"None of these films are necessarily illiberal, and indeed their messages can be quite strong. Elsa and Anna in Frozen 2, for example, teach a valuable lesson about the duties that come with privilege, especially privilege born out of past societal injustice (a lesson driven home even deeper by Thor: Ragnorak a few years later, as my colleague at Liberal Currents Paul Crider points out). Again, however, the preponderance of such stories builds a certain air of conservatism, where each individual has an assigned duty they must live up to, and little room is left for those whom Frederick Douglass calls self-made men, “who owe little or nothing to birth, relationship, friendly surroundings; to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education; who are what they are, without the aid of any favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results.” Disney nearly had such a character with the penultimate Star Wars film, but in the final installment mad"
