Showing posts with label the little mermaid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the little mermaid. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
King Triton is an Oppressive Dictator and an Abusive Father
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I want to say, with no irony whatsoever, that I like King Triton. He’s a rare grayish character in Disney’s black and white moral landscape. He goes through an actual, definable character arc during the Little Mermaid (I choose to ignore all supplemental material and sequels, and everything else that didn’t exist in 1989 and wouldn’t exist now if the film hadn’t been so financially successful). Kenneth Mars did an awesome voice performance with him. And Triton kinda looks like God on the Sistine Chapel, except a merman. He’s awesome.
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| Clearly Triton was actually drawn by Zombie Michelangelo. |
Disney’s fixation on monarchy is fascinating. I guess kings and queens are less threatening than other types of autocrats. Imagine a delightful family film with Emperor Triton. Or Chancellor Triton. Or President (for life) Triton. Frightening.
Ah, but I cast my suspicions on the notion of benevolent dictatorship, of which there are preciously few examples throughout history. Let’s look at what we see from Triton in the film:
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1. Triton rules by the threat of force.
Think of all the terror monarchs of history accomplished without godlike magical powers. Really – imagine Henry VIII as Poseidon. But I think the fact that he’s a magic king kinda makes the situation worse.
We see no actual limits to the triton and its mighty omnipotent power. We do see Triton using the triton to terrorize his citizens, especially his own goddamn daughter. After finding out she’s an anthropologist and saved a human from drowning, he destroys her life’s work with the triton in all of a few seconds.
He also used it to turn her into a human at the end, after the Character Development happened. Ursula takes the triton and uses it to alter the frigging tides and weather. The triton is like several X-Men rolled into one. That thing is a frigging weapon of mass destruction. And the king named himself after it. Well at least he’s self-aware. King Warhead.
2. Triton imposes strict limits on his people’s behavior.
No merfolk are allowed to go to the surface. Or the land. Think about that: imagine if going to the seaside was illegal. Or for that matter, moving to Europe. Most of the frigging biomes on Earth are illegal for merfolk, as is the frigging air. That’s some Soviet shit, right there.
| And Disney thought Scar was their fascist dictator. |
Also, apparently taking an interest in human culture is forbidden for the merfolk. I mean, Triton destroys Ariel’s museum after being mildly provoked – and this was his daughter. Ariel’s also suspiciously the only citizen who seems to have done this. Imagine what he’d do to someone who wasn’t Royal Blood.
3. He spreads noxious invective against foreigners out of proportion to all utility.
Classic dictator technique right there – what better to promote the insularity of your people than having a common enemy? Wag the dog and make him bark. And look at the way Triton does it – he goes on rants about humans who are all evil, harpoon-wielding face-eaters. In other words, it’s not ‘I hate humans,’ so much as ‘humans hate us.’ It’s spreading the meme that merfolk are the persecuted ones. And it reinforces the need for Triton to act as their noble defender, and makes it all the easier to frame his actions as noble defense.
That’s great – citizens are that much less likely to venture outward if they’re in fear. They might reach out to someone their group despises who seems harmless, but someone their group despises because of how harmful they are?
Triton seems to believe all of this himself, since he goes off on these rants even when it’s extremely inappropriate and undermines his credibility (and it’s in front of his own daughter). But the results would be the same either way.
Humans in this case encompass absolutely everyone outside his kingdom – there’s nowhere for merfolk to go where they won’t find the evil humans. They’re stuck there. And damned if Triton doesn’t want to keep it that way, out of hate completely disproportionate to the actual risk posed by humans.
And again, the event that prompted Ariel to resort to Ursula’s shadiness in the first place: Triton angrily threatened her before destroying her life’s work. He did it because she saved a human’s life.
She saved Eric’s life, and in such a way that it did not in any way affect the Masquerade or lead to merfolk being discovered. Actually, Triton didn’t even ask about that; he just got angry she saved a guy’s life. This isn’t maintaining the Masquerade; this is blind hatred.
Here’s the thing about Masquerades: continually killing people to keep them going is not only evil; it’s useless. If the Masquerade is so fragile that one witness can destroy it, it’s going to fail anyway. Fuck, if it depends on all citizens maintaining perfect behavior (not going to the surface) forever and you can’t control their behavior on every level, as Triton cannot – it’ll definitely fail.
