The Little Mermaid correct. Not even cartoon villains are allowed to be negative anymore

What if the woke were trolling us? I know, too many English words and Rampelli changes the newspaper. What if the zealots of progressivism were fooling us? It’s better that way. Disney’s Little Mermaid, the live action remake whose controversies you may have followed because it will be interpreted by Halle Baileya black actress (at the bottom of the sea where the sun’s rays don’t reach inclusiveness arrives) has decided to change some song lyrics to make them more in line with modern sensibilities. Composer Alan Menken said in an interview that “Kiss her” was partially edited to underline the consensus (may it never be that some little girl gets up and yells “Police! the prince is raping the Little Mermaid”) and the “Poor lonely soul “, the song of the octopus Ursula, has been revised to avoid encouraging young girls to shut up.

I said: what if they made fun of us? This story started fighting social injustice and ended up changing the words of children’s books and cartoons. Stuff that takes us back to the nineties and to that always cited and rarely read book which is “The culture of whining”, Robert Hughes, which defined the aesthetic drift of the past, and of the toxic and almost ridiculous use of euphemisms even not to offend anyone. He wrote: “No substitution of words is able to reduce the rate of intolerance present in this or any other society”. You only end up wounding an innocent tongue.

However, the risk of falling into the trap and sounding like trombones is great. It was ridiculous to ask for rigor and accuracy in the choice of casting: yes, a red-haired black woman is less common, but do we really ask for realism in a tailed woman who lives at the bottom of the sea and loses her voice because of an octopus witch? The request to stick to the original is also improper. Verisimilitude is sacrificed with each generation. We’re just fond of the 1989 Disney version we grew up with (and that we loved). In the fairy tale of Hans Christian Andersen, the Little Mermaid, very unlucky, is transformed into a human but every step of her involves terrible agony (in the Italian version she would have vulvodynia). She eventually fails to conquer the prince and becomes meerschaum. However, good news: the Little Mermaid has the opportunity to get a soul and go to Heaven by becoming a child of the air. The nineteenth-century happy ending would not have pleased the kids of the nineties.

We too were spared the original to adapt to the changing sensibilities of the times. It’s the market. (If I were to write a book I would choose rewriting the Bible with schwa or putting transgender characters in the Quran. You know the headlines in the papers). But there is another, more serious aspect. Bad characters today aren’t allowed to be negative. We are afraid that they will make us worse, that we cannot distinguish the symbolic from the literal level, that we are unable to handle unpleasant roles (which are the most interesting, especially in cartoons).

In the scene where Ursula is trying to manipulate the Little Mermaid, to convince her to sign the pact and give her her voice, she sings “Men don’t like gossip/They get bored hearing “blah blah blah!”” and also “Conversation has no effect on males/The gentleman avoids it if he can”. For men to fall in love, it is enough to see a beautiful silent woman (which is true: it is generally women who need a conversation to get excited, men pay not to hear them, but I have never written this). What would he have to say to convince her? Maybe “Give me the voice because no one will hear you as a woman in a patriarchal world anyway”? Better lagna, always.

According to literary historian Elias Bredsdorff, Andersen had never had sex but was a compulsive wanker. Others, however, argue that he was homosexual. According to Rictor Norton, a historian of LGBTQ+ history, Andersen’s love life was that of a sexual outsider who had lost his prince to another person. Andersen allegedly fell in love with a hereditary grand duke of Weimar and wrote him love letters (collected in My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries) and in her diary she said what a fairy tale it was to be arm in arm with him. What if the next Little Mermaid was a man in a wig?