Overanalyzing Disney: Why Mulan Did Everything Wrong

Disney-related posts continue to be my most popular content, so this week I'm giving the masses what they want - this time, with Mulan. Released in 1998, Mulan is a heartwarming tale of courage, family, and the importance of semi-convincing cross-dressing.

Fierce.

For those of you who spent the late 90s living in a Soviet-era bomb shelter, Mulan tells the story of Hua Mulan, a maybe-real-maybe-fictional woman who, according to a popular ancient poem, may have lived sometime in the 5th century. For once, the Disney adaptation is relatively faithful to its source material - in both the movie and the original poem, Mulan takes her elderly father's place in the Chinese army and manages to excel while successfully concealing her true sex. It's the perfect story of honour, deception and self-sacrifice, except for two little things:

Mulan is terrible at hiding the fact that she's female. 

Mulan's complete guide to gender-bending.

Before racing off to join the army in the middle of the night, Mulan makes a few quick adjustments to her appearance to help her pass as male. She slices off her hair with a sword, slips into some armour, and... that's it. The animators made subtle chances to her face to make her disguise more convincing, but seriously - she could be stuck in the army for months or years at a time, and the only thing saving her from decapitation is a vague hope that her funny-shaped ears are unfeminine.

She's shocked because she's picking up an FM easy listening station from the future.

And when I say decapitation, I'm not exaggerating. Mulan happened to live in that wide, "most of human history" window when impersonation of the opposite sex was considered a capital offense. The movie never comes right out and says it - because there's no G-rated way of telling three-year-olds that the only reward for female heroism is death by having your head sawed off - but when Mulan's deception is finally revealed (sixteen-year-old spoiler alert), the movie does show us what would have been Mulan's execution scene. In some versions of the Hua Mulan legend, that really is how her story ends; she gives the army twelve years of excellent service and gets beheaded by a commanding officer for her troubles. 

Mulan, coming uncomfortably close to being the Chinese Joan of Arc.

But let's give Mulan the benefit of the doubt here. Contrary to popular belief, East Asians have just as much sexual dimorphism as any other race - they have the same weight-height ratios between males and females that most ethnic groups do. This actually gives Mulan an advantage. We can see from her lifestyle at the beginning of the movie that she comes from a wealthy family; no one in her immediate area has to farm their own food (they actually have the luxury of using fertile land to grow pretty gardens), her family can afford nice clothes, makeup, matchmaking services and fancy temples without complaint, and her parents are elderly, which means that her healthy, still-living grandmother must be positively prehistoric. Remember, she's living a historical stone's throw away from the birth of Jesus - living in that kind of comfort is no small thing. Compared to her same-age peer group, she's probably pretty well-fed, which means her physical stature most likely matches up to that of the average, under-fed boy. Fine. 

She also seems to have convenient, magical face-morphing abilities to help her out. She changes her facial structure and jawline to be more masculine, which is useful. She grows a widow's peak in her hairline from out of nowhere (Women have lower hairlines than men, which makes widow's peaks less pronounced, and you are more accustomed to seeing widow's peaks on men, since they're easier to spot on people with short hairstyles.) and she darkens her complexion, which is a particularly remarkable feat for a woman who spends most of her waking life in the shade of a roof, tree or parasol (You associate darker complexions with masculinity. Trust me on this one. You just do.) But that's a rant for another day.

Apparently DIY jaw and chin implants were a thing in the year 400.

No, Mulan's face isn't the thing that gives her away. We've all seen some slightly feminine-looking men and masculine-looking women in our lifetimes, but if you were raised by civilized humans, you probably didn't march up and demand to know the person's true sex. Facial features are graded on a bell curve with a heck of a lot of overlap between the sexes - "Ping" isn't overly suspicious-looking. It's not Mulan's hesitation and general weirdness around bathing that gives her away either. In every group of people, you're bound to find one or two who keep to themselves and don't relish the thought of scrubbing their junk in public. Not even Mulan's physical strength - or lack thereof - gives her away; physical strength also grades on a curve, with enough overlap that you'll find generous quantities of women who can out-run, out-jump and out-water-polo most average men. Even Mulan has her moment in the sun - she figures out how to shimmy up a pole with two weights before anyone else can.

