Tropes overtaken by events

At my mum's house with the niblings we discovered one of my old books, The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch. The younger two liked the dragon but the older, my niece, was baffled by the story. The 'moral' of The Paper Bag Princess is that maybe the princess doesn't need to marry the prince. My niece was very, Why would she? I sort of had to explain that in the Eighties and earlier this was a very real possibility for what princesses in stories did. Not exclusively, the exceptions that prove the rule, but enough that there were also many stories about that not needing to be the case. Maybe girls don't need to wear pretty dresses, maybe princes aren't the be-all-end-all, maybe princesses can do the saving from the dragon. My niece was even more baffled. There's still lots of unhelpful messaging in kids' media but I don't think the idea that princesses exist just to sit around to be rescued by princes is one of them. I'm pretty sure you're going to find more subversions of that trope…