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.

Jaclyn Friedman has a fascinating column in the Guardian about the fact that even empowered princesses don’t do as much for girls as ordinary-boys-turned-heroes do for boys:

The studio whose most iconic heroes include a toy cowboy, a rat, a fish, a boy scout, and a lonely trash compactor (all male-identified, of course), couldn’t figure out how to tell a story about a human girl without making her a princess. That’s the problem in a nutshell: if the sparkling minds at Pixar can’t imagine their way out of the princess paradigm, how can we expect girls to?

The past decade may have seen a welcome increase in on-screen female action heroes, but we’re still far from gender parity in the genre, and even when they’re not princesses, they’re nearly all trained assassins or Chosen Ones. Joseph Campbell wrote indelibly about the power of The Hero with a Thousand Faces – an ur-hero who’s living a mundane life when he’s faced with a challenge through which he can discover his greatness. It’s easy to see why this matters: everyman hero stories teach every boy that he can make himself great through his own actions, regardless of how dull or difficult the lot in life he’s been handed.

Princess stories – even Action Princess stories – inherently fail the Conrad test.

I do think there’s something really important about teaching girls that the gender norms laid out for them are add-ons, rather than restrictions. Leaching the meaning out of a word like “princess” is a task that has value. But if we’re ascribing strength to states that girls in the audience think don’t apply to them, if the lesson and Brave and other movies is that if your father hasn’t hooked you up with weaponry and training as a child that adventure is still out of site, then we’re winning one battle at the expense of another. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case—the little girls in the audience at the screening I attended didn’t seem to have trouble identifying with Merida. But there’s nothing wrong with empowering girls who aren’t princesses, in making the journey to heroism a little longer, but proving it can still be traveled no matter where in the process you start.

Reading Fables put me in a fairy-tale minded mood, so I finally sat down and caught up with both Tangled and The Frog Princess.

I thought Tangled was fine, if not entirely remarkable, particularly in its condemnation of beauty obsession. “I see a strong, confident, beautiful young lady,” coos the witch who’s kidnapped Rapunzel and given her an extreme case of Stockholm Syndrome. “Oh, you’re here too!” It’s interesting to see the idea that people will go through extreme things to make themselves beautiful externalized. Rather than subjecting herself to surgery or extreme dieting, the witch hurts someone else. And the ending’s interesting: in a sense, it’s a reverse of the pretty-ugly girl takes off her glasses and everything changes moment. In cutting off Rapunzel’s hair, Eugene frees her from the thing that makes her valued for her looks rather than herself. But he also eliminates a source of strength and adventure for her. Presumably, she doesn’t need hair that she can rappel down now that she’s living in a palace, but the end of the movie did strike me as domesticating our heroine a bit.

By contrast, Tiana in The Princess and the Frog wants something other than to get married, or to get a man, and she doesn’t have to give it up, even to the businessmen who tell her, “A little woman of your…background would have had her hands full trying to run a big business.” By the end of the movie, the worthless Prince Naveen’s been transformed and galvanized by the force of Tiana’s dream, not just for her restaurant, but for life. When she snaps at him that “the only way to get what you want in this world is through hard work…I’m not a princess, I’m a waitress,” it reads as honest, not like she’s a scold — being a handsome gadabout hasn’t worked out particularly well for him. And ultimately, they build the restaurant together.

Someday, I think we’ll see princesses without the prince as the prize that’s waiting at the finish line. If there was one part of The Help, I liked it was that Skeeter’s dreams are totally independent of her useless oil-drilling boyfriend and she doesn’t have a moment of doubt (in the movie) about which is more important. And it sounds like with Brave Pixar’s giving us a movie where the princes are even more of a distraction. I’m not saying we have to do away with love stories, but that doesn’t mean that falling in love is the only thing princesses can do. And until we get a long-overdue Dealing With Dragons adaptation, I’ll settle for this.