And that little trick is exactly what should have given her away. 

Whoops.

See, one of the most consistent human sex differences is the distribution of strength in the body. Women mostly depend on their lower body strength; on average, women have proportionally larger thighs than men, and can match lower body strength with an average-sized male. When it comes to comes to upper-body strength, however, men have a clear advantage. An average woman has roughly half the upper body strength of an average man. This is due to two things - women tend to have smaller upper body muscles with weaker skeletal attachments, and women also tend to have more fat stores in the upper body, since their veins are full of hormones that constantly scream "PREPARE FOR INCOMING BABY" whether she likes it or not. You can't train this difference away. Even among super-elite athletes who spend their whole lives grunting into protein shakes and wearing Lycra because they can, man have the upper hand (Ha ha. This is what my humor has become.) in the upper body department. 

So what does this have to do with Mulan's climbing? 

Go ask a young, reasonably athletic male to shimmy up a vertical pole. In case there aren't any in your immediate area, I'll have this young man demonstrate:

Brought to you by "Big Willy D".

That's the easiest way for a man to climb a pole. They use their legs to grip and hold them in place, and then they use their allegedly hulking man arms to pull themselves upwards, shimmying with their legs so they don't slide back down. It takes advantage of the male body's natural strengths and conserves effort. If a guy wants to climb a pole with two weights, all he has to do is tie them to his ankles; he'll have to exert a little more effort to pull himself up, but he won't be thrown off-balance. 

Scroll back up and compare that to Mulan's climbing. She's not using the weights like that because it's clever and flashy - she's using them because it is literally the only way she's able to get up the pole. Instead of bracing herself with her legs and pulling with her arms, she's compensating for weak upper body strength by using her own weight to hold her in place so she can get her legs under herself and walk up the pole. All it would take is one little misstep to upset this delicate counter-balance and turn this two-dimensional character into a two-dimensional red stain on the ground below.

Ouch.

The fact that Mulan's little trick with the weights gets her hero status - instead of tipping off the captain that she's got womanly biceps - is nothing short of a Disney miracle.

Her father was never in any real danger.

As reckless and transparent as Mulan is, there's a method to her madness - she's just trying to keep her aging father from having to serve in the army. The military summons Mulan responds to wasn't sent out so that they could camp out together doing icebreakers and karate lessons together - the Chinese are about to face a serious invasion from the ruthless Hun tribe, led by an apparently-immortal falconer with a very serious eye disease.

Seriously, dude, you should get that looked at.

It's made very clear throughout the movie that the situation is desperate, and China needs all the men it can get - even if they're too old to fight. Mulan's father is elderly, and walks with a serious limp, relying on a cane to get himself around. It's clear that if he went off to war, he'd end up as cannon fodder for the Huns; the Chinese army doesn't care if he can defend himself or not, so long as he can stand upright and hold onto a sword. Mulan's whole family knows that he has no chance of returning from battle alive - his daughter's haphazard attempt to take his place is her only chance of saving her father.

At least, that's what the movie leads you to believe.

This is no place for an old man.

Mulan's summons scroll takes her to a training camp in the countryside, where new recruits undergo the physical and mental training they need to take on the Hun army. For what appears to be weeks, the men practice fighting with bamboo poles, carrying weights on their shoulders, hopping across rivers on rocks, picking up individual grains of rice, and other skills that will doubtlessly be useless on the actual battlefield. 

Their plan to defeat the Huns with shirtless yelling was quickly scrapped.

All this training culminates in the beloved training montage song/college student battle cry "I'll Make a Man Out of You". During the song, Mulan falls behind in the training regime, gets kicked out of the army, and stages a dramatic comeback by shimmying her feminine ass up the pole to retrieve the arrow. Naturally, she's welcomed back into the army and instantly becomes the best at every activity, racing ahead of the toned captain who literally had to carry her weight just days before, because in the Disney universe, 'believing in yourself' is a performance-enhancing drug.

