Brave‘s Merida is one of the few Disney princesses—along with Mulan—who gets to be physically active, and really the only one with a physique to match her love of riding horses, shooting things, and her ability to stand up to a bear. But Disney, as it’s done to other women in the official Disney Princess pantheon, decided that to mark her inclusion, Merida needed a new dress that was off-the-shoulder, and a belt instead of a quiver for her arrows. Unlike the other Disney Princesses, it also decided that she needed to get a lot skinnier for the occasion.

The website Disney debuted as a portal for Merida merchandise seems to be sticking with the original design for Merida, kinky red hair, forest-green dress, and bow ready to fire, a move that some advocates are claiming as a victory. But the products themselves seem to be a mix of Merida ready for action—at least holding on to her bow, as in this nightshirt—and Merida in party-wear, as on this mug. Change.org petitions may feel good, but it’s hard to get a big corporation like Disney to junk an entire product line on a moment’s notice.

But hopefully, as Disney considers the reaction to the Merida art that circulated, and as they consider how to make even more money out of the Brave universe, Disney could consider that dresses and princess crowns aren’t the only things that you could sell to little girls through their parents. Get into the archery sets game. Get into weaving kits, even. If “princess” is a title you can give Native American advocates, Chinese warriors, and Scottish tomboys, then the things princesses can do don’t have to be limited to going to parties.

Per Kotaku:

At CinemaCon today, Disney revealed plans to release new Star Wars films each summer beginning in 2015. The plan isn’t to go Episode VII, VIII, IX in three years but, rather, to run spinoff films in-between the major “episode releases” every two or three years. This is consistent with earlier reports of plans for spinoff movies, plus reports that the next trilogy will pick up after 1983′s Return of the Jedi. Disney’s announcement meshes the two together rather definitively.

In a way, I’m even more interested in what the spinoffs might look like than about the new trilogy. It’s a setup that creates more space for creative storytelling within the Star Wars universe, while still keeping the core space opera going under the—if nothing else—predictable leadership of J.J. Abrams. I don’t know that Disney will ever be comfortable getting this experimental, but there’s so much room for playing with visual styles, kinds of stories, and pairings of directors and subject material. Why tie Ben Affleck, for example, to the core trilogy movies when he could take his experience with Boston cop movies and apply it to a movie about the Corellian Security Force? Why not reunite Jessica Chastain and Kathryn Bigelow for an austere lady-Jedi movie—or even cast Chastain as Mara Jade? How about hiring Guillermo del Toro to do all of the monster design for the franchise going forward and letting him play with some stories about non-human main characters? Disney’s going to make an absolute fortune out of these movies. I’d like to see fans communicate to them as clearly and as loudly as possible, and as early in the process as we can, that we’d be excited to see the Star Wars franchise innovate if it’s going to flood the zone, rather than stay stagnant.

Netflix’s attempts to develop original content has frequently been puzzling to me, given its focus on resurrecting dead masterpieces like Arrested Development, remaking masterpieces that don’t necessarily translate to new settings like House of Cards, keeping alive shows that no one really believed needed to be kept alive like Terra Nova. But its latest move, to outbid other competitors for Disney’s back and future catalogue, actually makes perfect sense to me:

The agreement is the first time one of Hollywood’s big studios has chosen Web streaming over pay television. Netflix has made similar “output” deals with smaller movie suppliers like DreamWorks Animation and the Weinstein Company. But all of the majors — Disney, Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, Sony and 20th Century Fox — have stayed with Starz, HBO or Showtime until now.

Library titles like “Dumbo,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Pocahontas” will become available on Netflix immediately, Disney said. Netflix will begin streaming new release Disney films starting in late 2016, when the current accord with Starz expires. The deal announced on Tuesday includes direct-to-DVD movies…With the Disney deal, Netflix will be able to offer customers exclusive access to a pipeline of films that are reliably some of the year’s biggest box-office successes. Netflix has also made it a priority to strengthen its children’s and family offerings.

