(Disney) Princesses Gone Wild

January 1, 2012 2:17 PM

Princesses Gone Wild is a tumblr blog of Disney princesses re-imagined with tattoos, piercings, dyed hair and band t-shirts.

The site is unfortunately rarely updated but they are currently taking in submissions.

posted by slimepuppy (37 comments total)

this really works best for Meg.
posted by leotrotsky at 2:25 PM on January 1

Needs more butch.
posted by Burhanistan at 2:35 PM on January 1 [2 favorites]

So, it's not a collection of Stickam caps?
posted by Thorzdad at 2:39 PM on January 1 [2 favorites]

Apparently -- given what I first thought when I saw the link title -- Adventure Time has ruined my internal princess calibrator.

no Breakfast Princess?
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 2:39 PM on January 1 [10 favorites]

What strikes me is how tame these pictures look. Unless you touch the actual figures and physiognomy, it's all palette-swapping. If one of these girls were redrawn as heavy, ugly, or bony, we'd have something here, but now they just appear to be going through a phase. The "Twisted Princesses" guy gets closer to the mark, but his work is still all about the shock value.

To reverse this experiment, compare how mature and matronly the teenage girls and young women in any given 1940s yearbook picture look to us now, for no other reason than that they dress like our grandmothers.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:41 PM on January 1 [12 favorites]

On a similar 'Disney + Photoshop' vein, I've been enjoying these realistically drawn/rendered princesses.
posted by Gordafarin at 2:45 PM on January 1 [5 favorites]

This is where I admit that I kind of have a crush on Hipster Ariel.
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:49 PM on January 1 [2 favorites]

Where are the subdermal implants and tongue splittings and amputations?
posted by box at 2:55 PM on January 1 [1 favorite]

As someone with chronic allergic rhinitis, nose rings make me think about snotsicles.
posted by Fleebnork at 3:18 PM on January 1 [1 favorite]

(Jirka Väätäinen from Gordafarin's link above mash'ed-up a Bowie Photoshop of my baby daughter last month)
posted by growabrain at 3:48 PM on January 1 [1 favorite]

I was really expecting these to be more effective. There's really a context problem. Seeing Snow White all tatted out isn't so much shocking as it is simply dissonant; the rest of the picture is all Disney purity and light. I would expect tatted out Snow White to do something more interesting with the rest of her environment, her face, and her hair. Except for Meg, as leotrotsky points out looks like the body mods might be a non-surprising part of her culture, the rest of them are just as out of place.
posted by localroger at 3:50 PM on January 1

I realize there is only so much you can do with these characters without redrawing them, but without redrawing them I'm kind of meh about the whole thing.

I would, however, pay good money for a big sticker of Tinkerbell in a welding mask, jacket and gloves (a la the 2005 retcon) to replace the thoroughly silly NASCAR sticker on the side of my MIG welder.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 3:52 PM on January 1 [3 favorites]

Pretty sure I was behind hipster Mulan in line at the supermarket this morning.
posted by 2bucksplus at 3:58 PM on January 1 [4 favorites]

What with this current media focus on the modernization of fairy tales?
posted by savvysearch at 4:14 PM on January 1

There's also Disney Ladies from Last Night, which combines texts from last night with Disney princesses.
posted by Potsy at 4:25 PM on January 1 [4 favorites]

Same as the previous media focus on the modernization of fairy tales.
posted by LogicalDash at 4:30 PM on January 1

Not really. The current obsession is much more extensive than in years past.
posted by savvysearch at 4:44 PM on January 1

I would argue that disneys 10 year princess push is a sterilization of the old myths. Seriously, 28,000 princess products in a decade. It's a travesty to the actual fairy tale messages. But then, I think Disney is evil, so I may be biased.
posted by dejah420 at 5:10 PM on January 1 [2 favorites]

If only they'd been re-imagined to not have that uniformly simpering expression.
posted by Squeak Attack at 5:17 PM on January 1 [1 favorite]

I'm going to have a daughter in less than three months and the "Disney princess" is one of the few things that really scares me.
posted by Slothrup at 5:30 PM on January 1 [3 favorites]

Slothrup: I have an almost 4 year old girl. Be forewarned, as careful as you are, it's always the presents from f#¢king relatives that eventually get you.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:47 PM on January 1 [6 favorites]

Oh man, I LOVE that the Beast has plugs. That made my day and I don't even know why. He would totally fit in at a tattoo shop. Scary looking guy with a heart of gold.
posted by book 'em dano at 5:48 PM on January 1 [1 favorite]

I think one of the reasons it doesnt have a very good impact with the viewer is that the two illustration styles are so different. It doesn't look like a wild disney princess, it looks like a normal disney princess got drawn on, a la subway poster.
posted by FirstMateKate at 6:41 PM on January 1 [2 favorites]

I don't know if anyone really thinks it is, but this isn't really a subversion of the Disney princess stereotype; it's just updating them with contemporary standards of beauty. It'd be more interesting, to me, to go in the other direction and redesign them to past and non-American/western standards of beauty.
posted by byanyothername at 6:42 PM on January 1 [5 favorites]

Not bad, but it's no Disney Face Swap.
posted by dragoon at 8:44 PM on January 1 [6 favorites]

Does anyone even have eyebrow rings anymore?
posted by runningwithscissors at 9:37 PM on January 1

What with this current media focus on the modernization of fairy tales?

They're safe and pretty and conservative and the same shit everyone's parents grew up with. They're a known quantity. They don't require any extra critical thought.

