Disney Princesses are everywhere!

Since Disney Consumer Products started it's Princess franchise "six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, [their sales] have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001." With an growth like that, anyone would be hard pressed to simply ignore this 'phenomenon.' The fact is that these particular Disney characters are everywhere, even making appearances in video games. I'm not talking about the Princess-only video games directed at young girls, but Kingdom Hearts and all its sequels which are targeted towards a completely different demographic.

Kingdom Hearts, developed and published by SquareEnix (the same company that makes Final Fantasy) in conjunction with Disney, features 8 of the Princesses - minus Tiana. What's interesting, however, is each Princess' role. Of the 8 only Snow White, Aurora, Belle, Cinderella, and Jasmine are "Princesses" in Kingdom Hearts. Within the game, Pocahontas and Mulan are actually featured more substantially than Ariel, and yet are not represented as Princesses. In light of our class discussions of ethnic representation in Disney's Princess characters, it makes me wonder why Pocahontas and Mulan are left out.

Even more interesting is the conception of "Princess" in Kingdom Hearts. Not only are Snow White, Aurora, Belle, Cinderella and Jasmine Princesses, but they are, in the game's world "Princesses of Heart." A large part of Kingdom Hearts' mythology centers around the 3 parts to a being: the body, the soul, and the heart.

The heart, as one finds out during game play, is made up of light and dark, the latter of which exists because of people's greed. Princesses of Heart are maidens who are free of this darkness. What's problematic is the attachment of darkness is excluded only in those Princesses. Is it that KH is telling us that only those 5 Princesses are without darkness for a reason?

I'm sorry about this really late post, I've been feeling sick the last couple of days... and in my preoccupation totally forgot about posting this.