#i literally used to pray to princess diana because i saw someone say in a movie that the queen was closer to god

[fictionchronicler-blog]

Prince Charming: A Historical Romp Through Masculinity, Marriage, and Bad Haircuts

“And then he realized the doll wasn’t completely inflated.”

NOTE: Illustrations and gifs do not belong to me.

Ah, the perfect man, riding gallantly on a white horse, cape billowing in the wind, armor blinding in the sunlight—and he's on his way to find you, gentle reader!  This is supposed to be what we want, and I don't just mean women, but I mean general audiences.  The handsome prince saving the day is one of the oldest and arguably most satisfying endings there is.

While the term “Prince Charming” itself wasn't coined until 1889 in an English translation of the French fairy tale The Blue Bird, the idea of a noble man rescuing a damsel (usually a princess) from some unholy terror is as old as time, categorized as “princess and dragon tales” by folklorists.  Andromeda in Greek mythology has to be saved by Perseus from the kraken.  Sita in The Ramayana has to be saved by Rama.  In a Norwegian tale, not one but three princesses have to be saved from a troll, the youngest getting the guy in true fairy tale fashion.

This was...a very broad concept, I'll admit, and I almost decided not to do it, but the idea of the ideal man coming along and giving the heroine her happy ending has adapted over time like anything else, and your reliable ol' folklore researcher is here to guide you through it!

As True a Story as Fargo

“I rang the dinner bell fifteen minutes ago. Are you two still fighting?”

The tale of Saint George and the Dragon has been around since at least the eleventh century telling the story of a town needing to feed the nearby lake dragon two sheep a day to keep it from destroying their village—a scaly, supernatural Mafia situation. When that no longer appeases the dragon, the village assumes this means it wants the taste of human flesh and starts a lottery, the “winner” getting to sacrifice one of their children. Well, one day, the lottery winner is the princess. Dressed as a bride, she is led out into the forest to wait for the dragon.

In the first version I read of this, the princess volunteered to sacrifice herself for the good of her people, but I digress. We'll talk about women's agency here and there. Saint George comes across the princess and subsequently the dragon. Ordering the princess to give him her girdle, she does so and Saint George places it around the beast's neck. From here on out, the dragon follows the princess around like a dog on a leash. Saint George takes his new, unique entourage back to the village and offers to kill the dragon if the townspeople convert to Christianity. Fifteen thousand men convert. Take that, modern evangelism.

While Saint George and the Dragon is largely allegory, it falls in perfectly with the big medieval trend of courtly love. In a nutshell, courtly love is a way to make love both passionate and disciplined. Romantic love hadn't really been covered in literature up until now, Beowulf not really having to deal with having to juggle two prom dates.

It's hard to explain what courtly love is without saying “emo.” Think of love the way a teenager might see it. Not seething with jealously? It's not love. Your feelings aren't ruining your appetite? Not love. This was more or less a series of rules and concepts that dictated how romantic love was supposed to be. A man's good character makes him worthy of love. You should turn pale when your lover is around. Women should grieve for at least two years before allowing themselves to love again. It is not proper to love a woman you would be ashamed to marry, etc. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about courtly love is that there isn't that big an emphasis on love being returned. When a man falls for a woman, he should do nice things for her and just hope that one day she'll love him, too. Unrequited love was pretty romanticized. You can get a really nice feel for it in The Cantebury Tales' “The Knight's Tale.”

No.  That’s something else.  “The Knight's Tale” is much more long-winded and has no Queen songs.  That, and it's one of the least funny tales.  Thank goodness for the Miller and his story that involves farting in people's faces. Anyway, the tale is all about two imprisoned knights who fall in love with Princess Emily at first sight and spend the rest of the time fighting over her and praying to Roman gods to marry her...while she prays to Diana to either stay single or marry someone who truly loves her.    It's not as fun as other tales, mainly because the Knight has a tendency to get off-topic, but if you want textbook courtly love, read that.

So what do these stories tell us about people's version of the ideal man in the Middle Ages?