You’re prolonging the inevitable instead of preparing for it, like you should. This isn’t a political conspiracy where a tiny number of people just need to keep a few military secrets behind bars while going about their days legally until their dealings end and they’re cloaked by history (and those often fail, too); this is people hiding their entire existence from a world that just keeps getting more and more tech-savvy – with no end in sight. Imagine the merfolk trying to hide today, now that we have footage of giant squids in the deep sea.
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| Triton: you're next! |
Now, unlike vampires, the merfolk actually have the option of living excluded from humans, so maybe it’s more complicated here. But humans are a seafaring race even in your time, Triton, and it’s only the mid-nineteenth century. It won’t last forever.
You’ll have to face them sooner or later, and killing them is just going to set them up to be your enemy down the line, faster than you can say ‘self-fulfilling prophecy.’
My people figured this out around this same year - we started openly reaching out to humans in the mid to late nineteenth century, and forming the vampire community. Our elders were more or less under the impression that the Masquerade was in imminent danger of ending, and we may as well try to find some allies as a start (and increase our own population). Their timing was off (our Masquerade is kinda still going on, depending on your definition), but I'd say they succeeded, since we're in a much better situation now than we were even when I was first sired. But it was easier for our elders, since they were just frightened survivalists and not angry human-hating bigots.
4. Triton prioritizes family problems over running his kingdom.
Ariel goes missing, and he has literally his entire kingdom looking for her, at the expense of whatever the hell else everyone was supposed to be doing – not that we have any idea what they were supposed to be doing. Most of what we see Triton doing is focusing on Ariel. I guess Atlantica mostly runs itself.
That’s monarchy for you. It should be noted that this usually doesn’t equate to devoted, nurturing parents deeply invested in their children’s future so much as obsessive parents trying to protect what they consider ‘theirs.’ Triton sending out his manservant Sebastian to stalk Ariel was the least of their problems.
As for Triton's other daughters - even the film frames them as possessions. They're nothing but a long list of names beginning with 'A.' I think the blonde one Andrina had two lines, and the others had even less. They had little to no bearing on the plot. You could edit out all of them, and not only would it not change a thing, the film would make more sense.
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All I could do was stare at the screen wondering how the hell merfolk reproduce, since Triton appears to have six daughters of about the same age, and one who's only slightly younger. Are they actually close in age and the unmentioned Queen Triton just had one after the other and timed their conceptions? Was Triton polyamorous? Are merfolk prone to multiple simultaneous births? Are any of them adopted?
(That's what I was wondering in 1989, anyway. The prequels are good for something: at least they confirmed that the sisters are merely close in age. We even learn about the Queen. She looked exactly like Ariel, for one.)
It's great that Triton's other daughters are adults, since he spends all of his time focusing on his youngest.
This was bad enough in the beginning of the story. Ursula knew well enough that this was the flaw to go for, Triton’s Achilles heel. And it worked.
I know we’re supposed to be touched when Triton lets himself get turned into a sea polyp in Ariel’s stead. Even if it meant letting the triton fall into Ursula’s diabolical hands, we’re still supposed to be touched. So I guess if some world leaders gave a rogue nation the nuclear codes because they were threatening their families – they’d be doing the right thing and it would represent a serious, complicated moral dilemma?
5. Triton has slave labor.
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| Dolphins are not horses! |
During the concert scene, we see Triton’s chariot pulled by dolphins. He can’t just swim there himself? I know that’s just the film’s ‘water is air’ problem, but that’s fourth wall knowledge, right there. If you look for an explanation within the context of the film, it looks like conspicuous exploitation to me. What does he pay them with? How does he pay or otherwise compensate Sebastian? He squeezes Sebastian into his fist at one point, after being mildly provoked – not exactly the mark of a benign boss.
6. Merfolk scientific and social progress is in the gutter, and there’s a strong sentiment of enforced ignorance.
Ariel asks during her fantastic ‘Part of Your World’ number – ‘what’s a fire and why does it burn.’ Merfolk society has less scientific knowledge than hunter-gatherers (even if fire is an exception because it’s a land-based phenomenon, that only proves that being ocean-dwellers has stifled scientific progress. Humans know about volcanoes despite never having truly visited them). Merfolk appear to have no industry and no technology. And it seems they also have no written language.
Yeah, we see Ariel sign her name, when Ursula whips out that magic contract during their amazing ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls’ number. But plenty of otherwise illiterate people can sign their names. Illiteracy used to be a lot more common, and I’ve run into quite a few people who can write their names and nothing else.
