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Which Disney princess are you?

As if Facebook didn’t already offer enough tempting ways to waste time, apparently they’ve now developed their very own line of quizzes, too. Recently I got a message in my news feed telling me that one of my cousins had taken this quiz, and discovered that if she was a Disney princess, she would be Pocahontas: Since my cousin is an environmentally aware outdoor adventurer who works for a company that cleans up oil spills, this sounds plausible enough to me. Looking at the quiz, I also thought it was completely cool that it was gay-friendly (asking “What kind of guy/girl do you like?”).

Personally, though, I didn’t feel I needed to take a test to work out which one of the Disney princesses I was. Ever since the brunette Belle wandered into the early scenes of Beauty and the Beast, her head buried so deep in a book that she barely noticed what was going on around her, I knew I had found a Disney heroine I could identify with: I’m still convinced that the main reason she married the Beast was because she’d seen his library.

According to this interview from last summer, Harry Potter star Emma Watson always saw herself as Ariel from The Little Mermaid:

   

At about the six-minute mark – and between bouts of cracking up – she tries to explain the whole Disney princess thing to Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint: “You know everyone has their own ‘Disney princess’ – well, actually you won’t know, you didn’t have your own Disney princess – but, yeah, most young girls choose one which they’re like, ‘Oh yeah,’ like aspire to be, and mine was always the Little Mermaid. And my Dad will kill me for saying this, but for my fifth birthday party he dressed up as King Triton, which was so cool – my little brother was Sebastian – it was fantastic!” Of course, until recently the Disney princesses were only representative of a minority of the female population anyway. The early ones – Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel and Belle – were all white, and it wasn’t until 1992 that the first Middle Eastern princess, Jasmine, appeared in Aladdin: Since then, and perhaps in an attempt to diversify, Mulan and Pocahontas have been included as part of the official Disney Princess franchise, even though they are not technically princesses (this inclusion may also have something to do with that fact that more Official Princesses = an opportunity for Disney to sell more merchandise). Last year, Sarah wrote about the fact that early plans were underway for a ninth Disney princess to appear in a 2-D animation adaptation of The Princess and the Frog, to be released in 2009. Voiced by Dreamgirls star Anika Noni Rose, Princess Tiana will be the long-overdue first African-American Disney princess: The question this leaves me pondering is: who do the gay girls have as their princess? Of course, there’s no reason you have to identify with a princess at all – it doesn’t take much googling to find a “Which Disney prince are you?” quiz. But what that leaves me reflecting is that the Disney princes are a pretty dull bunch. The girls may have their own issues – let’s not even get started on how freakishly skinny the typical Disney heroine is – but the princes often have virtually nothing to do, other than come on at the end and break the magic spell. I suppose the Beast has got a bit of a personality and some character development, but it’s hard to identify very far with, say, Ariel’s dumb hunk of a Prince Eric.

As far as I can see, the best thing the gay girls have is Mulan. While she does admittedly have a boyfriend, she also has the theme song “Reflection” (sung by

Christina Aguilera), which has some of the gayest lyrics I have ever heard:

   

What do you think? Who’s “your” Disney princess (or prince)? Do you have one? Or do you see them merely as the evil source of all body issues and eating disorders for ever afterward?

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