1. Competent.  A real man gets things done.

2. Decisive. A real man does not stew on the morality of killing dragons.

3. Protective. Sombody’s gotta look out for these women who are inferior to men in every way, amirite?

4. Upper Class. Peasant men might not have had much time to rescue damsels. And the Peasants Respond!

Just a tad predatory looking. All he needs to do is sit on her chest while a random horse watches...

While fiction in the Middle Ages really enjoyed its daring sword fights and unrequited love, peasants in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries told tales to children with a far different purpose—don't go into the woods.  For the love of God, don't go into the woods, don't make deals with the devil, and don't run afoul of the fairy folk.  This might seem funny, but for peasants living in or around the Black Forest of Germany, this was no laughing matter.  Think how many fairy tales are more about being suspicious of suspicious-looking people than romantic love.  Keep in mind, too, that there is little to no chance of upward mobility in this kind of society.  If you're a peasant, your kids are going to be peasants, marry peasants, and produce little peasants of their own.  It's even worse if you're a farmer and your family's prosperity depends wholly on how well your crops do.  How can you get ahead in life?

1. Go off the grid and become a pirate/bandit/thief

2. Learn alchemy and hope for the best

3. Join the church and live in a cubicle for the rest of your life

4. Marry up.

The stories collected by the Brothers Grimm took royalty and made it the ultimate reward.  In most of their stories, if the protagonist (male or female) is clever enough to outsmart the villain and/or kind enough to listen to cleverer people who know how to outsmart the villain, they are usually rewarded with a prince or a princess at the end.  There really isn't much disparity in how often the reward is a princes vs. a princess.

I won't go into much detail in what all these stories are about, but if you haven't ever heard of “The Three Spinners,” “Cinderella,” “The Six Swans,” “Snow White,” “Snow White and Rose Red,” or “The Peasant's Wise Daughter,” you might be surprised to learn that the protagonist(s) is a plucky, kind-hearted, usually skilled maiden and her reward is a prince. For all the crap fairy tales get for being chauvinistic, it's jarring that the most memorable characters are all female.

So jarring, Charles Perrault decided to make a few changes.

In the late 1600s, fairy tales started becoming appealing to the rich, and like all good things the poor come up with, the rich people took it over and added a bunch of rules.  Many upper class French men and women had heard these peasant tales and saw them as potential for witty conversation in the salons. I like me some stimulating conversation, but I also know when not to mess with the original.  With courtly love also coming back into vogue, the stories evolved into elegant, romantic tales with a heavily-hammered-in moral at the end.  Less blood and fewer trees. The forest became a more pastoral setting, or even a city.  The peasant protagonists became gentry or displaced royalty.  And marriage became a big, big deal.

When in the Middle Ages, the prince figure was usually a knight a man of action, these were unquestionably princes, their refinement and sophistication as highly valued as their masculinity.  Beauty and the Beast started as sort of a fable for arranged marriages, that the guy you end up with may not fit your definition of handsome, but if you look deep enough, you'll find something lovable.

“Forgot my keys--oh.”

Okay, so you might not find something lovable, but the Beast is no less an extremely romantic (read: emo) character.  He asks Beauty every night to marry him, gives her his estate and possessions and invisible servants with no questions asked, and literally cannot live without her as he begins wasting away when she leaves to visit her family.  And of course, he's a prince that pissed off the wrong fairy.

It is in this same era that Perrault tweaked the Cinderella story.  The Grimms told a story of Cinderella's dead mother supplying her a gown and other ball-related necessities via tree, but Perrault creates a “fairy godmother” who pops in at the last minute to help Cinderella go to the ball—a place where she might be able to catch a husband and escape her bad home life—but never appeared before to use her benevolent magic to stop the girl's stepmother and stepsisters from abusing her. Perrault also cut out the stepsisters cutting off parts of their feet to try to fit into the slipper, preferring to have Cinderella turn the other cheek and find desirable husbands for them instead.  

