Rebellious Princess - Television Tropes & Idioms

Jasmine: I've never done a thing on my own. I've never had any real friends... except you, Rajah. I've never even been outside the palace walls.

Sultan: But, Jasmine, you're a princess.

Jasmine: Then maybe I don't want to be a princess any more!

Disney's Aladdin

To the Rebellious Princess, being part of the royal family is overrated: You have no control over the path of your life, your responsibilities are numerous and burdensome, you're generally under everyone's thumb, or you're destined to live unhappily in an Arranged Marriage. The only options are to throw off your frilly dress and to run off with the first hero who passes through (in old fashioned stories), or set off for Action Girl adventures on her own on the sly (in the modern ones).

The Rebellious Princess is usually a teenager, typically brash (since it goes hand in hand with being rebellious), and often blonde. Quite often, she's the hero's love interest. Sometimes the Rebellious Princess is the Staff Chick, but not always.

Somewhat more common in the earlier days of the RPG genre than they are now; their population has dwindled with the reduced number of games involving monarchies.

Examples:

Video Games

Pretty much every character named Nina in the Breath Of Fire series.
Extremely common in Final Fantasy games:
- In Final Fantasy IV, the player encounters Edward/Gilbert, a rebellious prince who masquerades as a "Spoony Bard".
- Lenna and her elder sister Faris in Final Fantasy V - the latter, having disguised herself as a man and become the captain of a gang of pirates, distinctly more so than the former. To her defense, she had been adopted by the pirates' captain after a tragic Hiryuu accident.
- Final Fantasy VI gives us Sabin/Mash, another rebellious prince who gives up co-monarchy over the kingdom of Figaro to live as a monk.
- Rinoa of Final Fantasy VIII is not quite a princess, but fits the trope nicely -- she's the leader of a terrorist group seeking to overthrow the Galbadian government, of which her father is the Minister of Defense.
- Garnet from Final Fantasy IX is a borderline member -- she has a much calmer, shyer personality than most, but she's still a Rebellious Princess.
- Ashe in Final Fantasy XII is still working for her country, but in a nonstandard way. Larsa also takes a break form being heir to The Empire to adventure.
Marle from Chrono Trigger also exemplifies this trope, even going so far as to use a pseudonym (her real name is Nadia).
Princess Seraphine from Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords. The player character is supposed to escort her to the court of the man to whom she's betrothed, but she begs for help in escaping. If the player elects not to force her into her arranged marriage, she joins the party and aids with future battles.
Princess Alena from the second chapter of Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior IV. In fact, within the realm of video games, she's the ur-example.
- Lady from the Japanese-only game Lady Stalker is a rich girl instead of a princess, but is otherwise not only a perfect example, but is so much like Alena that she's one of the pieces of evidence used to back up the rumor that the game was originally intended as a Dragon Quest Gaiden Game focused on Alena.
Nalia from Baldur's Gate 2 follows this rule to the letter, except that she's nobility rather than royalty. She also spouts somewhat condescending quasi-socialist lines about helping the "less fortunate", but in a world where even the most egalitarian governments tend to be oligarchic and the economy is a sort of capitalism, she's fighting a losing battle. She's also shown as being somewhat of a self-righteous poser.
Jelanda in Valkyrie Profile, and Alicia and Celes in Valkyrie Profile 2
Eclair in La Pucelle Tactics.
Parodied in Kingdom Of Loathing, in which one of the randomly encountered enemies in the "Penultimate Fantasy Airship" zone is the Spunky Princess.
Princess Peach in her own game, Super Princess Peach and Super Mario RPG. In pretty much any other game, shes a Distressed Damsel, though.
Jade Empire has Silk Fox], who enjoys escaping the pressures of palace life by donning a disguise that looks like a cross between a ninja suit and a harem girl outfit. Mainly, she just wants to take down the Evil Chancellor to her father. Interestingly enough, her character model is the only one that changes throughout the entire game: She removes her veil in the Imperial Palace and after the Point Of No Return.
Super Robot Wars has not one, but three:
- Princess Shine from the Original Generation series, who starts piloting a Humongous Mecha to liberate her kingdom and eventually ups and joins the heroes outright...
- Princess Armana Tiqvah from the Alpha series (actually, Alpha 3), who bucks the trend by being a princess of The Empire instead.
- One of the protagonist of the mostly forgotten Super Robot Wars 64, Manami Hamill, actually fits this despite not being a Princess, but an Ojou. She's a daughter of a high ranking family that actually supports the resistance force in attempt to liberate the Earth.
Tiltyu of Freege in Fire Emblem 4. Pretty much she's the only noblewoman in the first generation who ran away from home because she disagreed with their methods (Ayra of Isaac did run off from home, but she still adheres her Kingdom's ethics).
- In Fire Emblem 6, there's Princess Guinevere of Bern who's on the run for questioning her older brother, King Zephiel She's finally crowned as Queen when Zephiel dies at the hands of Roy, but still has lots of nobles hissing at her.
- Fire Emblem is somewhat unusual when it comes to this trope in that rebellious princes outnumber their female counterparts. Probably the most famous of these is Hector from the seventh game; he's technically a minor noble, but otherwise hits every note of this trope.
Angela of Seiken Densetsu 3. While her motive might not quite fit the trope, her personality and actions are certainly a match.
- In that game's prequel, Secret of Mana, Princess Purim runs off with the hero in search of her love interest, Dyluck.
Kumatora from Mother 3 - how many princesses do you know that can take on an army tank and live?
Lise of the still-Japan-only Atelier Lise. It's a little different in that she actually loves her parents and they love her... however, her father is a financial idiot and has managed to get the entire kingdom into a multimillion-gold debt to a foreign bank, and if the kingdom can't pay it off, the bank will foreclose on the rights to rule the kingdom - by any means necessary. Thus Lise disguises herself and leaves home to make a fortune in a neighboring kingdom, setting the game's action and plot into motion. She fits the other parts of the trope to a T, being a bit brash and overbearing and she did technically dodge an arranged marriage by doing this - an arrangement to the Prince of the kingdom she's now in. Ooops.