What’s smart about this is that it’s Netflix identifying an actual niche in the market. Hulu’s done this already in a lot of ways, doubling down on content that will appeal to serious television and film fans, whether it’s streaming foreign and foreign-language content like Hatufim, historical shows like Ironside, or even films from the Criterion collection. It’s true that Hulu is building its audience with a lot of tiny Legos, but the bricks in that wall don’t cost them a lot either, and it means they can easily adjust should one of those investments fail to pay off.

Investing in children’s and family programming is an unsexy way to build a firewall, but it’s an important one. Parents who want access to content for their children, but are worried about their youngesters wandering elsewhere in the cable lineup, or who don’t want to shell out cable prices when they only want some of the content, are a perfect audience for Netflix. And they’re a much clearer audience than whoever Netflix thought it was aiming Lillyhammer at. I don’t think it’s dumb for Netflix to experiment with original content. But until it figures out an actual successful strategy there, it makes much more sense to me for the company to spend $300 million a year on Disney content than for it to spend $100 million on 26 episodes of House of Cards

I promise this will be the last exercise in Star Wars nerdery for…a little bit, at least. But Jamelle Bouie, who is one of my favorite people to geek out with, and I sat down yesterday to record a Bloggingheads episode about our hopes and fears for the new movie coming down the pike. In it, Jamelle makes what I think is a good point: that Disney’s profit incentives could actually be good for fans if they did things like release remastered box sets of the original cuts of the movies.

Another part of the conversation we had was how to design villains for the new movie better. In the absence of Vader , as a Big Bad for most of the prequels, the villain design was either haphazard or racist. One thing Jamelle and I discussed was whether the new movies could introduce the shape of familiar conflicts but with different participants. The remnants of the Empire could function like an insurgency, but one run by white, British-coded members of the Imperial Navy. If you want to do a trade wars story, bring in Thyferra, the planet that produces Bacta, and where a white minority forces labor out of an alien majority, a la South Africa. If you want to force an existential crisis with the Jedi, bring in the Yuuzhan Vong, who have an apocalyptic worldview, and are very effective at implementing it, to be al Qaeda. In a way, I’m excited to see how this goes less for Episode VII itself and more for a chance to think about what our action movies should be.

In the rare bit of news that could blow Hurricane Sandy off the map, Disney announced today that it had purchased Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion—and announced that the company will debut Star War Episode VII in 2015. “It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers,” George Lucas said in the official announcement of the transaction, in what is a substantial understatement, given the creative quality of the prequels. “I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.”

While this opens up a new chapter in the cinematic development of the Star Wars universe, that doesn’t mean Disney will be flying off into uncharted territory. The Star Wars Expanded Universe includes a huge number of licensed books (not to mention video games, comic books, graphic novels, and animated television series) that lay out the story of the franchise’s main characters, and in some cases, their distant descendants. Given that Disney will need to woo legions of long-term fans who love the larger Star Wars universe and were burned to greater or lesser extents by the awfulness of the prequels, and will certainly want to keep monetizing the expanded universe, I expect they’ll preserve that continuity. The question is just which stories they decide to use as source material. Here are five options:

1. Heir To The Empire: One of the most venerable entries in the Expanded Universe, this series of three novels, also known as the Thrawn trilogy, explore one of the most fascinating problems left behind in the wake of the battle of Yavin: how do you clean up a counterinsurgency that includes highly trained admirals with considerable industrial resources and military hardware at their disposal, not to mention a Dark Jedi? Chock-full of military strategy, major roles for all the core characters, and a romantic foil for Luke Skywalker who isn’t secretly his sister—the awesome former Imperial agent Mara Jade—Heir to the Empire is probably the strongest contender for Episode VII, and Episodes VIII and IX to follow—that is, if you want to stick with the original characters.

