The Little Mermaid: Disney Changes and Omissions That Might Ruin Your Childhood

The Little Mermaid is a Disney favorite of 80s and 90s girls. What’s not to love about Ariel and her fabulous red hair? We all wanted to be mermaids; we all sang the songs in the shower and attempted to brush our hair with a fork (don’t try it; it doesn’t work). We couldn’t figure out why Ariel wanted to leave her life beneath the sea, but we were rooting for her to marry the handsome Prince Erik, whom she’d rescued from an ill-fated birthday party at sea.

That part of the story is the same in both the original Danish tale by Hans Christian Andersen and Disney’s 1989 film version.

As a child, my grandma gifted me the 1975 Japanese animated adaptation on VHS (I highly recommend it). Despite a few small differences—including that the little mermaid dies and goes to heaven after she jumps from the ship rather than becoming sea foam—this less popular film follows the original story fairly accurately.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that I realized not many people know the original story or have seen the 1975 film. A professor one day, to the horrified gasps of my millennial classmates, recounted the traumatic un-Disney ending of the Hans Christian Andersen version during a lecture: ” . . . so the little mermaid loved the prince and couldn’t bring herself to kill him, so she threw the dagger into the ocean and jumped in after it, where she died and became sea foam.”

Although I’d seen the 1975 movie many times, I’d never actually read the original Danish tale. So recently I decided to read it. I was struck by it so much that I then read it a few more times and revisited both animated movies. It became a bit of a weird obsession. In this article, I outline the most significant differences between the original and Disney’s tale (with a few callouts to the 1975 version as well).

Here goes!

Who’s Ariel?

None of the characters have names in Andersen’s version, and the little mermaid is referred to as thus throughout the narrative. There’s also the Sea King, the sea witch, the grandmother and sisters, and the prince. No additional ocean-dwelling companions, Flounder, Sebastian, or otherwise, accompany the little mermaid at any point. Instead of singing fun songs with her fishy friends, the little mermaid tends to her garden in the sea palace. Notably, she plants only red flowers and has a statue of a prince that she’s fond of staring at, and behind which she planted a rose-colored weeping willow. Unlike the extroverted Ariel, the original little mermaid is is described as “a strange child, quiet and thoughtful.” Like Ariel, she is the youngest of six sisters and described as being the fairest and having the most beautiful singing voice of all the mermaids.

In the Japanese adaptation, the little mermaid’s name is Marina. She’s blonde and has a dolphin companion named Fritz.

Different Rules about the Surface

In the Disney version, Ariel breaks her controlling father’s rule to never go to the surface. In Andersen’s tale, going to the surface is a rite of passage among adolescent mermaids once they turn fifteen. The original little mermaid, being the youngest, waits patiently for her turn, listening with quiet wonder as each sister tells of her experiences on the surface. As the novelty wears off, the sisters mostly lose interest in the world above the surface—except to occasionally attempt to lure unlucky sailors to their death:

Before the approach of a storm, and when they expected a ship would be lost, they swam before the vessel, and sang sweetly of the delights to be found in the depths of the sea. … But the sailors could not understand the song, … and these things were never to be beautiful for them; for if the ship sank, the men were drowned, and their dead bodies alone reached the palace of the Sea King.

The original little mermaid’s first above-the-sea experience pretty much mirrors Ariel’s and Marina’s: she sees a party on a ship and watches mesmerized as the people dance to the music. She sees the prince and becomes transfixed. After a hurricane comes out of nowhere and she sees the prince get knocked unconscious by falling debris, the little mermaid rescues him and swims him to shore.

In the Disney version, Ariel sings to Erik on the beach in an effort to wake him but has to leave when his two manservants arrive. In the original, the little mermaid leaves the prince when bells ring from a nearby church, followed by the emergence of a bunch of girls who start walking toward the beach. The little mermaid hides behind a rock in the bay and watches as a dark-haired girl goes to him and holds his head until he wakes up, and the little mermaid goes home, satisfied that the prince is OK but unhappy that he had no idea it was she who saved him.