We're going from the clever, talented heroines in the Grimm stories to waifs who are damned if they do, damned if they don't.  If you're pure and sheltered like Sleeping Beauty, you'll still fall into a hundred-year coma.  And if you're naughty...well, this time a woodcutter has to come cut Red Riding Hood out of the Wolf's stomach...then fill said stomach with stones. This kind of undoes Perrault's moral about not trusting strangers since this woodcutter never appears in the story at any other time, but we can't have a morally susceptible female rescuing herself, can we?  Even Bluebeard downplays the heroine's character to uplift the prince's/nobleman's. Bluebeard's a freakin' serial killer and yet Perrault's text blames the wife for the situation, that if she just had refrained from being too curious, her husband wouldn't be trying to kill her for finding out about all his previous wives.  

“Princes went from chivalrous to serial killers?”

Not quite, but the heroines were rarely given personalities and the princes were the rescuers, the real movers and shakers in the story. Princes went on adventures and rescued future brides.  In 1706, the first English translation of One Thousand and One Nights told the West the story of Prince Ahmed, who a nifty magic tent that could expand to the point where it could hold armies and contract to the point where he could put it in his pocket.  He also happens to buy a magic healing apple and saves a princess with it.  There are a number of strong, three-dimensional female characters, but the princes all get to be active and go on adventures.  There is also a robot.  I'm not joking. But a huge double standard is that women are foolish and selfish and cheating on their husbands with a Moor is the worst thing ever, but the men in the story (princes included) sleep around, hit women, and even Sinbad murders a bunch of innocent people for food, but the male characters are rarely punished in these stories.  The whole fictional reasons these stories exist also lauds men; the Sultan is worried about being cheated on, so he kills every wife he has.  Scheherazade, the newest wife, is creative and clever and tells stories that always leave the Sultan wanting more, so he spares her life, choosing to keep her after a thousand and one nights.  The Sultan lives happily ever after, madly in love with an intended murder victim.  

So let’s see how things have changed?

1. Competent?  Check.

2. Decisive?  Check.

3. Upper Class?  More check than ever.

4. Protective?

Protection adapted, didn't it?  Protection stopped being more about keeping women away from beasts and more about providing for women.  The men in these stories are not only filthy rich—which is its own kind of protection—but they are also morally guiding these women and keeping them alive.  Bluebeard's wife is rescued by her brothers at the end, but Perrault says the moral of the story is that curiosity can lead to deep regret.  He then goes on to talk about how “clearly” this story takes place a long time ago as, “No husband would be so terrible as to demand the impossible of his wife.”  How the hell is that the issue when the man's a serial killer???  What does curiosity have to do with the very first wife???

We're going to throw in another value here.  Wise.

Think about it. Cinderella's prince immediately seeks her out, seeing her as no one has seen her before, as appealing. The “Marquis” in Puss in Boots is in reality a simple miller's son, but the Cat is so worldly and clever that he more than makes up for it. The woodcutter is a fatherly figure who heard Red Riding Hood's cries for help and knew exactly what to do and took her home to her mother. Even Bluebeard, who sets his wives up for failure and has a room full of tortured corpses is entitled to test his wife and keep this horrendous secret, his only crime being that he “asked the impossible of his wife,” which translates to, “asked his wife not to be too curious about her own home, lest she find the room of tortured corpses.”

Yin and Yang

Hamlet: I said I wanted the grave to be dug under a weeping willow tree on the edge of a cliff perpetually surrounded by mist!  How hard is that?

Gravedigger: But this is where the cemetery is, sir.

Hamlet: (to skull) Can you believe this guy?

Hamlet, first performed in 1605 is not anything all that special, but so many tote it as Shakespeare's masterpiece.  My theory is that that is all propaganda on the part of actors.  Getting to play Hamlet is like being written a blank check—the actor can do with the role whatever he wants because it is sooooo ambiguous!  You don't even know how old Hamlet's supposed to be, as he's a student in medieval Denmark, which would put him in his late teens, but the gravedigger says Hamlet's 30.  Hamlet seems slightly more upset about his mother remarrying than having learned his father was murdered, but he also goes berserk a few times at people who aren't involved in his father's murder at all, and while Claudius, the villain, murders one person (in back story) and angsts about it for the rest of the play, Hamlet himself gets quite the body count and shows little to no remorse about it.  

