Disney: 100 years of waiting for Prince Charming

Reflecting on the Disney centenary, Lauren Windle finds herself dis-enchanted with Prince Charming and reflecting on what might be a better kind of attraction.

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

A plastic wind-up Snow White toy stands to the right of the photo, with hands clasped waiting

Photo by King Lip on Unsplash.

Picture the scene: you’re outside running an errand; maybe you’re taking the bins out or cleaning your car in the street. The sun is blazing and you’re in a great mood. Bolstered by the good weather, you start to sing to yourself. Maybe you’ve got Spotify on or the car radio’s playing. Just as you’re getting your groove on to Gaga, someone comes up behind you, about a foot away and joins in with the song . . . Startled, you stop singing and swing round to see the other half of your unsolicited duet.

The other person also stops and says: ‘Hello, did I frighten you?’ Clearly concerned, you back away towards your house. The person continues: ‘Wait, wait, please don’t run away.’ As you dash through the front door and slam it behind you, you hear your uninvited singing partner pick up the song where the two of you left off in an attempt to serenade you as you flee.

They never made a Snow White 2. Maybe that’s because watching the slow and agonizing breakdown of a relationship that was entered into prematurely isn’t very ‘Disney’.

Menacing, right? No one’s stopping to swap numbers with the creepy crooner. Except this is the exact interaction between Snow White and Prince Charming in the Disney film (1937). Word for word. I sat through it to check. Did she call the police? Was she embarrassed and uncomfortable with his invasion of her personal space? Did she drop a message to the other princesses to tell them to watch out for the crackpot future king? None of the above. The next time we hear her speak about the prince, Snow White is talking to the seven dwarfs and explaining that she’s ‘in love with him’, he’s ‘the only one’ for her and ‘there’s nobody like him anywhere at all’. Those are actual quotes.

When the prince and Snow White are finally reunited, she is woken from her unconsciousness by his kiss and he leads her away, wordlessly, into the sunset. In the whole film Snow White doesn’t say a word directly to the prince.

They never made a Snow White 2. Maybe that’s because watching the slow and agonizing breakdown of a relationship that was entered into prematurely isn’t very ‘Disney’. I, for one, would pay to watch as Snow White grows to realize that marrying someone who looms up on young women and breaks into song isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; and as the prince gets fed up with all the woodland creatures leaving their droppings as they traipse through the house to help with all the various daily chores.

Now this is key so listen up: there is no ‘the one’ and you do not have a ‘soulmate’.

The relationships we saw as children to model our hopes and dreams on were fundamentally flawed and Disney was at the heart of what I will be calling from here on in ‘The Great Deception’. In our treasured childhood films feelings of love didn’t grow from a deep and mutual understanding of who the other was. It was an encounter that sparked love at first sight, followed by some questionable courtship practices. It’s a sinister day in the magical kingdom when you realise Belle was a hostage with Stockholm syndrome; Ariel changed her species and gave up her voice in order to gain favour with the prince; and Sleeping Beauty was given a non-consensual kiss while unconscious.

We know all these are fairy stories, but the material we surround ourselves with has a tendency to stick, no matter how impervious we believe ourselves to be. Somewhere between Cinderella’s pre-midnight Waltz and Aladdin and Jasmine’s market stall encounter we fell for the idea that instant attraction is preferable to that which builds and develops more slowly over a longer period of time. The reality is that some of the best, most fulfilling relationships don’t kick off with irrepressible feelings of chemistry. In some cases, that chemistry wanes over time and in others it develops with greater engagement.

That said, those of us who are conscious that a pretty face or a banging body aren’t all they’re cracked up to be when contributing to a lifetime-length relationship, do forget that attraction is still important. The best depiction of a healthy attraction I’ve heard is Will van der Hart’s on The Dating Course. He compares a relationship to a church candle – one of those fat pillar ones. The attraction is the wick; you need it to get the thing going. But if you’re all wick, you’ll burn out quickly. The wax is the substance, the friendship, the deeper understanding of each other, the experiences you share. But if you’re all wax, you can’t get the flame going. However, if you have both, you’ve got a candle that will burn brightly and for a long time.

Another glug of Kool-Aid that Snow White had guzzled down was this idea of ‘the one’. Now this is key so listen up: there is no ‘the one’ and you do not have a ‘soulmate’. Neither of those things exist. Mr/Mrs Right is not out there. Get on with your life.

The entertainment conglomerate has done its best in recent years to repent for the generations of young girls with unrealistic romantic expectations.

Back in the ancient days of Athens, Plato shared some questionable insight into the origin of humans. Turns out, way back when, people had four legs, four arms and a head with two faces. Zeus, despite being king of the gods, was afraid of what these eight-appendaged, double-faced people could do, so he split them down the middle. Humans, now incomplete, walked the earth pining for their other half, throwing their arms around each other and intertwining their bodies in an attempt to grow together. In summary, the idea of a missing person to complete you is not founded on any scientific or biblical truth. It’s misinformation from Plato and Jerry Maguire. It is not a great premise to build your life and expectations on. It’s a waste of time.

What someone should have told Walt was that there are a number of people Snow White would meet in her life who would be a suitable marriage partner for her. She would have a different but fulfilling life with each. A person would become ‘the one’ when she chose to commit to them, because she would be making a promise to them to eliminate all others from the equation. Leaving just one.

