Although Disney has never shied away from a certain amount of darkness in its animated feature films — this is, after all, the studio that notoriously introduced millions of traumatized children to the concept of seeing your parents murdered in front of you— the corporation has always had a particularly complicated relationship with its princesses. Decades before the first thinkpiece bewailing the sexist heteronormativity of Cinderella or the passive femininity of Sleeping Beauty, Disney was already in the habit of sanitizing the source material in its princess oeuvre, skipping over the gore, the grit, and the occasional not-so-happy ending.

Examples abound: the stepsisters in Disney’s Cinderella are ugly, cruel, and grasping — but they don't cut off their own toes to try to fit into the glass slipper, as in the original fairy tale. The Little Mermaid as told by Hans Christian Anderson was a devastating story of a girl who gives up everything (and eventually takes her own life), all for the love of a man who sees her only as a friend; in Disney’s hands, it became a tale of self-actualization and empowerment to a banging soundtrack of crustacean calypso. Snow White, the first ever animated Disney feature film, gave its villainous queen a less-macabre comeuppance even as it left the central theme of savage female intrasexual competition intact.

But there’s censorship, and then there’s social engineering — and so perhaps it was inevitable that the corporation which prohibits depictions of smoking alongside impalements and beheadings would also, eventually, decide that it wasn't enough just to do away with the darker or more sexually tinged elements of its fairy tales. The whole idea of princesses needed to be reimagined for the modern age, brought into compliance with an entertainment landscape ruled by the strong female character, a.k.a. women with hot bodies and great hair who otherwise behave just like men. Contemporary heroines weren’t looking for a happily-ever-after in the arms of a handsome prince; they were tough, smart, sexually adventurous, and possessed of the formerly male-coded inclination to solve their conflicts by punching things.