Motivation for Becoming Human

While it’s true that the little mermaid falls in love with the prince after rescuing him in all versions, that isn’t the only reason she wants to marry him. Shortly after rescuing the prince, the little mermaid has quite the existential conversation with her grandmother in which she is informed that mermaids have no soul.

We have not immortal souls, we shall never live again. … Human beings, on the contrary, have a soul which lives forever. … they rise to unknown and glorious regions which we shall never see.

It’s not so bad, says her grandmother, because mermaids live very long, carefree lives and can grow as old as 300.

She goes on to explain that it is possible for a mermaid to obtain an immortal soul, but to do so, she must first obtain the unconditional love of a human:

Unless a man were to love you so much that you were more to him than his father or mother … and he promised to be true to you here and hereafter, then his soul would glide into your body and you would obtain a share in the future happiness of mankind.

That’s some heavy stuff for a little kid to grasp, so it’s not surprising that Disney left it out.

The Sea Witch Had No Ulterior Motives

Since the drama about mermaids having no souls is arguably a bit much for an audience of tots, Disney turned to the sea witch as an easy villain, named her Ursula, and gave her reasons to hate Ariel and want to sabotage her.

Ariel’s father, King Triton, had banished Ursula from society because of her use of black magic in an effort to dethrone him and rule the ocean as queen, so when we meet Ursula, she is living in exile in a creepy cave infested with evil eels and sea snakes. Her goal to one day dethrone King Triton is not exactly a secret, nor is her jealousy of Ariel, so why Ariel would take such a risk over a guy she’d never even spoken to was beyond me. The original little mermaid’s motivation for becoming human is what makes Andersen’s tragic tale so much more compelling.

Ursula’s deal is that Ariel can live as a human for three days. If she can get prince Erik to kiss her before the end of the three days, she will remain a human; otherwise, she will revert to mermaid form and belong to Ursula forever.

The sea witch, like Ursula, lives in her own super scary lair surrounded by unsavory, serpent-like sea minions, but the reason for her own isolation is unstated and presumably self-imposed. Like Ursula and her “poor, unfortunate souls,” the sea witch makes black-magic deals to help unfortunate merfolk achieve their desires for a price. Despite being an obvious misanthrope, she has no beef with the little mermaid’s father or the little mermaid herself.

Controversial therapeutic techniques notwithstanding, the sea witch at least makes an effort to talk the little mermaid out of wanting to become human, warning her that events are unlikely to work out in her favor and bluntly explaining the consequences should she fail to win the prince’s heart:

The first morning after he marries another your heart will break, and you will become foam on the crest of the waves.

The sea witch has no motivation to betray the little mermaid and never interferes in her relationship with the prince. In fact, the sea witch isn’t even mentioned again until she later accepts the little mermaid’s sisters’ hair in exchange to help them save the little mermaid’s life (more on that later).

Every Step is Agony

Beyond some early stumbling to get upright and take her first awkward steps on land, Ariel experiences no ill effects from her newly sprouted human legs, but Andersen’s little mermaid isn’t so lucky. She endures life as a human not only voicelessly but with excruciating pain at every step. The sea witch warned of this as well:

No dancer will ever tread so lightly; but at every step you take it will feel as if you were treading upon sharp knives, and that the blood must flow.

Fun.

The Sea Witch Cut Out Her Tongue!

Yeah—like with a knife:

Well, have you lost your courage? Put out your little tongue that I may cut it off as my payment; then you shall have the powerful draught.

In the Disney version, Ursula just sort of magics Ariel’s voice into a conch shell for reasons that should be obvious.

The 1975 animated version leaves this part to the imagination; we hear the sea witch say she needs Marina’s voice, and the next thing we know, Marina’s swimming out of the lair voiceless, and Fritz is waiting outside lamenting that he “heard everything.”