Yeah, you want to watch it again.

In case you missed the movie's gaping plot hole in the above paragraph, let me say it again: Mulan gets kicked out of the army. For poor performance. China is desperate for soldiers, and she's a healthy, able-bodied eighteen-to-twenty-something-year-old... and she still gets booted out for not living up to their rigorous training standards. Now imagine Mulan's father. He's so old and crippled that he has difficultly standing up without the assistance of a cane; when he tried to walk unaided to his armour, he limps so badly, he could churn butter just by holding a jug of cream in his hands. There's no way he can manage any of the running, jumping, swimming, fishing, archery or bucket-balancing rock-fencing required by the Chinese Boy Scout Summer Camp army training camp. Captain Shang would take one look at him hobbling to his tent and send him straight home to safety.

'Fake it 'til you make it' doesn't seem to work here.

Remember, Mulan is following the exact same set of instructions her father was given. It says "report to training camp", not "fling yourself under the sword of the nearest Hun". It should be painfully obvious, even to Fa Zhou's worried family, that he'll be turned away from the army before he ever has a chance to see battle. Mulan's story takes place 1,500 years before the 'one-child policy' was put in place; in that era, a family with no sons would be practically unheard of. The military summons was intended to recruit a strapping (but untrained) young man from every house, not a tired, wounded old warrior. 

This is not the hero China needs.

So what Mulan should have done was just leave well enough alone. She'd stay home, her father would go a brief, refreshing horseback ride before being immediately pitched out of the army, and Mulan could lead a happy life of sipping tea and tormenting the local matchmaker. Everyone wins. 

Except maybe the Emperor. But screw that guy.

How do you feel about Disney's first Asian princess? Leave it in the comments. Also, consider voting for me in the 'Best Funny Blog' category of the 2013 Canadian Blog Awards - anyone can vote!

13

Winning the Darren Zenko Prize

I just won my first writing award.

Hooray for me!

One sentence makes for a vague and crappy blog entry, so here's the full story:

When I transferred from the faculty of science to the faculty of arts this year, I realized that I was missing the six fine arts credits that every arts student must complete before being unleashed on Canada's Starbucks franchises. I was given a choice of four different disciplines - music, drama, visual art or creative writing - and since I'm pretty certain that writing is my thing, I whipped up a writing sample and sent off an application to the class. A few weeks later, I got the good news - I was one of twenty-five applicants chosen to take the class under award-winning Canadian author Thomas Wharton. 

Seen here in this twenty-year-old headshot that comes up when you Google him.

The class was based around short stories. Now, I've read The Lottery and The Telltale Heart, and all the other corpse-tastic horror stories they make you read in high school, for some reason, but I'd never actually written a short story. Novels, I can do. Condensing all of my devastating wit and charming characters into 10-page stories was new to me. In true Janel fashion, I waited until the night before my first deadline to crank out a short story; desperate for an interesting plot, I settled on writing a story about a middle aged man who wants to impress his classmates at a high school reunion, and decides that the only way to do so is to steal the Mona Lisa. 

Because that's a sane, reasonable choice. 

In workshop the next week, I fully expected to be berated for my silly, haphazard plot; instead, I got my first A+ of the semester. The feedback I got on that story, and on the other pieces of writing I produced for the class, was incredibly helpful, complimentary and encouraging. For the first time since I started writing novels in my senior year of high school, I felt like I really was working towards a writing career, and not just chasing shadows. 

Just because it worked for Peter Pan, doesn't mean it's a good idea.

The class came to an end in early December, and I figured that was it. I was surprised, then, to see an email from my professor three weeks ago. Had he finally come to his senses and realized how silly my stories were after all? 

My creative process. 

