I thought she was going to have to end up married at the end and I was so. angry. Brave ranked up there with Mulan in terms of kids movies that I think actually teach kids good lessons, which is a pretty high honor in my book.
Personally, for their first female protagonist, I felt like Pixar could have done a lot better than a Rebellious Princess. It’s cliche, and I would have liked to see them exercise more creativity, but besides that, I think the instructive value is dubious. Yes, it’s awfully burdensome to have one’s life direction dictated to an excessive degree by external circumstances and expectations. But on the other hand, Rebellious Princesses, including Merida, tend to rail against the unfairness of their circumstances without stopping to consider that they live in societies where practically everyone has their lives dictated by external circumstances, and there’s no easy transition to a social model that allows differently.
Merida wants to live a life where she’s free to pursue her love of archery and riding, and get married when and to whom she wants? Well she’d be screwed if she were a peasant, since all the necessary house and field work wouldn’t leave her with the time, her family wouldn’t own a horse, unless it was a ploughhorse she wouldn’t be able to take out for pleasure riding, and she’d be married off at an early age out of economic rather than political necessity. And she’d be similarly out of luck if her parents were merchants, or craftsmen, or practically anyone else. Like most Rebellious Princesses, she has modern expectations of entitlement in a society where those expectations don’t make sense.
It sucks to be told you can’t do something you love because of societal preconceptions; “You shouldn’t try to be a mathematician, you’re a girl,” “’You’re a black ghetto kid, what are you doing aiming to be a businessman?” etc. But Rebellious Princesses are in a situation more analogous to “You might want not to have to go to school and be able to spend your time partying with friends and maybe make a living drawing pictures of cartoons you like, but there’s no social structure to support you if you try to do that.”
By the end of the movie, Merida and her mother birepbzr gurve cevqr naq zhghny zvfhaqrefgnaqvat, naq Zrevqn’f zbgure yrneaf gb frr gur vffhr sebz ure Zrevqn’f cbvag bs ivrj naq abg sbepr ure vagb n fhqqra zneevntr sbe cbyvgvpny rkcrqvrapl, juvyr Zrevqn yrneaf… gung fur ybirf ure zbz rabhtu gb abg jnag ure gb or ghearq vagb n orne? Fhccbfvat gur bgure gevorf jrera’g cercnerq gb pnyy bss gur zneevntr, naq fur jnf fghpx pubbfvat orgjrra n cebonoyl haunccl zneevntr naq crnpr, be ab zneevntr naq jne, jbhyq fur unir pubfra nal qvssreragyl guna fur qvq ng gur fgneg bs gur zbivr?
This probably all sounds like I disapproved of the movie a lot more than I really did, but I definitely wouldn’t rank it alongside Mulan terms of positive social message. Mulan wanted to bring her family honor and keep her father safe, so she went and performed a service for her society which demanded great perseverance and courage, which her society neither expected nor encouraged her to perform. Merida wasn’t happy with the expectations and duties her society placed on her, so she tried to duck out of them, nearly caused a disaster, and ultimately got what she wanted without having to make a hard choice between personal satisfaction and doing her part for her society.
I thought that Brave was actually a somewhat subversive movie—perhaps inadvertently so. The movie is structured and presented in a way that makes it look like the standard Rebellious Princess story, with the standard feminist message. The protagonist appears to be a girl who overcomes the Patriarchy by transgressing gender norms, etc. etc. This is true to a certain extent, but it’s not the main focus of the movie.
Instead, the movie is, at its core, a very personal story of a child’s relationship with her parent, the conflict between love and pride, and the difference between having good intentions and being able to implement them into practice. By the end of the movie, both Merida and her mother undergo a significant amount of character development. Their relationship changes not because the social order was reformed, or because gender norms were defeated—but because they have both grown as individuals.
Thus, Brave ends up being a more complex (and IMO more interesting) movie than the standard “Rebellious Princess” cliche would allow. In Brave, there are no clear villains; neither Merida nor her mother are wholly in the right, or wholly in the wrong. Contrast this with something like Disney’s Rapunzel, where the mother is basically a glorified plot device, as opposed to a full-fledged character.
The antagonist is the rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage.
There should be a word for forcing other people to have sex (with each other, not yourself). The connotations of calling a forced arranged marriage ‘rapey’ should be offensive to the victims. It is grossly unfair to imply that the wife is a ‘rapist’ just because her husband’s father forced his son to marry her for his family’s political gain. (Or vice-versa.)
I wasn’t specifying who was being rapey. Just that the entire setup was rapey.
That was clear and my reply applies.
(The person to whom the applies is the person who forces the marriage. Rape(y/ist) would also apply if that person was also a participant in the marriage.)
