okay as much as i love Darling Charming, and her knightliness and valor, and how she subverts the concept of a hero in Ever After... it still irks me that all of that kinda goes hand-in-hand with the idea that fairytale princesses are always passive.
some of the most famous fairytales represented in the EAH cast have that sort of heroine: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Rapunzel are all protagonists that have to be rescued. which tbf is not in itself a bad thing, something i feel the writers of EAH understood better than many of their contemporaries, but i digress. the point is, back in the 2010s with that huge boom of fairytale-inspired media also came an influx of retellings about "girls who don't have to be saved," which imo sort of defeats the point of the fairytales they were usually meant to retell, but again i digress.
don't get me wrong; Darling Charming addressed that idea very well and she remains to this day one of my favorite examples of it (being strong and kickass without having to sacrifice any femininity). but that interpretation of fairytales completely ignores an entire category of them, something EAH also ended up doing in the end.
what i will never understand is how one can possibly mess up the premises, morals, and characters of fairytales like Beauty and the Beast, the Little Mermaid, and the Snow Queen: three very famous stories about girls who exercise agency and do brave and scary things for the people they love. if that's not what a hero is then what the heck is?? instead we get a half-baked B&B retelling, a cardboard cutout of a mermaid, and freaking ripoff Elsa of all things.
and while we're at it shall we take a trip through all the other, still famous, just not-commercialized-by-a-rapidly-declining-megacorporation fairytales that also included heroic female protagonists?? i know they were all too weak to take on "The Wild Swans" (Andersen)/"The Seven Swans" (Grimm) because it would have destroyed the "princesses are always waiting around for a hero in fairytales" propaganda in one fell swoop. "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" and all the other beauty-and-beast tales where the princess goes on long arduous journeys to find and rescue her lover from monsters much worse than dragons? don't exist. and now when we say "Tam Lin" we're made to think of ACOTAR.
i get that a Gerda-inspired character may not have been as marketable as the Snow Queen herself, but did we reeeeeally have to go and pretend there are no other princesses that save anyone else ever. especially when Rosabella Beauty was standing. right. there.