Not at all. As it turned out, the creative writing department has professors nominate one student from their writing classes each year for the Darren Zenko Memorial Prize in Creative Writing, and my professor had chosen to nominate me. The award goes to one creative writing student each year who produces high-quality work and shows the most potential to succeed; the winner is given a chance to attend the Banff Centre Writing with Style Workshop, a fancy writing retreat that I had often heard of but had exactly no chance of affording. I knew my odds of actually winning the prize weren't great - for one, I was being nominated from the most basic of all the writing classes, and most importantly, I was required to submit a cover letter. 

I do not like cover letters. 

How I write cover letters.

The letter was supposed to explain how I would benefit from attending the workshop, so I wrote an earnest and probably-too-honest explanation of how writing outside of a school environment would let me unleash the complete literary lunacy that I kept bottled up for the sake of my GPA. They also needed a writing sample, so I attached my Mona Lisa story. And that was that - I sent off the application and tried not to get my hopes up. 

On Friday, my professor emailed me to say that I'd been selected as the winner.

Victory means double-punching the sky.

So I'm off to the Fall 2014 Writing with Style workshop - incidentally, I'll be celebrating my 22nd birthday at the centre. Participants have the option of workshopping a short story, poem or the first chapter of a novel, and since novels will forever be my first, wordy loves, I'll probably choose the latter. I have plenty of time to start another book while I wait for September to hurry up and get here. 

202 days to go. Not that I'm counting.

So that's the story of how a mandatory arts credit requirement led to a magical mountain writing adventure. Those of you who are still desperately hanging on my every word come September (Which should be all of you. Please. I have cookies.) will doubtlessly be treated to one or more blog posts filled with helpful things I've learned and indistinguishable photographs of mountains I've taken. Because seriously, people, great blog topics don't grow on trees. 

But sometimes great stories grow out of tight deadlines and half-remembered fun facts about Renaissance art. 

9

In Defense of Ron and Hermione

This past week, J.K. Rowling dropped thousands of jaws and fanfiction writers' panties when she announced that she regrets pairing Hermione Granger with Ron Weasley, and in hindsight, she would have married the brilliant witch to the story's hero -  Harry Potter himself. Rowling has always been open about the fact that Hermione Granger is a thinly-veiled depiction of herself, and has been quoted as saying that her initial decision to marry Hermione and Ron was "a form of wish fulfillment", a statement that forces me to assume she lusts after the loins of skinny, impoverished gingers on a regular basis.

Which means that, with the Queen down to her last million dollars, Rowling should be getting ready to accost Prince Harry any day now.

Reactions to the interview have been mixed, to say the least; supporters of the original ending are gathering up their torches and pitchforks to defend the Weasley-Granger matrimony, while Harry/Hermione supporters are snorting celebratory cocaine off their laptops and writing boatloads of celebratory and newly author-sanctioned Harry/Herminione erotic fanfiction.

Harry/Draco supporters are still waiting for their day in the sun. 

I fall firmly in camp Ron/Hermione, and I have since the very beginning. Putting the two of them together subverts the whole "hero gets the girl" trope - something that's fairly important for a series so steeped in cliches it might as well be tea - and it presents Hermione as a thinking, feeling person, instead of a human prize to reward Harry for conquering mean old Voldemort. Plus, people have compared me to Hermione Granger my entire life, and I took it to heart so much that I ran out and got myself my very own Ron.

Which makes dressing up for comic conventions so much easier.

But it's not my personal feelings that drove me to wrote this post, and I'm not even going to touch the debate about whether or not authors have the right to change their stories years after they've been published. No, I'm opposing J.K. Rowling's Harry/Hermione revelation with her own words; the personalities and events she assigned to her characters are more than enough evidence for why Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny should end up together. Consider that:

Harry isn't the most appealing guy in Hermione's life.