Ursula’s contract may have been English, but it wasn’t anything that required much of a reading level. Yeah, it’s English – a human language, and not a merfolk one. Assuming Ariel actually read it – it’s not like she needed to in order to make her decision. She also has plenty of books in her museum, but doesn’t appear to have read any of them. She’s ‘ready to know what the people know,’ she says, as she flips through books there’s no evidence that she can read.
We can interpret all of that as convenience on the part of the animators, but I like it better when I can find an in-universe explanation for things. It’s more fun than just laughing at the plot holes and the limitations of the film medium.
I never understood why Eric didn’t offer Ariel some writing utensils up on the surface. Or for that matter, why Ariel didn’t try to get her hands on them. She briefly tries to communicate using sign language, but after that, they communicate through inference. It would have been nice if they had thrown us a few scenes of Ariel trying to write and failing. But as it stands, the plot makes a hell of a lot more sense if we just assume Ariel is illiterate. Along with the rest of merfolk society – if your royals are uneducated, what hope is there for the rest of you?
7. Merfolk culture mainly consists of propaganda promoting the royal family.
The concert that opens the underwater portion of the film that Ariel misses? It’s Triton’s daughters introducing themselves and singing about how great Triton is. Ariel misses her cue to perform, and Triton looks like he’s going to explode. Hey man – the Show Must Go On. His reaction makes more sense of the concert is a reflection of his ego, which it clearly is. There doesn’t seem to be much more to merfolk culture.
8. Ursula seems to be kind of a magical version of a black marketeer.
That’s what happens in most dictatorships; you get a black market. The dictatorial government won’t provide for your needs, so you go to the criminals. Naturally, the criminals are unregulated and screw you over, but really, the dictator was screwing you the fuck over by not providing for you in the first place. Indeed, black markets under authoritarian regimes can actually be liberalizing forces for economic and even political freedom - look at the Soviet Union.
Hey, Ursula almost looks like a libertarian hero, here. And like many libertarian heroes, she's a frustrated despot. Rock on, Ursula. The mighty Triton is always all right as long as you're the one wielding it, right?
Like many dictators, Triton undermines his own power in the process – Ursula seems to get a lot of her magic goods in her deals with merfolk, so Triton is just sitting there letting her consolidate her power. Which she could only do if he left his people no other alternative but to go to her, and since the merfolk economy appears to be mainly magical, with magic the province of only a few elites capable of understanding it, you can appreciate their plight.
Geez – Triton can turn merfolk into humans. We find out that Ursula helped her clients by making them, among other things, more conventionally attractive – they couldn’t have gone to Triton? We don’t actually see any limits to the power of the triton. Any reason they didn’t go to him, and preferred to risk their lives by making a shady deal with an unscrupulous sorceress instead of doing what should have been legally and logistically better and gone to their king? Methinks Triton is a mite stingy with what magic he’ll give the masses. Let ‘em eat cake, right Triton?
9. Ursula manages to enslave dozens of Triton’s citizens and he doesn’t interfere.
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Ursula frigging lines the entrance to her evil lair with polyps of the people she’s permanently enslaved with her (which I actually always found a bit irresponsible. Why aren’t they in an evil storage closet, Ursula? Don’t you think lining your lair with monuments to your own shadiness might put off new clients? Let’s not get overconfident, dear.) This has been presumably going on for years. And the one time Triton interferes is when she threatens to do it to his daughter. His is a Daddy State, run by a deadbeat Dad.
Wacky Paranoid Speculations
1. Triton actually is an emperor who ousted the other sea kings:
How much of the ocean does Triton control, anyway? He gets called the ‘sea king’ sometimes, but then Ursula takes his place and claims to be ruling the whole ocean. You mean the Atlantic Ocean? Oh. So what about all the others? Triton says to Ariel ‘as long as you live under my ocean, you obey my rules.’
2. King Triton created merfolk:
Triton turns Ariel into a human at the end of the film. So – he can turn merfolk into humans? I’ll bet he can do the opposite. Merfolk are pretty strange, biologically. They appear to have most of the organ systems of fish and humans, and yet almost none of the weaknesses that their human half should have underwater (they can breathe, see, and not have their bones and organs crushed by heavy pressure – incredible). That’s not evolution; right there – that’s magic. Magic which exists in the story, and which King Triton appears to control.