Does the fact that Hamlet is a prince have to do with this role often being the peak of an actor's career?  Why do we think an actor who can play Hamlet well can do anything?  Hamlet's not really enough of a jerk that it's Villain Sympathy.  In fact, Hamlet is one of the least proactive protagonists in literature.  The majority of the play is him wondering what he should do.  Should he listen to this ghost that claims to be his father?  Should he tell any of his friends what's going on?  Should he kill Claudius when he finds out that, yes, the guy did kill his dad?  Should he leave his mom out of it, or was she involved?  To be or not to be?  

But to the mainstream, Hamlet is the guy who holds the skull and waxes poetic while sword fighting in period dress.  Somehow, him just sitting on this supernatural order to avenge his father's death has been twisted to where we've decided it's the role of a lifetime.  Shakespeare wrote other characters who were princes, but none of them were as prominent or as over-analyzed as Hamlet.  

Does Hamlet have any good qualities?  Well, of course, or the play would have been a complete flop.  He's magnetic.  He's smart, snarky, and unsure of himself.  But then you have Ophelia, his love interest.  Whereas Hamlet is defined by his struggle to be decisive, Ophelia just lets her father and brother make decisions for her.  She is dutiful, she has no idea that Hamlet is pretending to be crazy for some of the play (or maybe he is crazy.  So much ambiguity), and when her brother leaves, Hamlet seemingly rejects her from out of nowhere, her father is killed and her lover banished, she goes off the deep end.

Therefore, it seemed like what was going on is that women were losing more and more of their credibility while royal men could afford the luxuries of indecision here and there so long as they still fit all the other criteria.

Hammer It Further In, Victorians!

The Victorians might just be my favorite historical group of people. They're a psychological delight.  Not that they were as repressed as pop culture makes them out to be, but they were all about restraint when it came to deviant behaviors and ideas, often disguising them. In the Victorian era, the hero stopped being the centerpiece of the story.  Most of the care, detail, and time went into the villain. Dracula, Sweeney Todd, Spring Heeled Jack, Frankenstein, Dorian Grey, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and just about the rest of the cast of Penny Dreadful were the ones driving the plot of their respective stories, the ones the authors paid the most attention to.  Often, they were pitted against an innocent heroine, like Christine in The Phantom of the Opera and Mina in Dracula, but there was an edge to them.  Both Christine and Mina might surprise readers in how deadpan and genre-savvy both these women are, and while they don't physically vanquish their beasts, they play key roles.

So where does this leave the prince?

The role of the home in the Victorian era became more significant than ever before.  A man's home was his castle.  His job was to make it a safe haven; his family's job was to make it a domestic ideal.  Again, the ideal man was a protector, someone who could keep his wife and children safe from beasts (poor people, people who didn't speak English, Irishmen, etc.), but also protect them morally.  It's kind of easy to be seduced by the list of villains I put on here, isn't it?  They're just as rich as princes, sometimes handsome, often decisive and passionate...and maybe therein lies the problem.  The ideal man was not yet passionately in love with the heroine.  

“What do you call all that courtly love business?”

Isn't that more in love with the idea of being in love?  Honestly, you pick a random woman, say you'll do great things for her whether she loves you or not, but at the end of the day, you're the one getting the credit for doing those brave deeds and she'll be seen as ungrateful because you've never even had a conversation with her to tell her how you feel.  Loving a woman in the sense that you physically desire her while still desiring her friendship wasn't happening yet.  In a society that didn't encourage women to be open about their own passions, the men also weren't really allowed to do much that wouldn't result in a scandal.  He was supposed to treat his wife more like an employee than the object of his affection.  He could praise her skills at mothering and running a household, and maybe she could play a mean tune on the pianoforte, but none of her skills were supposed to be superior to his own.  The princes and heroes of the Victorian age were as bland as all get-out because everybody wanted to live vicariously through the more passionate villains.  