To the man-fancying ladies and gentlemen of my blog: let's say I've got a young, reasonably attractive single guy that I'd like to set you up with. There are just a few things you need to know about him. He's an orphan, and he spends approximately 7/8ths of his waking life being angry about that fact. The other 1/8th of his life is devoted to angsting about being orphaned, even though he has absolutely no recollection of his parents or the night they died. His greatest accomplishment in life is a disfiguring facial scar, which, like every other thing he's ever achieved in his life, was the result of someone else's actions. He's such a terrible judge of character that he spent seven years railing on a man who risked his life on multiple occasions to help him, just because the man happened to have less-than-stellar personal hygiene and chose 'skulking' as his preferred method of locomotion. This guy's exceptional decision-making has also lead him to commit grand theft auto, confront a convicted serial killer by himself and lead several of his friends into their untimely graves. Oh, and if that's not enough for you, he also has a 24/7 psychic connection to Voldemort. Or whoever the real-life equivalent of Voldemort is. So... probably Vladimir Putin. 

Yes. Definitely Vladimir Putin.

Now tell me, do you want to meet this man? I posit that you do not. Harry spends most of his time after the fourth book being a confrontational and emotionally unavailable Vladimir Putin mind-twin, and Hermione is there to witness every meltdown and screaming fit along the way. With the exception of Ron storming off in the seventh book, the trio spend most of their time in a cycle of Harry blowing up, Ron calming everyone down, and Hermione finding a sensible way to work through their problems.

This is 90% of Harry's emotional range in a single photograph.

In fact, there are a few times when Ron and Hermione themselves become the target of Harry's wrath, mostly when he's throwing hissy fits about things that are in no way Ron or Hermione's fault. He has a tantrum at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place because Dumbledore made him spend his summer in a safe, comfortable Muggle suburb with people who are too afraid of him to challenge even his slightest whim, and he has a similar meltdown on the two of them when Ron gets upset at being treated like his funny little ginger sidekick. If Harry has even the slightest hope of scoring himself some sweet, sweet Hermione lovin', this is the worst thing he could be doing. By constantly putting his friends on the defensive against him and forcing them to tiptoe behind his back, like he's some kind of savage, magical hyena, he's actually strengthening the bond between them by uniting them against him. And years of forcing Ron and Hermione to be partners in crime can have only one possible outcome - they become permanent partners, the kind who don't always have to wear pants. Ginny, of course, witnesses very little of this. She is never the brunt of Harry's wrath, even when she's stupid enough to take orders from a talking toilet diary that almost gets her killed, which is probably why she agrees to marry him. 

Harry has a type... and Hermione doesn't fit it. 

Some people have a "type", which is a fancy way of saying that they date the exact same type of person over and over and then act surprised when it doesn't work out. Harry might not date a lot of women, but he dates just enough to let us see that he has a type. Throughout the Harry Potter series, the titular character is romantically linked to a grand total of four women - he's interested in Cho Chang and Ginny Weasley, he goes on a date with Parvarti Patil, and he dodges the affections of Romilda Vane. These are four very different people, but if you look closely, there is something that separates the women he wants from the women he doesn't - including Hermione. 

Just because the entire internet wants her, doesn't mean Harry does too.

Ginny Weasley is a Caucasian Gryffindor student one year younger than Harry. Cho Chang is an Asian Ravenclaw one year older than Harry. They seem completely different on the surface, you racist bastard, but let's take a closer look. Cho Chang is characterized as being kind, timid, and delicate. She's a tiny, very pretty girl with sleek hair and freckles. When she first appears, she has a naive, innocent nature, though she later toughens up after an indirect encounter with Voldemort and joins Dumbledore's Army. She's one of the only characters to be depicted openly crying during the books, and she's one of the only women to play on a house Quidditch team. Ginny Weasley, on the other hand, is depicted as being kind and timid around her long-time idol, Harry. Her family prevent her from roughhousing with her brothers, as she is regarded as being too delicate for that. Physically, she's described as being tiny and extremely pretty, with freckles and long, sleek hair. When she first appears, she's naive and innocent enough to be taken in by Tom Riddle's diary, but after surviving her encounter with the Horcrux, she toughens up and joins Dumbledore's Army. She is one of the only characters to be depicted openly crying, and she's also one of the only women to play on a ... you see where I'm going with this.

These are essentially the same person.

