Dangerous Women 2: Tinker Bell
A direct-to-video sequel to my popular essay
Last week, my 4 year old daughter came down with an RSV infection. As we were stuck at home with her for a couple of days, we caved on one of our parental media consumption restrictions and decided that it’s a good time to start watching full length feature films for kids together.
My daughter is, thankfully, a normal (read: neurotypical) little girl and as such, she loves princesses, mermaids and fairies. Hence, the first full length movies we picked for her were the Disney’s Tinker Bell series.
Previously, I’ve written about woke stuff in Disney’s versions of fairy tales:
Given that this was one of my most popular essays, I figured that I was really on to something. As a result, watching anything from Disney automatically puts my woke detector on alert. And with the Tinker Bell movies… there’s a lot to unpack there.
A feminist utopia
The fairy world depicted in Tinker Bell movies is a bizarre feminist utopia:
The fairies are born as young adults (read: no childcare - more on that later) and then are automagically (read: no agency) assigned a “talent” that determines their future job and social class/caste.
Pixie Hollow, the part of Neverland inhabited by the fairies, is a matriarchy ruled by a queen and a 50/50 parity cabinet of ministers.
The vast majority of fairies are female. Male fairies are an underrepresented minority.
The fairies are presented as the driving force behind the process of changing seasons of nature. The spend most of their time working towards that purpose.
The “nature talented” fairies who perform feminine work like caring for plants and animals directly contribute to the strategic goal of the fairy community. Thus, they are considered high status. Only female fairies can be “nature talented”.
The low status castes are the ones who don’t contribute to goals of the fairy community directly, but instead they maintain the infrastructure of the fairly land. These include the pixie dust fairies, who manufacture and distribute pixie dust, a critical magical resource, and tinker fairies, engineers and builders who create and maintain the primitive, medieval level technology required for fairy operations. Both low status castes are predominantly male, with occasional females in between.
After birth, Tinker Bell is immediately assigned to the tinker fairy caste. Like a typical feminist fiction protagonist, she is set out to make her mark in a male-dominated industry. But since the status system is gender reversed1, Tink also struggles with the fact that her “talent” and job are considered low status, just like many women doing stereotypically feminine jobs in real life.
At first, I imagined that all of this is Disney’s retcon: a new backstory based on a woke interpretation of the characters’s name. However, it’s somewhat consistent with the creative vision of J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan:
'She is quite a common fairy,' Peter explained apologetically; 'she is called Tinker Bell because she mends the pots and kettles.'
Neurodigivergent
The original Peter Pan novelization includes a description of Tinker Bell’s hot-tempered character:
Tink was not all bad: or, rather, she was all bad just now, but, on the other hand, sometimes she was all good. Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. They are, however, allowed to change, only it must be a complete change.
Simply put: the original Tinker Bell was a BPD girl.
The Tinker Bell movies maintain her BPD nature, but on top of that, show her as a somewhat socially awkward tinker - someone who’s obsessed with things rather than people. Effectively, she has a full set of neurodivergent traits: BPD, ADHD and autism.
People who are neurodivergent or have personality disorders struggle in life. The area they especially struggle in are social relationships. Yet, Tinker Bell has no problem with making friends and everyone is happy to help and support her despite her quirks and flaws.
The Woke lie presented here is: You can have BPD/ADHD/Autism and everyone will love you anyway - even if you put no effort in getting along with others.
I understand that the idea behind woke neurodiversity is to push to slowly build a world where the above is true. Hence, the current trend of normalization, celebration and fetishization of mental and personality disorder.
But the whole idea is so against the human nature that this project is doomed to fail. Instead of setting up poor people with mental and personality disorders for social failure in the real world, they should be provided with help to learn and adapt.
Tinker Bell is a pretty girl, and we all know how pretty girls can get away with BPD (which goes on to even be fetishized by some men like
) and other horrible behavior. But I don’t think that pretty privilege would exist in a world where almost everyone else is also a pretty girl.The friendzone fantasy
Tinker Bell and most other female fairies are basically hot girls in sexy outfits:
This creates somewhat of a cognitive dissonance, considering that all relationships between male and female fairies are asexual.