Merfolk are also excellent singers with a musical culture – I’m trying to think of something that seems less appropriate for an underwater society, and I can’t. Now, vampire culture is musical, too – we’re voice mimics, and with a shit ton of training, you can get a good vocal range. But, you know, we’re terrestrial. And the voice mimicry is related to our batty echolocation. Merfolk don’t do echolocation like dolphins – they appear to talk and sing like humans and they can somehow do it underwater. Could it be because they were originally human, at least as a species?
We’ve established that Triton is paranoid and horribly racist against humans, yet well-intentioned and with the capacity for altruism. That can actually be a frigging scary combination, even in the real world without all the magic. Imagine giving someone like that nigh-omnipotent power.
Could he have turned a bunch of people into merfolk, taken them to the ocean as a protective measure, at least in his own mind (and erased their memories, we assume)? Triton does seem much older than almost all the merfolk we see. It certainly would explain his rise to power.
Conclusion
So this is more or less why I liked The Little Mermaid, beyond the great songs, animation, and voice performances. I see it as the story of a liberal adventurous young girl who escaped her abusive family and by extension her backward, racist, xenophobic, oppressive police state in favor of a liberalizing European monarchy and freedom, and by extension brought both cultures together.
I get the distinct impression that this isn’t what the writers intended.
Yeah, I think Triton and her sisters were supposed to represent a loving family and a genuine sacrifice for her. But hey, Eric: irresistible.
Well, that’s the way Ursula framed it anyway – always listen to the villain. Even when the villain doesn’t believe what she says, and is transparently using it to manipulate the protagonist, as with Ursula’s rant in her Poor Unfortunate Souls number.
Well, as much as the prospect of a girl marrying some guy she barely knows frigging bothers me, it doesn’t sink the movie for me. The protagonist is still in a better place than she was before, shit got done, and even if she and Eric had an amiable breakup she’d be better off in his kingdom than her father’s.
And they brought both cultures together. Just think of the economic possibilities of being a seafaring nation and knowing a bunch of merfolk.
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Plus, this way, maybe her father won’t suddenly realize the implications of the power he wields with the triton and take over the world, or something.
And now maybe her father’s learned a lesson and will go on to be a less alternately deadly and negligent monarch and father. Really though, I’d be more comfortable if Ariel and Prince Eric stole the triton.
Image links in order of appearance:
http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/disney-princess/videos/34005564/title/what-disney-princesses-teach-girls.
Friday, August 3, 2012
Defending the Indefensible: The Little Mermaid Introduction
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| http://media.photobucket.com/image/recent/disneyhush/194lilmer-00626.jpg |
The Little Mermaid
is the first Disney Animated Canon film I liked (except Fantasia) and nearly every group I’m in has a list of justifiable
problems with it. It’s anti-feminist, body-biased, classist, monarchist, and
racist against mermaids – and by extension, all non-humans generally regarded
as fictional.
This puts me in an awkward position because I can usually
see both sides, and find myself drifting towards the excluded middle. There are
patterns in most of my opinions on media:
Rule number indeterminate: I can like something no
matter how offensive it is.
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| http://www.btchflcks.com/2011/12/animated-childrens-films-you-say.html |
And that’s good too. Pop culture skews conservative, and I
saw the whole 20th century. If I hated anything that offended me,
I’d pretty much hate anything made before twenty years from now at least. The
number of people who share my exact politics could probably share an apartment
together and still have room for orgies. I support political movements that
haven’t happened yet. Given the state of past and present political movements, I'm lucky I can be flexible.
And honestly, if a good message won’t save a bad film, a bad
message won’t condemn a good film. Unless it’s really fucking bad. You know, Birth of a Nation bad (that film looked
really impressive back in 1915, but I hated it anyway. And now it looks like
drama club crap – all’s wells that ends well).
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| filmsquish.com |
At least all sides of the Little Mermaid debate can agree on one thing: it’s not as offensive
as Birth of a Nation (the animation
has held up better, too – but then it’s only been 23 years). High praise
indeed, but at least that means a Little
Mermaid debate is less than completely unthinkable, which it would be for Birth of a Nation. The objections to the Little Mermaid are reasonable, so my
defenses range from Devil’s Advocate to Rejecting Confirmation Bias to Wacky
Extrapolations.
Rule number indeterminate the second: I can make fun
of a work that I like.
Picking apart movies is one way that I enjoy them. Not the
only way, but it is important. If I stopped, they’d be less fun. Plus, this way
you can enjoy more movies. If good movies are fun to pick apart, bad movies are
even more fun.
