MEET 12 "REJECTED PRINCESSES" WHO ARE TOO BADASS FOR disney 

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Mai Bhago, 18th century Sikh warrior-saint and only survivor of the Battle of Khidrana, seen here decapitating a guy. Read the rest of her story here.

Fredegund was a 6th-century Merovingian queen consort with a penchant for killing people. She nearly killed her own daughter, in fact, just for vocally aspiring to her eventual throne. Read the rest of her story here.

Nzinga Mbande, 17th-century queen of what is now Angola. Some rumors about her, "to be taken with a brick of salt, include: After killing her brother’s family, she ate their hearts to absorb their courage; she maintained a 60-man-strong harem throughout her life — this one, best I can tell, is more regarded as true than most of the others." Read her story here.

Corn Maiden, mythological Native American figure who purportedly fixed the corn shortage by making corn out of her body. The variations across this legend about what happened next are innumerable, including one in which the villagers tied her up and tossed her in the river.

Hatshepsut, arguably the greatest pharaoh in history, ruled for less than twenty-two years. To quiet gossip at court, she began her rule wearing men’s clothing, including the pharaoh’s false beard.

Penta, sister to the king, who chopped off her own hands to avoid the king\'s intended ancestral marriage proposal. (He\'d said her hands were here most attractive feature.) In return, he stuffed her in a trunk and tossed it in the ocean. She survives, and eventually a sorcerer gets her hands back. Read her story here.

Sita, from the Ramayana. Ravana kidnaps princess Sita, and Rama goes on bloody rampage for years in order to get her back. Unfortunately, Rama then sends Sita into exile, pregnant with their kids, when a rumor emerges that she\'s had relations with a demon. Read more here.

Beloved, from Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name. Beloved appears to be the dead daughter of freed slave Sethe, who Sethe killed as a two-year-old to keep her away from slavers. A decade later someone who seems to be Beloved appears magically and turns Sethe\'s mind inside-out.

Wu Zetian, first and only female Emperor of China, who poisoned her own infant daughter to frame the old queen and get her out of the way. (It worked, and the old queen was summarily executed.) Read her story here.

Pasiphaë, mythological Greek queen who supposedly gave birth to a Minotaur. Also, she made a charm so that if her husband slept with anyone besides her, he would ejaculate serpents, scorpions, and millipedes.

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s 12-year-old enchantress, with whom a grown man gets so obsessed, he marries her mother so he can be close to her--eventually becoming her legal guardian.

Sergeant Mariya Oktyabrskaya, the first female tanker to ever win the Hero of the Soviet Union award. After her army officer husband Ilya was killed in action, Mariya sold literally all of their belongings in order to buy a tank.

On her first outing in the tank, she outmaneuvered the German soldiers, killing around thirty of them and taking out an anti-tank gun. In the end, she was taken out by a mortar round when she got out of her tank to fix it. Read more about her here.

At this point, we\'ve seen just about every iteration of Disney princesses recontextualized by creative fans. The well may have run dry, but this exhaustion speaks to how eager a global audience is for animated females who break the traditional Disney mold. In the meantime, one writer has started conjuring some new princesses who break that mold so comprehensively they\'ve become more likely characters for violent indie thrillers than family-oriented studio fare. Which is kind of a shame.

Former DreamWorks effects animator and fledgling artist Jason Porath recently created Rejected Princesses, a website that features detailed, often hilarious stories and illustrations about some historical and mythical women who were just too darn interesting to end up with their own big budget four-quadrant vehicles. It\'s a counter example to the litany of animated heroines who seem to lack much agency; the ones who have some semblance of power within reach, but too often end up relying on a romantic interest or other helpful tropes, to save the day. (Porath cites Hayao Miyazaki\'s--especially

Rejected Princesses developed out of a lunchtime conversation at Porath\'s old workplace back in February, during which he and some colleagues tried to determine who\'d make the least suitable candidate for an animated princess. After eventually soliciting some suggestions on Facebook, the gears began to grind in Porath\'s imagination and he was very much compelled to see what some of these characters might look like, even if he had to draw them himself.

"Each woman is based off as much visual reference of the actual story as possible," the artist says of the project which formally launched last week. "As opposed to any specific cinematic princess that\'s come before. The influences are different for each woman\'s story, with an eye towards detail. Pasiphae\'s entry, for example, is actually set in the historical palace at Knossos, has the constellation for Taurus in the background, and even uses her laurel to give her figurative \'horns.\'"

Initially he went strictly off of friends and Facebook folks\' suggestions. Once he started doing heavy research for some of these characters, others would announce themselves and prolong the research phase indefinitely.

"I tried to cast a wide net with this first batch--not just culturally and racially diverse, but pulling from history, fiction, and myth," Porath says. "Some are badass, some sociopathic, and some are just bizarre. The idea can be an umbrella for a lot of stories, and I wanted to see which ones people would react to."

Now that the response has surpassed anything Porath had been hoping for, with fans sending in loads of requests every day, expect to see lots more unorthodox examples going forward--even if Disney, Dreamworks and the like don\'t follow suit.

Have a look at more Rejected Princesses in the gallery above and read one of Porath\'s stories in full below.

Here’s one of the most badass Rejected Princesses of all: Sergeant Mariya Oktyabrskaya, the first female tanker to ever win the Hero of the Soviet Union award, and her tank, Fighting Girlfriend.

