Herais?unmask

Hera is the queen of heaven, Zeus's wife and sister and the goddess of marriage, women and family. Her temples at Argos and Samos were among the oldest and largest in the Greek world. Her defining characteristics in myth is her jealous and vengeful nature in dealing with any who offended her, especially Zeus's numerous adulterous lovers and illegitimate offspring.¹

So, mapping Hera's characteristics onto our target princess:

• Hera is the angry goddess. The princess must have a temper.
• Let's specifically direct her rage against the men in her life. She should have a catalogue of rejected suitors longer than any other princess.
• Hera's marriage begins with Zeus disguising himself as an injured bird to get close to her. The princess must have a husband, but let's have him lie to her.
• She should be regal in her bearing. Give her a diadem and gold earrings, and have her so inured to the trappings of royalty that she forgets to take them off even when in disguise.
• The whole film could be about who gets to marry the princess, because Hera is the goddess of the marriage-bond. But let's give her the second lowest screentime of all the Disney Princesses.²
• And the princess's arc should be about the right to choose and she isn't some prize to be won. Only, you know, don't actually let her choose. Cos that would be silly. Instead, make sure her marriage is a foregone conclusion the audience saw coming a mile away.

Hera is obviously Jasmine. Men lie to her for the entire film. Her father, the Sultan, lies about the immutability of marriage law. Jafar lies as freely as Zeus conducts extramarital affairs. Aladdin — the good one — gets close to Jasmine through deception, just as how Zeus got to Hera.³ Confronted by Jasmine at the end of the magic carpet ride, Aladdin has the perfect opportunity to come clean yet he chooses to double down and keeps the lie running.

Jasmine is not a woman who distrusts men on principle. She is a woman who has been correct. And that's the tell, because Hera's tragedy is not that she is suspicious. It's that she is right, every time, about everything, and gets called shrewish for noticing.

---

Extra-diegetic. Hera is defined by not having her own story. Jasmine is the only Disney Princess whose film is named after another character — her lying husband.

Footnotes

1. There is one story where she's the protagonist and she comes out ahead, but it features her working her ass off in order to literally seduce her own husband. ↩

2. Disney princess screen time, ranked — GoldDerby. ↩

3. As with many inveterate liars, Aladdin's signature line is "Do you trust me?" ↩