Well, film changed how we view the devil.  Did it change how we view Prince Charming?

Who Would Have Thought Melodrama was Boring?

Now, to be fair, not all these guys are princes, but I would be remiss if I was going to talk about princes in film and omit Disney's contribution.  For a long time, Disney animators had difficulty animating human men, and it shows.  Remember that short, Goddess of Spring?  Even though her arms are boneless, she looks like a passable female human. The god of the Underworld, though?  It looks like an old-time Mardi Gras mask.  

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in 1937, the same year that the Prince Valiant comic strip did, and both princes are given next to no personalities.  Snow White's prince doesn't even get a name!  Please stop saying Snow White is objectified when it's her prince that is treated as nothing more than a goal and subsequently a reward.

“But his heroism is just supposed to be accepted because he's a man and he's royal!”

Is it?  Disney animators tried to work around the lack of princely influence in the Grimm version by writing a subplot about the Evil Queen capturing the Prince and him escaping...but animating a realistic-looking man was just too hard for them.  We don't care about him or look at him like a person.  He's Snow White's reward.  Nothing more.

Cinderella's prince, officially the “Prince Charming” of Disney canon, is also objectified.  He has maybe three lines?  He isn't even there when Cinderella puts on the slipper?  His dad is given more screen time than him?  

Notice that, in keeping with the Victorian melodramas and silent movie traditions, the movies that have the most boring princes have very engaging, very passionate villains.  The Evil Queen, the Wicked Stepmother, and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty are given richer animation, more distinctive voice actors, and a deliciously evil charm, that, so far, the princes just can't top.  They remained fairly quiet with their heroism just a given.  Around this same time, Laurence Olivier won an Oscar for 1948's Hamlet, the only time an Oscar was given to someone playing a Shakespearean character.  So it seemed like the prince was still relatively unexplored.  “He's a prince!  Must be a great guy.”

Not all princes in early Hollywood were bland, but there was a kind of leading man that got a lot more action, both in the cinematic and romantic sense—the rogue.

In the 30s and 40s, it was more common for the hero of a movie to be anything but a prince.  He was a hard-boiled private detective, a thief (usually of the Robin Hood variety), or a pirate, as swashbuckling dramas were big back then. Princes, therefore, started becoming a little buffoonish.  The ideal man in the 50s was, oddly, the family man.  The prince had changed to the ruler of a suburban home, still retaining all the traits we've mentioned before, only Ward Cleaver (Leave it to Beaver), Steve Douglas (My Three Sons), Ozzie Nelson (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), and Andy Taylor (The Andy Griffith Show) all upheld values most of Middle America agreed with and added a truly positive item to our list:

1. Competent

2. Decisive

3. Upper Class-ish (rise of the middle class!)

4. Wise

5. They Want to be Dads

Parody Ensues

The 60s changed a lot of things, how princes are portrayed among them. While the Prince Valiant comic strip was still going strong, people began wondering if this Prince Charming ideal was really a positive thing.  Wasn't the upper-to-middle class white guy the enemy of the Civil Rights Movement?  Wasn't the patriarchal figurehead oppressing and dismissing women?  Were these guys—gasp--just like everyone else in that they're fallible and sometimes do stupid or misguided things? Jeez, these Prince Charmings (Princes Charming?) must all be doofuses when you peel back the veneer.  Isn't that how princes are in real life?

When Royalty Smiles...

In 1973, Jay Williams wrote the children's book Petronella, and it fit right in with the Women's Movement.  Eager to seek her fortune, Petronella sets out into the world like her brothers and learns about a prince held captive by a wizard named Albion.  Albion says she must prove herself by completing certain fairytale-esque tasks, she does so through kindness and wit, and—spoiler alert—she and Albion fall in love.  Turns out, the prince is just a house guest that won't leave.  I can't find the cover art for the back of the book, but the prince looks like a Monty Python character.

