SG: What do you hope people take away from your work? But I was good at it, so I stuck with it. SG: How did you get involved in animation? JP: Most of it is on the website, but I’m also easily found on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter. There’s also a ton of extra content on the website - think deleted scenes and making-of content. JP: It’s available at any local bookstore or on Amazon. JP: I’d love to do a video series of some of these stories. These are stories that deserve to be heard. I know some people won’t read those, will assume all chapters are for all readers, and will get upset - just look at my negative reviews - but I did my best. So I instituted a system of labeling each chapter with maturity levels and content earnings - sort of movie ratings on a per-chapter basis. On the web, I can make filters, so readers can avoid more difficult content. JP: I worried a lot about communicating content. SG: How was the process of creating the book different from the blog? It’s been an unbelievable honor - and responsibility - earning that trust. I am astonished at how strong my friends have been, for so long. They’ve entrusted me with secrets and stories they’ve told almost nobody else - their hidden struggles and tragedies, tales every woman knows but men rarely hear. They always liked me and trusted me, but now that they feel like I get it, it’s like a curtain has been pulled back. JP: The biggest change has been one of the most unexpected: my female friends, people I’ve known for decades, have started to talk to me differently. SG: How has creating this project changed your life? I only hope I can be half as cool as her.

She wrote books, made books, held her own job, wrote her own ticket, and raised me and my many brothers (I have seven - no sisters). It was a world that had no place for women like her.

She grew up as a brilliant, strong woman in Kentucky in the 1950s. So I started making it, because I wanted it to exist. None of my coworkers had heard of them, which I thought was a shame. A bunch of the ideas I tossed out were people I knew from Wikipedia, like Nzinga Mbande (the Angolan rebel queen) or Ada Lovelace (the world’s first programmer). Jason Porath: It started almost as a joke - a competition with DreamWorks co-workers to brainstorm the worst possible animated princess movie idea. Smart Girls: How did you get interested in the idea of Rejected Princesses? Upon leaving the animation industry after working on movies like How To Train Your Dragon 2 and Kung Fu Panda 2 Jason Porath started the Rejected Princesses blog - which went viral, and two and a half years later, it has become a book! As Jason puts it, “I’m a straight white dude from Kentucky, so kind of an unlikely candidate to tackle all this, but I love the work and try to do my best by it.” At Smart Girls we are HUGE fans of Jason so we sat down with him to learn more.

Rejected princesses by jason porath