Hermione - along with Parvati Patil and Romilda Vane - falls well outside Harry's unnervingly specific criterion for romantic partners. For one thing, these women are much more outspoken and direct; Parvati nags Harry to be a better date, Romilda actually resorts to chemical warfare in a bold attempt to win him over, and Hermione spends most of the series telling Harry what to do to keep his Boy-Who-Lived ass alive. Furthermore, Hermione doesn't even come close to meeting Harry's physical standards. Emma Watson may be an internet Goddess whose status is rivaled only by Jennifer Lawrence's, but in the books, Hermione is described as being bushy haired and bucktoothed. When she throws on a dress and runs a comb through her hair for the Yule Ball, her friends and classmates actually have astonishing difficulty recognizing her. She does eventually find a sneaky way to deal with her chipmunk-toothed problem, only to fall into the clutches of Bellatrix Lestrange a few years later and become disfigured when a racial slur is carved into her forearm. 

Not cool, Bellatrix.

So Rowling can talk about 'wish fulfillment' all she wants - she set up Harry with wishes of his own, and they don't involve his bushy-haired friend. 

Hermione needs to be a know-it-all.

If you look over at a classmate and call them a "Hermione Granger" - something that has happened to me many, many times - chances are, you're not paying them a compliment. You're pointing out that they spend so much time with their hand in the air that their fingers have gangrene, or that they spend so much time reading they have to manually re-moisten their eyeballs with a sponge. Hermione is fully aware of what her 'keener' status is doing to her reputation - an actual teacher, who would normally encourage these things, docks her house points for being, and I quote, "an insufferable know-it-all". So why does she keep acting that way? There are really only two explanations; either it's some sort of deep-seated compulsion she has, like an academic Tourette's syndrome, or else she just gets off on knowing trivia that other people don't. Either way, it's pretty clear that Hermione isn't going to change anytime soon.

Hermione in her natural habitat.

So if Hermione's habit of correcting other people is built-in, unalterable and potentially necessary for her to achieve sexual arousal, she's only going to be happy if she finds a partner who:

1. Is in constant need of correcting. 

2. Marvels at her brilliance on a regular basis. 

And if you look around Hogwarts based on those two criterion alone, it's Ron "Not the spiders" Weasley who meets them the best. No other character in the entire series operates on the same redheaded-stepchild logic that drives Ron to be the single most quotable person to appear in the franchise.

Pictured: the appropriate reaction to almost everything that comes out of Ron's mouth.

And that's exactly what Hermione needs. Think about what happens every time the trio runs into some kind of danger. Hermione figures out exactly what the team needs to do, from preventing Harry from drinking poison in Book 1, to remembering to pack spare clothing when the pair sets out for a year of camping in Book 7. And the boys' reactions are always the same. Harry snatches up whatever help Hermione is offering, beats his chest, screams "I AM THE CHOSEN ONE" and runs off to find more danger for Hermione to deal with for him. Ron, meanwhile, tends to stick around and let Hermione know just how clever and brilliant she is. Book by book, Ron makes it clear that if a know-it-all is in the market for a partner, he's really the obvious choice.

Ginny Weasley is a stand-in for Lily Evans. 

J.K. Rowling is more obsessed with the circle of life than Mufasa ever was. All of her books deal heavily with inter-generational relations, and the quasi-depressing idea that we're all doomed to do more or less the same stupid things that our parents did. This is hinted at throughout the book - Neville bravely confronts Voldemort like his parents did, the Weasley children grow up to be a combination of quirky and bureaucratic like their father, Teddy Lupin is a Morphmagus like his mother, and so on - but no one is a better example of a parental clone than Harry himself. Harry essentially assumes his father's life - they are almost identical in appearance, they were both Gryffindors who played for the house Quidditch team, both are close to Remus Lupin and Sirius Black, they both make liberal use of the invisibility cloak, both are killed by Voldemort, and both have a tendency to be arrogant shitheads.