In this same year, there was another book out there with a prince who was deceptively appealing.  William Goldman wrote The Princess Bride and later adapted it for the screen in 1987.  The only person who starts out as royalty in the book is Prince Humperdinck, and that name alone should tell you this isn't someone to take seriously.  Sure, he's competent, noted in the film for being an excellent tracker, and he's quite the mastermind, but he's also the villain!  The whole reason he plans to marry Buttercup is so he can kill her on their wedding night and frame another kingdom for it so he can get a war!  Buttercup's True Love is actually a former farm boy named Westley who is doing a stint as the Dread Pirate Roberts.  Humperdinck doesn't stand a chance.

I do like Chris Sarandon's performance.  He brings such dignity to it, which actually makes it more fun.  

As if pop culture wasn't dropping the anvil fast enough that Prince Charmings weren't all they were cracked up to be, Stephen's Sondheim's Into the Woods gave us Cinderella's Prince and Rapunzel's Prince, and the line, “I was raised to be charming, not sincere,” says it all.  Who would have thought a musical about interconnecting fairy tales would have so much innuendo (it's pretty uncomfortable seeing certain parts of this with children, let me tell you), adultery, psychological abuse, and character deaths?  It was finally filmed in 2014 and satirizes these angst-ridden overly-masculine types with the song “Agony:”

We're going to talk about one more before we get an interesting counterpoint to all this parody. Ladies and gentlemen, Prince Charming from the Shrek universe:

Forget the fact he looks like Jaime from Game of Thrones.  Rupert Everett's Prince Charming is a spoiled, prissy snob whose mother is none other than the Fairy Godmother, the brains behind the operation. Seriously, the movie where Prince Charming takes the lead as the Big Bad is terrible.  There isn't much to say about the role even though it's entertaining except that it just goes to the other extreme.  Prince Charming is decisive about not letting an ogre be with the woman that was promised to him, and he does seem competent at horseback riding and doing the tango, but he's whiny, preens a little too much for traditional manly men, and, most importantly, is okay with forcing Fiona to be with her against her will.  

“But, but, but, if the Prince Charming archetype is just an illusion, what kind of man can we have faith in?”

Well, I would say the rogue as in most movies, he proves to be a hero underneath the snark and scruff, but that's another meta (see The Unscrupulous Hero meta).  This brings up a good point—at least these parodies of princes are characters.  They have personalities and arcs.  You can call them a lot of things but you can't call them bland.  Prince Charming up until now has been a construct, a goal, a reward. Everything but a real person. 

Evolution!

Bringing it back to the Disney princes, 1989 responded to all these unworthy princes with Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid.  I consider him the prototype prince since he is substantially given more to do and emote than the previous princes ever were, but he's still kind of vanilla.  Eric likes being out on a ship, longing for a life at sea while Ariel longs for a life on land.  Hmm.  He plays the flute, totally doesn't mind doing the messier tasks a crewman on a ship would do, and the film goes out of its way to show that he is brave and not one to be messed with.  He saves his dog from a fire and harpoons a giant octopus woman.  He hangs out with Ariel, has fun when she’s around, and this was one of the first Disney movies that introduced some chemistry between the human leads.

After Eric came the Beast, Aladdin, and Simba, and while Aladdin is by far the most fleshed-out of these characters, these prince figures were given something Eric didn't have—pain.  Disney's Beast isn't proposing to Belle every night like in the original fairy tale.  We don't meet him as a romantic lead, but as a broken chimera despairing that his entire life seems to be defined by one bad choice.  Simba may not be the most interesting character, but there is a moment in the movie where he starts yelling at the sky (read: his dead father) about Mufasa not being there for him and then just breaks down in tears and cries, “It's my fault.”  Good lord, you feel for him there as much as you do when he's a little cub shaking his dead father in hopes of awakening him.  

