Ever think abt how much Disney flattened the Little Mermaid story?

Ever think abt how much Disney flattened the Little Mermaid story?

In the book, Littlest is kinda an oddball neurodivergent coded stereotypical boy-crazy teenager prone to pent-up obsession (to the point it gets genuinely friggin weird at times)
Ahiru from Princess Tutu reminds me a lot of her

Importantly, she finds the statue FIRST, THEN saves the prince, THEN wants to learn more about human world

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We see an arc as she matures emotionally, going from physical attraction to empathy to inquiry

Even more importantly it's during this inquiry that she learns about humans possessing immortal souls. It's the goal of obtaining one herself that pushes her to make the deal with the Sea Witch, while her love for the Prince was not motive enough on its own

Over the course of the story, we're left to wonder if

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she gains agency by acting to achieve her dreams or loses it through constant self-sacrifice for the Prince?

Is she selfless by setting her own wellbeing aside to intervene to support him & save his life over & over, or selfish by putting her family through so much pain &, yeah, kind of using the Prince too just so she can gain entry to heaven herself?

Hey, welcome to the core themes of this coming of age story & of

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coming of age in general

Who doesn't have to ask themselves things like this as they start growing up?

The message seems to be that exploration, maturing & attempting to attain agency always carry risk & you may not even get what you wanted but that sometimes you may find something even better & maybe the effort is worthy in itself

How often do you see that? Where the pretty princess DOESN'T get to be w

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the prince? A story w love in it but which is NOT, at its core, a love story?

By contrast, Disney's Ariel has her original traits only as far as can be considered palatable. She's INTERESTED in the surface, but not OBSESSED, DIFFERENT but not WEIRD, queer & neurodivergent coded but in a way only visible to someone who really knows what to look for

Her original plot beats & arc play out backwards as well

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She "wants to be where the people are", THEN saves Eric, THEN finds the statue.

Inquiry. Empathy. Physical attraction

Her motives become LESS mature, and her desire to explore gets superseded by her desire to be w him. Her love for a man is what prompts her to make the deal when her curiosity was not. She literally looks directly at the broken face of the statue before steeling herself to go & it really

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looks, yes, like she is just making this decision based on an impulse because of a guy she likes & like she definitely IS giving up her agency for him.
Quite possibly the opposite of her arc in the book.

I get that the original story's talk of God and immortal souls might sound a bit strange to our modern secular ears, especially coming from a Disney kid movie, but wouldn't it have been interesting to see?

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Why take the religious elements out of a deeply religious story?

But what really bugs me is how much Littlest's relationships with other girls get erased

Her Grandmother (yeah she had a grandmother in the original) who taught her to take pride in herself & go for what she wanted even if she had to suffer for it, who surfaced with her son for the fist time in ages just to support her as best she could when

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Littlest needed it most, & whose hair fell out w grief on learning her fate

Or her sisters who loved her to death, who entertained her w their own adventures at the surface, who came to her aid when they saw her upset, who helped her find where the Prince lived, & who traded their long hair to the Sea-Witch (implied to be very important in mer-culture) in a desperate attempt to find a way to save her life

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This particular problem really comes to a head when it comes to how the Sea-Witch is characterized.

In the book she's truly a Chaotic Neutral

She isn't there for long, but she leaves an impact. Living on the outskirts of mer society surrounded by whirlpools, sunken ships, skeletons, polyps & sea snakes, she harbours no particular malice to Littlest. She doesn't try to interfere w her goal or to manipulate

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her into making the deal either
On the contrary, she directly tells her that it is a terrible idea that will bring her only pain, and when the conversation turns to Littlest losing her voice, her exact words are "it is NOT a trifle I ask"

She IS depicted as scary and dangerous...*because Littlest is making a scary and dangerous decision*

Disney's Ursula is loud, takes up space, aggressively wields & seeks

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power, actively thwarts Ariel's goal & in fact orchestrates most of Ariel's choices & pitfalls by constantly watching her from afar so she can eventually use her as a hostage. When she mentions the voice thing, she dismissively calls it "a token, really, A TRIFLE".

&, yes, considering what a fundamentally queer story this is, this does have some very uncomfortable "grooming" implications which lead to

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very bad things in real life when that idea is taken to heart by people from childhood (not to mention seriously cheapening Littlest's active role in her story of her own accord, for better or worse no matter what)

This shit is not neutral!

I mean seriously the Hays Code had been abolished for decades by this point
They didn't "have" to depict queerness like this!

Just..UGH! BAD DISNEY! VERY BAD DISNEY!

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Don't try & tell me that the original Sea Witch wasn't interesting enough either.

I dare you to try & tell me they "had" to replace a personification of the wild & chaotic nature of magic & miracles, who always keeps her word & extracts only the price required for what you ask...with yet another queer-coded campy disney villain...because she would be "boring" otherwise

She's basically the only other woman

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Ariel interacts with in the whole movie, too!

We really went from Littlest's final action in the story being to kiss the Prince's new bride on the forehead before ascending to heaven, a gesture of feminine solidarity & a blessing to be happy w him, towards a woman she barely even knows, despite every circumstance pitting them against each other

To..."other women are scary & predatory & will undermine

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your relationships w men"

Where's the nuance?
It's like a whole ocean of depth has been dried up

At least Snow White, Cinderella & Sleeping Beauty had a clear bad guy in the original story

Why HERE?

Why did The Little Mermaid *specifically* need another "jealous older lesbian-coded evil woman vs pure quiet younger more hetero-coded good woman" plot which Disney had already done to death by that point?

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It just feels so dull to subsume a story like this into the "traditional hetero christian marriage good, everything else bad" Disney formula

Even the Prince feels flattened

He went from a generally well-meaning but painfully oblivious & often condescending guy who, not unlike the Sea-Witch is not malicious but ends up screwing her over bc he has his own motives & is left genuinely blindsided & devastated

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by the apparent sudden disappearance of his strange new friend overnight

to "ooh he wants to find love, but he doesn't feel quite ready, oh wait the story has to wrap up with a marriage so now he conveniently is"

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Well, anyway tldr

Why does the Sea-Witch feel oversimplified into a moustache-twirling villain now?

Because she's not the Sea-Witch. She's Ursula

Why does the Prince feel like he's not allowed to have flaws or honestly much of a personality or motives of his own at all, really?

Because he's not the Prince. He's Eric

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Why does the Little Mermaid feel like she's just stumbling through the plot not changing or learning anything or having any arc or agency of her own?

Because she's not the Little Mermaid. She's Ariel

Thank you for coming to my overly long and pretentious ramble about a fairy tale with a fucking mermaid in it from nearly two hundred years ago

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