Pornography and the Disney princess: textual fidelity in erotic fan appropriations

ABSTRACT

This article uses metadata from the archive of pornographic fan art featuring Disney princesses found on Rule34.com. The data suggest that, broadly, princesses with a higher pornographic presence tend to be white, be of the ‘rebellious’ type, feature in a commercially successful film, and be drawn in the Marc Davis style. An analysis of the tags by princess suggests that two of the most common genres are pictures of princesses alone, either naked or semi-naked or pictured in a sexual scenario with their canonical partner. It is further the case that certain princesses – Snow White, Mulan, Elsa and Anna, and Raya – are associated with specific kinks. The overall data suggest that ‘emotional realism’ and fidelity to the source material are the prime driver in shaping pornographic fan appropriations.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s media
• Disney princess
• pornography
• fan art
• appropriation
• adaptation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In part, Marcus’ discomfort may be that he is worried others will conflate a sexual response to children’s media with a sexual response to children. There is certainly a potential for such readings; in The Little Mermaid, Ariel states that she is 16 years old and it is noteworthy that the tags for Merida presented later in Table 5 include ‘teen’ and ‘teenage’. Their hourglass shapes, muscular partners, romantic agency, and interpolation into sexual innuendo described in the following, however, suggest physical maturity and (young) adulthood – the characters (perhaps with the exception of Rapunzel) generally look, act, and are responded to as adults.

2 I first become aware of this kind of pornography, by way of an unsolicited pop-up on a video game walk-through site, when using dial-up internet in the late 1990s.

3 Rule34.com is not the only site to feature Disney-inspired pornographic images; DeviantArt, for example, offers a similar corpus. I selected Rule34.com because its tags make data collection easy and because it aggregates art from other sources, making it representative of other similar sites.

4 The site’s title is reference to the internet meme ‘if it exists, there is porn of it’.

5 The website hentaicharmugen.com is explicit that the sex acts depicted in the game are non-consensual; characters are divided into the categories ‘victim’, ‘aggressor & rapist’, and ‘versatile’. Not all victim characters are female and not all aggressor/rapists are male, and so the game does facilitate queer interactions, but there is no evidence of the ‘sensuality’ or centring of female desire which Jenkins (2013, 192) identifies in slash fic.

6 The Toy Story film series was originally created by Pixar. Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, before the release of Toy Story 3, but the studio has been able to maintain something of a distinct identity.

7 Some sexual references, such as the Genie’s mention of honeymoon activities and Buzz’s erect wings, are unambiguous sexual references, but other moments – Mustafa’s face in the Lion King poster looking like a woman’s back, for example – seem to seek something that is not there. The Guardian’s 2021 list of the weirdest sex scenes of all time include a lustful look shared by Simba and Nala in The Lion King during the ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight’ montage. The moment may be obliquely suggestive of foreplay, but hardly amounts to a sex scene.

8 As scholars of Shakespeare have long argued, to ask ‘how many children had Lady Macbeth?’ is a meaningless question because it presumes that the character has a life beyond the words on the page; a common dividing line between fan and academic readings is that fans treat characters as though they are real people with lives beyond the text whereas academics tend to approach characters as fictional constructs.

9 To avoid confusion with similarly named characters, the site tags the protagonist of Sleeping Beauty as ‘princess_aurora’.

10 All profit figures are from IMDB.com.

11 Diaz (2014) reports on a study by Sieradzki, which has been widely reported elsewhere but is, at the time of writing, unavailable.

12 Rule34.com sorts these tags alphabetically rather than by frequency. It shows the number of images across the entire site with a given tag, but not for the individual princess.

13 Rule34.com also has a ‘canon_couple’ tag, but it tended to yield fewer returns than specific character names.

14 I would have liked to include a data set for images in which the character appears with non-canonical partners, but the tags do not allow this: a search for ‘princess jasmine – aladdin’, for example, would return all of the images included in the ‘solo’ tag as well as images of Jasmine in sexual scenarios with characters other than Aladdin. Given that artists are not limited by franchise and source text, enumerating all of the possible characters with whom a given princess might appear would be impossible – the search ‘princess jasmine symmetra’ (a character from the video game Overwatch, a franchise unconnected to Disney), for example, yields one result.

15 Charizard, despite its appearance, is a Fire/Flying-type Pokemon, not a Dragon type, although it can learn some Dragon moves.