Prince Naveen in The Princess and the Frog is not your grandmother's prince.  It's almost a full-out comedic role as Naveen is...kind of a bum.  He's a prince, but he's lazy, so his parents have cut him off, leaving him to either get a job and work for a living, or marry a rich woman.  Ha ha, Naveen just wants to play the ukelele, enjoy New Orleans' night life, and pick the richest of his many admirers to marry.  After he falls for Tiana, he doesn't change all that much.  He is willing to work for something and can buckle down, but he's still that funny, enthusiastic guy you want to be friends with.  He isn't diminished in his relationship with her. Nor is she.  Naveen can get Tiana to loosen up, and while the plot of The Princess and the Frog is needlessly complex here and there, the romance is very strong and their banter is right up there with all the great movie romance banter.

D’awww!

Counterpoint to a Counterpoint

Oh, Prince Hans of the Southern Isles, I'm onto you, what with your romantic-comedy shtick.  To this day I am torn as to whether or not the twist to make him the villain was a good one or not.  On the one hand, it gives his character a reason for being in the story, and it's a realistic lesson that trusting everyone is just as bad as trusting no one.  However, what's the goofy little smile at the end of the clip all about?  Does he genuinely like Anna but still plans to somehow take over the throne?  Is that just how he smiles when he tweaks his own schemes?  His original plan was just to marry Elsa, but now it seems like, “Well, I can marry the cute, funny girl instead and just kill the aloof one.  Win-win.”  

“Psychopaths don't wear t-shirts saying 'You're with Psychopath' on them.”

Very true, and a commonality many psychopaths share in real life is that they are, you guessed it, charming.  They know how to attract people to them.  Unfortunately, though, things like empathizing with those people and putting those people before themselves are not really feasible things for a psychopath to do.  But then again, we are talking about film here, not real life, so is it a cheat that they made him the villain seemingly out of nowhere?  Weren't we supposed to be given some hints about his true nature since this is a story?

If you ask Disney, they did disperse clues here and there that Hans was not what he seemed.  He wears gloves, for example.  Did you know gloves are a visual shorthand for villain?  Never mind that most of Hans' screentime is either at a ball in which gloves would have been fashionably appropriate or when it's, you know, cold outside. Another thing they refer fans to is that in the song “Love is an Open Door,” Hans' lines about “finding his own place” and agreeing that Anna's “sandwiches” response to his “We finish each other's ____” was what he was going to say are indicative that he's stringing her along.  Okaaaayyyy.  

“But if you were taken in, isn't that the point?  Nobody knowingly gets involved with a psychopath.”

Yeah, but this is all so vague.  Consider that while Elsa is the queen and Anna is the princess, they are way too busy dealing with their own problems to actually rule Arendelle or do anything to help all the innocent people suddenly plagued by an unexpected winter.

Look at this!  Doesn't this just muddle things more?  Hans is the one handing out blankets and inviting the subjects to the castle where he makes it a point to say it's warm there and they've got plenty of hot food for everyone.  We're making the villain the only character in the entire thing who does any damage relief?  I'm sure this is probably a “catch more flies with honey than vinegar thing” as the truly logical person would conclude that Hans is just trying to win over the peasants so they don't revolt when he takes things over, and I know that being homicidal doesn't necessarily preclude anyone from being a great ruler, but come on!  

I guess the point the movie is trying to make with Hans is that you can meet a guy who seems great on paper and fits all the items on the checklist we've been keeping track of, but he can still turn out to be a jerk.  And I will say that Disney has tried the “surprise villain reveal” thing in a few of its other movies that came out after this, but this one handled that the best.

The New Wave

I can't say 2015's Cinderella is better than the 1950 version, but one thing it did that I admire was that it made Prince Charming a person. Prince Kit (I would have named him something else, but I digress) has his doubts that he can be as good a king as his father. Richard Madden gets to actually act as he not only has to be a little restless in his role, but also gets to express grief. He had said that the challenge of playing the Prince is to make sure that Cinderella is not seen as being lucky to get a prince, but that this prince is lucky to have found her.

We have an earlier example of this with 1998's Ever After. Prince Henry (Dougray Scott) is a very reluctant prince and shirks his duties whenever he can. It is Danielle (Drew Barrymore) who changes his way of thinking in that he can do so much good with the power that he has, and it is his obligation to do so. He listens to her, respects her, it's clear that he also physically wants her, and the two get plenty of time to get to know one another. His reaction when the princess he's betrothed to starts wailing is priceless because it's so in-character and there's even Leonardo DaVinci thrown in the movie for fun...a very charming movie indeed.