I refuse to believe that those glasses were trendy for over forty years.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Harry seems determined to be a younger, angstier and hairier James; it's only natural, then, that he should make everyone around him uncomfortable by chasing after his very own Lily. Lily Potter (nee Evans) was a redheaded witch of low birth who spent most of her childhood fully aware of her magical powers and anxiously awaiting the day she'd finally get to go to Hogwarts. At school, she was revered for her intelligence, good looks, wit and stubborn, sharp-tongued charm. Her potions teacher, Professor Slughorn, was so delighted with her that he inducted her into his apparently-prestigious Slug Club, where students stand around in fancy outfits and try not to be eaten by vampires. Slughorn wasn't the only male to notice her, either; she was wildly popular at school, and spent most of her later years fending off the affections of multiple boys. 

Nope, no Oedipus complex here. No, sir.

Do I even need to spell it out? (Pun possibly intended. Sorry.) Ginny is a redhead of low birth who spent much of her childhood fully aware of the magical community and longing to get on the Hogwarts train. She, too, was a member of the Slug Club, revered for her good looks, wit and fiery-headed charm. She spends her later years at school being constantly inundated with the affections of her male classmates, to the point that her brothers, Fred and George, threaten to intervene. 

Yeah, good luck with that. 

Hermione may be a lot of things, but she's no substitute for Harry's deceased mother. Sure, she's clever like Lily, and yes, she comes from a Muggle-born background, but that's where the similarities end. Hermione was completely oblivious to her supernatural powers during childhood, and only clued in to her abilities when a Hogwarts representative turned up at her dentist parents' doorstep. While Lily was kind and charming, Hermione almost inevitably comes across as abrasive and insufferable to everyone who's not as smart as she is. Far from being coveted by every student with a Y chromosome, Hermione is ignored by men - the only exceptions being Viktor Krum, a Bulgarian Quidditch player who knows her for less than two weeks, and Ron, her eventual husband. So if Rowing's goal was to show us how life comes full circle, she doesn't need to go back on her decision to marry Harry and Ginny - she got it right the first time. 

___________________________________________________________________________________________

So how do you feel about J.K. Rowling's announcement? Are Ron and Hermione truly meant for each other? Or is Rowling right to say that they'd never work out?

I'm up for the 2014 Canadian Blog Award for Best Funny Blog! If you enjoyed this post, consider voting for me here - anyone can vote!

4

Tangled vs. Frozen: How They're Secretly the Same Movie

On November 27, 2013, Disney released their 53rd animated feature film: Frozen. Based incredibly loosely on Hans Christian Anderson's pants-shitting nightmare story The Snow Queen - minus all the kidnapping, pedophilia and Satan, of course - Frozen has been hailed as the greatest animated movie to come out of Disney studios since the Spice Girls broke up. Audiences seem to agree - the film has raked in $813 million dollars worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing Disney film ever released.

Yeah, yeah, we get it Simba, you're #1.

If you haven't seen Frozen yet, you need to. Immediately. For two good reasons:

1. Until you've seen Frozen, you are an empty, joyless shell of the person you will be after viewing this film. Seriously. You are a skin-wrapped void where fond memories of an animated talking snowman, a self-aware reindeer and Disney's greatest song ever should be.
2. If you haven't watched Frozen, this blog post is going to be a gigantic festival of spoilers.

You know you wanted to see this again.

Even if you haven't seen the full movie, it only takes one glance at a poster to recognize that Frozen is animated in the exact same style as Disney's first successful foray into 3D animation - Tangled. Both films feature protagonist with wide doe eyes, impossibly long eyelashes, tiny chins and whole lot of sideburns. It's not exactly hard to understand why; right from the beginning, it's obvious that the two movies were created with the same artists, programmers and sentient pieces of software that Disney rely on. Know what else Frozen and Tangled have in common?

Their entire freaking plot.

Subtle, Disney. Subtle.