The entertainment conglomerate has done its best in recent years to repent for the generations of young girls with unrealistic romantic expectations. They’ve produced a slew of powerful and sassy women, out for adventure with no love interest in sight; see Moana and Raya and the Last Dragon. But for myself and my millennial peers, the stage has already been set. If he doesn’t rock up on a valiant steed, quite frankly, we’re not interested.

Review

Ageing

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Culture

Film & TV

5 September 2025

5 min read

Foundation shows you can’t ‘Ctrl+V’ a soul

A sci-fi classic unearths transhumanism’s flaws

Giles Gough

Giles is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

A woman confronts a man whose clone stands behind her.

Apple TV.

One of the reasons that science fiction has had enduring popularity as a genre is its ability to illustrate thought experiments. The way it can attempt to answer questions that can’t even be asked in any other kind of fiction is what gives it power as a form of storytelling. One question that keeps coming up is: what if you could live forever, through technology?

One person to attempt to answer this question is Isaac Asimov, one of the early giants of the sci-fi genre. Born in 1920, Asimov arrived into a world that was rapidly changing, and yet, his imagination was still able to outpace it. Much of what he is known for is his depiction of robots, with ‘Asimov’s laws of robotics’ influencing the depiction of androids in Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, direct adaptations of Asimov’s own work were few and far between. Robin Williams’ Bicentennial Man released in 1999 and Will Smith starred in I, Robot in 2004 were the best of the bunch. That is, until Apple TV began adapting Asimov’s Foundation.

Asimov’s Foundation books were written across the span of fifty years. The premise of the stories is that in a distant future, a galactic empire is beginning to fail and cannot be saved. The mathematician Hari Seldon develops the theory of psychohistory, where he uses statistical laws to predict the future of large populations. In the wake of the empire’s fall, Seldon predicts a dark age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Seldon devises a plan to reduce this dark age to just one thousand years by preserving a ‘foundation’ of knowledge. The novels describe some of the dramatic events that frustrate, or are a result of Seldon's Plan. One of the features of the story that the Apple TV show of Foundation focuses on is attempted immortality.

Foundation gives us three depictions of ‘immortality’. Firstly, Seldon orchestrates having his conscience eventually uploaded into the Prime Radiant, a super-computer in order to allow him to shepherd his plans beyond the limits of his own human lifespan. Secondly, his protégé, Gaal Dornick is throughout the first season put into a cryo-sleep that lets her move into the future without ageing. Finally, the characters of Dawn, Day and Dusk attempt immortality through cloning. The tyrannical emperor Cleon decided that the only person fit to succeed him was…himself. So, he creates a revolving triumvirate of his own clones: Brother Day, a Cleon in his prime; Brother Dusk, an aging Cleon who serves to advise Day; and Brother Dawn, a young Cleon being trained to succeed Brother Day. This "genetic dynasty" has been ruling with an iron fist for 400 years by the start of the series.

These interpretations of immortality grant each character the ability to shape and curate history in a way that no one human could ever achieve. But as there’s no drama without conflict, Foundation shows us the downsides of this kind of immortality. Firstly, Gaal’s version, being frozen in cryo-sleep for decades might literally extend her life, but from Gaal’s perspective, it is no longer than it would have been otherwise. Whilst she does get to see history play out, she loses connections with people like her family and her lover Raych. She is unable to build the life she would have planned for herself.

No-one mourns your absence because there’s an identical copy of you still walking about.

Seldon’s version of immortality is flirted with by tech bros and transhumanists like Peter Thiel. The idea of a computer that has the processing power to replicate a human brain turns up in numerous stories, but it’s another false immortality. Firstly, the original Hari Seldon still dies, and the ‘digital version’ stored eventually in the Prime Radiant is merely a copy. We might not think much of copy and pasting a document or file on our computer, but it doesn’t quite work the same for human beings. A copy is not the same as the original. You can’t ‘Ctrl+V’ a soul. In addition to this, we find out at one point that due to a mistake, Hari’s digital self has been trapped in darkness, fully conscious but with no rest, no distractions and no way of communicating with the outside world for 148 years. This naturally drags Hari into an interminable madness.

Lastly, the Empire run by the clones, Dawn, Day and Dusk suffer much the same problem as the other two. It’s not a real immortality; as each clone eventually dies. But in many ways, it’s even worse than death. No-one mourns your absence because there’s an identical copy of you still walking about. This is a trope that is troubling, because a protagonist dying and being returned via cloning is often presented as a ‘resurrection’. It has been used as a story arc in the X-men comics and in Peter Capaldi’s era of Doctor Who, with very little outcry from their respective fandoms. Possibly because the thought that the producers have canonically killed the main character and replaced them with an exact copy is simply too uncomfortable to consider. In Foundation itself, the clones are judged by their fidelity to the original (a cold and petty despot) and any deviation is met with a death sentence. Whilst clones may be one way to rule a sci-fi galactic empire, it’s possibly their inability to adapt to changing circumstances that contributes to the fall of civilisation.

The great irony in all of these interpretations is; you are only immortal to those observing you, and an immortality that relies on perspective is not really an immortality at all.

It seems that hard science fiction, and ancient Greek myths can at times, overlap in their focus. Viewed in one light, Asimov’s Foundation series can be seen as one long story of Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods to give it as a gift to mankind, only to be punished by Zeus for his actions. Asimov appears to be telling us that mankind can’t accurately predict the future and you can’t live forever. So despite being a staunch atheist, one of the great minds of science fiction might be suggesting that immortality may belong squarely in the realm of the divine.

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