During World War 2, her army officer husband Ilya was killed in action. In response, Mariya sold literally all of their belongings in order to buy a tank. She then wrote Stalin the following letter:

"My husband was killed in action defending the motherland. I want revenge on the fascist dogs for his death and for the death of Soviet people tortured by the fascist barbarians. For this purpose I’ve deposited all my personal savings--50,000 rubles--to the National Bank in order to build a tank. I kindly ask to name the tank ‘Fighting Girlfriend’ and to send me to the frontline as a driver of said tank."

Stalin wrote back pretty quickly and said yes.

Initially, the army was skeptical of her ability to handle a tank. However, she quickly proved in training that she could drive, shoot, and throw grenades with the best of them--skills she’d picked up from her late husband, with whom she’d presumably had some interesting dates.

On her first outing in the tank, she outmaneuvered the German soldiers, killing around thirty of them and taking out an anti-tank gun. When they shelled her tank, immobilizing Fighting Girlfriend, she got out--in the middle of a firefight--and repaired the damn thing. She then got back in and proceeded to kill more Germans.

During all this, she wrote a letter to her sister describing her time in the war. She told her “I’ve had my baptism by fire. I beat the bastards. Sometimes I’m so angry I can’t even breathe.”

In the end, she was taken out by a mortar round when she got out of her tank in the middle of yet another firefight to fix Fighting Girlfriend. She was awarded the highest honor in the Soviet Military and is buried in one of the nation’s most sacred cemeteries.

That’s roughly what her outfit would have looked like, depending on the time of year.

The model of tank depicted is a T34 tank, the actual one that Fighting Girlfriend was.

The Fighting Girlfriend logo was on the side of the turret, just out of the cropping of this picture, so it didn’t make the cut. I didn’t want to be inaccurate and just put it on the turret.

Mariya is actually sitting in front of the machine gunner’s outlook, so it would be jutting into her and presumably she wouldn’t be very comfortable. It was the only way I could make the composition I had in mind work.

The German soldiers used many different color tracer rounds, but red was among them.

The planes in the background are PE-8 Petlyakov Soviet bombers.

Joe Berkowitz is a staff writer at Fast Company. Continued

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hrmm... Aren't Disney Princesses based on well known/popular fairy tale/romanticized historical figures?

Divine Society is here to promote a new perspective on what kind of world we all which to live in. A world where Everyone is Free to do as they please as long as they are responsible for their own actions and bring no harm upon another.

Actually this is irrelevant. If you read the original Brother Grimm stories that inspired sleeping beauty, snow white and stuff you would learn that there was a lot of incest, sex and other things that people are too stupid to talk about without being SHOCKED... Porn made me VIOLENT!

The only thing I regret about this is they won't have a place in Kingdom Hearts or any of those badass video games Disney has been putting out lately.

Is that badly placed slipper on "Lolita" for real? Jeez, looks like Goldmember.

Where are the 12 stories? Is there another link? I'm only seeing the Mariya one.

What about Lucy from Elfen Lied XD She killd 6000 peopel in lLess than one year with her own "hands". And she was 10-12 years old. This is a badass girl. .Ok she have superpowers.

I'm sorry, but how is it badass to murder your children and/or be the victim of a sexual predator?

There's an ugly hint of pandering misogyny here, claiming that anything that isn't the traditional Disney princess formula must be badass... and listing women who do things like cold-bloodedly murder their own babies. Some of these women are badass... but cold-blooded murder is not. Hold women responsible for the same actions that would be considered atrocities if men did them, instead of praising them.

You want badass? Read "Sabriel"... but don't adapt it for Disney. They'd gut the story, the point, the creepiness, and the implicit-rather-than-explicit love story.

You want real-life badass? You can find plenty of them. But don't talk down to women by pretending that any woman who kills people is automatically "badass."

Genghis Khan was a badass, Hannibal was a badass, Vlad the Impaler was a total badass. I don't see the misogyny here, all those dudes were very bad men.

Did they kill their children? Did they do so, in some cases, to frame someone else for the murder and get them out of the way?

Now, Mariya in the example given here is a total bad ass and should get a movie. But the ending would have to suck.

A Hatshetsut one could be brilliant in my opinion, she could be their next non-evil Queen after Elsa

Oh, I'd love to see these movies. It'd be a challenge to make these stories anything similar to child friendly though. These girls played a tad too rough, and few of them would consider getting a boyfriend the end-all and be-all that Disney seems to prefer..=)

Trying to frame your own mother for the throne is not badass. Thats just...wrong.

While Luetenant Oktyabarskaya was definitely a fine soldier and a hero, I hardly think this story could be handled by Disney. No offense, but are you out of your mind???? Yes, women fought in Russia in WW2. So did children, and men over the age of sixty. Do you know why? Because the young adult males were dead, and someone had to step up. The women didn't fight because they were bad ass. They were angry and desperate. You should see what happened to the Germans unlucky enough to surrender to the Russians rather then Americans or British. You figure there could be a Disney song about that? Your idea of what children should see, or what a cartoon can express are really very odd. Not to mention that none of these are princesses of any kind, really. Next you will tell us to have a Disney cartoon about the innovation of Vietnam, Perhaps a North Korean female member of the Viet Cong can be at the princess.

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