2. X-Wing: Rogue Squadron: That said, the smartest thing for this new franchise to do would be to move beyond the core cast Luke and Leia Skywalker and Han Solo. The actors who played them are too old to reprise their roles in storylines set relatively soon after the events of Return of the Jedi, and too iconic to be replaced. But there are a lot of terrific other stories set in the Star Wars universe, and for my money, the best is Michael Stackpole’s X-Wing quartet, which involves Wedge Antilles, a minor character who survived both Death Star runs, setting up a new commando squad of flying aces. The franchise introduced Corran Horn, a Corellian Security Force veteran (basically, a Star Wars cop), who joins the squadron and learns more about his family history, and the forces that make him such a remarkable pilot. It also featured Ysanne Isard, one of the great villains of the Expanded Universe era, a former Imperial agent who seizes control of Coruscant, the Imperial capital planet, and then when she risks losing control of it, wages a biological war on non-human species that can only be fought with an extremely expensive cartelized medicine. It’s still an Imperial-New Republic showdown, but in foregrounding commando skills, conflicts between humans and non-humans, smugglers, and trade wars, the Rogue Squadron books explored strikingly new dynamics and made the Star Wars universe a much richer, more thoughtful place.

3. Yuuzhan Vong: If you want to throw out the conflict between the New Republic and the Empire—by this point in the Expanded Universe a breakaway state called the Imperial Remnant—Disney could tell the long-arc story of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion of the galaxy. A wacky conquering species that worships pain, views mechanical technology as an abomination, and terraforms planets to their needs, the Yuuzhan Vong unites the New Republic and the Empire, explores all sorts of complex new dynamics in the Force, and gets seriously violent and crazy. This franchise could be an amazing match for a monster-builder like Guillermo del Toro or an innovator like District 9 director Neill Blomkamp. But it’s probably too far out of the core Star Wars brand for this to happen.

4. Legacy of the Force: The most conservative choice, but probably also the most sensible one, is probably for Disney to skip forward a generation. This franchise explores the rise of Han and Leia’s twins, Jacen and Jaina Solo, as powerful Jedi Knights in their own right, and stages a very different kind of deadly familial showdown as Jacen’s arrogance leads him to the Dark Side, and Jaina rises as the Sword of the Jedi, the greatest warrior of the order. There are big romances, explorations of Han Solo’s home planet, Corellia, the tragic death of Luke Skywalker’s wife, Mara Jade, and lots of other collective drama. I wouldn’t mind a Legacy of the Force series. But it would be giving away a lot of potential to truly develop the world George Lucas built, with much greater nuance than he lent to the prequels.

5. Indie Star Wars: There is a lot of delightfully weird stuff in the Expanded Universe, including The Courtship of Princess Leia, in which Han finally tries to get it together to put a ring on it, but not without kidnapping, incredibly awful attempts at cooking, and a bunch of Force-sensitive witches with pet Rancors; Children of the Jedi, which literally involves Luke Skywalker having ghost sex; Truce at Bakura, which involves soul-stealing aliens invading the fragile New Republic; and superweapon stories like The Crystal Star and Showdown at Centerpoint. I think, however, we’re safe from an adaptation of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, which was written before the big Luke and Leia reveal, and reads as disturbingly sexual in retrospect.

Last week, we got word that Disney was introducing its first Latina princess, Sofia, in a television special. But unfortunately, rather than using this occasion to tell a culturally specific—and as a result, less generic and more interesting—story, Disney decided to put Sofia in a European fairy-tale setting and use her as a marketing vehicle for other Disney products. And now Disney is backtracking on the idea that Sofia is Latina or Hispanic at all:

“What’s important to know is that Sofia is a fairytale girl who lives in a fairytale world,” Nancy Kanter, senior vice president of original programming and general manager of Disney Junior Worldwide said in a post on the Princess Sofia Facebook page. “All our characters come from fantasy lands that may reflect elements of various cultures and ethnicities but none are meant to specifically represent those real world cultures.”

Kanter said that most importantly, Sofia’s world reflects the ethnically diverse world we live in “but it is not OUR world, it is a fairytale and storybook world that we hope will help spur a child’s imagination.”

