Damsel: The Trope of Subverting Tropes

Damsel means an unmarried woman. The protagonist gets married in the first 15 minutes of the movie. The “writers” were too lazy to even look up the title in the dictionary.

At this point sticking to old tropes and ignoring chances to subvert them will be considered subversive in and of itself

If the blood ritual is enough to trick the dragon, why do the victims have to be from other royal families and not just kidnapped peasants?

I love how we're supposed to view the dragon as an innocent victim because of what happened to her babies....while never questioning why the king and his men were hunting her in the first place nor think to hard about the hundreds of innocent girls over the centuries that it killed and the countless more it would have kept killing if Elodie hadn't put 2 and 2 together.

Remember when subversion was actually clever, and not just creating new tropes to reuse over and over again? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

What if the twist was that the damsels were never in any danger. That the dragon was raising the sacrificed girls as replacements for her children.

The concept of a Virgin Girl Sacrifice is that under normal circumstances women were considered so precious (due to their ability to give birth) that men would risk their very lives to ensure the safety of the women and children, a male sacrifice is unheard of because men were expected to go off and risk their lives as a matter of course (drive off a hungry predator, fight a rival tribe, hunt in the middle of a terrible storm). The concept of sacrificing a woman (especially one who hasn't gotten married or given birth) was so extreme it was reserved for situations that no other option was available. The Virgin Sacrifice is a sign of either pure evil (killing women for personal power or enrichment) or pure desperation (the dragon won't let us leave and is requiring the sacrifice).

Expectation: Princess has to find clever ways to survive/kill a dragon. Maybe turns into a savage in the process. Reality: Girl befriends the evil remorseless dragon that killed her father and they go burn some strawmen.

The Writers: If you ignore all the evil acts the dragon has committed then you can see why she's really the victim in this story.

Damsel is what happens when the selling point of your movie is what it isn't rather than what it is. When you think in terms of what is "bad" rather than understanding why it's "bad." If you just think "woman being rescued is bad," then you think that her saving herself is enough to make the movie good. If you understand the WHY, which is that damsels in distress were often undercooked and glorified plot devices, then you can give them an actual personality, give them a reason to be kidnapped other than "so the hero can rescue her," or if they rescue themselves you can give them a good movtivation that makes you want to see them succeed. Shrek subverts the damsel in distress much better because they knew to do more with Fiona than just give her an action scene and call it a day.

“His entire filmography is but a candle next to the Sun of this movie’s twists and turns” I’ve expired 💀

Netflix: subverting all Tropes in order to appease "Modern Audiences."

subverting tropes is so overplayed now it is the tropiest trope of modern entertainment.

That's a story from the Grimm brothers, where a prince comes to take a girl (commoner) to be his princess, but her sister becomes jealous, killing her. She seduces the prince e becomes his chosen one, leaving her home to his faraway kingdom, only to discover she was chosen to be dinner for the family. I didn't have the courage to watch this movie. Thank you for taking a bullet for us.

You don't even have to watch a trailer to know a movie is garbage. Just the fact that a major studio made it is enough now.

I love how they had her taking apart her dress to "dismantle the princess trope" just to have her end up looking like a pr0stitut3 at the end😅

That's not how a dowry works usually the bride's family is the one paying the dowry

Also, I think we should all take a moment to thank Jennifer Lawrence for pioneering the idea of women in movies. None of us would be here today if she hadn't shown us the way.

Also, the movie expects me to see the Dragon is not evil despite the fact that she's been killing three innocent women in regular intervals for over a century you can argue she didn't know that these girls weren't related to the king, but even if they were, what does this have to do with them? Also, if this is an eye for an eye type deal, she should have been done after killing the first three. How long does she plan on carrying out her revenge? It's been over a century We're not even going to bring up the fact that she let that Dragon destroy a castle with Lord knows how many innocent bystanders despite they're only being 3 guilty people

Netflix Producers: "Hey Millie Bobbie Brown, I know people were annoyed with Enola Holmes sullying Sherlock as barely competent and Mycroft as an insufferable prude in pursuit of In Your Face Grrl Power Cringe but what if we do mostly the same thing but with like dragons and swords?" MBB: "You son of a bee sting. I'm in."