As per my post above, I’d argue that the “rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage” is less of a primary antagonist, and more of a bumbling comic relief character.
Upvoted. My thoughts on Brave are over here, but basically Merida is actually a really dark character, and it’s sort of sickening that she gets away with everything she does.
Interesting enough to repeat is my suggestion for a better setting:
Consider another movie they could have made, Paisley, about a Scottish girl on the cusp of womanhood who gets a job in one of the first textile mills and is able to support herself and live independently through hard work. This story has the supreme virtue of having actually happened: arranged marriage was not done away with because a preteen girl complained that she wasn’t ready, it was done away with because people got richer and could afford something better.
I understand your critique, and I mostly agree with it. I actually would have been even happier if Merida had bitten the bullet and married the winner—but for different reasons. She would have married because she loved her mother and her kingdom, and understood that peace must come at a cost—it would still very much count as a movie with no romantic angle. She would have been like Princess Yue in Avatar, a character I had serious respect for. When Yue was willing to marry Han for duty, and then was willing to fnpevsvpr ure yvsr gb orpbzr gur zbba, that was the first time I said to myself, “Wow, these guys really do break convention.”
Merida would have been a lot more brave to accept the dictates of her society (but for the right reasons), or to find a more substantial compromise than just convincing the other lords to yrg rirelbar zneel sbe ybir. But I still think it was a sweet movie.
I agree that it was a sweet movie, and overall I enjoyed watching it. The above critique is a lot harsher than my overall impression. But when I heard that Pixar was making their first movie with a female lead, I expected a lot out of them and thought they were going to try for something really exceptional in both character and message, and it ended up undershooting my expectations on those counts.
I can sympathize with the extent to which simply having competent important female characters with relatable goals is a huge step forward for a lot of works. Ironically, I don’t think I really grasped how frustrating the lack of them must be until I started encountering works which are supposed to be some sort of wish fulfillment for guys. There are numerous anime and manga, particularly harem series, which are full of female characters graced with various flavors of awesomeness, without any significant male protagonists other than the lead who’s a total loser, and I find it infuriating when the closest thing I have to a proxy in the story is such a lousy and overshadowed character. It wasn’t until I started encountering works like those that it hit me how painful it must be to be hard pressed to find stories that aren’t like that on some level.
One thing that disappointed me about this whole story was that it was the one and only Pixar movie that was set in the past. Pixar has always been about sci fi, not fantasy, and its works have been set in contemporary America (with Magic Realism), alternate universes, or the future. Did “female protagonist” pattern-match so strongly with “rebellious medieval princess” that even Pixar didn’t do anything really unusual with it?
Even though I was happy Merida wasn’t rebelling because of love, it seems like they stuck with the standard old-fashioned feminist story of resisting an arranged marriage, when they could have avoided all of that in a work set in the present or the future, when a woman would have more scope to really be brave.
All in all, it seems like their father-son movie was a lot stronger than their mother-daughter movie.
I don’t think “This Loser Is You” is the right trope for that. Actually, I don’t think TV Tropes has the right trope for that; as best I can tell, harem protagonists are the way they are not because they’re supposed to stand for the audience in a representative sort of way but because they’re designed as a receptacle for the audience to pour their various insecurities into. They can display negative traits, because that’s assumed to make them more sympathetic to viewers that share them. But they can’t display negative traits strong enough to be grounds for actual condemnation, or to define their characters unambiguously; you’ll never see Homer Simpson as a harem lead. And they can’t show positive traits except for a vague agreeableness and whatever supernatural powers the plot requires, because that breaks the pathos. Yes, Tenchi Muyo, that’s you I’m looking at.
More succinctly, we’re all familiar with sex objects, right? Harem anime protagonists are sympathy objects.
I agree that This Loser Is You isn’t quite the right trope. There’s a more recent launch, Loser Protagonist, which doesn’t quite describe it either, but uses the same name as I did when I tried to put the trope which I thought accurately described it through the YKTTW ages ago.
If I understand what you mean by “sympathy objects,” I think we have the same idea in mind. I tend to think of them as Lowest Common Denominator Protagonists, because they lack any sort of virtue or achievement that would alienate them from the most insecure or insipid audience members.
Zrevqn yrneaf… gung fur ybirf ure zbz rabhtu gb abg jnag ure gb or ghearq vagb n orne?
Meridia learned to value her relationship with her mother, which I think a lot of kids need to hear going into adolescence. When you put it this way it doesn’t seem nearly as trite as your phrasing makes it sound.
Merida wants to live a life where she’s free to pursue her love of archery and riding, and get married when and to whom she wants? Well she’d be screwed if she were a peasant etc.
