For decades, Disney has been infamous in its own way of telling fairytales by centering on traditional understandings of heroism that heavily emphasized uplifting masculine values through its male hero who journeys on his quest to save a distressed princess by fighting an evil. As a result of framing characters into conventional gender norms, it has long been producing a princess narrative that disempowers women through constant representations of helpless princesses: Snow White or Aurora, and horrible maternal figures: the evil stepmother or the evil witch queen. In contrast, it also serves as a means to highlight masculine superiority through a prince character and his masculine heroism.
However, in recent days, it is prominent to see that Disney has been deconstructing the heroism in the other way around by engaging with the ideologies of “feminist quest heroine”, a theoretical framework that revises the traditional quest narrative and heroism by filling in feminist elements. Through a feminist quest heroine, it is no longer the quest narrative that means to cherish masculine superiority but to subvert traditional myth of classic heroism and to challenge hegemonic masculine ideas of representing female characters. Consequently, it conveys the model of female heroism that stands against patriarchal oppression and revokes the perpetuation of male superiority.
The selected Disney films, Brave (2012), and Maleficent (2014), prove that the revision of heroism results in a new feminist princess, Merida, who subverts gender stereotypes of princesses and girlhood through her noncompliance of hegemonic femininity, an idea that seeks to weaken women. Furthermore, the feminist revision not only re-portrays the princess character but also the female villain who also subjects to another classification of patriarchal oppression that attempts to categorize powerful women into non-hegemonic feminine ideas.