When Joanna Weiss of the Boston Globe and I talked about Brave, she mentioned that a lot of early reviews complained the film was unoriginal–“just another princess movie,” she said. There are two strands of criticism that I would like to address: 1.

With all that in mind, since the release of Disney-Pixar’s Brave, I’ve been reading reviews and commentaries of the film with interest. Can’t a girl who is supposed to be strong not be a loner?

Finally, having studied girl power media for several years, it bothers me that Merida is presented as isolated, an anomalous female, without a community of female peers her own age.

The storyline itself features such unappealing would-be suitors that Merida’s disinterest in romance is undercut: What if the three young men who must vie for her hand were more like Prince Charmings than doofuses?.

The film’s marketing, which essentially ignores that Brave is a tale of a mother-daughter relationship (presumably for fear that such a story wouldn’t be a box office draw), is insulting.

I saw Brave the day it debuted in theaters, and I’m glad that Merida is a different kind of princess–one who can be read as a critique of both the trope that princesses are passive and the trend to tell their stories as romances.

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