Merida from Brave to be the Next Disney Princess..

[Silivren]

A few facts. Last I checked. Even from my families' history .............. Scotts didn't have kings (they were actually called Monarchs). Which would mean no princesses. So she should have NEVER been put in the "princess" category.

Um you do know A king is a monarch right? Scotland has had kings, lots of them. One of the most famous was King James (King of Scotland as James VI and King of England and Ireland as James I)

Sorry but I never grew up hearing my grandmother, great grandparents talk of kings EVER when it came to clan rulers. They were called monarchs. Shame you had to ruin all I was taught to prove yourself correct because that's what wikipedia said. Wow.

“I think Disney is sending mixed messages here, because it’s trying to appeal to both sides of the equation,”

And this is it right here. From the yahoo article. Disney is trying save face and still earn that coin. Another shame.

Well..on the first point. I'm not Scottish, I'm Irish but I do remember that at least in Shakespeare's Macbeth which takes place in Scotland there is a King Duncan. I've always heard the word King BUT that's just me.

That out of the way.. Sadly, Disney is a company. They're always going to be going for money. If some even liked the new Merida even a little bit then Disney knows they can make money off of her.

[Nachtwulf]

Evidently, Disney is pulling the 'redesigned' Meridia and has replaced her on its site with images from the movie.

I have to say, though, the actual people responsible for the changes are probably just some art-department schmoe who got handed a screenshot of the extant princesses and a picture of the movie character and got told 'do this, only more like these'. I'm 99% sure he didn't intentionally set out to 'trivialize femininity' or anything like that, in fact, I'm pretty sure no one even imagined that anyone would object. It's less about 'altering the character' and more about media product uniformity.

If you have a bunch of products (it could be jars of jam, or it could be Disney Princesses), and all the labels (say, of jam) are a certain shape, color, and set of fonts, then suddenly you add a new one and it's a different color with different type... in the marketing world this is considered undesirable and confusing to the consumer. Therefore there has to be design consistency. The failure here is, I think, making the separation between characters that people have become personally vested in, and a consumer product... but Marketing rarely talks to Design first about -anything-, and by the time they do, they've already gotten the rubber stamp from the brass upstairs... (trust me, I'm a graphic designer).