The Myth of Prince Charming

We are all used to the fairy tale wrap up at the end of Disney animated features.  Prince and princess kiss, and live happily ever after.

Do they really though?  How can this fairy tale magic work if the princess has only just met her liberator?

Disney has made a lot of money marketing their princesses, but their princes are boring, dull, and lifeless. The prince characters exist only to rescue the princess and become a last minute solution to poverty, abandonment, and loneliness.

The princess hardly knows a prince before she is carried away to his castle to spend the rest of her life with him.  What has she got herself into?  Some of the Disney princes don’t even have proper names and are only an archetype of a strong male savior, swooping in to save the day and validate the princess’s struggle.  Let’s look at the worst offenders:

Snow White and The Prince:  She doesn’t even properly meet him before she’s led to the woods by the huntsman and she goes into hiding.   Their only interaction is when he interrupts her singing to the doves and she runs away, probably in fear.  He sings to her briefly from below her balcony and that ends their brief courtship.  Though the fact that he hears her shrill piercing voice and is still interested, does give him points in his favor.

However, the next time Snow White sees her prince she’s woken from a roofie cocktail and he whisks her away from her friends, to what we can only presume is a life of servitude and sexual favors.  While living with the dwarfs might have been meager, at least she was appreciated and loved.  The Dwarfs tried to avenge what they thought was her death, they build her a beautiful monument and guard her glass coffin day and night.  Prince Date Rape rides up after all the hard work has been done and takes her away to who knows what end.  LAME.

Cinderella and Prince Charming: Prince Charming only loves Cinderella after she’s had a rat-assisted, magically induced makeover.  Her hair and dress are perfect. She even has glass slippers!  This is not Cinderella as herself.  She is masquerading as a princess.  She’s basically had the magical, magazine cover, airbrush treatment of perfection when he meets her.  They dance and sing together at the ball and fall in love, but she has to run off since the magic spell that makes her so perfect wears off at midnight.  Way to perpetuate the myth that a man will only love you if you have a ton of makeup on, have your hair just right and come from a proper background.  That’s right, you can never be yourself and expect to be loved.  Cinderella flees into the night, leaving behind her shoe, and its back to her rags and reality before she knows it.

The prince then sends his manservant (a weaselly old guy with a foot fetish) out to find his “true love”.  Romantic?  Find your true love based on shoe size?  No description of her hair color, face, or demeanor?  He gives no distinguishing characteristics of his love, only her glass shoe.   Sounds like a crappy Internet dating service, not the stuff of fairy tales.  The next time the prince sees Cinderella she’s been cleaned up again, nothing of her former life as a maid remains, and they get married.  Joy and happiness forever.

Not all the princes are losers though.  In the third of the princess movies they start to get things right.

Sleeping Beauty and Prince Phillip: There is little to complain about here.  This is the first time that both the princess and the prince have names, character backgrounds at last!  Prince Phillip and Aurora have an arraigned marriage, which is an archaic tradition, but still common in European fairy tales. The arrangement was set-up but their parents, who are old pals and want their kingdoms united by marriage.  When Aurora is born the prince goes to meet her, which is a little creepy in modern western culture. He’s slightly older than her (5 years or so?), but this visit is acceptable considering they’ve been betrothed.

He crosses her path again shortly before her coma when the goofy woodland creatures that Aurora has been talking to go steal his clothes to re-create the prince she’s been dreaming about.   They too sing a song together and dance before parting ways again.   He travels to the castle and gives up his future kingdom so that he can marry who he thinks is a peasant girl.  He gets kidnapped, by the most awesome Disney villain and is possibly tortured while locked in the dungeon.  After a magical assist he breaks out and fights through briers and brambles to the castle gate where he does battle with the Maleficent Dragon.   By the end, viewers know more about Phillip than Aurora, considering she’s comatose for a third of the picture.   After true love’s kiss awakens the kingdom, the couple shares a dance.  They don’t get married, they only dance.  Aurora is after all only 16!

Aurora’s situation isn’t bad, but poor Snow White and Cinderella!  They’re doomed to lameness.  Their princes have no personality or emotion.  I hope divorce exists in fairy tale land.   The love at first sight is idiotic in these movies.   Love takes time.  Not necessarily a long time, but longer than the length of a song as Disney would suggest.  Love also takes two sides.  The Prince and Prince Charming are bland vegetables who are dead behind the eyes.  These princes don’t come to the rescue, they warble somewhere off stage while someone else does the work.

I’m left wondering why our culture has idolized the idea of these fairy tale princes.  They don’t really do anything all that charming or caring.  Only in a fantasy world do these guys have any good qualities.  What good are dragon fighting skills when I have a bad day at work?  How will bursting in to song help me stave off foreclosure?  What good is a giant castle in the sky if there is no love or friendship?  In real life, a prince is someone who holds your hair back when you’re sick from too much Tequila and makes you alka-seltzer and grilled cheese the next day.

A prince is someone who makes you laugh when you’ve had a shitty day and no one else is on your side.  Disney, I’m done with the false, empty princes and dramatized ideas of fairy tale love. You’ve sanitized the stories to the point where the “the dream” is actually a nightmare. If Prince Charming is the ideal model of male behavior, then we’re all screwed.

All artwork by: FERNL from DeviantART.  Go check out the rest of his gallery.

All characters pictured and discussed are owned by Disney.

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