{"id":677,"date":"2013-10-31T19:47:31","date_gmt":"2013-11-01T02:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/?p=677"},"modified":"2015-03-12T11:18:52","modified_gmt":"2015-03-12T18:18:52","slug":"fallen-princesses-beyond-happily-ever-after","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/2013\/10\/31\/fallen-princesses-beyond-happily-ever-after\/","title":{"rendered":"Fallen Princesses: Beyond “Happily Ever After”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\n<\/a>Source:\u00a0dinagoldstein.com<\/a>\u00a0(via<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Happy Halloween! Or, should I say, welcome to the time of year when we discuss problematic \u00a0costumes<\/a>\u00a0and<\/a>, obviously, Mean Girls<\/a>. I used to think that this was as far as the conversation would go. However, I was recently directed to Diana Goldstein\u2019s Fallen Princesses<\/em><\/a>. (To see all of the images at once, try here<\/a>.) Fallen Princesses <\/em>plucks our childhood idols from their fantastical castles and inserts them into the very real problems women face today. Disney princesses may not have to deal with loneliness, obesity, war, cancer, or the environmental impact of consumerism \u2013 but we do.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a Disney-hater. I enjoyed the films as much as many other children, and you may<\/em> have found me singing \u201cA Whole New World\u201d and \u201cUnder the Sea\u201d on the beach this weekend. Still, as exhibited by Goldstein\u2019s project, it\u2019s time for some new stories, some more complex stories. We don\u2019t even have to go back to the original Grimm tales \u2013 thoughtfully romanticized by Disney \u2013 to do so. Let\u2019s start with the fictional.<\/p>\n

Take Hazel (who has cancer) and Augustus (who still has a hamartia), the star-crossed lovers of John Green\u2019s bestselling The Fault in Our Stars<\/em>. Speaking about the upcoming film adaptation (due in theaters June 2014), the author says:<\/p>\n

When was the last time you saw a movie in which the leading lady has nasal cannula in every scene of the film<\/em>? It does not happen. Hollywood usually doesn\u2019t make, like, love stories about disabled teenagers. Source\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cancer doesn\u2019t go away simply because there are few multifaceted, mainstream depictions of characters who, by the way, have cancer. Furthermore, real people have flaws. Real women (like Hazel) are, at times, selfish and moody. That\u2019s okay, because we are also funny and giving and a hundred other traits besides. We don\u2019t need to expect ourselves to be able to sing on pitch with fluttering birds while riding magic carpets and balancing in glass slippers (or something).<\/p>\n

If we venture into the Real World, though, I can think of no better princess than Malala Yousafzai. She knows struggle. She knows war. She is wiser<\/a> than any fairy godmother. Her strength and unwavering passion are far truer marks of nobility than the inability to sleep with a pea tucked beneath an astonishing amount of bedding.<\/p>\n

So be a princess \u2013 tonight or any day after. Or be a queen. Or don\u2019t. Either way, revel in your complexity. Remember that nobody\u2019s life is perfect; it only seems that way because they don\u2019t permit you to peer behind the curtain, to sneak a glimpse of the chapter following \u201cThe End.\u201d \u201cHappily ever after\u201d is never really the end. We have a lot to talk about: beauty myths, poverty, our treatment of the elderly and the disabled. We don\u2019t need<\/em> Disney to confront these issues. We\u2019re our own heroines, and we\u2019ve got plenty of battles from which to choose.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0 Miel Jasper<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0 Managing Director<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0 Scr ’16<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source:\u00a0dinagoldstein.com\u00a0(via) Happy Halloween! Or, should I say, welcome to the time of year when we discuss problematic \u00a0costumes\u00a0and, obviously, Mean Girls. I used to think that this was as far as the conversation would go. However, I was recently directed to Diana Goldstein\u2019s Fallen Princesses. (To see all of the images at once, try here.) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":680,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2013\/10\/cancer2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}