The Prince Never Loved Her

At least not like that. As it turns out, the original prince can’t be won over by a hot bod and “expressive eyes” alone, although he does care for her…

The prince said she should remain with him always, and she received permission to sleep at his door, on a velvet cushion.

… like one would care for a dog.

And then he leads her on with a bunch of quasi-dates that any fifteen-year-old girl can reasonably be expected to misconstrue, which she happily endures in excruciating pain secretly:

He had a page’s dress made for her, that she might accompany him on horseback. … She climbed with the prince to the tops of high mountains; and although her tender feet bled so that even her steps were marked, she only laughed …

Ariel’s and Prince Erik’s courtship, for the sake of little girls everywhere, went down a little differently. Ariel figures out some way to sort of quasi-communicate with Erik using adorable gestures, and he starts to fall for her regardless of her muteness. A fun song and a romantic canoe ride ensues.

The Other Woman

One day, the prince informs the little mermaid that his parents want him to travel to a neighboring kingdom to meet “a beautiful princess.” He tells the little mermaid that he doesn’t want to marry the princess; that the only one he can really love is the beautiful dark-haired girl who found him on the beach—the one who saved his life.

‘I cannot love her. … If I were forced to choose a bride, I would rather choose you, my dumb foundling, with those expressive eyes.’ And then he kissed her rosy mouth, played with her long waving hair, and laid his head on her heart, while she dreamed of human happiness and an immortal soul.

So the prince grudgingly goes to meet the princess, and it’s her—the dark-haired girl from the beach! They lock eyes, and the wedding ceremony begins that same day.

Now, this really sucks for the little mermaid, who’s legit about to be sea foam, but she loves the prince and doesn’t want him to know how miserable she is, so she kisses his hand and smiles. She participates as a bridesmaid in the ceremony and dances more gracefully and beautifully than anyone can all throughout the wedding reception, smiling and laughing atop her bleeding feet, the pain of which she hardly noticed with the knowledge of her imminent and permanent death:

All present cheered her with wonder. … Her tender feet felt as if cut with sharp knives, but she cared not for it; a sharper pang had pierced through her heart. … This was the last evening she should ever see the prince, for whom she had forsaken her kindred and her home; she … suffered unheard-of pain daily for him, while he knew nothing of it. … An eternal night, without a thought or a dream, awaited her: she had no soul and now she could never win one.

Disney’s other woman is Ursula disguised as a dark-haired girl—a callout to the original dark-haired girl?—named Vanessa, who uses Ariel’s voice and hypnotizes Erik to marry her instead of Ariel. With the help of Ariel’s fishy friends, however, Ursula’s plan is thwarted, her disguise is discovered, and Ariel gets her voice back in a dramatic scene in which Ariel’s singing snaps Erik out of his hypnosis and he identifies her as the one who sang to him on the beach that morning.

Ariel and Erik are finally about to kiss when Ariel turns back into a mermaid and is taken by Ursula. King Triton shows up and offers Ursula his trident in exchange for Ariel’s freedom, which Ursula uses to make herself all huge and terrifying and tries to kill everyone including Erik. Erik then valiantly impales Ursula with a chunk of shipwreck, and the Disney trope is complete: the evil villain is dead, the spell is broken, the prince and sea-princess marry, and everyone lives happily ever after.

In Andersen’s version, the little mermaid is standing alone and heartbroken above deck long after everyone aboard the ship is in bed awaiting sunrise and the oblivion it will bring her when she hears her sisters’ voices. She sees their heads rise between the waves, their once-alluring hair cut up to their ears. They had heard of the prince’s wedding—and their sister’s fate—and went to the sea witch for help:

We have given our hair to the witch … to obtain help for you, that you may not die to-night. She has given us a knife. … Before the sun rises you must plunge it into the heart of the prince … and you will be once more a mermaid. … Haste, then; he or you must die before sunrise.

