll buy that. Apart from when Snow White rebuilt her whole life in one day after being forced to flee the only home and family she'd ever had, immediately establishing herself in charge of both her animal cleaning crew and the Dwarfs' cottage. And when Cinderella managed to keep up her good spirits and find her own secret support group while living in an abusive home. (Mental fortitude is strength too!) And when the Fairy Godmother (a woman) stepped in to help Cinderella make it to the ball because three women had stopped her in spite of Cinderella (the woman's) best efforts. (Honestly the only active male characters in Cinderella's story were the mice.) And when the Three Good Fairies rescued Phillip and basically walked him through every step of his escape from Maleficent (another powerful woman). And when Ariel saved Eric from drowning, Eric whose ship she'd been admiring because she'd loved humans and the human world for years before she ever saw him. And when Ariel was coming up with a plan of her own to see Eric again, before she ever got desperate enough to ask Ursula. And when Ariel saved Eric from being blasted to death with Ursula's magic trident. And when Belle offered to take her father's place in Beast's dungeon. And when Belle stood up to Beast and refused to let him treat her any way he liked, even running away from the castle on the first night. And when Belle later stood up to Gaston when he was trying to force her to marry him, and found a way to prove her father's sanity anyway. And when Belle broke Beast's curse and saved his life. And when Jasmine refused to choose a suitor she didn't love, standing up to generations of societal expectations. And when Jasmine ran away from home in order to get a taste of that freedom she'd never been allowed. And when Jasmine stood up to the guards and tried to stop them taking Aladdin. And when Jasmine frightened Jafar because he knew she would follow through on her promise to get rid of him. And when Jasmine went so far as to seduce Jafar to give Aladdin the chance he needed to take Genie's lamp back. And when Pocahontas saved John Smith's life. And when Esmeralda saved Phoebus's life. And when Esmeralda freed Quasimodo and stood up to Frollo in front of the entire city of Paris. And when Meg pushed Hercules out of the way of a falling pillar, sacrificing herself to save him (which he then reciprocated, risking his life to save her). And when Mulan – you know, at this point, I don't really need to go on. Not once we've reached the Warrior Heroine of China (who also still had a love interest).
The early Disney Princesses are just prizes for the men.
Prizes for doing what? Snow White and Cinderella's princes had barely five minutes of screen time. Between them. That's if I'm being generous. You know, I think the real reason Snow and Cindy never saved their men was because their men just weren't on screen long enough to get themselves into any trouble.
It encourages little girls to dream about falling in love.
And?
It implies the only goal a girl can have is falling in love.
Ah, so that was what you were trying to say. But does it, though? What about Ariel's dream to live on land? What about Tiana's dream to own a restaurant? What about Belle's desire for adventure, Jasmine's desire for freedom, or even Rapunzel's draw to the floating lanterns? It's the easiest thing in the world to write a female character who has dreams for her life and still wants to fall in love. Why do we treat falling in love – at least for a woman – as being mutually exclusive with any other life goal??
There are already enough princesses who have love interests.
Yes, and you know what else, I think there are already enough murder mysteries that have killers. Seriously, though. That one only holds up on the assumption that the majority of people who don't want romance are actually Disney Princess fans. And considering some of the least popular princesses are also ones with no love interest, I'm inclined to doubt that.
Why do men and women always have to fall in love? Why can't they be just friends for a change?
That's... actually not a bad point, I admit. It makes a lot of sense to showcase friendship too in a franchise where love and connections are celebrated. And I'll be honest – some of my very favourite Disney Princess movie plot points centre on the Princess making friends with the male characters. Snow White bonding with the Dwarfs, Rapunzel befriending a whole tavern full of angry thugs, Mulan and her three army buddies – oh, wait. It's almost like the Disney Princesses were making friends with men right from the very beginning – and not at the expense of having love interests.
The Disney Princes put dangerous ideas about love in young girls' heads.
