Sleeping Beauty (franchise) such as the "Sleeping Beauty" characters. Characters from "Sleeping Beauty" also make minor appearances in the direct-to-video films based in the show, "" and "Mickey's House of Villains". Fantasy television series "Once Upon a Time" regularly include live-action interpretations of characters including Maleficent, Aurora, Phillip, King Stefan, and Aurora's mother is mentioned as Briar Rose, the "original" Sleeping Beauty. Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather appears as recurring character in the American animated television series "Sofia the First", as the headmistresses of Royal Prep. Aurora appeared in the 24th episode of the series, "Holiday in Enchancia". The series features characters from the
The Sleeping Beauty Quartet a warning that premature sexual encounters are destructive. Feminist theorists have focused on Sleeping Beauty's extreme passivity and the sexual nature of her awakening in the fairy tale. Anne Rice literalized these symbolic sexual elements—particularly, the passive sexual awakening or rape of Beauty that has been denounced by feminists—in the story by rewriting it into an explicit sadomasochistic erotica. However, Rice's cross-gender identification with the submissive male characters with receptive capacity in the trilogy—Alexi, Tristan and Laurent—enabled her to circumvent the equation of the female gender and masochism and, via their homoerotic interactions with the dominant male characters, she could