Zeusis?unmask

Zeus is the canonical master of disguise. No god has disguised themselves so frequently and so effectively. To achieve his (usually lascivious) aims, he has variously disguised himself as:

• A white bull
• An eagle
• An ant
• A swan
• A cuckoo bird
• A serpent
• A shower of gold
• A dark mist
• A mortal
• A goddess
• A satyr
• A cupbearer

Zeus' disguises are so famously convincing that they don't just survive casual inspection, they pass the most intimate of scrutinies.¹ So if we don't see among the princesses a lightning bolt wielding, sky ruling, god fathering character, Zeus is in disguise again, and we can trust it to be a very good one.

While other gods may be revealed by their domain or iconography, the biggest clue to Zeus' identity is through his origin story:

• The titan Cronus learns that he is destined to be overcome by his own children, just as he had overthrown his father.
• Cronus tells his wife Rhea to give him Zeus, but Rhea tricks Cronus by giving him a stone to swallow.
• Zeus is sheltered by the Kouretes, the gods of the wild mountainside.
• Zeus returns in disguise and tricks Cronus into drinking a poison, causing Cronus to regurgitate Zeus's siblings.
• After a war, Zeus overthrows Cronus to take his place as the ruler of the gods.

There is exactly one Disney princess story that matches this beat for beat:

• An incumbent ruler is threatened by a successor, which mirrors the manner in which the ruler overthrew the previous ruler.
• The incumbent tasks an agent to kill the successor, but loses heart and instead deceives the ruler with a decoy.²
• The successor finds shelter among the wild guardians of the mountains.
• When the successor and incumbent finally meet, one of them is in disguise, and one tricks the other into swallowing a poison.
• The incumbent is vanquished and the successor takes their rightful place on the throne.

The story of Snow White is just a retelling of the Titanomachy, sanitized for Disney.

But where's the war and lightning bolts? Zeus battles Cronus to take his place as king of the gods. And clearly, Snow White, having just eaten the apple, is out of action during the entire scene as the dwarfs chase and vanquish the evil queen.

Or is she? Right when Snow White collapses and the evil queen cackles in triumph — a flash of lightning and the crack of thunder. Torrential rain cascades down while the evil queen flees the vengeful dwarves. The god of the sky and thunder is close at hand. Hounded by her pursuers, it seems the evil queen might get away… until crack! A lightning bolt strikes the ledge she is on and the queen falls to her death!³

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Extra-diegetic. Snow White is the first of the Disney princesses and kickstarted the entire franchise. And to this day, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) remains the most successful Disney animated movie of all time when adjusted for inflation, boasting a massive estimated lifetime worldwide gross of over $2.3 billion.⁴

Footnotes

1. Zeus has learned a hard lesson about the need to stay in disguise — revealing his true form led to the incineration of his lover Semele. And then he had to have a fetus sewn into his thigh. Not a mistake he's going to make twice. ↩

2. In the original 1812 fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, Sneewittchen, the parallels are even more explicit. The evil queen eats the decoy lungs and liver with salt, believing them to be Sneewittchen's. ↩

3. A devil's advocate might say that the evil queen was killed by the fall, not the lightning bolt. And that for all we know, perhaps she survived the fall, eh? But that's exactly what happened to Cronus. Cronus wasn't killed by the lightning bolt. He was cast down into Tartarus, a deep, inescapable abyss beneath the underworld. ↩

4. See Guinness World Records. ↩