So the little mermaid goes below deck to the prince’s cabin and finds them asleep, his bride’s head resting on his breast, and he speaks his bride’s name in his dreams. The little mermaid then flings the knife out into the ocean, and red bubbles that look like blood rise from the sea where fell, and the little mermaid plunges herself into the sea to die.

But—and now this is where the Victorian-era technique of guilt-tripping children into behaving comes in. An alternative ending was later added in which the little mermaid does not become sea foam but instead rises up and becomes a “daughter of the air,” a spirit with the ability to eventually obtain an immortal soul following about 300 years of servitude to the good of mankind.

Additionally, well-behaved children alone have the power to decrease the daughters of the airs’ length of servitude by being good little children, as one companion spirit tells the little mermaid in the new ending:

“For every day on which we find a good child, who is the joy of his parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. . . . for we can count one year less of our three hundred years. But when we see a naughty or a wicked child, we shed tears of sorrow, and for every tear a day is added to our time of trial!”

You better be good, kid, you’re denying other littler mermaids their eternal souls!

12 More Irritating and Overused Expressions

While I love my job as an editor, there are days when every little thing annoys me—usually, that annoyance is with meaningless corporate jargon. I’ve seen the articles about words and phrases that just irritate the crap out of people, so I decided to compile my own list of hackneyed buzzwords.

I’d like to preface this by admitting my guilt for using many of these things myself, but I’d like to call for their demise once and for all. A large part of me is convinced that we all secretly despise these phrases but only continue to use them so we’re not “that weird person at the office who doesn’t understand our lingo.” Here is a list of my twelve most hated expressions.

Reach out: When I think of this phrase, I associated it with people reaching out for help with a serious problem related to health or welfare—or vice versa, reaching out to help someone with a problem. In corporate jargon, this phrase is used to refer to sending an email or making a phone call, usually to clear up some simple discrepancy or misinterpretation. It makes me roll my eyes every time, but I still use it in my own emails to my manager just to not sound weird.
Speak out: I see this all the time in headlines, but it’s rare that the articles they refer to discuss anything newsworthy. To “speak out” about something connotes seeking justice for some social wrong. The club SOAR stands for “Speak Out Against Rape.” Nowadays, “speaking out” can refer to anything from rape and murder to a celebrity’s dramatic new haircut.
According to science: Likewise, this is typically used in clickbait headlines, and often, the “science” they’re referring to is some uncited study based on an entirely different topic. An article referring to a cluster of surveys that show a slight correlation between getting married at age 31 and a low divorce rate may have the headline “Why You Shouldn’t Get Married After 31, According to Science.” These types of headlines [and the articles associated with them] are misleading at best, and at worst, completely false.
At the end of the day: Unless you literally mean to set a deadline for the end of the day, this phrase is meaningless filler—just categorize it along with “like” or “um.”
Anything ending with “hack”: To hack something means to bypass security features to gain insider knowledge about something not readily available. Life hack, kitchen hack, teaching hack, writing hack—they’re all just tips and suggestions.
Game changer: Not every new thing is a game changer. In order to be classified as such, it would have to drastically and forever change the way some type of system operates. The new bug-fixing software upgrade is not a game-changer; it’s just the way technology naturally progresses.
Innovation: See: game changer.
Bandwitdth: “I don’t have the bandwidth for that right now.” The word you’re looking for is “time.”
Utilize: I had a teacher once who used this word at least twenty times a day, and it drove me nuts. “Utilize your notebooks,” “utilize your minds,” “utilize your desks” … Ugh! In nearly every case, “use” would be perfectly acceptable. To utilize conveys that you’re using something to its most optimal potential or not for its intended purpose—for instance, I may utilize a bobby pin to unlock a door or utilize my Word skills to correct the formatting on someone’s résumé, but I’m not utilizing my pen to take notes; that’s what it’s for.
Suck it up, buttercup: Always used by forum trolls. Please be more original.
Think outside of the box: I wish people would think outside of the box when it comes to this hackneyed expression—just please don’t tell me to innovate instead.
Personal brand: While it’s true that being conscious of how you present yourself on the Internet is important for success in today’s career market, referring to me as a “brand” just makes me feel more like a box of Kellog’s than a person.

