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zaiatzgeistbeth:
literaryreference:
libraryoftheancients:
annachibi:
anti-capitalistlesbianwitch:
“At some point in the picture, a kindly female friend of Laura, who knows the facts of life, removes her glasses. It turns out, suddenly, that she can see perfectly well without them, and our hero falls passionately in love with the now-beautiful Laura and there is a perfectly glorious finale.” - Isaac Asimov’s essay “The Cult of Ignorance”
(Source)
EDIT: I found the full article for anyone who wants to read it. The “Girl With Glasses” trope is mostly contained to the photo above, though.
*slams fist on table*
This is why I used to resent every time someone compared me to Anne Hathaway! The Princess Diaries became my grandmother’s go-to example of how I could so easily “become beautiful” and attract boys by just “caring about” (read: spending time, money, and effort on changing) my appearance. Fucking hell.
Yeah, I like the Princess Diaries but hate that it uses that trope.
The thing that made teenaged me really mad about The Princess Diaries, the movie, is that in The Princess Diaries, the book, she gets the makeover and she hates it. She feels it doesn’t make her look any better, it just makes her look less like herself–and the narrative validates this; the makeover doesn’t Get Her the Guy or anything, her friends also think it’s weird, and she goes back to her original style as soon as she can. And then the movie just played the makeover trope dead straight and I was outraged.
Of course, then like eight books into the series she does become Suddenly Hot, though less in a makeover way than mysteriously developing curves in all the right places like Hermione in a bad fanfiction, and teenaged me was pretty pissed about that too, but I do still appreciate the way the original book does it.
My favorite thing about the books vs the movie is that after the movie came out the books did a meta thing where Mia talked about a made for TV movie about her life that in no way resembled her actual life, like the actual movie in no way resembled the books.
zaiatzgeistbeth:
literaryreference:
libraryoftheancients:
annachibi:
anti-capitalistlesbianwitch:
“At some point in the picture, a kindly female friend of Laura, who knows the facts of life, removes her glasses. It turns out, suddenly, that she can see perfectly well without them, and our hero falls passionately in love with the now-beautiful Laura and there is a perfectly glorious finale.” - Isaac Asimov’s essay “The Cult of Ignorance”
(Source)
EDIT: I found the full article for anyone who wants to read it. The “Girl With Glasses” trope is mostly contained to the photo above, though.
*slams fist on table*
This is why I used to resent every time someone compared me to Anne Hathaway! The Princess Diaries became my grandmother’s go-to example of how I could so easily “become beautiful” and attract boys by just “caring about” (read: spending time, money, and effort on changing) my appearance. Fucking hell.
Yeah, I like the Princess Diaries but hate that it uses that trope.
The thing that made teenaged me really mad about The Princess Diaries, the movie, is that in The Princess Diaries, the book, she gets the makeover and she hates it. She feels it doesn’t make her look any better, it just makes her look less like herself–and the narrative validates this; the makeover doesn’t Get Her the Guy or anything, her friends also think it’s weird, and she goes back to her original style as soon as she can. And then the movie just played the makeover trope dead straight and I was outraged.
Of course, then like eight books into the series she does become Suddenly Hot, though less in a makeover way than mysteriously developing curves in all the right places like Hermione in a bad fanfiction, and teenaged me was pretty pissed about that too, but I do still appreciate the way the original book does it.
My favorite thing about the books vs the movie is that after the movie came out the books did a meta thing where Mia talked about a made for TV movie about her life that in no way resembled her actual life, like the actual movie in no way resembled the books.
