[Quick hit: thank you WordPress scheduling feature!]

Considering my past musings on Disney Princesses and Princess Culture, I couldn’t let The Will Box‘s photo set of Disney Princesses in armor to go by without comment.

The costumes came to my attention in this io9 article. Since I am not much of a cosplay aficionado, I’ll admit I only scrolled through the first dozen or so pictures to see the Princess remixes — after that, things devolved very quickly to a bunch of pictures of people I don’t know, trying to look like fictional characters I also don’t know, in an expression of a hobby (cosplaying) that I just profoundly don’t get.

Ultimately, one of my discomforts around cosplay is the cultural patterning that so often happens with men armoring themselves up while women sex themselves up (also see: Halloween costuming trends).

To some degree, these armored Princesses still twinge my discomfort on that score, being as the “armor” is still very much of the plate-mail bikini variety. Nevertheless, I am also very interested in and pleased by the subversive remix of presenting these Princesses as individuals capable of their own fights and self-defense, rather than needing to wait around for their princes to rescue them. And all while maintaining enough of the original iconography for the connections to be clear.

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Image Credit: The Will Box. (Retrieved from: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.575306665931274.1073741976.308639119264698&type=1 )