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La Sirenita
La Sirenita
So, mer-people live at the bottom of the sea. The mer-king has six daughters, and their grandma helps raise
them. When they turn fifteen, they can journey to the water's top to check out the strange land-people (what
kinda freak lives on land, anyway?).
The youngest daughter is quiet and beautiful, and she waits eagerly for her turn to go up top. When she does,
she sees a handsome human prince on a ship, celebrating his birthday.
A storm destroys the ship, but the little mermaid saves the prince and gets him to land. She hides to make sure
people find him. A group of girls discover him, so the mermaid goes home.
She becomes even more quiet and thoughtful after this, till one of her sisters helps her find the kingdom
where he came from, so she can watch him as he lives in the palace (stalker much?).
One day, during a friendly chitchat with her grandma, she asks what happens to humans that ends their lives
besides drowning. Grandma answers that humans have a short lifespan, whereas mer-people live for 300
years. Plus, when humans die, their immortal souls rise up into the sky to a super coolio other world. Mer-
people just become sea foam after dying. Wamp wamp.
The little mermaid is not too thrilled about this sea foam business. According to her grandma, a mer-person
can only acquire an immortal soul if a man falls in love with her and marries her. This marriage somehow
gives the mer-woman a part of the human's soul, even though he keeps some of the soul for himself.
Of course, the little mermaid has to try to make a man fall in love with her now, but she doesn't think she can
do it on her own. So the little mermaid sneaks away from a swank undersea party to go find the sea witch and
ask her for help. The entrance to her home is filled with icky grasping polyps, and she hangs out with eels, so
those parts made it into the movie.
The sea witch says she will give the little mermaid legs and grace, but every step she takes will feel like she's
walking on knives. If the prince marries someone else, the mermaid will die the next day. And, as if that's not
scary enough, the witch will also cut out her tongue as payment. Undeterred, the mermaid agrees to the whole
enchilada.
She swims to shore, takes the sea witch's potion, and passes out from the pain. The prince finds her, now in a
human body, and says she reminds him of the girl who saved him (who was just a random chick from a
temple who happened to be there when he woke up). But the mermaid can't tell him that she was actually the
one who'd saved him. Life's not easy when you've got no tongue.
Still, the little mermaid becomes a favorite companion of the prince's, meaning she gets to tag along with him
everywhere like a puppy dog. Then he's supposed to marry the princess of a nearby kingdom. Turns out she's
the same chick who "rescued" him while she was at the temple for her education.
The mermaid witnesses all of this, and she's starting to get anxious about her impending death. Then her
sisters swim up to her. The sisters have cut off all their hair to trade with the sea witch for a special a knife. If
the mermaid kills the prince with this knife, his blood will turn her legs back into a tail. One man's death is
another (wo)man's... tail?
But she looks at the sleeping prince and bride, and decides she can't do it. She throws the knife into the sea.
She expects to turn into sea foam, but instead she becomes a spirit of the air. The other daughters of the air
explain that because of her kindness—i.e., not murdering the prince and his bride in cold blood, awww!—she
has become one of them instead of turning into sea foam.
As a spirit of the air, she'll have a shot at gaining an immortal soul so that she can go to heaven… in 300
years! But every time she visits the house of a good child, that time will be lessened. Isn't that nice?
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