Yet there’s an ambivalence hidden inside these stories. Cinderellas are tricky; they are privileged by birth and oppress

Diana’s tormentors are normally the show’s protagonists, the royal family we’ve come to know and root for over the past three seasons. But in an instant, all of the characters we like become terrifying strangers. Our only concern is for the helpless young woman who finds herself trapped with these inbred, old-money monsters.

When I was newer to sobriety, I might have been disappointed by this realization. These days, it doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve discovered how fulfilling a life with no alcohol can be, and I know that I’m not really missing out at all.

My only real choices are continuing to abstain from alcohol completely, or giving up on sobriety and ending up drinking until I get wasted every night. That middle ground of drinking just one or two is not a realistic middle ground for someone with my psychology.

Even after years sober, I still can’t really understand the mindset of a non-addict. When I felt the small effects of the first beer or two of a night, I could never resist the urge to keep going.

In Ready or Not, the heroine is a bride named Grace who’s forced to play her in-laws’ preferred “game” on her wedding night — this game being of the “most dangerous” survivalist variety And in Knives Out, the heroine is a nurse, Marta, who is framed for murder after her wealthy employer dies, presumably at the hands of his awful family. Both women, like Diana, are wide-eyed and exaggeratedly pure of heart. (Marta is so relentlessly sweet and innocently imperiled that the audience of a 19th-century melodrama would probably find her a tad unrealistic.)

When I try to imagine drinking just a beer or two, and nothing more, it still sounds like it would be impossible. These days, I almost never get cravings for alcohol, but I can visualize exactly how instantly my first beer would turn those cravings right back on.

In a way, this is nice to realize, because it makes my options crystal clear. When I first quit drinking, I used to wish that I could learn to moderate my alcohol intake instead of abstaining entirely. I dreamed about being able to drink without having it overrun my life. That dream doesn’t fit with the way that I actually interact with alcohol though.

When I was newer to sobriety, I might have been disappointed by this realization. These days, it doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve discovered how fulfilling a life with no alcohol can be, and I know that I’m not really missing out at all.

This is in contrast to the grotesque decadence of the families they’re dealing with. The coked-up sister-in-law and shambling drunk brother in Ready or Not who hunt Grace with Great-Grandpa’s heirloom murder weapons; the narcissistic influencer and blustering douchebag who won’t stop mentioning that he “saw Hamilton at the Public” in Knives Out; and in The Crown, the pathetic man-child Charles and the human icebox that is Queen Elizabeth II. These people are deformed by wealth, made inhuman by it, and can only sustain themselves through the suffering of people like our heroines.

There’s a scene early in The Crown’s wildly popular fourth season, where Princess Diana meets her royal in-laws. She’s barely out of her teens and suffers from profound insecurity and anxiety; until she met Prince Charles, she was working as a part-time kindergarten teacher. Now she stands face-to-face with the most powerful people in the country—and they hate her. They stand around her in a circle, like wolves closing in on a wounded deer. They talk over her every time she speaks. She’s supposed to have memorized a complicated hierarchy of titles and greetings, and they mock her every time she gets something wrong, which is often. The camera whirls around Diana, watching the panic attack brewing on her face, until we’re as dizzy and overwhelmed as she is.

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g, Zelle became the mistress of the museum’s wealthy founder Lyon industrialist Émile Étienne Guimet. She tried unsuccessfully to regain custody of her daughter. Her ex-husband produced photographs of her in her performance attire (or lack thereof) to convince the court that she was an unfit mother.

As a political statement, it’s not subtle: the machinery of capitalism is oiled by the blood of the workers, etc. It is (probably) not true that all wealthy families are comprised entirely of depraved soulless drug-addicted homicidal maniacs, no more than it is true that every working-class person exists in a state of moral perfection, observing the cruelty of the world through giant Keane eyes. Yet you can see why it feels true, here at the end of 2020, when the Oval Office has been occupied for four years by one of the most depraved and freakish families in existence.

Whatever bad ideas you have about the rich, the Trumps confirm them. Donald, an incoherent whirlwind of racism and cruelty and sexual violence; his wifem an empty-eyed shell whose only clearly expressed opinions involve hating children and Christmas; his sons, a heady mixture of stupid and mean; Ivanka, selling airbrushed Glossier-pink fascism; and Jared, somehow the only man on earth paler and more incompetent than Prince Charles.

This is not an uncommon place to find yourself in 2020. Watching The Crown, I realized that it essentially shares a plot with two other recent movies: Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, and Ready or Not by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. Like The Crown, these are essentially Cinderella stories with body counts, where pure, innocent young women are suddenly elevated into families of depraved aristocrats. It’s through those women’s battle to survive that we navigate the bloody class subtext of our princess fantasies.

We understand the ugliness of power now — whether through the Trumps, or the revelations about Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein — and how money can both morally deform the rich and empower them to commit acts of violence. In the face of this power, most of us feel small and vulnerable. And in Hollywood, “vulnerable” somehow always equates to “young white woman.” (Marta, the only heroine of color, is the most two-dimensional character; if she weren’t literally perfect, a white audience might refuse to sympathize.) In our minds, we are all princesses, even if we are men.