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valtsv

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oak23

someone: the disney little mermaid is a bad adaptation of the original story because she’s meant to die at the end

me: the original story was meant to be an outlet for the male author having unrequited and repressed romantic feelings for another man and the only happy ending he saw for a same sex attracted man was to die and the only reward was being able to earn his soul through the joy of children his stories brought while the Disney adaptation touched upon the same themes with the work of Howard Ashman, another same sex attracted man but instead being able to give the mermaid a happy and loving relationship where she lives out her dreams is just as thematic and truer to the what the story sought to tell instead of having it become a tragedy. in this essay i

oak23

Okay so the rest of the essay be here:

I am going to preface this by saying the people involved in these stories did not intend for The Little Mermaid to be a 1:1 replica of their lives but it’s clear how significant their experiences shaped the telling of it.

Hans Christian Andersen’s sexuality isn’t easy to define especially since the society and culture he lived in wouldn’t have the language or the framework to discuss sexuality, and it would do a disservice to say he was gay when he didn’t have a known romantic life. But his love life has been defined by his numerous unrequited loves that ranged from women to men, but also his steadfast refusal to have sex.

Another aspect of Andersen is how heavily religious he was and how that showed through his work. Some of his other stories like “The Ugly Duckling”, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “Thumbelina”, and “Princess and the Pea”, all have themes around being alienated but that there isn’t a true villain in any of them and their happy endings be something close to divinity and good morality. Though not overtly religious in his stories it’s clear how much faith he had in God doing the right thing in the end.

The Little Mermaid however, is probably one of the most overt in how his religion and his sexuality intersected.

A brief overview of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is that in his story, Mermaids are creatures born without souls, however they live significantly longer than humans.

But it’s precisely because of this, the titular Mermaid longs to become human in hopes she too will gain a soul. She chooses to trade her tongue to get a pair of legs to woo a human she rescued, and on these legs all she feels is pain and suffering, and she must do so in silence. If she cannot gain the love of her prince, she will die without a soul, and never get to heaven. All the while, the prince loves her only as a brother would in the time they spend together and eventually chooses to marry another girl.

The mermaid is then given a chance to return to her life as a mermaid if she kills the prince before she dies but in doing so she will never have a soul. She loves him too much to do so and chooses death over living as a creature with no soul.

But when she dies, she finds herself amongst the daughters of the air, and is told because of her love and her suffering she has the chance to gain a soul unlike any other mermaid. She can work for 200 years making sure children are happy and be granted a soul thereafter.

So, looking at this, you can draw clear parallels with this story and Andersen’s personal life.

Like the mermaid, Andersen saw himself as a creature without a soul. He too was in love with a man who only saw himself as a brother to Andersen. Andersen saw himself doomed to be silent, doomed to constantly feel like he was walking on knives and doomed to be alone.

But his idea of a joyous ending is that his suffering wasn’t all for naught, that his stories that he wrote for children and the joy they brought WOULD eventually grant his greatest desire to be granted a soul and accepted into heaven.

Of course there isn’t a villain, Andersen accepted that his culture that cruelly casted him out was correct in doing so, and that he had to work within the system to exist.

The Little Mermaid’s themes of suffering and love were tied to Andersen’s life and his sexuality intersecting with his religion.

The 1989 Disney version has consistently gone on record that despite have Musker and Clements being directors, Howard Ashman, a gay man with AIDS in the 80s, was the creative force in character writing, music and the creative direction the movie eventually went in.

In the movie, all of the religious aspects have been stripped away, and the motivations have been changed.

Ariel no longer wants to gain a soul, her desire to become human instead is tied with feeling alienated with her home life and wanting acceptance elsewhere. Her hobby of collecting human stuff HEAVILY echoes the experiences of many LGBT+ people who had interests outside of their gender roles, and being unable to to see eye to eye with bigoted parents. People often mistake her attempts at asserting her own identity as “being in love” when the narrative is about her wanting agency and respect for who she is.