I am forever grateful for my mother insisting I read up on the real Little Mermaid (Fuck your happy ending! Sea foam! No hair! Stab Eric!) as it helped me become aware of how the stories have changed to suit their periods. I mean look at the early princesses - bowdlerized to take out the sex and violence, dumbed down to a happily-ever-after married to some dude you maybe met once. (Snow White, Cinderella)

Then you have the token women's libbers/girl power, princesses who have something of their own independence, if only for a little while, but who really are happiest with a good strong man in their lives. Sleeping Beauty of the 70s lib- portraying a gynocracy of lady fairies that can only make the happily-ever-after once a stupid teenaged mortal prince shows up, and who then are relegated to their rightful place, arguing over whether the dress should be pink or blue. Ariel and her rebellious desire...to fit in with the humans, and how she is handed from one man (her father) to the next (Eric) with her only act of agency involving another evil woman and a whole lot of suffering. If only she's listened to her dad!

Come the nineties and noughts, you have sassy, stronger spirited princesses who nonetheless are happiest when they abandon whatever prior life they had and just go off with some man. By that point my sisters and I had largely aged out of Disney so I have limited knowledge of how contemporary Disney princesses fare. I stopped voluntarily watching Disney movies roughly around the Hercules period, as I was flabberghasted they thought that was a story fit for children, and the mess they turned it into bears no resemblance to classical myth and takes wretched, wretched liberties with the material. Making Hades the bad guy? Really?

Anyway.
posted by Jilder at 9:52 PM on January 1 [7 favorites]

Hades as bad guy was to me not much of a stretch. Hercules as Zeus and Hera's son?

FALSE.

Disney has gotten better (see: Mulan, Lilo & Stitch, Tangled) and especially with Pixar (but Pixar is very much 'boy movies' still).
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:25 PM on January 1

No excuse for Hades as the bad guy. He's probably one of the most blameless of the gods. Sure, there's that kidnapping of Persephone bit, but that's basically it and unpleasant as it was pales compared to all the rapes and abductions and monster-attacks and collapsed walls and curses and whatnot that the rest of the gods and goddesses of that pantheon got up to.

It was a cheap cop out because they couldn't cope with a morally ambiguous hero.
posted by Jilder at 11:05 PM on January 1 [3 favorites]

An ex-girlfriend of mine, who made part of her living doing body piercing in my home town, used to refuse to spend any time there socially. She took great issue at being identified in the community by her customers.

I never really understood her stance until she and I were in line at my local Safeway in San Rafael, California, when a fourteen-year-old-girl ran up to her yelling "Look, Mommy! It's the bellybutton lady!" This kind of thing happened to her often, which was why she didn't want to be too close to it.

These images remind me of a significant her clientele: upper-middle-class to elite unblemished "princesses" varnished with the barest vestiges of unnatural, forced-looking street.

How is it that I have come to the point where I pick apart photoshopped cartoons?
posted by Graygorey at 12:27 AM on January 2 [1 favorite]

I'm going to have a daughter in less than three months and the "Disney princess" is one of the few things that really scares me.

Meh. I found that less of a problem. Most people grasp that trad Disney stuff isn't going to go down well in my neck of the woods for my daughter. It's the Pixar-loving dickwits who think that marginalising female characters and girl-in-the-fridge tropes are wrong and evil except when Pixard do it and get really snotty when I explain that, no, a diet of Toy Story and Cars is not, in fact, an improvement.

Studio Ghibli are great. Monsters vs Aliens. I like that in the Ice Age series Sid actually likes caring for kids. Bob the Builder's uneven, but the later bits where Wendy is Construction Girl aren't too bad. If you're outside New Zealand it's probably hard to get hold of the awesome Suzy's World series where Suzy explains science and technology to children in a non-patronising fashion (and had my 4 yo daughter surprise a helicopter pilot at an emergency services open day by accurately explaining how the collective on his helicopter worked). A Cat in Paris went down well here, albeit a bit scary.
posted by rodgerd at 1:48 AM on January 2 [2 favorites]

Tattoos and noserings are wild? What is this, 1980?
posted by KokuRyu at 3:21 AM on January 2 [4 favorites]

I'm going to have a daughter in less than three months and the "Disney princess" is one of the few things that really scares me.

It's possible. The 12 year old in our house managed to hate princesses. Might've been the steady diet of The Ramones and KISS - heavily curated by her father. She never fell for Hannah Montana -- it was vilified in our house.

She also never really had a reason to dress up -- so that probably helped. She's capable of dressing up now, for school events --is its not something they really have to practice as young children. We're not church goers and she escaped having to go to lots a weddings or anything. We didn't "anticipate" shopping for dressy clothes or make a big deal of it. She could choose a dress or nice slacks --or no pressure either way. Compliments when she looks nice have more to do with looking "grown up" than "like a princess.

You can do it!
posted by vitabellosi at 5:39 AM on January 2 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure which is more offensive to my eyes - simpering Disney princesses or ugly tattoos. In combination - vile.
posted by Summer at 6:21 AM on January 2

but Pixar is very much 'boy movies' still

True, and sadly funny because Lasseter has said often how awesome Miyazaki is, and so many of (most? all of?) Miyazaki's movies are about strong, adventurous girls or women who are valued for their personal qualities, not their looks.
posted by smirkette at 7:46 AM on January 2

Lilo And Stich isn't even in the same universe as the simpering princesses.
posted by The Whelk at 8:35 AM on January 2

This was wonderful. Thank you.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 1:05 PM on January 2