Part of your world

Today is International Mermaid Day, where we pay tribute to merfolk all over the world.  But today I'm dealing with just one particular mermaid.  Etsy shop is the one and only MoFunAccessories.
This hair dec is a fairly obvious nod to The Little Mermaid, particularly with the "dinglehopper."  I never was the world's biggest Little Mermaid fan, though I did love how Ariel wasn't afraid to back-talk to her father.  I do not recommend sassing one's parents, but we all know that teenagers do it, and Ariel was precisely that (she specifically states that she's sixteen).  Then true of teenagers she makes a rash decision and gets in over her head, but because this is Disney everything ends hunky-dory.

It's funny, I didn't have a lot of problems with my family when I was sixteen.  True, I wasn't allowed to do much and I didn't like that, but instead of yelling and arguing I asked Daddy point-blank "Don't you trust me to say 'no'???  Don't you trust YOUR own parenting???"  Daddy was a big man and a little strict, and I was afraid he might yell at me, but he gently replied "It's not you that I don't trust, Sarah.  It's the other person.  The other person doesn't always take 'no' for an answer."  We talked a little more, we understood each other, and we hugged it out.  That was nice, being able to talk to Daddy like an adult rather than as a smart-a$$ kid (I wasn't always that level-headed).  He wasn't a perfect daddy, but he was a good one.  I miss him.  It's been nineteen years now and I still miss him.

Anyway, back to The Little Mermaid.  I was about twenty-two when I learned that the Disney flick deviates from the original Hans Christian Andersen tale quite a bit.  On the other hand, if one reads Anderson's story then one will know why Disney cleaned the story up quite a bit.  The original tale also has a religious aspect; the titular little mermaid wants to become human because humans have souls and go to Heaven if they're good.  Merfolk, on the other hand, lack souls completely and dissolve into sea foam upon their death, regardless of whether they were good merfolk or bad.  Oh yeah, and the little mermaid loves a human prince, thus why she asks about humans in the first place.  In the original tale he transformation from merperson to human is excruciatingly painful.  Notice that in this image the former mermaid's feet are bloody.  She's not bleeding like a stuck pig in this image, but it's obvious that she's hurting.
In order to obtain her soul the little mermaid has to not only earn the love of the prince, but full-tilt marry him!  Unfortunately she fails at this, and her sisters inform her that the only other option is to kill the prince.  In this scene the mermaid's sisters are instructing her on how and why she has to kill her beau, and it's hard to tell, but the closest sister is handing the little mermaid a knife.  
Ultimately the little mermaid elects not to kill her beau and doesn't become human, but all is not lost.  While our heroine doesn't get a Disney-style happily-ever-after ending, things do end on an optimistic note.  If you want to find out how, read the story, LOL!  Hans Christian Andersen suffered from depression during his life, and a great many of his stories have darker crap in them.  The Snow Queen, around which Frozen is loosely based, is another example of this, though that story is not as dark as parts of The Little Mermaid.  Just the same, it's easy to see why Disney wanted to make the stories a bit more palatable for modern-day kids.  

Love,
RagingMoon1987

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