Nutcracker: A Better Princess Tale

The typical narrative of European fairy tales is a princess who needs rescued by a prince.  At least, when the tale is not about the evilness of dwarves or Jews (We tend to ignore the nastier parts of our traditions. This is known.  It is faithfully continued by Disney.

To be fair, I've heard Disney is doing better with its princesses from a feminist standpoint.  I wouldn't know; I refuse to patronize Disney's offerings due to their continual lobbying for a longer copyright period and the way they block Japanese animated releases in the U.S.  Also, the last time I tried to play a Disney DVD, it turns out they don't play nice with Linux because of their demand that the user download InterActual player.  Stallman's curse on the purveyors of DRMs!  Turing bless the makers of libdvdcss!

I said all that, not just because Disney, like the TSA, is an entity I won't pass up an opportunity to say bad things about, but because I recently saw The Nutcracker. It's not the first time, but it had been some time.  Nutcracker is an inversion of your prince rescuing princess trope.  Our prince needs rescued himself, because, well, he's been turned into an anthropomorphic novelty kitchen tool.  This may be the pinnacle of incompetence.  After our eponymic character is restored to human form by Clara, he then must engage in an epic battle with the Mouse King.  He loses.  Clara saves him by beating the Mouse King to death with her shoe.  It's hard to get less distress-y than that as a damsel, while at the same time it's hard to get more rescued as a prince.