Well yeah, but the answer to “society sucks and how can I fix it” isn’t “oh it sucks for everyone and even more for others, I’ll just sit down and shut up”. (Not that you argue it is.)
From TV Tropes:
If she’s not the hero, quite often she’s the hero’s love interest. This will sometimes invoke Marry for Love not only as another way for her to rebel, but to also get out of an Arranged Marriage
This is exactly why I thought Brave was good—it moved away from this trope. It wasn’t “I don’t love this person, I love this other person!”, it was “I don’t have to love/marry someone to be a competent and awesome person”. She was the hero of her own story, and didn’t need anyone else to complete her. That doesn’t have to be true for everyone, but the counterpoint needs to be more present in society.
And I said it ranked up there. Not that it passed Mulan. :) And it gets that honor by being literally one of the two movies I can think of that has a positive message in this respect. Although I will concede that I’m not very familiar with a particularly high number of kids movies.
I edited my comment to rot13 the ending spoilers; I left in the stuff that’s more or less advertised as the premise of the movie. You might want to edit your reply so that it doesn’t quote the uncyphered text.
Meridia learned to value her relationship with her mother, which I think a lot of kids need to hear going into adolescence. When you put it this way it doesn’t seem nearly as trite as your phrasing makes it sound.
I think that’s a valuable lesson, but I felt like Brave’s presentation of it suffered for the fact that Merida and her mother really only reconcile after Merida essentially gets her way about everything. Teenagers who feel aggrieved in their relationships with their parents and think that they’re subject to pointless unfairness are likely to come away with the lesson “I could get along so much better with my parents if they’d stop being pointlessly unfair to me!” rather than “Maybe I should be more open to the idea that my parents have legitimate reasons for not being accommodating of all my wishes, and be prepared to cut them some slack.”
A more well rounded version of the movie’s approximate message might have been something like “Some burdensome social expectations and life restrictions have good reasons behind them and others don’t, learn to distinguish between them so you can focus your effort on solving the right ones.” But instead, it came off more like “Kids, you should love and appreciate your parents, at least when you work past their inclination to arbitrarily oppress you.”
Now that I think about it, very few movies or TV shows actually teach that lesson. There are plenty of works of fiction that portray the whiney teenager in a negative light, and there are plenty that portray the unreasonable parent in a negative light, but nothing seems to change. It all plays out with the boring inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
I thought she was going to have to end up married at the end and I was so. angry. Brave ranked up there with Mulan in terms of kids movies that I think actually teach kids good lessons, which is a pretty high honor in my book.
Personally, for their first female protagonist, I felt like Pixar could have done a lot better than a Rebellious Princess. It’s cliche, and I would have liked to see them exercise more creativity, but besides that, I think the instructive value is dubious. Yes, it’s awfully burdensome to have one’s life direction dictated to an excessive degree by external circumstances and expectations. But on the other hand, Rebellious Princesses, including Merida, tend to rail against the unfairness of their circumstances without stopping to consider that they live in societies where practically everyone has their lives dictated by external circumstances, and there’s no easy transition to a social model that allows differently.
Merida wants to live a life where she’s free to pursue her love of archery and riding, and get married when and to whom she wants? Well she’d be screwed if she were a peasant, since all the necessary house and field work wouldn’t leave her with the time, her family wouldn’t own a horse, unless it was a ploughhorse she wouldn’t be able to take out for pleasure riding, and she’d be married off at an early age out of economic rather than political necessity. And she’d be similarly out of luck if her parents were merchants, or craftsmen, or practically anyone else. Like most Rebellious Princesses, she has modern expectations of entitlement in a society where those expectations don’t make sense.
It sucks to be told you can’t do something you love because of societal preconceptions; “You shouldn’t try to be a mathematician, you’re a girl,” “’You’re a black ghetto kid, what are you doing aiming to be a businessman?” etc. But Rebellious Princesses are in a situation more analogous to “You might want not to have to go to school and be able to spend your time partying with friends and maybe make a living drawing pictures of cartoons you like, but there’s no social structure to support you if you try to do that.”
By the end of the movie, Merida and her mother birepbzr gurve cevqr naq zhghny zvfhaqrefgnaqvat, naq Zrevqn’f zbgure yrneaf gb frr gur vffhr sebz ure Zrevqn’f cbvag bs ivrj naq abg sbepr ure vagb n fhqqra zneevntr sbe cbyvgvpny rkcrqvrapl, juvyr Zrevqn yrneaf… gung fur ybirf ure zbz rabhtu gb abg jnag ure gb or ghearq vagb n orne? Fhccbfvat gur bgure gevorf jrera’g cercnerq gb pnyy bss gur zneevntr, naq fur jnf fghpx pubbfvat orgjrra n cebonoyl haunccl zneevntr naq crnpr, be ab zneevntr naq jne, jbhyq fur unir pubfra nal qvssreragyl guna fur qvq ng gur fgneg bs gur zbivr?
