#because I have encountered a handful of works with nice stepsisters for Cinderella - as OP requested

[healerqueen]

Excellent post, @itspileofgoodthings. Jacqueline is a treasure. I love your analysis. If anyone wants to read other excellent Cinderella retellings with nice stepsisters and many other excellent twists, you might like The Reluctant Godfather by Allison Tebo and The Stepsister and the Slipper by Nina Clare. They are both romantic comedies, often hilariously farcical, but both of them also have heart. The Reluctant Godfather is cozy and sweet, while The Stepsister and the Slipper is more dramatic and edgy (in the latter, the stepsister is actually a flawed antagonist, but she has a character arc).

Jacqueline from Ever After!

I love Jacqueline! She’s the reason I always want there to be a nice stepsister in the Cinderella story even though, as far as I know, she’s the only one of her kind.

But that is the thing I love about her the most. She embodies the beautiful and heartening idea that kindness can be found in unexpected places. And in her case that isn’t a happy accident; it’s to her credit.

It’s true that Jacqueline is positioned to be sympathetic to Danielle because her mother and Marguerite don’t treat her very well either—they’d throw her under the bus in a heartbeat if they had to—but that still doesn’t mean she had to be kind. She could have tried to avoid being lumped in with Danielle by being extra cruel to her and by trying to win her mother and sister’s “favor” by flattery. The temptation to that was probably pretty high as a potential defense mechanism against their cruelty.

And instead she doesn’t. She shows Danielle kindness. It’s in small ways at first and not necessarily the most “heroic”—it’s realistic in that she doesn’t have the courage or even the means to stop the cruelty—but she’s there to help afterwards and that IS a balm. My favorite scene with her is when she takes care of Danielle’s wounds after she’s been whipped—pause to think about @byjoveimbeinghumble saying that Ever After is the DARKEST version of Cinderella and how that is achieved without any extra twists to the story—not just because it’s relieving to see someone take physical care of Danielle but because she says “she shouldn’t have said that about your mother.” Which Danielle needed even more than the treatment of her wounds. Jacqueline reminds Danielle that there are people who care, that there are people who aren’t cruel, that not everyone is out for themselves at the expense of human decency. And she needs to know that not just so the memory of her mother can be saved from cruel words, though that too, but so she can stay sane and remember that this isn’t the reality of the whole world, just that of two particularly awful people.

It’s such a gentle scene and such a truthfully sister scene (when they both start laughing about Danielle punching Marguerite it is the CUTEST) and what I love is that the movie shows you that Jacqueline means that moment of kindness beyond only the moment itself. By the end of the movie, she has fully separated herself from her mom and sister and is instrumental in the fact of Danielle’s happy ending and so gets her own instead of the fate that befalls her mother and sister.

She’s a beautiful example and reminder for me that people can change, even from within a rotten circle, that we aren’t divided into inflexible camps of good and bad but that we all have choices to make and they can be different than those expected of us or forced on us. By position, Jacqueline isn’t a “good” person; she’s one of the enemy. But by the end of the story she isn’t because she hasn’t let herself be. And that is so hopeful. We need to pay attention to the Jacquelines of the world to give us hope and also to remind us that a total “us” against “them” worldview is wrong and false, that we have to see people as individuals who are capable of changing and choosing different paths than the one they’re on at the beginning.