Disney never prepared me for this. You’d think that in my extensive collection of Disney VHS tapes one of them would have prepared me for this moment. Disney told me it would all work out and as a child knowing nothing of the world, I believed. Disney told me the girl always got her prince and I prayed that if Disney said that’s how it went, it had to be true. Disney told me the bad guys never won and since I had no interest in the Nightly News, I believed. Disney told me love conquered all. But that was a lie too. Love doesn’t conquer all, the girl doesn’t always get her prince, and more often than they should the bad guys win. But I couldn’t learn these lessons the easy way. No child can. It takes years. And around age seventeen you begin to get the full grasp of the lies you were told as a child in every single one of Disney’s Animated Features. Starting with Snow White, their first animated film, all the way to Tangled, their latest lie, to the next generation of unsuspecting, and believing children.
In my short life I have discovered:
Bad guys, aren’t always as easily identifiable as a witch with a crooked nose, sometimes they look like the high school’s quarterback or the girl next door. Disney’s villains always tried to reek horrible consequences for their nemesis of choice, but by the end of the film all negative aspects disappeared. The bad guys always got caught and were either punished or died. It was always that simple. There was never a scenario where one might win, you might have thought they would win, but they wouldn’t. It wasn’t possible. Well, in the real world, a lot of times the real bad guys, the murderers, the rapists, the child abusers, the serial killers, they not only don’t get killed in some poetically just way like in a Disney movie, they get away with it. Completely.
There are more losers than princes. That is a horrible but true reality of the world we live in. Our generation’s men, for the most part, don’t want to have an epic romance that ends with a sweet kiss and a “Happily Ever After” sign attached to it. Let’s face it. Most of them just want sex and they are willing to tell a lot of lies to get it. Lies like, “You’re so beautiful” and “I love you so much”. But these are ugly truths we can’t tell children. Disney, takes a different approach. Disney has an approach of building up children’s dreams and expectations of what love should be. Men should be willing to die for you, they should slay dragons for you, or so says Disney. Disney has no concept of “friends with benefits” or “casual dating”. Poor Walt Disney would probably turn in his grave if they even thought about creating a movie that had realistic expectations of either partner, that simply isn’t the way things at Disney are done.
The prince of your dreams doesn’t always want the girl back. This is a problem we see over and over again. Since there are so few actually good guys (or girls for that matter, I’m not trying to be biased) most girls center on a select few guys. Now that isn’t entirely their fault, its what they choose to do with that power that is sometime questionable. In the world of Disney, there is always one girl for one guy, there is an element of fate or destiny to it. There is no fighting it, they will end up together, if only that were true for the world we live in. More often than not love, is unrequited love. You fall in love, alone. Or if you are lucky enough to fall in love with someone who loves you back other things come in to mess it up. Its inevitable, it seems.
Love doesn’t conquer all. This is the biggest of the lies Disney told me. I held onto the belief that if you truly loved someone nothing could get in the way of that. I foolishly believed that there was no force on Earth powerful enough to destroy love. But I learned I was wrong. Love doesn’t conquer busy schedules or long distances (emotional or physical). Sadly Disney was wrong. Sometimes loving someone isn’t enough. Sometimes love is so painful it makes you do crazy things. Sometime love isn’t enough to make someone stay, or try, or care. It just isn’t.
I learned all these things in my short almost seventeen year life. I wonder what other lies I will discover Disney told me. Am I afraid? No. I’m terrified.
Before you comment on anything about my piece, I am aware this sounds very jaded, bitter, and biased (just for the record). For any guys who happen to read this I'm sorry if this offends you. I don't mean this as a snub to all men. I do believe good men exist. This is merely an observation.
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