The way some people talk about the Disney Princes, you'd think they were forcing the Princesses to do all the housework while they run off to the pub and look at strippers or something. These guys are absolutely devoted. They'll give entire libraries, fight dragons and giant serpents, spend the entire winter searching for her, and get involved in a mer-conflict they knew nothing about and could very easily have just walked away from. They'll make a real effort to overcome their character flaws in order to be worthy of this amazing woman, and they've been shown to admire everything in the Princesses from a fun-loving nature to athletic skills to lovely singing voices – not just beauty, it was never just beauty. What dangerous ideas are we talking about? The Prince waking Snow White from a curse of eternal slumber, with a kiss that was extremely necessary and which she gave consent to the second she was able? Aladdin being so desperate to impress Jasmine he lies to her – not to deceive or manipulate her, but just to look more impressive himself – and then finding out firsthand what a bad idea that was and apologizing? You know, what with all the stories around showing controlling, domineering men wearing women into submission and having that be considered “romantic”, I'm amazed it's the Disney Princes we've all decided to pick on. You'd think even the underdeveloped earliest ones would be a breath of fresh air from all of that!
Disney Princes give young girls unrealistic expectations for romance.
And here I thought they gave toxic, dangerous expectations. Seriously, though. We live in a world of seven-billion-plus people, none of whom are static, all of whom tend to respond to expectations and treatment from those around them. Is it really likely, if you want to be treated a certain way in a relationship, that no one, not a single person on the entire planet, wants the same type of relationship as you do? Or that more of the people around us wouldn't up their relationship games if the generally accepted standards were raised? Maybe the problem isn't having movies that give young girls high expectations. Maybe the problem is that somewhere along the way, we stopped expecting.
A word for those who like to bring up age gaps.
I bring this up only because I watched a whole video on the topic of Disney Princesses not having romance anymore, and the very top comment was one basically dismissing every point this guy had made, in order to complain about the Prince and Princesses' apparent ages. There are people around the Internet who like to bring this up every chance they get, underneath what would otherwise be very sweet Disney Princess content meant only to let us Fans connect over these characters and stories. So to those people I say:
Shut up. The princes' ages are never mentioned in these movies, and the princesses' hardly ever. It's the easiest thing in the world to retcon if the age you heard online makes you uncomfortable, instead of getting all smug about it and trying to ruin someone else's favourite story by pretending it's pedophelic. (Especially as much Disney Princess fan art could be very easily imagined as taking place a few years after the movies.) The Disney Princesses are written to be the equivalent of young adults. Yes, sometimes the exact number of years we're given is a little lower – probably because in the eras they lived in, 16 was considered a young adult and it wouldn't be realistic to have everyone waiting until they were 18. But in every single case, they have the physical bodies of young adults, they're at that stage of life, they have that mental capacity – the only ones thinking of the Princesses in connection with children or minors are the ones who keep bringing up these ages.
A word on the Princess Franchise
Most movies, if the love story isn't quite as well-developed as it might have been, don't get a second chance to do it better. But Disney has a unique opportunity to develop those relationships which left something to be desired. The Disney Princess franchise should have been the prime opportunity to re-develop some of the Princes. They're adding on to the characters' lives and stories anyway, with all the little stories found in Disney Princess colouring and activity books, short Princess story collections, and the Disney Princess comics. Why not take the opportunity to really show us Disney Couples: The Married Life? We should be seeing The Prince as part hopeless romantic, partly in his full Errol Flynn glory, supported by Snow White while he is enchanted by her sweetness, her baking, and the way she takes charge and insists everyone wash. We should get to see even more how Eric and Ariel bond over exploring their kingdom, having fun, and avoiding their royal duties. We should see a human Beast who is still gruff but sweet and devoted to Belle, Jasmine and Aladdin going off on adventures as the ultimate power couple, and Mulan developing her relationship with Shang. We could see all the Princesses as loving, supportive wives, and then it wouldn't matter so much if a villain had a loving supportive wife too. But instead, I almost get the sense that, with the exception of Prince Charming for some reason, the Disney Princess franchise seems to be deliberately avoiding any good Prince content. The Princes can be very sweet and supportive, but often they'll just be there, or else not even mentioned. Very rarely will they be coming along with the Princess to help her solve the problem or tackle the adventure of the day. Is this to make very sure the little girls looking up to our Princesses don't ever see them needing a man? I couldn't say for sure, but there is that whole narrative that we don't want the Princesses putting “unhealthy” ideas into young girls' heads... I don't think there's necessarily any malicious intent behind this; it might just be a misguided conception of girl power. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if the idea was to make the franchise “healthier” for its little-girl audience, not by showing them what healthy marriages look like, but by downplaying all Disney Princess love interests as much as possible.
