I grew up on the Disney’s the Little Mermaid. You could say that Ariel was one influential little lady. Now I’m grown up, I see other adults read all sorts of things into the Little Mermaid film.
Usually it goes like this. Ariel is a bit of a soppy teenager and gives up everything – her family, her freedom, her voice, her sense of self – in terrible magical deal to chase after a man she met once and didn’t even have a proper conversation with. If she can’t do it? Eternal torment as one of Ursula’s bitch-plants in the sea witches’ back garden.
Man, they are getting it all wrong!
It’s not about Prince Eric at all. In fact, it was never about a Man. It was always about something else.
Ariel had always been facinated with the human world: so obsessive and facinated, in fact, that she had a whole cave full of exciting human junk and got so lost in learning more about the human world that she would miss important family events. It was her passion – the human world is what she loved more than anything, and she wishes she could be a part of it.
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the first human ship she’d snuck up to see. It probably wasn’t even the first hot dude on a ship she’d seen either. But it WAS the first hot dude she’d seen up close, saved the life of, and then kind of felt up all over. Wouldn’t that leave an impression on any girl?
Anyway, enough about the hot dude. He’s not really very important.
When Ariel’s daddy finds out she’s been hoarding all this human stuff, even sneaking up to the ocean to watch the humans, he looses his shit and destroys all her human stuff, all the things it has taken her years to collect and organise and learn about – the most important thing to her was that collection.
This is the catalyst for what happens next. She feels like her family doesn’t understand or support her and will never ever support her desire to be a part of the humans. She doesn’t fit in under the ocean. (Anyway, as the youngest princess, what’s really in store for her? She’s not very important, she’s never going to rule the kingdom – she might be married off in some undersea treaty to help foster trade or peace agreements, but that’s about it really.) She’s been juuuuust about pushed enough and she’s in just the right kind of reckless emotional state to actually have the balls to do what she always wanted to do.
Become a human.
The hot dude is just a way in.
The only way she knows how is through the dodgy sea witch, and knowing her dad, seemingly the only other magical being under the ocean, would probably lock her up if she said she wanted to become a human, to sixteen year old Ariel the sea witch is her only choice. She’s just about desperate enough to take the shitty contract, and of course, she’s only thinking about escaping and getting her dreams coming true – human, at last!
So now she is a human, and she loves it! Trying out her legs, putting on clothes, seeing all the things she’s dreamed about and always wanted to see – she’s just so excited!
Problem is, the hot dude is her ticket to staying human. Get him to kiss her, she stays human. If not, back home to deal with her dad. Ah well, he’s a hottie, and it’s just lucky that she’s so adorable and gorgeous and has that whole magnetic sedutive mermaid vibe going on. Why else would a prince be spending all his time with this mute peasant girl he met on the beach?
I don’t think the Little Mermaid is a tale about a teenager giving everything up for a guy. I never did. I think it’s about a little mermaid who had the balls to know what she wanted and, in a rock bottom, all or nothing moment, go after it. She always wanted to be human. So she did it. Boom. If she hadn’t, is she’d got to Ursula’s cave and had the contract in her hands and gone “Errrrrm, on second thoughts no thanks”, she would have spent her whole life wishing and wondering what would have happened if she had tried it.
(I know it’s a bit silly to “fall in love” with the first hot guy she sees, but she’s sixteen. How well thought out were your romantic choices when you were sixteen? Thought not. And here Ariel shows a little cunning – she gets a prince to fall in love with her, so she gets to live her human life with wealth and power and comfort. Pretty damn sneaky there, Ariel.)
In the original Hans Christian Anderson story, the Little Mermaid wanted to be human so she could have a soul, and the only way to do this was to win the love of a man (not exactly one of the 19th century’s groundbreaking feminists, that Anderson). So once again, romance was just a way to get what she actually wanted.
Ariel refused to live life according so someone else’s demands. She was a little weird, a bit of an outcast in mermaid society (her best friend was a fish instead of another mermaids? Case in point) but she still found a way to make her goddamn dreams come true. She knew what she wanted, and was brave enough to go after it, even if it was risky and scary.
That’s pretty damn badass if you ask me.
(Rumplestiltskin photo source: http://www.comicvine.com/forums/battles-7/rumpelstiltskin-once-upon-a-time-vs-darkseid-new-5-1510537/)