I believe this can be interpreted as woke “sex negativity disguised as sex positivity”: It’s good and empowering to be sexy, provided that it doesn’t lead to any actual sex.
The fairies are born as young adults, which means that children don’t exist in the fairy world. Since there is no need for anyone to get pregnant and provide childcare, the fairies are free to spend all the time at what they value the most: work. This indirectly sends another woke message: Children/childhood/childcare are worthless - work is what everyone should focus on instead.
The lack of sexual reproduction means that in the fairy world, there is no marriage and sexuality. Hence, any close intersexual relationships are limited to the dreaded friendzone.
In a radical feminist mindset, a friendzone relationship is probably the holy grail of intersexual relationships: the woman gets all the attention and emotional support she needs, but the man gets none of the sex he needs.
To be clear, I am not a redpilled enough to consider all intersexual relationships as transactions where men provide women with attention and emotional support in exchange for sex. Men and women both need sex, attention and emotional support, but it’s hard to not notice that on average, women want and need attention and support more, and men want and need sex more.
The sexless friendzone relationships are clearly one-sided, and promoting them by showing them as the only type of intersexual relationships available in a fantasy world is another woke/feminist lie: The friendzone is the best and purest form of a genuine relationship between two people of opposite sex.
At this point, some of you may object: “But it’s good that they’re getting friendozned! This is a fairy tale for little girls! Little children shouldn’t be sexualized!”.
Yes, I agree that little children should be spared the disgusting details of human sexuality, and a good time to have The Talk is sometime before hitting puberty or being shown porn on a friend’s smartphone at school, whichever comes first.
But still, I think that little children should have a vague notion of sexuality. They should know that people in romantic relationships hold hands, touch and kiss each other. They should also know that a proper and desired way of how this escalates is marriage and having children together.
Ideally, witnessing their parents’ relationship should provide children with a proper blueprint of a sexual relationship. But in it’s absence, or in addition to, children’s media can and should show the basics of human sexual relationship dynamics - anything a small child could possibly notice and learn by watching a high-functioning relationship of their parents.
I think it’s also important for children to know the basic facts about the mechanics of courtship: having a crush, asking someone out and dealing with rejection (both rejecting and being rejected). The critical part for children should be recognizing and rejecting unwanted sexual advances. This is because, for children under the age of consent, all sexual advances are unwanted by default and, well, pedophiles exist.
I don’t usually freak out about pedophiles, but from what I understand, a child who’s totally oblivious to the sexual nature of things is the easiest target for a pedophile - it doesn’t really know that being molested is something bad that it should object to or report afterwards.
Dangerous Fairies
As I described in Dangerous Women, most fairy tales with young female protagonist are based on a common template I dubbed the Princess Journey:
A conflict ensues between the Princess and the Evil Woman. The Evil Woman unleashes a covert plot of indirect aggression to hurt the Princess and move her out of the picture. The Princess is passive and oblivious, and she falls victim to the Evil Woman’s woes, until her situation becomes critical. Eventually, the Princess is saved by an unexpected divine, magical or third party intervention - Deus Ex Machina.
Howewer, like most woke stories with female protagonists, the Tinker Bell movies are more aligned with the stereotypically male Hero’s Journey template. Yet, some of them also include a secondary Princess Journey subplot.
The fairy queen is a benevolent fairy (god)mother type character. However, Tink often ends up in trouble with Vidia - a high status mean girl fairy:
Notably, Vidia is the least scantly clad of all young fairies - she is the literal pantsuit girlboss.
Here, the Princess Journey story takes on the familiar mean girl twist known from teenage drama stories. Vidia becomes a frenemy of Tinker Bell - she often gets both jealous and annoyed with her behavior, which prompts her into being mean. She either bullies Tink, tricks her into trouble or sets her up for failure. However, as an autistic socially awkward girl, Tinker Bell is oblivious to her obvious social cues and still considers Vidia her friend.
