#... or does she

now i KNOW—i know—it would have been mentioned if she were. ramble incoming but i promise i'm going somewhere. (warning: she did not go somewhere)

i think one of the biggest reasons why people are (were? it's kind of old discourse now lolol) prone to overlook/ignore Sleeping Beauty is because she's a very passive character for a protagonist. unlike other "damsels in distress," she doesn't really make any major choices for herself. even her choice to try the spinning wheel, leading to pricking her finger, was predetermined. you compare that to other heroines like Cinderella, who chooses to rebel against her stepfamily's wishes, or Snow White, who has to make decisions in the strange woods for her own survival, and it becomes pretty clear that Sleeping Beauty doesn't have agency. it was taken from her from infanthood.

nor does she even fight for her own agency, because she presumably doesn't know that it was taken from her. she has no conflict and no motive to follow, and from there you get no story. (the exception is in Disney's version, where she is shown to have conflict with her godmothers.)

i've touched upon it before (here, too), but Sleeping Beauty the fairytale is driven by the parental figures, not the princess herself. all the major turning points in the story were caused by her parents or the fairies. we then follow the seventh fairy godmother, the one who altered the curse, even after Sleeping Beauty has fallen asleep. she's the one who puts the rest of the kingdom under the same spell so that the princess won't be alone when she wakes up. she is very much the true hero of the story!

i'll have to add, even the prince doesn't do anything at all in this story. in Grimm's version he does kiss the princess; in Perrault's he just waltzes in at the right time, which is really funny to me. (Disney makes yet another brilliant exception with Philip, who is the best of the princes but that's ofc irrelevant to EAH)

okay that was quite the walk but back to Farrah! she could be responsible for Briar's story (or like... Briar's daughter...? idk...) bc she is clearly powerful enough. she just has the unfortunate restriction of being bound by time restrictions and apparently can’t grant her own wishes. so i'm not sure how that would work. but still—it's not like the canon made much room for the child of another fairy godmother, because Farrah is known as the daughter of THE Fairy Godmother, as if there's only one. which actually makes no sense at all so we could also ignore that, and bring back the much more sensible idea that "fairy godmother" would be, like "princess" and "witch," another archetypal track at EAH and therefore other future fairy godmothers exist. the Shannon Hale books do sort of support that since, if i remember correctly, Farrah didn't appear in any of them (?).