Once there lived a franky grotesque princess

The inaccuracy of fairy tales has been bothering me of late. Take your average story, aimed at an audience primarily consisting of 6 year old girls in pink trainers. A beautiful princess is miss-treated, probably by an evil step-mother, but who overcomes all the odds to marry a handsome prince and be born away to a life of wedded bliss.

Firstly, we must ask ourselves, is this girl really likely to be attractive? In such stories, the very mention of a crown basks the owner in an unobtainable ethereal light. In fact, their uncommon beauty is a common way of identifying such royal members, even when they are undercover. The reality however, is that royalty means this wench comes from an interbred, incestuous litter rife with inherited diseases and probably considerably too few grandparents for a healthy gene pool. This can hardly be the way to produce stunning good looks. Stunted looks and retardation are far more likely, which is probably how such individuals are really identified while in hiding.

This child's grotesquely bad looks are far more likely to be the reason why her step-mother (also probably one of her cousins), despite being hideously ugly herself, decides that the girl has to go. Probably it is a cost-saving measure to reduce the number of steam-cleans the castle carpets need after the servants vomit from seeing the girl first thing in the morning.

Cast out into the wilderness (and basing the details on a popular Disney-made franchise), the only place where this vilely deformed child can find shelter is in the household of 7 vertically challenged men, whose diminutive stature enables them to avoid the full frontal of the girl's cross-eyes stare.

Being severely mentally challenged, the revolting girl draws attention to her whereabouts through her warbling singing and the stampede of wildlife that charges in to see what has destroyed their home. Her stupidity is only matched by that of her step-mother/cousin who tricks her into an enchanted sleep, rather than decapitating her deformed head.

Placed in a glass coffin as a popular horror show item, our beastly little girl is awoken by a handsome prince (but no doubt actually suffering from similar aesthetic issues) and carried away for a life of bliss.

Apart from the obvious fact this has done nothing to improve the gene pool, this benighted child is a princess. This doesn't just mean her atrocious ugliness has to be politically denoted charming, it means she's the heiress to a kingdom. She can't just ride off to a neighbouring land! She has responsibilities. Additionally, what was a prince doing there to begin with? You can't just stroll through another country as the heir apparent for a rival land. The only two options are that he was actually heading an army poised for invasion, in which case our said princess was less of a bride than a prisoner of war, or he was her brother. Given what we've already seen, either seem quite likely.