This probably all sounds like I disapproved of the movie a lot more than I really did, but I definitely wouldn’t rank it alongside Mulan terms of positive social message. Mulan wanted to bring her family honor and keep her father safe, so she went and performed a service for her society which demanded great perseverance and courage, which her society neither expected nor encouraged her to perform. Merida wasn’t happy with the expectations and duties her society placed on her, so she tried to duck out of them, nearly caused a disaster, and ultimately got what she wanted without having to make a hard choice between personal satisfaction and doing her part for her society.
I thought that Brave was actually a somewhat subversive movie—perhaps inadvertently so. The movie is structured and presented in a way that makes it look like the standard Rebellious Princess story, with the standard feminist message. The protagonist appears to be a girl who overcomes the Patriarchy by transgressing gender norms, etc. etc. This is true to a certain extent, but it’s not the main focus of the movie.
Instead, the movie is, at its core, a very personal story of a child’s relationship with her parent, the conflict between love and pride, and the difference between having good intentions and being able to implement them into practice. By the end of the movie, both Merida and her mother undergo a significant amount of character development. Their relationship changes not because the social order was reformed, or because gender norms were defeated—but because they have both grown as individuals.
Thus, Brave ends up being a more complex (and IMO more interesting) movie than the standard “Rebellious Princess” cliche would allow. In Brave, there are no clear villains; neither Merida nor her mother are wholly in the right, or wholly in the wrong. Contrast this with something like Disney’s Rapunzel, where the mother is basically a glorified plot device, as opposed to a full-fledged character.
How boring. Was there at least some monsters to fight or an overtly evil usurper to slay? What on earth remains as motivation to watch this movie?
The antagonist is the rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage. Vg vf fynva.
There should be a word for forcing other people to have sex (with each other, not yourself). The connotations of calling a forced arranged marriage ‘rapey’ should be offensive to the victims. It is grossly unfair to imply that the wife is a ‘rapist’ just because her husband’s father forced his son to marry her for his family’s political gain. (Or vice-versa.)
I wasn’t specifying who was being rapey. Just that the entire setup was rapey.
That was clear and my reply applies.
(The person to whom the applies is the person who forces the marriage. Rape(y/ist) would also apply if that person was also a participant in the marriage.)
As per my post above, I’d argue that the “rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage” is less of a primary antagonist, and more of a bumbling comic relief character.
Cute rot13. I never would have predicted that in a Pixar animation!
There is an evil monster to fight, of a more literal sort, but it would be a bit of a stretch to call it the primary antagonist.
Upvoted. My thoughts on Brave are over here, but basically Merida is actually a really dark character, and it’s sort of sickening that she gets away with everything she does.
Interesting enough to repeat is my suggestion for a better setting:
Of course, it’s difficult to make a movie glorifying sweatshop labor, whereas princesses are distant enough to be a tame example.
I understand your critique, and I mostly agree with it. I actually would have been even happier if Merida had bitten the bullet and married the winner—but for different reasons. She would have married because she loved her mother and her kingdom, and understood that peace must come at a cost—it would still very much count as a movie with no romantic angle. She would have been like Princess Yue in Avatar, a character I had serious respect for. When Yue was willing to marry Han for duty, and then was willing to fnpevsvpr ure yvsr gb orpbzr gur zbba, that was the first time I said to myself, “Wow, these guys really do break convention.”
Merida would have been a lot more brave to accept the dictates of her society (but for the right reasons), or to find a more substantial compromise than just convincing the other lords to yrg rirelbar zneel sbe ybir. But I still think it was a sweet movie.
I agree that it was a sweet movie, and overall I enjoyed watching it. The above critique is a lot harsher than my overall impression. But when I heard that Pixar was making their first movie with a female lead, I expected a lot out of them and thought they were going to try for something really exceptional in both character and message, and it ended up undershooting my expectations on those counts.
I can sympathize with the extent to which simply having competent important female characters with relatable goals is a huge step forward for a lot of works. Ironically, I don’t think I really grasped how frustrating the lack of them must be until I started encountering works which are supposed to be some sort of wish fulfillment for guys. There are numerous anime and manga, particularly harem series, which are full of female characters graced with various flavors of awesomeness, without any significant male protagonists other than the lead who’s a total loser, and I find it infuriating when the closest thing I have to a proxy in the story is such a lousy and overshadowed character. It wasn’t until I started encountering works like those that it hit me how painful it must be to be hard pressed to find stories that aren’t like that on some level.
