The little mermaid original story gay

In this song, the theme of performative gender is clear. She is frustrated by the strict gender roles, her yearnings for a different life are misunderstood and maligned, and the love that she wants to act on is deemed not only impossible but irresponsible and wrong.

This has resulted in a queer read of many of our favourite characters, films, and shows — regardless of whether the proof was in the pudding. Through Ursula, Ariel can imagine herself in a different way: empowered. Ursula is literally instructing Ariel that the way to win the heart of human Prince Eric is not just to be a woman, but to act like a woman.

Not only does Ursula physically inhabit the mannerisms of drag queens, but she is an active foil to the mer patriarchy that exists within the film. This is thanks in large part to writer-producer Howard Ashman. While Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is undoubtedly grim, there’s also a Little Mermaid queer backstory that is poignant.

Those confines have stifled Ariel, and Ursula is the only woman to whom she can look as a model of how to break free of those constraints. At the end of the story, the prince falls in love with another woman, and the mermaid, heartbroken in her grief, throws herself into the sea and dissolves into seafoam.

Up until the s, there were almost no queer characters in animation, but cartoons did bend the gender-binary rules. Her desire to transform her physical self to be her true self and act on her feelings of love was an apt metaphor for living as a closeted homosexual.

With the lid shut, she was simply the baddie. Andersen was seemingly besotted with the son of his American patrician patron Edvard Collin. With the imagining of stories and characters as specifically queer, the better idiom is the accurate one: the proof is in the eating of the pudding.

Disney's live-action The Little Mermaid has had complaints over its differences from the cartoon, but the original story was a deeper allegory. The author of the original "The Little Mermaid" was bisexual and he wrote it after his male crush rejected him.

She has agency over how she inhabits her own body, how she takes up space, and how she fits into the society into which she was born. Was 'The Little Mermaid' About Hans Christian Andersen's Unrequited Love for a Man? We can at least confirm that Andersen's original tale doesn't have the happy ending that Disney princess stories do.

After all, it is up to us, the audience, to say what we feel when consuming our media.

The True Story Behind

She accentuates stereotypically feminine assets — her hips, her lips — and drapes her eels Flotsam and Jetsam around her like an underwater feather boa. Even the open, transparent lake has its unknown depths which no divers know. Ariel is struggling with the parts with which she was assigned at birth both her womanhood and being a mermaid and what they mean for her autonomy.

For the preponderance of the history of pop culture, there has been a dearth of queer stories. The Little Mermaid fairy tale was written by a queer man, Hans Christian Andersen, so protests about the new movie's diversity are pointless.

Set against this backdrop, to suggest that gender and sexuality were malleable and performative was revolutionary. This is a movie, after all. Ursula performs femininity the way a drag performer does. Ashamn, a gay Jewish man, was responsible for imbuing so much of the movie with queer themes, hitherto unexplored explicitly or as explicitly as they could be by Disney.

Lift it, and you find a depth of queer resistance and, yes, villainy still. Notably Buggs Bunny, as well as Tom and Jerry, featured frequent cross-dressing. This notion that femininity and womanhood is an act, and that anyone can perform it, is distinctly queer and in direct response to the political climate at the time.