Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Princess

2021-08-12 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Princess
Votey panel for Princess
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic subverts the classic fairy tale trope of kissing a frog to turn it into a prince/princess. A man encounters a frog wearing a crown who tells him that if he kisses the frog, a princess will marry him. The man agrees ("I'm in!"), but the frog then adds increasingly concerning conditions: the princess will remain in the frog's body, she'll stay a frog physically, but will have "some governing authority over a small region" -- and that authority will be "merely ceremonial, derived from tradition, and exercised under the direction of God." When the man asks what this means in practice, the frog essentially admits the arrangement means nothing useful. The man asks "Do I really want a princess? That just means... no help?" and the frog responds "You know what, I'll pass." The joke satirizes the concept of royalty itself -- pointing out that a "princess" in modern terms is largely a ceremonial title with no practical benefits, making the fairy tale bargain essentially worthless.

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