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| flixist.com |
And really – how many films are perfect from start to finish
according to everyone who views them, irrespective of time, place, and culture?
I don’t even know how you’d produce a film like that – you’d need
indoctrination plus the cessation of social and technological progress to even
come close. So – there’s always a basis to mock something, even if it’s good or
used to be.
Part of my job involves getting some idea of how people will
react to us when the Masquerade ends, with whatever limited evidence available.
Picking apart non-human fiction itself is great, but picking apart critical and
fan reactions is way more revealing. Fan reactions and discussions are usually
undiluted opinion, and there’s so much there.
It all depends on the topic. The Little Mermaid touches on enough sticky issues - on touches on them in a sticky way - that it's hard not to get stuck in any place. Including the center.
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| article.wn.com |
Part One
One interpretation: Ariel drastically alters her
physical appearance to please a man and to become sexually mature.
My interpretation: Ariel transcends the physical
limitations she would have suffered in her chosen environment and is able to
live the life she wants using Magic Indistinguishable from Advanced Technology.
People tend to interpret Ariel’s desire for legs as a desire
to have sex. Last time I checked, though, legs were for, um, walking. Yes,
there’s a cliché in mermaid fiction that mermaids don’t have human sexual
organs, so how do you fuck them (you writers have no imagination, do you?) but
there’s no evidence for that in the film. As it stands, it seems more like a
raunchy joke than an argument, and the day jokes start substituting for
critical thinking is the day I eat the sun.
It’s a trope being projected onto the film. And naturally, it’s
about sex. Stop following us, Freud.
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| http://www.btchflcks.com/2011/12/animated-childrens-films-you-say.html |
It’s all there in the Part of Your World number (probably my
favorite animated musical scene of all time). Ariel wants legs to properly
function as a human, and especially jump, dance…walk down a street…and she wanted
them before she even meets Eric or pines for any man. Ariel doesn’t see Eric
until several scenes later.
And no, ‘dancing’ does not equal ‘sex,’ (I wish) unless
that’s your kink.
There are definitely legitimate criticisms of ‘Eric and
Ariel,’ not the least of which is the fact that they barely know each other. I
frigging hate the One Week Courtship trope. As far as I’m concerned, if I’ve
known you for less than a month, you’re an acquaintance, no matter how much I
like you. I’ve known some of my friends for over a century, and my people won’t
sire anyone we haven’t known for at least five years. A marital commitment for
life, after less than a year – that’s completely alien.
But given the evidence from the film, if things didn’t work
out with Eric, Ariel still probably wouldn’t ask her father to turn her back
(although she might ask him for money. Or pearls – Triton should have some
liquid assets).
She wanted to be human anyway.
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| pajiba.com |
But people still make it all about Eric. Okay, Ariel always
wants to go to Land, that elusive foreign country whose borders are policed
(badly) by her dictator father. Just like I’ve always wanted to move to Norway and
can’t (international immigration is considered an unacceptable risk for
vampires with illegal identities. Sadly, I agree with that policy.). Say that
changed, and I met this great Norwegian, and now I want to move there with him
or her (or them). I’d still want to see Norway , damn it.
Ariel goes the whole song without even talking about men,
except about how human men probably don’t reprimand their daughters, and ‘they
understand.’ Well, given her father’s behavior, I see where she’s coming from.
Wait until later in the movie: I don’t think any human father has ever
destroyed all his daughter’s archeological findings using an omni-powerful
weapon of mass destruction.
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| http://fuckyeahthelittlemermaid.tumblr.com/page/64 |
That still has nothing to do with romance or sex, and
everything to do with wanting personal freedom.
She wanted to be part of human society, for reasons
intellectual and aesthetic. I mean: look at all the awesome stuff we have.
Ariel has that enormous museum of human artifacts. We see her add a few things
to it in the early part of the film. At that rate, it probably took her years
to assemble all that stuff, meaning she was interested in human culture for
years. She got it from a shipwreck, too – how many shipwrecks can there
possibly be, even before the days of steamers?
Forget Milo from Atlantis: the Lost Empire – Ariel is
Disney’s Adventure Archeologist. Ariel got all that stuff under extreme risk
from predators like sharks and her father, and even does what research she can.
Which is itself a grim reminder of the days when checking your sources was so
much harder, and you’d have almost no way of knowing if you were consulting an
expert or a know-nothing seagull like Scuttle.