Film

Outside of the interactive electronic oeuvre, practically every female protagonist in the Disney Animated Canon since The Little Mermaid has been of this type (Ariel, Jasmine, Pocahontas, etc. etc. etc.), possibly as a response to feminists complaining about how "Disney Princesses" had been treated previously (almost exclusively) as Distressed Damsels. Belle from Beauty and the Beast is a notable departure from both character types (she's rebellious, but she's a rebellious intellectual of no bloodline worth mentioning), as are Lilo and her older sister from Lilo and Stitch.

Western Animation

Animaniacs sent up the above example in their Pocahontas parody with the song "Just the Same Old Heroine." ("First I tuned an aerial / Then I rang a bell...")
Partially subverted in Gummi Bears, where Princess Calla, a princess who loves to go adventuring, has her father discover her secret participation in a contest for the winner to become an official protector for herself. However, far from disapproving, he is deeply impressed with her physical prowess and says publicly that it's clear she needs no personal protector after all.
Toph from Avatar The Last Airbender. Not exactly a princess (her family is rich, but not titled unless you count an actual last name) and not quite a teenager (she's twelve), but other than that she fits the trope dead-on.
Princess Allura from Voltron, who becomes one of the mecha pilots and The Chick on the team.
One could argue Starfire from Teen Titans being that leaving her home planet to do the hero thing on Earth, plus fighting against her sister when it was time to go back, is pretty rebellious.

Literature

Princess Eilonwy from The Prydain Chronicles, whose outspokenness and rebelliousness at times border on childish brattishness.
- And since Disney created The Film Of The Book with The Black Cauldron, Eilonwy is also part of the previously listed Disney line-up. Given the above plus the fact that she predates Ariel, the Rebellious Disney Princess trope is Older Than They Think.
Ce'Nedra from David and Leigh Eddings' Belgariad series certainly has the attitude and the love interest bit down, but she actually loves being a princess- one of her major problems with marrying Garion was the fact that, as Overlord of the West, he outranked her.
Princess Cimorene from The Enchanted Forest Chronicles - early in the first book, she intentionally gets herself "kidnapped" by a dragon in order to escape her current life and an arranged marriage.
Princess Meg from The Runaway Princess, a typical "hates doing princessy things like embroidery" princess, starts off the book by questioning the stereotypical princess story her mother reads to her before bed, and later defies her father and attempts to interfere with the contest he set up to marry her off and help stimulate the kingdom's economy. She ends up winning the contest herself, accidentally.
Princess Amy from The Ordinary Princess bolts from her home after her parents and their councillors come up with a plot to hire a dragon and imprison her in a tower in order to force some prince into marrying her. Amy's deception of being an ordinary person is helped by the fact that, as a baby, a fairy actually blessed her to be ordinary -- she doesn't look or act like a stereotypical princess at all!
Anne Dare of Greg Keyes' The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone tetralogy -- though she is thwarted in her rebelliousness first by family members who are actually smart enough to predict her defiance and catch her at it, then by some (well-deserved) guilt-tripping from her friend and maidservant, and finally by, well, reality, in the form of a legion of disasters, tragedies and prophecied battles.
How has Eowyn not been mentioned yet?! She is a technical princess, being as her uncle is the king. Anyway, after she marries Faramir the two of them are granted rule of Ithilien, a province of Gondor. The Film Of The Book left this part out, though.

Anime

Lucia of Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch is the heroine, but doesn't understand nor appreciate her position -- so she just tries to do what she wants.
Princess Euphemia li Britannia in Code Geass renounces her throne succession rights and goes against her father the Emperor's policy (though not far enough to start a full-scale rebellion). She is also the love interest of one of the main characters, Suzaku Kururugi; this is "bad and rebellious" since in the eyes of the huge majority of the Brittanian ruling class Suzaku is a "damn dirty foreigner."
- In R2, the rebellious princess mantle that Euphemia dropped when she died is taken up by her older sister Cornelia, who goes rogue to clear Euphie's name after the Euphinator incident.
Cagalli Yula Athha in Gundam SEED is de facto the princess of the neutral state of Orb but runs off to wage guerrilla warfare against ZAFT in Africa. She is much less volatile in the sequel, Gundam SEED Destiny.
In G Gundam, we have the tomboyish and willful Maria Louise from Neo France doing lots of un-princess-like things to get the attention of her "Knight in League" and local Gundam Fighter, George do Sand. After she actually grows up and learns her lesson, Maria doesn't lose her spirit and does what she can to aid George and the Shuffle Alliance.
Relena Peacecraft in Gundam Wing. Even after being made Queen of the World Sphere Alliance, she refuses to go along with Romefeller's plans and instead makes her own policy.