Basic Trope: Princesses are heroic, queens are villainous.
- Straight: Princess Sarah is The Heroine and the good-natured, loving princess of the Kingdom of Troperia. Her cruel, manipulative, Evil Aunt, Queen Regina, is the Big Bad running Troperia into the ground and aiming to get Sarah out of her way.
- Exaggerated:
- All the princesses in the setting are good; all the queens are evil.
- Sarah is Incorruptible Pure Pureness incarnate, Regina is a cartoonish Devil in Plain Sight.
- Downplayed:
- Sarah is heroic but kind of a jerk; Regina has some redeeming traits but is overall still the villain.
- Sarah is still squaring up against Regina, but has an ally in the good Queen Candace.
- Regina is antagonistic to Sarah, but not outright villainous. Rather, she's a Fantasy-Forbidding Mother who stands in the way of Sarah going out and seeing the world, but she means well.
- Justified:
- Fairy Tale Tropes are baked into the setting of the story; the powers that be drive queens to be evil and princesses to be good (until they are crowned).
- Troperia is a Matriarchy. The crown the ruler wears is imbued with dark magic that drives them to madness and villainy.
- Power corrupts, and unlike the Queen, Sarah has not had chance to be corrupted.
- Regina is a Proud Beauty who guards her public image fiercely, becomeing jealous of the attention the still-innocent and Obliviously Beautiful Sarah gets with the court/public/press as she matures. This drives the Queen towards insanity and ever greater evil.
- Inverted: Sarah is The Evil Princess and the Big Bad, while Regina is The High Queen trying to keep her away from the crown of Troperia.
- Gender Inverted: The Hero Prince Sam would be every bit a Princess Classic had he not been born a prince, but he still is on the run from his Evil Uncle Big Bad King Rex, who is jealous of his youth, handsomeness, and power.
- Subverted: Sarah only pretends to be good. She's actually Regina's protegee in the dark arts, and is acting as The Mole for the heroes.
- Double Subverted: Only for her to reveal that she's actually a quadruple agent, and is truly working with the heroes to bring down Regina.
- Parodied: As soon as the crown landed on her head during her coronation, Regina's personality underwent a complete 180 and she became a hammy, overbearing tyrant.
- Zig-Zagged: Depending on the episode; Princess Sarah is good and pure in some episodes, but unreasonable and bratty in others. Meanwhile, Regina is overbearing and stuffy in some episodes, but reasonable and understanding in others.
- Averted: No queens or princesses are shown in the story; if there are, neither is particularly good nor evil.
- Enforced: Sarah was supposed to be a young queen keeping her evil cousin Princess Regina from usurping the throne, but the executives say that the target audience views queens as bad and princesses as good, so Sarah becomes a young princess and Regina an older evil queen.
- Lampshaded: "Sarah is the good one, but Regina is the bad one."
- Invoked: Foreseeing the havoc his sister Regina would wreak on the kingdom after being declared regent after his death, King Rex's last wish is that Sarah is raised to be a good woman who would want to take on Regina.
- Exploited: Sarah plays up the "good, innocent, loving" part of her princess image and releases propaganda painting Regina as a wicked queen to win over Troperia's citizens so she has more support to depose Regina.
- Defied: Regina is crowned Queen Regent, but strives to cultivate a good relationship with Sarah and be a good queen, because she doesn't want to be like fantasy's evil queens who are deposed by good princesses.
- Discussed: "Let me guess, Sarah, you're a princess with a Wicked Stepmother or evil mom queen whom you want gone? That's always the case with princesses in the stories."
- Conversed: "Anyone notice how queens are always evil and princesses are always good? What's up with that?"
- Deconstructed: Princess Sarah really wants to become Queen, but her male relatives keep her away from the crown, fearing that she will instantly let the power go to her head.
- Reconstructed: Sarah, upon growing up, marries a supportive prince and has the kingdom converted to a principality, allowing her to rule as a princess, while Queen Regina rallies her supporters in a civil war to restore the monarchy with her at the top.
Back to Good Princess, Evil Queen.