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| jimhillmedia.com |
(Although I have to give Scuttle some credit – forks being
combs almost seems credible if you don’t have hair and have never used a comb
before, and you eat with your beak. It might even sound more plausible than the
truth. And the idea that prehistoric humans stared at each other all day long
until they spontaneously invented music is only slightly sillier than how many
pop historians characterize pre-history.)
Ariel’s ready to do things she’s never done before, which might
include sex but need not be limited to it. And hey, she’s “ready to know what
the people know/ ask them my questions and get some answers.” Don’t worry,
Ariel – it’s the mid-19th century, you’re living in a time of
educational reform, and you’re marrying into the upper class anyway.
Everything’s fine.
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| yadambross.wordpress.com |
And Ariel’s questions include, ‘Fucking fire, how does that
work?’ Yes. It’s the mid-19th century, and Ariel doesn’t know where
fire comes from, putting her knowledge of science at pre-caveman levels. Well,
that’s what happens when you’re raised in a totalitarian dictatorship that
forbids access to the outside world and all its knowledge, lest you be
corrupted by tolerance. She sure won’t want for intellectual stimulation when
she escapes the hydrosphere.
Yeah, you could take that as a joke about how of course a
mermaid wouldn’t know about fire. They’re underwater! Well, humans live on
land, and know plenty about the sea, not to mention outer space and the inside
of volcanoes and other places that are much harder to visit than the beach as an air-breathing mammalian mermaid. But
hey, half the time people assume that I don’t know what a kitchen is, because
why would a vampire need that? So I guess Ariel’s pretty much screwed.
People are also using a cosmetic surgery metaphor here:
Ariel is altering her physical appearance to please a man. All right –
‘surgery’ I can understand. That’s the closest real-world analogue I can think
of, given our current lack of transformative omni-powerful magic. But cosmetic surgery?
Okay, if this film really was about a girl who needs (or
thinks she needs) plastic surgery to get a guy, and the Little Mermaid was in fact the Hottie
and the Nottie with fins: yeah, I’d hate it. No amount of cool animation,
entertaining voice performances, or awesome songs can save you from that
message. But I don’t think it is.
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| http://themorpheusheadcase.blogspot.com/2012_02_01_archive.html |
According to some definitions, plastic surgery involves the
restoration of form and function – cosmetic surgery is only a subset of a set
that includes reconstructive surgery and the treatment of burns. It’s never
said how long pre-op merfolk can stay on land, but let’s just say for the sake
of argument that they can at least exist on land efficiently for long periods
of time.
Do people who raise this argument object to Ariel living on
land at all, or just living on land with Eric? Would they be fine with the
story if it were just one mermaid’s valiant struggle to be terrestrial? If so,
Ariel would still probably want legs, and it still would have nothing to do
with sex or appearance.
Cosmetic surgery is literally all about appearances. Your
abdomen doesn’t do anything different after a tummy tuck. If it did, it would
change how we feel about tummy tucks. We’d call them something different, at
least.
Even if Ariel doesn’t have to keep her fish tail moistened,
she still can’t walk. Eric has a whole fleet of merchant clipper ships – from
the looks of it, anyway – so this is around 1840s-1860s.
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| buyvintage1.wordpress.com |
Those godawful uncomfortable Bath Chairs were still probably
on the market then. Hey, Eric’s royalty, maybe he can hook Ariel up with one of
those newfangled wheelchairs with the reclining backs and footrests.
Proto-self-propelled wheelchairs didn’t happen until about 1869, and even then
they weren’t all that great. New technology does have a tendency to work like
shit and cost you an arm and a leg when it’s first introduced. Also,
wheelchairs are suspiciously always designed for humans.
Now I’m imagining a wheelchair specifically designed for a
mermaid. I hope everyone else in this fictional European society is just as
liberal as Eric, anyway, and can accept a mermaid queen consort, especially his
family.
Although, they did agree to marry Eric and Vanessa, a woman
with no papers, no known family relations, who seemed to have appeared by
magic, and then they more or less did the same thing all over again with a
post-op Ariel, so who’s to say how they’d feel about her pre-op?
Well, Ariel does still technically come from royalty, so
maybe that trumps all other concern with frigging monarchists (I fully support
anyone who criticizes Disney Princess films for their glorification of
monarchy. Why is there so much damn monarchism in fantasy, anyway? Must fantasy
always glorify the censored past?).