Artie Hammer is also a good prince, Prince Alcott in Mirror, Mirror. About the only good thing in that, actually. I didn't feel it was dark enough to be a Snow White story, but Snow White and the Huntsman didn't have enough joy to be a Snow White story (or enough actual dwarves playing the parts). Again, the Prince gets to be funny, gets to be a bit political as his whole reason for going to this kingdom in the first place is to meet with the Queen (Julia Roberts being horribly miscast). I don't appreciate the amount of ogling this otherwise children's movie does to the poor actor, but for the most part, he's a character in his own right. Maybe soon he'll pick some better projects that don't have him upstaged by a guy pretending to be a Native American like in The Lone Ranger.

But my all-time favorite Prince Charming has to go to Josh Dallas' David “Charming” Nolan on Once Upon a Time.

“Attention, everyone!  I know magical shenanigans are ruining all your lives, but you have to be in the background while the show focuses on my family's drama! For goodness sake, pull yourselves together and be the comic relief!”

Charming is pretty much everything we've covered so far, and you can see the historical detail they put into developing his character.  This prince started life as a shepherd, a commoner who, by some magical deals that don't merit this meta, must pose as a prince.  He gets to be one for real after he marries Snow White, but the crafted him to be a farmer-type guy.  He drives a pickup truck.  He wears a lot of flannel.  He's sometimes old-fashioned with his flaws as he can be overly protective and quick to judge, but he's also quick to change his opinion when he's proven wrong.  

Charming is deceptively easy to understand, and I don't mean that he's an airhead or a parody of what he represents.  I mean that his goals in life are simple. His likes, his morals—they're all simple, even his fears.  The man's greatest fear is that he isn't a good dad.  That's so relatable since every parent has wondered that about themselves, but it's fresh and unique when it's applied to Prince Charming, a “character” far more defined by offscreen heroics than being a member of a family.  In the very first episode, he's taking on three swordsmen while holding his infant daughter.  That's the character in a nutshell. 

It's a role that's a little underwritten, but like Hamlet, that sometimes means you can do some amazing things with it.  OUAT is full of polarizing characters, but Charming is not one of them.  He's universally loved, and that has everything to do with how convincingly Josh Dallas plays him, especially that he is able to play a father to an actress technically older than him playing his daughter.

Even when he doesn't have much to say, Josh Dallas brings so many fatherly gestures and facial expressions to the part.  That might be why the show has given him more and more to do as it's gone on.  It's a new take on the Prince Charming construct, isn't it—that all the sword-fighting, arrow-shooting, horseback riding, face-punching, and villain-confronting this guy does is for his family?  

His relationship with Snow on this show is sort of the measuring stick to which all other romantic relationships are compared to, and I wouldn't even say ��Snowing” is the main romance.  While Snow gives Charming some much-needed direction, he gives her confidence. There are so many moments when Snow is doubting herself that Charming is the one to build her back up.  His belief that his wife can do anything is the foundation of True Love, and I don't mean that he sees her through rose-tinted glasses.  They are partners. One gets the sense that they rule together, whether it be in the flashbacks in the Enchanted Forest, or how they handle the town's problems in the present. 

So I would say our checklist is looking more like this:

1. Is a complex human being with positive (competent, decisive, wise, willing to parent) and some flaws to stay interesting

2. Has respect and admiration for his love and their relationship has a healthy dose of friendship in it

But if I were to just list all of Charming's traits—good and bad—or anything other well-written character in any medium—the list might just go on and on.  It's that way with real-life personalities, and opinions will vary on what the ideal man or woman is like.  Prince Charming is no longer an archetype or a plot point but a person, a real person who is inspired to do his best for love at the same time he inspires the person he loves to do their best.  Life is hard, and it's hard to find someone to share it with, but the fact that fiction is emphasizing these aspects is so positive.