Here, the two woke lies that are served are:
You can let the mean girl bully you and plot against you, and yet, everything will end up well, even if you can’t read social cues and are oblivious to what’s going on.
If a mean girl is trying to hurt you, the other girls will side with you instead of the high status mean girl, even if you’re socially awkward.
This led me to a strange realization: The original Peter Pan story also includes the a secondary Princess Journey subplot. But here, Wendy is the Princess and Tinker Bell is the Evil Woman.
As a magical female, Tinker Bell fits well within the “witch” Evil Woman stereotype. She first appears as a jealous BPD girl who bullies Wendy. Then, she tricks the Lost Boys into shooting Wendy from the sky, which almost kills her. In Disney’s version, she also betrays the Lost Boys by revealing the location of their lair to Hook, who promises to get rid of Wendy.
Later in the story, Tink arguably redeems herself by saving Peter Pan in a Hero’s Journey-ish way - drinking his poison in the original play and snatching the bomb planted by the pirates in Disney’s version. But still, in the Peter Pan story, she’s the Evil Woman, or a morally dubious character at best.
Yet, Tinker Bell went on to become one of the most popular Disney characters and, as a “symbol of Disney’s magic”, has been featured in Disney TV commercials, a host of other Disney shows and a meetable character in Disney’s theme parks.
The Tinker Bell movies provide her with a new origin story. A story in which she’s no longer the Evil Woman, but a Hero and a Princess bullied by another Evil Woman. Hence, the movies are another example of what I described as Antiheroic Revisionism in Dangerous Women - retconning an Evil Woman from a classic fairy tale into a heroic protagonist in a modern reboot or spin-off.
The usual reason for antiheroic revisionism is woke feminism. But in this case, it also allowed Disney to morally cleanse one of their most popular characters.
Parental Advisory - Woke Content
Disney’s Tinker Bell movies are actually pretty great. The visual design of the fairy world is beautiful (if you don’t mind the dated CGI, which probably wasn’t even top-notch back then, given that the movies were low budget direct-to-video productions), the characters are charming, and - setting wokeness aside - they’re actually pretty harmless. All of them are “certified fresh” on RottenTomatoes (the first one has a 90% rating). My daugther loved them, and both me and my wife enjoyed them as well. I can sincerely recommend them to anyone who, like me, has a neurotypical little girl who loves fairies and other little girl stuff.
As for the wokeness, I believe that it’s OK for an anti-woke conservative to treat it like junk food. It’s not good for you, but you will be fine if you only consume it occasionally, have an otherwise balanced diet and offset its effects with a healthy (non-woke) lifestyle. But if your lifestyle is poor (woke) and/or junk food or woke culture is all you or your kid ever consumes, it may lead to dire consequences in the future.
Also, children are more prone to confusing fact with fantasy. J.M. Barrie added Tinker Bell’s pixie powder in the Peter Pan play as a necessity that allowed the children to fly, because "so many children tried [to fly] from their beds and needed surgical attention."
Here, conservative parents should help children understand that the fairies, flying and magic are not the only fantasy components of the Tinker Bell stories - the wokeness is part of the fantasy as well.
I remember that one of the songs in the first movie had something about “a magical land where everyone is happy all the time”2. I found that pretty ironic: despite being a feminist utopia, the fairy world included as much (if not more) drama, status seeking and vicious female intrasexual competition as the real world, sometimes making the ones involved deeply unhappy in the process.
With that in mind, I found it unsurprising that, considering the Peter Pan storyline, Tinker Bell eventually decided to leave Pixie Hollow and fell for Peter Pan: a big (read: highly sexually dimorphic), high status thug and a leader of a gang.
More precisely, the fairy world is a society where men don’t form hierarchical structures like corporations or the military. High status men don’t exist, and therefore all men are low status working class guys, quietly maintaining the infrastructure of the society.
At least in the Polish version of the movie - the original English lyrics may have said something different, but I’m too lazy to verify that now.
Love it
I’ve always had a thing for TInker Bell. I used to fear it was evidence of subconscious pedophilia. But i think it’s just the bob, the skirt and the attitude.