Fridge-Funny: Thanks to all the made-up ceremonial traditions Delancy fabricated to buy our heroes time, they will one day be actual rituals to honor how she stalled for time.
Miss Privet identifies Blair as an example of someone with character, but no confidence, but doesn't say much about confidence without character beyond saying that it's dangerous. The natural example of this flaw is Dame Devin, who is firmly convinced of her own importance and that Delancy deserves the throne more than her sister-in-law did, and shows no positive qualities to temper this attitude. Her actions make the danger of this mindset clear: she had her own brother and his family killed so Delancy would inherit the throne, then tried to get Blair expelled without just cause merely on the chance that she might be the long-lost Princess Sophia.
When it comes to choosing the commoner who enters the school, they aren't chosen through a test of character and intelligence or something, but through a lottery. Good God, whoever founded that school was an idiot.
For further fun, Miss Privet later admits that only about a third of the lottery students actually graduate, meaning most of the time and money spent trying to educate them is effectively wasted. And as Blair's experience shows, even intelligent and hard-working lottery winners have the odds stacked against them: Blair would have flunked out if Miss Privet hadn't tutored her to help her catch up.
The fact that Dame Devin not only murdered Blair's biological parents, but also attempted to murder Blair herself when she was just a baby.
Since Dame Devin was apparently a commoner who married into royalty and was said to be Queen Isabella's sister-in-law, it can be assumed that whomever her husband (Delancy's father) was, he was the younger brother of either King Reginald or Queen Isabellanote Probably the latter, since kings are born into nobility and if Isabella was the ruler-regent, Blair's biological would've technically been a prince consort instead of a king. If this is true, Dame Devin and her daughter are technically already princesses.
This makes a bit more sense when considering that real-world peerages often drew a distinction between a person who legally inherited a title and one who married into it. Dame Devin would properly be a Princess Consort since she married a prince, and might have lost the right to use a royal title when her husband died (hence her being "Dame" Devin, which is an honorific title, not a noble title). Delancy would have inherited the title of Princess from her father, but based on Miss Privet's comments early in the film, she has to graduate from PCS before she's allowed to use it. After Blair is confirmed to be Princess Sophia, Delancy will probably have to give up being a princess in favor of a lesser title or none at all, since she's no longer in the direct line of succession (real-world precedent for this is complicated and varies depending on time and place, but many real-life countries no longer allow cousins of the reigning monarch to style themselves princes/princesses).
Why don't the princesses receive lessons in economics, international law, or diplomacy? Are they all expected to become figureheads instead of actual monarchs?
They probably do; it's just not shown on-screen because the lessons on poise and decorum are more stereotypically "princessy". Those classes are also the ones Dame Devin teaches, so they naturally get more screen time because that's where the conflict between her and Blair happens.