What are your most hated words and expressions? Tell me in the comments!

Aegon Targaryen—12th of His Name?

ATTN: Spoilers ahead from season 7 of Game of Thrones.

If you’re up to speed on the HBO phenomenon that is Game of Thrones, then you’re aware by now that Jon Snow is not only not a bastard but also true heir to the Iron Throne. His real name is revealed to Eddard Stark by his sister Lyanna in one of Bran’s infamous flashbacks in which, as she lay dying shortly after giving birth to a son following her secret marriage to Rhaegar Targaryen in Dorne, Lyanna makes Ned promise keep her baby’s identity a secret because the usurper and Ned Stark’s BFF, Robert Baratheon, was betrothed to Lyanna and would have the infant assassinated out of jealousy over Lyanna’s marriage to Rhaegar and insecurity regarding his claim to the throne. So Ned agrees to raise Aegon as his bastard son Jon Snow, infuriating his wife Catelyn, who had recently given birth to their first son, Robb, when Ned returned to Winterfell following Robert’s Rebellion.

Jon Snow is not the first Aegon Targaryen to be fathered by Rhaegar—nor is he the second or even tenth Aegon of house Targaryen. One of the babies murdered by the Mountain during Tywin Lannister’s Sack of King’s Landing was Rhaegar’s firstborn son Aegon by Elia Martell, whose marriage Rhaegar secretly annulled (as Gilly discovered in an old maester’s diary in season seven of the HBO series). The Mountain raped Elia before murdering her along with hers and Rhaegar’s two children, smashing the infant Aegon’s head against a wall. (Poor Elia—betrayed and cast aside by her husband, raped by Gregor Clegane after watching him murder her two children before cutting her in half, her son’s name given to a newer sibling by a newer, younger wife. Will no one ever avenge poor Elia Martell?)

In an effort to discover just how many Aegon Targaryens existed in the Song of Ice and Fire universe, I attempted the map the Targaryen family tree, beginning with the first Aegon Targaryen, first of his name and Lord of Dragonstone, who preceded Aegon I Tagaryen, or Aegon the Conqueror/Aegon the Dragon. To do this, I read GRR’s novella The Princess and the Queen, which detailed an historic Targaryen civil war for the throne known as the Dance of the Dragons. The novella is included in the anthology Dangerous Women, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, and includes short stories by other fantasy writers such as Diana Gabaldon, Jim Butcher, and Carrie Vaughn.

This undertaking of mapping a Targaryen family tree by piecing together clues from a novella-long narrative about an enormous family with members who share common names and incestuous relationships soon proved an exhausting, frustrating endeavor. However, a last-ditch-effort search for “how many Aegons” on Google brought me to a list on A Wiki of Ice and Fire—a significantly less tedious route—which I used to fact-check the bits and pieces I’d managed to compile from the novella, along with an exhaustive list of the dragons and their riders for another post I will write later regarding the dragon skeletons beneath the Red Keep. The last and eleventh Aegon referenced in the Wiki list is the infant son of Rhaegar and Elia, making Jon Snow/Aegon the twelfth of his name.

(As an aside, Daenerys reveals in an internal monologue in A Game of Thrones before being sold to Khal Drogo that she’d always assumed she would marry her brother Viserys, as Targaryens typically marry their siblings.) So when it is inevitably revealed to her that Jon Snow is actually her nephew, she’ll be even more shocked to realize that not only is she not the last Targaryen but that Aegon has a more legitimate claim to the Iron Throne. One can only speculate how that will go down in the series and the long-awaited continuation of the Song of Ice and Fire series—(we’re waiting, GRR).