On the surface, the two films couldn't be more different: Tangled is a heartwarming re-telling of Rapunzel (without the blindness or unplanned childbirth), and Frozen is a heartwarming re-telling of The Ice Queen (without enslaved children with chunks of mirror lodged in their eyes). Rapunzel is smothered by her overbearing mother and wants a glimpse of a royal castle. Princesses Anna and Elsa grew up in isolation without parents, and Anna dreams of stepping foot outside the royal castle. Totally different. But when you put on your nitpicking hat and really dissect the stories, you'll find that Rapunzel's story is just a combination of Anna and Elsa's stories. 

Don't believe it? Let's see if this sounds familiar:

The story starts with a young princess, who spends her entire childhood shut up in a castle/tower/stone structure of some sort. She was involved in a mysterious incident as a young child, and her parents desperately try to conceal her supernatural powers from the outside world. From a young age, she knows that there will be terrible - albeit non-specific - consequences if her magical abilities are ever revealed.

"Uncontrollable Ice Queen powers" might be slightly more difficult to hide than glowing hair.

And so the young princess grows up naive and restless, yearning for a chance to step outside her stone walls and take part in the world outside. She tries to while away the long hours with art (either painting it or conversing with it), but it's a poor substitute for human contact.

One of these girls is marginally crazier than the other one.

Everything changes, of course, when the princess reaches a milestone birthday and technically becomes an adult. For the first time, her world opens up, and everything she's been missing out on is there for her to explore. Of course, her newfound freedom is only temporary - she only has one day (Princess Anna) or three days (Rapunzel) to fulfill all her hopes and dreams before returning to isolation. No sooner is she left alone, however, than she has an unorthodox chance meeting with a man with well-groomed facial hair. 

If Flynn Rider and Prince Hans combined their facial hair, they'd almost have a full beard.

The princess sets off on a grand adventure to, er, find herself, or resolve her lifelong angst, or whatever it is she's doing. Shortly after setting out, she and her incredibly reluctant travel companion wind up at a dimly-lit establishment in the middle of nowhere, where the princess gets some unlikely help from a large, burly, potato-shaped man. 

A large, burly, potato-shaped man who is definitely in touch with his feminine side. 

The princess reaches the apex of her journey, and learns to lighten up and embrace the quirky teenager/palace-dwelling ice monarch that she truly is inside. In a weirdly specific shared plot point, she undergoes a personal transformation and becomes exponentially hotter with an elaborate braided hairdo. 

Either the animating software came with a "screw it, let's slap a braid on her" button, or someone at Disney has a braid fetish.

With her inner Zooey Deschanel character unveiled, the braided princess takes a long, hard look at her travel companion and realizes that he makes her feel all tingly inside. He's a scruffy, orphaned commoner from the wrong side of the tracks, and he's locked in an unnatural, empathetic bromance with a sassy ungulate, so by modern Disney standards, he's obviously her soulmate.

Next time, Disney, I demand a movie about a scruffy Canadian lumberjack and his beloved moose.

Just as it looks like the princess is about to board the 'happy ending' train and ride off into the sunset, with true love and large hoofed animal in tow, she's tricked into leaving his side and returning home. Things take yet another weirdly specific turn when the princess bravely sacrifices herself to prevent a traitor from her past from stabbing her loved one to death. 

Wow, that Flynn picture does not look so good out of context.

Disney isn't quite ready to actually have a princess suffer for her actions and spend the rest of her life as a dark-haired commoner with a dead boyfriend, or as a girl-shaped chunk of ice; naturally, everything works out for the better, and the princess re-claims her place as the most beloved member of the royal family. Most importantly, at long last, she's is finally in a place where she's happy and truly being herself. And how do we know that? Why, it's because her hair has finally returned to its natural colour, of course! And she even gets to kiss the guy!

Disney: masters of recycling.

Now, don't get me wrong. Disney can spruce up this same formula with cute characters and catchy songs from now until the heat death of the universe, and I will watch every family-friendly moment of it, assuming that I possess biological immortality I was otherwise unaware of. But there is a formula there. 

Like a lobster. Technically, these little fuckers can live forever.

What do you think? Are Tangled and Frozen two fancy re-tellings of the same story? Or am I on a special kind of crazy pills this week? Please, do let me know.

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