Craig Gerber, co-executive producer/writer on the project says, “Princess Sofia is a mixed-heritage princess in a fairy-tale world. Her mother is originally from an enchanted kingdom inspired by Spain (Galdiz) and her birth father hailed from an enchanted kingdom inspired by Scandinavia.”

This isn’t just cowardly: it’s all kinds of boring. The idea that you’d create alternate universe that’s like our own not to comment on reality by giving people a framework that lets them consider issues that would be painful to discuss directly, but to escape actual problems and painful issues like the lack of representation of people of color (Latinos are the most underrepresented ethnic group in American popular culture), you’re giving up not just a chance to make a difference, but a chance to do interesting story work. I get the appeal of a fantasy world shorn of our problems and our most uncomfortable history. But that’s also a fantasy that strips characters of the things that make them specific and unique, and of and chances to exhibit specific kinds of heroism that are deeply moving to the people in the audience.

Disney is introducing Sofia, who is supposed to be its first Latina princess, in a television special, Sofia the First: Once Upon a Princess, that will air November 18 on the Disney Channel. The problem—or depending on how you see it, upside of the character—though, is that the only indication that we have that Sofia is Hispanic is that Disney is telling us that she is:

Now, certainly it’s possible to be Latina or Hispanic and be light-skinned and have fair hair as people like half-Cuban Cameron Diaz are a constant reminder. And I can see an argument that it’s good for Disney to remind viewers that Latino is a label that encompasses people of many different origins and who look many different ways.

And so it strikes me as less of a problem that Sofia looks the way she looks and more that Disney was dull enough to set another princess story in the European fairy tale tradition. When Disney’s put stories about women who aren’t white on the big screen, it’s often done so in ways that draw drama and detail from their racial and ethnic backgrounds, and that expand the definition of princess to cover all kinds of brave, enterprising young women. Aladdin was one of the first Disney movies to juxtapose the horrors of arranged marriages with the appeal of a love match, rather than pretending that its characters were simply free to marry who they chose. In Mulan, the titular character has to cope with the intersection of gender expectations and Confucian values to carve out a place for herself and her aspirations in ancient China. Pocahontas got to save a man, rather than the other way around, in a break from Disney’s generally traditional past, and to do so as an advocate for cross-cultural understanding. And in The Princess and the Frog, Tiana is an entrepreneur driven by her love of New Orleans cuisine.

Sofia, by contrast, gets absorbed into a blended royal family, goes to school where she’s taught by the tree good fairies from Sleeping Beauty and gets an amulet that puts her in communion with Disney princesses past. The whole project looks less like an original story and much more like an opportunity for marketing. Disney may have denied some little girls an opportunity to see a princess who looks like them on screen. But it’s also punted on giving viewers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds an innovative, engaging story about a young woman’s adventures.

The Walt Disney Company is famous for its notoriously strict dress codes for both employees of and visitors to its theme parks. It took until this January for park employees to win the right to grow beards and goatees. The guidelines for Disney World note that “Guests wearing wedding attire are discouraged from entering the Theme Parks.” And now, the Company is being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Imane Boudlal in a suit that alleges that Boudlal was fired for wearing a hijab at work. The company has countered that they gave her opportunities for different positions where she would have been permitted to wear her hijab, presumably those that didn’t involve interacting with customers in public. This seems likely to play out in court.

According to the standards set out by the Equal Employment Opportunity Opportunity Commission, Disney will have to prove that it would be an “undue hardship on the employer’s operation of its business” to let Boudlal wear a hijab in a position where park visitors would be in a position to see her. But more to the point, these allegations highlight what counts as normal and what counts as distracting in the homogenized vision of the world of Disney. The overall ethos of the “Disney Look,” the basic covenant governing dress code for Disney employees is “a classic look that is clean, natural, polished and professional, and avoids ‘cutting edge’ trends or extreme styles.” If conservative religious dress isn’t considered “classic,” “polished,” or “professional,” that says a great deal more about the people making the judgements about what those terms constitute than about anyone who wants to wear a hijab or a yarmulke. We are, after all, talking about a place where people go to pose with people in giant chipmunk suits.