‘You Royal, You Rebel’: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Politics of Play in Mattel’s Ever After High Franchise (2013–19)

Considering the trans/remediation of ‘The Tale of Legacy Day’ across Mattel’s Ever After High (EAH) fashion-doll line and franchise (2013–19), this paper will explore narrative and the negation of authority as necessary play-line functions and as validation of social non-conformity for children. I will argue that the constraints of ‘play’ in EAH have produced a unique storyworld that maintains the fairy tale’s utopian impulse whilst engendering and endorsing an endless cycle of narratives. Within Sticks and Stones (2001), Jack Zipes suggests ‘young people are constantly reacting against and defining themselves against a culture [that fosters] sameness and conformity to corporate systemized beliefs and values.’ Broadly, this critical engagement with ‘systemized beliefs and values’ manifests in children’s play, with ‘toys [offering] children opportunities to create new narratives other than those adults provide’ (Austin, 2022). As such, toys can be understood as an ideological site of ‘negotiation and resistance’ (Austin, 2022) capable of generating multiple, varied narratives and are designed with this purpose. These qualities, of children’s media and toys, offer an interesting interaction with the fairy tale, a narrative type defined by both the stability of its structure and its constant transformation — here the surety of the fairy tale comes to symbolize the organising structures of society. EAH responds to, and contends with, the tensions between fairy tale stability and transformation, social conformity and generative play. Notably, in both the fairy tale and play, ‘repetition and variation [result in] unsuccessful imitation’ (Lüthi, 1980), framing them as inherently disruptive and ‘anarchic’ modes (Bernstein, 2013), meaning even conformity can be considered a rebellious and generative act.
A transmedial franchise consisting of a web series (2013–16), multiple book series (Hale, 2013–17; Selfors, 2015–16; Alexander, 2017; Shea and Finn, 2017–19) and a graphic novel (Dragoon, 2017), EAH remediates its own narrative through multiple mediums and perspectives, refusing the authority of a singular text. Following the school adventures of the fairy tale’s next generation, Mattel hinges its doll-line on the rebellion of a single character — Raven Queen, daughter of the Evil Queen — against the structures and expectations of the fairy tale, and the very literal author-ity of Headmaster Grimm. When ordered to sign the ‘Storybook of Legends’, a magical contract binding each character to the fairy tale legacy of their parents, Raven refuses — knowing, in a metafictive turn, that only misery and defeat await her in the ‘Snow-White’ tale. Raven’s refusal proves catalytic, prompting characters on either side of the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ divide to reassess their conformity, and self-consciously consider their place in the world and the fairy tale. With Raven’s disruptive action as the fulcrum of each transmedial text, EAH utilises multivocality and textual slippages — tenets of postmodernist revision — to maintain the generative play of the doll-line and resist the authority of any governing structure or body within the fairy tale.