“She’s a mermaid? Well, is she a royal mermaid? All right then, just make sure she doesn’t change
back again like that Vanessa girl you almost married, you have no idea the
angry letters we’ve been getting.”
Maybe Ariel wouldn’t have social problems so much as
physical ones.
Handicap accessibility is unfortunately modern. Ability is
all relative to where you are and what you’re doing. Ariel’s body is just fine
under water (for reasons that defy biology and physics, but whatever. The
audience will accept the impossible but not the improbable and all that), but
she would be handicapped on land. Obviously Ariel isn’t inherently handicapped,
but there’s no such thing – what she wanted was to be on land, and she lacked
the ability to do that in the way she wanted.
Obviously, handicapped people can make whatever decisions
they want about augmentation, but I certainly wouldn’t fault any handicapped
person for wanting it. Wheelchairs are augmentation, too. Even Bath Chairs.
As for cosmetic surgery – Ariel never complains once about
the appearance of her tail. The only time she refers derisively to her fins is:
“flipping your fins, you don’t get too far.” In other words, function.
Yes, the transformation had the side effect of altering her
physical appearance. Indeed, people given prosthetic limbs do look different
afterwards, but I doubt that’s what they were after.
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| onceuponatimeinscience.wordpress.com |
Yes, Ariel loved the look of her new feet afterward. And
after people get sired, they always make fang faces at the mirror a few times
(fuck, I still do that), but I’m pretty sure that’s just a perk.
Hah – Ariel, if anything’s slowing you down, it’s your hair.
Even stubble creates drag – swimmers shave, or wear bathing caps. So Ariel, if
you’re doing anything cosmetic, get a shave. Or wear a bathing cap all the
time. See: function.
C’mon, 1980s – even a mermaid has to have big hair? Well,
Eric does too, so why not?
 |
| Just like all 1800s princes. colossalvitality.wordpress.com. |
 |
| Prince Albert en.wikipedia.org. |
Saying Ariel got cosmetic surgery to look hot for a man
implies the guy wanted her to, and wasn’t attracted to her before, or was more
attracted after. Ariel certainly wasn’t self-conscious about her tail so much
as physically limited by it, so what about Eric?
Is there any evidence that Eric didn’t find Ariel attractive
as a mermaid? He saw her phase into mer-form again, and when Ursula captures
her, he immediately follows them: ‘Grim I lost her once; I’m not going to lose
her again,’ and risks his own life to help Ariel defeat Ursula. That implies
that he does think Ariel is the same woman he fell in love with, even now that
he knows she’s a mermaid. His feelings for her seemed unchanged by the
revelation.
He takes the whole ‘undersea world of merfolk’ revelation
pretty well, too. I wish half the people in our community reacted half that
well. There’s a reason we have so many therapists on staff.
 |
| http://www.availableimages.com/celebs/h/daryl-hannah/pictures-splash_pph_30.html |
Contrast that with the way Alan Bauer reacted in Splash: he finds out his long-term
girlfriend Madison
is a mermaid, and broods about having fallen in love with something like that.
It’s a romantic comedy trope to complain about your love
interest’s character – just before the redeeming third act to make way for the
happy ending. In this case, Madison ’s
flaw is that she’s a member of a species other than human. A quote from Alan
Bauer: “I don’t expect love to be perfect, but it should at least be human.”
 |
| alittlesprite.blogspot.com |
Geez – this is how much he freaks out over someone as benign
as a mermaid. I guess if it were one of my people, he’d be breaking out the
garlic and stakes.
Oh, and Alan actually refers to her as a fish. Awesome. It’s
okay to be shocked, Alan. But blatant racism is another thing, especially when
it’s the 1980s. Where’s your historical apologist excuse?
I’d say Eric was just the guy the film needed to get Triton
to re-consider his racist rage-ahol (all the more impressive for an 1850s
aristocrat). When Triton overcame his racism, it felt organic. With Alan, it
seems to have happened because the plot said so and John Candy agreed.
Redemption is great, but I still prefer the guy who wasn’t a racist in the
first place, especially in the context of choosing a frigging life-altering
political and marital partnership. And did Alan overcome his racism, anyway? Or
did he just decide to make Madison
an exception?
 |
| thatchbo.blogspot.com |
(Racist or species-ist, whichever term fits; they’re morally
equivalent, and I don’t label different groups of people different species
without proof that they’re incapable of producing viable offspring. I’ve spent
the last few decades explaining to people that vampires and humans are the same
species – vampires can’t breed with anyone, let alone each other. ‘Species’
doesn’t mean ‘so different you’re not one of us.’)