Ursula being a villain in this version is tied to how LGBT+ people of the 1980s understanding at least part of their oppression was due to predatory and unscrupulous people, as well as being systematic. This contrasts with Andersen’s work because Andersen, despite suffering, always put faith in the systems surrounding him and only striving to work within them, while Ashman understood that to work with society you don’t do business with morally neutral people.

While Andersen sees the only option for people, or to him, creatures, like him to gain any morally good ending, they need to remain passive and work within the system to get what they want.

But the 1989’s response to that is, no, to get a happy ending, you NEED to question the system, you need to fight against it because it is a system that only uses you to get what it needs and it needs to be destroyed to get a happy ending. Like, you CAN NOT separate how this change in the story occurred with Howard Ashman being a gay man with AIDS during 1980s America.

In the end, Ariel reconciling with her bigoted father to be able to live her life as a human with another man thematically ties in to how Andersen saw his own happy ending.

The Little Mermaid is a story that can not be separated from two men who dealt with complex relationships with their own identities, and it’s disingenuous to say the 1989 film is a bad adaptation for not religiously following the plot points of the original.

The Little Mermaid is at its best when it explores how a person’s sexuality and identity is alienated from the culture around them, and how they navigate the system that oppresses them.

Andersen saw the system to be just and his idea of a happy ending clashes with Howard Ashman’s own experiences of a system that needed to be defied to have earned a happy ending.

All in all, the 1989 movie is a good adaptation, not for slavishly keeping every detail, but for reflecting where society is, and for keeping the themes of unrequited love, identity and coming of age relevant to their audience.

klobbaklanks

cakejam

this lemur didn’t seem pleased that i was taking photos of him

actionables

so done

with you and your rude shit

fluentisonus

Lovers of Valdero // Lovers of Hasanlu // Bronze Age Scythian Couple // Sarcophagus of the Spouses // Etruscan Sarcophagi // Roman Sarcophagus // Ilka Scarneo Monument // A Memorial to Marriage, Patricia Cronin

evilsexy

this tweet really spoke to me

valtsv

disney’s Reagan (2025). his mom gets pushed off a cliff by gays

i'd better be cast as one of the gays

unexplained-events

Researchers have used Easter Island Moai replicas to show how they might have been “walked” to where they are displayed.

VIDEO

smileforthehigh-deactivated2017

Finally. People need to realize aliens aren’t the answer for everything (when they use it to erase poc civilizations and how smart they were)

desiremyblack

(via TumbleOn)

pearlsnapbutton

What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”

kiwianaroha

Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it

And the Iroquois told Europeans that squirels showed them how to tap maple syrup and no one believed them until they caught it on video

theopensea

Oral history from various First Nations tribes in the Pacific Northwest contained stories about a massive earthquake/tsunami hitting the coast, but no one listened to them until scientists discovered physical evidence of quakes from the Cascadia fault line.

thegirlthewolfate

Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.

Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/

Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄

archaeologistforhire

Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.

“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.

In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.

“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/16/inuit-canada-britain-shipwreck-hms-terror-nunavut

“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”

Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.

“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/sammy-kogvik-hms-terror-franklin-1.3763653

crazythingsfromhistory

Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.

Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.

fluffmugger

oh man let me tell you about Indigenous Australian myths - the framework they use (with multi-generational checking that’s unique on the planet, meaning there’s no drifting or mutation of the story, seriously they are hardcore about maintaining integrity) means that we literally have multiple first-hand accounts of life and the ecosystem before the end of the last ice age

it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.

Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least

ironbite4

Ain’t it amazing what white people consider history and what they don’t?

gluklixhe

I always said disservice is done to oral traditions and myth when you take them literally. Ancient people were not stupid.

eastsidecosmic

curlymcclain

i love this suez canal thing because it’s as simple as that. most news requires so much context and explanation and now? the boat is stuck. that’s it baby, that boat sure is stuck. let’s unstick that boat if we can, it needs to not be stuck. fabulous

annanclausen

Also it's stupid and not like... Super depressing to hear about. It's just stuck! Will they get it loose anytime soon? Who knows. This is definitely my favourite news story in a long ass time