One thing that disappointed me about this whole story was that it was the one and only Pixar movie that was set in the past. Pixar has always been about sci fi, not fantasy, and its works have been set in contemporary America (with Magic Realism), alternate universes, or the future. Did “female protagonist” pattern-match so strongly with “rebellious medieval princess” that even Pixar didn’t do anything really unusual with it?
Even though I was happy Merida wasn’t rebelling because of love, it seems like they stuck with the standard old-fashioned feminist story of resisting an arranged marriage, when they could have avoided all of that in a work set in the present or the future, when a woman would have more scope to really be brave.
All in all, it seems like their father-son movie was a lot stronger than their mother-daughter movie.
I don’t think “This Loser Is You” is the right trope for that. Actually, I don’t think TV Tropes has the right trope for that; as best I can tell, harem protagonists are the way they are not because they’re supposed to stand for the audience in a representative sort of way but because they’re designed as a receptacle for the audience to pour their various insecurities into. They can display negative traits, because that’s assumed to make them more sympathetic to viewers that share them. But they can’t display negative traits strong enough to be grounds for actual condemnation, or to define their characters unambiguously; you’ll never see Homer Simpson as a harem lead. And they can’t show positive traits except for a vague agreeableness and whatever supernatural powers the plot requires, because that breaks the pathos. Yes, Tenchi Muyo, that’s you I’m looking at.
More succinctly, we’re all familiar with sex objects, right? Harem anime protagonists are sympathy objects.
I agree that This Loser Is You isn’t quite the right trope. There’s a more recent launch, Loser Protagonist, which doesn’t quite describe it either, but uses the same name as I did when I tried to put the trope which I thought accurately described it through the YKTTW ages ago.
If I understand what you mean by “sympathy objects,” I think we have the same idea in mind. I tend to think of them as Lowest Common Denominator Protagonists, because they lack any sort of virtue or achievement that would alienate them from the most insecure or insipid audience members.
That’s a very fair critique. A few things though:
First, you might want to put that in ROT13 or add a [SPOILER](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_VZewGVtB3pE/S5C8VF3AgJI/AAAAAAAAAYk/5LJdTCRCb8k/eliezer_yudkowskyjpg_small.jpg) tag or something.
Meridia learned to value her relationship with her mother, which I think a lot of kids need to hear going into adolescence. When you put it this way it doesn’t seem nearly as trite as your phrasing makes it sound.
Well yeah, but the answer to “society sucks and how can I fix it” isn’t “oh it sucks for everyone and even more for others, I’ll just sit down and shut up”. (Not that you argue it is.)
From TV Tropes:
This is exactly why I thought Brave was good—it moved away from this trope. It wasn’t “I don’t love this person, I love this other person!”, it was “I don’t have to love/marry someone to be a competent and awesome person”. She was the hero of her own story, and didn’t need anyone else to complete her. That doesn’t have to be true for everyone, but the counterpoint needs to be more present in society.
And I said it ranked up there. Not that it passed Mulan. :) And it gets that honor by being literally one of the two movies I can think of that has a positive message in this respect. Although I will concede that I’m not very familiar with a particularly high number of kids movies.
I edited my comment to rot13 the ending spoilers; I left in the stuff that’s more or less advertised as the premise of the movie. You might want to edit your reply so that it doesn’t quote the uncyphered text.
I think that’s a valuable lesson, but I felt like Brave’s presentation of it suffered for the fact that Merida and her mother really only reconcile after Merida essentially gets her way about everything. Teenagers who feel aggrieved in their relationships with their parents and think that they’re subject to pointless unfairness are likely to come away with the lesson “I could get along so much better with my parents if they’d stop being pointlessly unfair to me!” rather than “Maybe I should be more open to the idea that my parents have legitimate reasons for not being accommodating of all my wishes, and be prepared to cut them some slack.”
A more well rounded version of the movie’s approximate message might have been something like “Some burdensome social expectations and life restrictions have good reasons behind them and others don’t, learn to distinguish between them so you can focus your effort on solving the right ones.” But instead, it came off more like “Kids, you should love and appreciate your parents, at least when you work past their inclination to arbitrarily oppress you.”
Now that I think about it, very few movies or TV shows actually teach that lesson. There are plenty of works of fiction that portray the whiney teenager in a negative light, and there are plenty that portray the unreasonable parent in a negative light, but nothing seems to change. It all plays out with the boring inevitability of a Greek tragedy.