Is there any evidence that Ariel turned human for Eric, and
not for herself? Even if being with him was motivating her, wasn’t she still
ultimately doing it for herself? And again, what the hell does it have to do
with sex, instead of, say, the travails of long-distance relationships?
Eric and Ariel don’t live in different cities so much as
different habitats. Forget sex, Ariel and Eric can’t do anything together! He
can come visit her on board ship in between running his kingdom and hanging out
with his sailor buddies, but she can’t see him. It would make her a pretty
passive player in this relationship, anyway.
 |
| mommymouseketeer.com |
Eric can’t visit her underwater and see Atlantica, despite
being a skilled mariner who would probably want to see a cool undersea world.
Sure, he successfully swam to the bottom of the ocean in that scene where he
harpooned Ursula, and managed not to have his organs crushed by the pressure.
He’d still need to come up for air repeatedly, though, and how long could he
keep that up (the one rule most writers seem to remember about the physical
consequences of humans and water is that humans can’t breathe underwater)? And
I know Ariel and her people have awesome ‘talk underwater’ superpowers (I want
those), but does Eric?
Ariel certainly couldn’t function as a queen consort from
the sea, and Eric would be expected to find another, despite being in love with
Ariel. Yeah, I hate monarchy too, but that’s what we’re stuck with here. It’d
be hard to have even an unconsummated relationship with her being all
sea-bound. So even of you ignore the overwhelming evidence that Ariel wanted to
be human anyway, and make it all about her relationship with Eric – it’s still
about a relationship, not just about sex.
And yes, I’ve heard people say that being a mermaid as a
metaphor for sexual immaturity. Yes, just like werewolves are a metaphor for
menstruation – hey, they have a ‘time of the month’ too. And phasing into a
ravening monster is kinda like PMS, right? With my people, geez – vampires have
been used as a metaphor for so many things I just exude symbolism.
 |
| comicvine.com |
So let me get this straight: Ariel is nonsexual because of
her lack of an obvious vagina. Well, we don’t know her that well. Maybe merfolk have internal genitals like dolphins with
urogenital openings way down the backs of their tails (merfolk tails look like
dolphin tails with scales, anyway) but come on! That’s not where they’re
supposed to be – they only count if they’re at the crotch. And dolphins
definitely don’t get pleasure from sex; only humans get sexual pleasure.
 |
| realclearscience.com |
Triton initially thinks that she’s crushing on a merman –
merfolk sexual behaviors seem to be similar to human ones. Triton doesn’t freak
out about Ariel dating a merman; in fact, he was giggly about it, and wondering
whom the lucky merman was. Ariel was already sexually mature for merfolk.
Saying that she needed a human vagina for sex – what, merfolk sex doesn’t
count?
Hell, I actually thought it was funny thinking that Triton
immediately assumes Ariel’s crushing on a merman instead of a human – c’mon,
Triton, she doesn’t swing that way, but thanks for assuming she does.
Hey, it’s not that much of a stretch, intentional or
otherwise. In 1980s film, alternative sexuality wasn’t discussed so much as
mocked derisively, even though the gay rights movement was well underway, and
the Civil Rights Movement was winning. In 1989, Loving v. Virginia was more than two decades old, and
by 1990, there were 964,000 interracial couples compared to 310,000 in 1970.
I wish it didn’t have to take so long every time. Critics
today give stories about interspecies love a lot of flak, and it isn’t even a
political issue yet.
 |
| chilloutpoint.com |
When and if we achieve sapient AI, virtual reality people, animal
uplift, make first contact with aliens, the Masquerade finally ends, the
bioengineering of humanity to the point of speciation, or all of the above – I
expect I’ll have to listen to the same arguments about same-sex marriage and
relationships with a new name and a cheap tuxedo (it’s unnatural, your love
isn’t as good as ours, you’re so icky, I’m actually secretly attracted to or
sympathetic to ‘x’ but won’t dare reveal it for fear of my reactionary social
group so I’ll cover it with unwarranted hostility, etc.)
Vampire society is ahead of the curve: human/vampire sexual
relationships are the norm (friends-with-benefits counts).
Really, Xenophobes of the Future should be happy about
Ariel/Eric – they’re the same species by the end of the movie.
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