Disney movies, and especially Disney Princess movies – by which I mean all the ones where the heroines and heroes move out of a life where they feel held down and find something new and beautiful, not just the ones in the “official” franchise – have always been here to show us the possibilities the world can offer, the magic of following your dreams, the power of believing in yourself, and the power of love. They were never meant to show the power of not needing anybody and remaining entirely independent and single. And yes, you can definitely show the power of love using all sorts of relationships, not just romantic – but you cannot possibly show the power of love by avoiding romance. You can't downplay and degrade one type of love, show your heroines coming out just fine and even being stronger without it, and then still expect to portray love as a powerful force of goodness. All you can do that way is feed into the whole “don't need no man” narrative, which then feeds into a value system that completely contradicts everything the name of Disney has ever stood for. And speaking of the name of Disney – it may be the same name as the studio that gave us all such consistently beautiful movies for most of those 100 years, but the name isn't enough to keep me coming back if they keep putting out content I don't agree with. Not when it isn't the same content I signed up for, not when it isn't even the same people who built that wonderful company in the first place.
Disney needs to start acting like the big, influential company it is, and stop feeding into the loudest popular narrative. We need to stop telling ourselves, and we especially need to stop telling our little girls, that we can only be strong if we never connect to another person or rely on anyone besides ourselves. We need to stop associating “love” in our minds with choosing the wrong person, victimhood, regret, or one person completely losing their identity in their feelings for another. We need to start building love up again as the power it is, a positive force powerful enough to leak into every other aspect of a person's life, two people joining their strengths together to build a better life and, by extension, a better world. All Disney is doing, in refusing to write another Prince, and in playing down all the ones they've already written, is feeding into the idea that love is weak and harmful.
But there are things we can do. We are the Fans, and if the Vocal Minority can make their voices heard to the extent that something actually changes, so can we. All the people who have been making Asha/Starboy fanart, and making them more iconic than anything that actually came out of the movie in the end, are already helping. They are at once showing Disney what we really wanted, and refusing to just sit back and accept what we got instead. We can focus on other Princes more as well, in our art and fanfictions and doll collections and in our discussions – whatever we do as Fans to celebrate the Princess franchise. We can build up their characters, expand on the sometimes very little we see in their movies, and explore what they would be like as full, vivid characters – even if the Princess franchise won't. We can talk about and celebrate heroes like Quasimodo, Phoebus, Hercules, Tarzan, Robert, and Edward, expanding the pool of “official” Princes we have to choose from. We can stop repeating the common criticisms which do not hold up once we actually rewatch the movies (Prince Charming couldn't recognize Cinderella's face after dancing with her, Eric decided to be with some random mute girl he knew nothing about, etc). I'm not saying the earliest Disney romances were perfect, because they weren't. I'm not saying you can never criticize any of these movies, because of course you can. But I do say that the criticism must be valid, and not something repeated because someone else on the Internet said it because it sounds funny in a meme. (We're told not to repeat gossip because of the lasting damage to the person's reputation – this is much the same thing.) And I also say that just because the Disney romances went through some rough patches in the beginning is no reason to eliminate them entirely now.
I would put it like this: if something has been this successful in storytelling for centuries of human history, if it resonated with us all that time, there must be a reason. Stories of romance and True Love and love conquering all else would not have stuck with us for as long as they did if they didn't speak to something in the very depths of our souls, something that knows how life could really be. And the less we see evidence of such things in the world around us, the more we need to see them in our stories, or we may lose faith that those things could ever happen.
We need to see love portrayed as a powerful force of goodness, love in all its forms. We need to see healthy relationship dynamics shown for what they are (and unhealthy dynamics shown for what they are!), so that we know them when we see them. We also need strong masculine role models, showing young boys what they are capable of becoming and helping them grow into their very best selves. You know we haven't been getting many of those in modern cinema, and unlike with the Princesses, Disney's best male characters have never formed a franchise to combat that.
We need these kinds of stories, and the company which spent 100 years showing us the power of love and helping us believe in our dreams should be first in line to give them to us. I am convinced that the few people who would complain if fairytales and romance came back would be far outweighed by the number of delighted fans who are longing to finally see them again. And I think it would be best for everyone if Disney took a gamble on that, too. At the moment, they seem to be writing for the people who don't even like the stories their company was built on. If you want to be in charge of this company, you have to act like you belong with this company. Otherwise, go start your own movie studio and make as many “strong independent women” as you want.
But this is what we want, Disney. It's time to bring back the Princes.
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