Marianne: It’s so beautiful out here. 

Bog King: Yeah; it’s just me, you, and the moon. 

Moon: HEY! YOU TWO SHOULD KISS! 

(source: Benjamin Schneider, this video)

Shalalalalala,

Don’t be scared,

You’ve got the mood prepared;

Go on and

Kiss the girl!

My (Disney? princess series so far :) Which princesses would you like to see next? <3

One month left until ShortBox Comics Fair!

I’ll be debuting “Love Condemns Her”, a speculative spinoff of the original The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson. 

 (Read right to left.)

#HalleBailey as #Ariel!! Since it’s #MerMay, I thought it would be fun to create a 2021 updated design of live action Ariel (my last one was in 2019) and I would definitely say I’ve improved!   #TheLittleMermaid #Disney #Mermaid

https://www.instagram.com/p/COyl40PBp_G/

Halle Bailey as Ariel 🧜🏾‍♀️🐚 

As someone that grew up on the animated classics, I do prefer when the live action remakes stay true to the originals in many ways, however with TLM, I fully embrace Disney switching things up and casting a black girl to play Ariel. Yes, she had a distinctive look that we all remember, but Ariel’s race was never an integral part of the story. On top of that, she is a mythical creature, so she can be any race. Halle can sing amazingly and is beautiful! Sounds great to me & I am sure she will do a fab job. As long as the cast have amazing chemistry + the story and visuals are amazing, i’ll be happy. Please do share your opinions, but let’s be kind and respectful.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BzgKFVvB0w_/

Reverse Fairy Tales

If Ariel was under Ursula’s care and grew up to be her sea witch apprentice. Canonically, Ursula was Ariel’s aunt (but the concept was abandoned then brought back in a book as I’ve heard…)  See a higher resolution at my twitter :)! 

hey do you guys know about the uncomfortably horny BDSM song cut from Disney’s Aladdin

no but I wanna

it’s called “Humiliate The Boy” and it’s just line after line of Jafar making it Weird™️

including the very real lyrics “oh, we’ll emasculate him slowly/all the better to enjoy/how delicious to humiliate the boy”

Disney why

Disney I can’t kinkshame fast enough to keep up with this shit

after learning Ursula’s character design was based on a (truly splendid) drag queen, I just sort of got lazy with assuming she would always be the most salacious disney villain. 

but apparently Jafar is a dom with a thing for twinks & humiliation play so what do i know

I don’t think I’d call Ursula especially salacious–she makes jokes implying that men only want sex, and she moves like a theatre major at the grocery store with their friends, but I wouldn’t describe her as horny.

I guess Frollo has a whole song about how horny he is, and both Gaston and Jafar also have “marry the heroine but in an evil way” as motives. 

Ursula is comfortable in her sexuality. Frollo is horny on main but trying to deny it. Gaston and, apparently, Jafar are horny period, with Gaston being mysoginistc and Jafar having a humiliation kink

Oh dear

ok someone do an alignment chart

I made an alignment chart because I needed something to occupy my time. no one but frollo is on the “conflicted” bar because no other disney villain is anything but 100% comfortable with their sexuality and that’s that about that. gaston is evilly sexy, not evilly horny, because the only person gaston is horny for is gaston.

also, did we NOT already know jafar was kinky? was the slave girl outfit and hypnokink not a huge giveaway?

I love tumblr coz where else would I read a serious analysis of Disney villains in terms of them being sexy/kinky/horny while listening to a very disturbing kinky Jafar song

someone replace “but conflicted” with “but a creep” and add scar and hades

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

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.

thank you for this ❤️ every time I see a post defending The Little Mermaid my heart grows a few sizes bigger. I will not allow TLM slander on my blog tyvm. The story behind the story is one of queer longing across generations through its different authors. and that’s beautiful! plus Ariel herself has always been involved with the world above first before falling in love with any specific human. Remember, the song may be called “Part of Your World” (and it’s my favorite song so bear with me for a minute), but she doesn’t actually say those words until she’s rescued a human. The lyrics she’s emphasizing in her monologue set to music, which is what her solo is, are always “wish I could be/part of that world”. Think for a minute and see how you can relate that to your own life, because there are an infinite amount of meanings that little phrase can have unique to every individual. And for the record I actually wrote my senior thesis on this 😂

check out the following videos by queer creators Dreamsounds and Bev Veatch:

and go watch the Howard documentary on Disney+ if any of this is completely new to you!

Mermay 2020 - Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid - by Lucas Werneck (Part 1)

Now THIS is art.

Have I reblogged this before. I don’t care, How absolutely amazing this is. 

IT JUST GOT BETTER

This made my day.

MINE TOO

In the Little Mermaid (1991), Ariel meets an African mermaid from the Ivory Coast. This is because mermaids are fictional and can be black.

Have you ever seen professional swimmers? With the broad shoulders and lean muscles?? Why are mermaids pretty much never built like that?! (*o*) I also want chubby mermaids to be a thing in media! D,X 

EDIT: Apparently some people think it would be completely illogical to have a strong upper body when you have a fin to swim with. Sure. Right. Gotcha. Much sense. I’ll tell that to King Triton. :P

If Ariel was under Ursula’s care and grew up to be her sea witch apprentice. Canonically, Ursula was Ariel’s aunt (but the concept was abandoned then brought back in a book as I’ve heard…)  See a higher resolution at my twitter :)! 

omg this is 5k away from 100k omg

AAAHHH IT HIT 100k Thank you so much!!! <33

*puts on sunglasses, looks up at the moon* “The Little Mermaid, huh? I remember her.” *whips off sunglasses and looks directly into the camera* “Be a shame if someone made it super gay.” 

The Little Mermaid and the Sea Witch

“I love you,” Ariel says without looking up from the seaweed she’s weaving into a basket. “I’d die for you.”

Ursula’s heart stops. She stares into her crystal ball blankly, long nails scraping against the surface unpleasantly. This isn’t what she expected from her day. 

You can’t, she wants to say.

You’re not for someone like me, she wants to confess.

Your father will kill you for this, she wants to warn.

Oh thank god, she wants to sob.

Ursula is alive because she thinks twice before she speaks at all. She stares into the murky depths of her future and thinks.

Ursula is the sea witch. She’s been cursed before, so many times before, and she knows she’s not fortunate enough to turn away the blessings that fall into her lap (might not be strong enough to even try). Ariel is a blessing, the greatest blessing that has ever found its way into her cave, into her home, into her arms. Ariel is the best part of the tides, the ones that roll in during summer, warm and welcoming even into the dark part of the ocean Ursula has been forced to call her home. If Ursula is smart, she’ll do anything to keep Ariel right here, so close that Ursula can reach out and touch her if she wants.

But.

Ariel is beautiful and curious and smart. She’s enthusiastic and empathetic and has the most beautiful singing voice that Ursula’s ever heard. Ursula’s a sea witch, cursed to her fate by Triton when she was too young to fight back. She thinks that Ariel doesn’t deserve the same fate.

“Are you sure?” Ursula asks at last. 

Keep reading

Disney Princesses by Maxine Vee