“Ariel sold her voice for legs just because of a guy“
Meanwhile Ariel with legs;
Ariel already loved the human world long before meeting Eric (you don’t get a collection like hers overnight) and when she finally got a chance to explore it, she took it.
Ursula made it more about Eric than Ariel ever did.
and i mean hell this has been talked about before in more depth than i can, but when people complain about how the ending was changed (the original fairytale does not give ariel a happy ending, she dies trying to protect the prince), i think about the fact that this was written by a gay man in the 1980s
and i think it’s entirely valid (and gives her an extremely strong connection to the queer community) to change the story so she doesn’t die because of who she loves
Triton made escape a necessity. Once someone goes to the point of destroying your possessions in a violent rampage, there is no staying and sticking it out, there’s no safety. (And Ariel, even in Ursula’s lair, gave Triton more thought than he deserved at the time.) Nowhere in the ocean she could go and be safe. Everyone’s always ‘why don’t they just leave :|’ in abusive situations until the leaving is not something they find 100% worthy of approval.
Ursula made it about Eric. She didn’t have to. Ariel had to get out from under Triton’s thumb, it could have been literally anything. Ursula took advantage of a desperate victim for her own agenda. Realistic predatory behavior toward a vulnerable person.
And also
There’s always the ‘Eric didn’t want her until she was silent and meek’ criticism - FIRST OF ALL he started out looking for a woman who wasn’t silent, and second of all what part of the carriage driving bit (or any of her other actions on land) is meek, exactly?
People above have noted the queer subtext. Now, on the subject of Ariel being willing to leave her family, aside from the baseline ‘this is an abusive environment and she was not safe there’ angle I already mentioned, consider: Ariel’s father made it clear he would stop at nothing to crush and tear down who she was and replace it with what he wanted her to be. Now - what demographic might that resonate with? And given Ashman’s involvement, do you think that was a coincidence?
there has been scholarly discussion about the idea that the og little mermaid story, where she dies at the end, was written as a queer allegory.
so taking that into account… there is something very touching about taking this story from hans christian andersen from beyond the grave and being like “things are different now. they get to be happy. she gets to live.”
also in re: “Eric didn’t want her until she was silent and meek” the meek part’s been discussed but can we please talk about how when he first met her he thought she wasn’t the girl with the voice that he was trying to find and was disappointed, but that he slowly fell for her anyway? He’d explicitly wanted Ariel WITH her voice, but came to love her without it.
The bit about Howard Ashman being queer is finally giving me some glimmer of understanding of why the teenaged girl mermaid is named “Ariel.” Because, although the Disney movie single-handedly changed popular perception thereafter, Ariel is a boy’s name. Howard Ashman absolutely knew that.
(Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest also has male pronouns, in case anyone was struggling to remember.)
Also, in context, even the Little Mermaids tragic ending in the original story has a bit of a beautiful meaning to me in light of a queer context.
Andersen and the stories he writes are very Christian, sometimes gratingly so (looking at you, “The Marsh King’s Daughter”). Whatever you feel about it, if you want to understand his intent with his stories, you need to understand that he’s wanting to tell stories through a lens of Christian morals, and a sincere belief in a Christian afterlife.
In the OG story it’s explicitly stated that mermaids live for 300 years, but unlike humans they do not have immortal souls, when they die it’s oblivion.
In the story, if she cannot get the Prince to love her romantically by the end of the allotted time, she will die. However, her family gets the sea witch cut a deal saying that if the Little Mermaid kills the Prince before the time is up, she will be released from that deal and be allowed to live out the rest of her natural life.
She refuses to do this and accepts death. But in so doing this, she explicitly is stated to earn the equivalent of a human soul and earn eternal paradise.
The ending hits less to a more secular audience, but to me it’s always held a great meeting in a queer context. Even though his love for another man was unrequited, Andersen is validating it as sacred, as holy. The mermaids atypical, non-normative love for a human, although untenable, rather than being an unnatural thing that curses her serves as the path to her redemption.
We have more rights now and can conceive of more ways of looking at queer love, we can conceive of happy endings, so it makes sense and it’s right and good that the story changes with time. But it still chokes me up to imagine a faithful Hans Christian Andersen, refusing to think of his love for another man as anything less than holy.
It is entirely possible that I’m reading too much into it. But that’s what I’ve always thought.