If Jon Snow a.k.a. Aegon Targaryen were to take the Iron Throne, that would make him the seventeenth Targaryen king, and the sixth Targaryen king to go by the name Aegon Targaryen, after Aegon V Targaryen—called Aegon the Unlikely and Egg because he was the fourth son of Maekar I, making him unlikely to become Maekar’s heir. Maekar was the fifteenth Targaryen king and father of King Aerys Targaryen, the Mad King, father to Daenerys, Viserys, and Rhaegar and grandfather to Jon Sow/Aegon. (Confused yet? Because I sure am.) So if Aegon [Jon Snow] Targaryen takes the throne, what would his full namesake be? My guess is something along the lines of:

Aegon Targaryen, twelfth of his name, former Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, Lord of Winterfell, and King of the North; the Resurrected; the (arguably) Prince That Was Promised; King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men; Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm.

Of course, we have no idea whether Jon/Aegon will take the throne. His motivation doesn’t appear to be one of power but of stopping he Night King and his hoard of wights, White Walkers, and now an undead, [ice? blue fire?] wight dragon. With Daenerys’ likewise goal of destroying the Night King to avenge Viserion with Jon at her side, it is highly likely that they will both end up dead. As we know, GRR enjoys turning traditional fantasy tropes on their heads, so the two most likely heroes of the story are almost bound to perish. It’s also entirely possible that the TV series and GRR’s book series will have entirely different endings so as not to dissuade fans of A Song of Ice and Fire from finishing the series—if it ever gets written.

CMoS 10.32: “US” versus “United States”

In this new section of chapter 10 in the newly published 17^th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, “US” may be used in regular running text in reference to the United States in both adjective and noun forms, “subject to editorial discretion and provided the meaning is clear from context.” Previous editions advised use of “US” in running text only in the adjective form (e.g., “I live in the United States” vs. “It was a US policy”) or in figures and tables and the like.

I’m not sure if this qualifies as earth-shattering news, but maybe it will make certain niche writers’ and copyeditors’ jobs slightly less tedious.

CMoS Will Release 17th Edition in September

As a subscriber through my job to the Chicago Manual of Style Online, I received an email announcing the release of the 17th edition this September. Some of the changes are discussed on their Shop Talk blog—among them the styling of website titles, new and expanded sections in the citation chapters, and—arguably the most anticipated—treatment of singular they.

The gender-neutral pronoun problem has always bugged me. The standard accepted replacements his or hers and he or she are clunky and ruin the rhythm of prose, and one as a pronoun can sound pretentious. Rewording to avoid either of these options can prove a tedious process that doesn’t even improve the text. It’s just one of those grammar quirks that makes lots of people want to pull out their hair.

The current edition of CMoS does not permit singular they in formal writing, recommending editors to either reword to make the subject plural or replace with he or she or his or her.

Well, hallelujah! The 17th edition will, while not outright encouraging it, afford more flexibility in use of singular they in certain contexts, even in formal writing. For example, the sentence “Everyone must remove their hats” will no longer be considered erronious (although, in this instance, your would work just as well).

Flexibility notwithstanding, the alternative recommendations are still preferred by CMoS, and the Shop Talk blog reiterates that the audience is the most important consideration when making these and other such usage choices.

While many sticklers will be annoyed by this new flexibility, I am personally delighted! Singular they has been used in spoken English for centuries because it comes naturally in speech. For instance, one of the following statements would not make you sound cool at a party:

Someone has to move their car.
Someone has to move his or her car.

The latter example feels just as awkward to type as it does to say.

In addition to singular they as a replacement for generic he, the 17th edition will also permit singular they to refer to a specific person who prefers to be referenced using a gender-neutral pronoun. This is allowed even in formal writing.

One caveat with the use of singular they in reference to one specific person is that the verb is conjugated the same as when referring to a group (e.g., “They are going to the store” when one person is going to the store). You obviously wouldn’t want to say “They is going to the store.”