Current Events > Which option best describes how you feel about Ariel being black?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm not a fan of forced diversity but if they would've casted Terry Crews as King Triton, I would have approved of the movie.

ellis123 posted...

Disney's, unsurprisingly, has no such messages and is just a vapid love story in which you could make the argument that the villain was actually the tragic hero the whole time. Acting like "lololol, you just hate it due to no suicide" is disengenuous at best as literally the only carry over is that there is a mermaid and said mermaid gets a love interest. You can easily have it not end in suicide and still have a relevant message, heck even a different one would still be fine, but Disney went out of their way to scrub anything "unclean" out of it to the point of having nothing worth talking about beyond the music and the animation (which are both jaw-droppingly good).

So Disney's TLM is just a modern day game that looks good?

I don't really care personally. Would it have been cool to see a live action version of the classic Ariel? Maybe, but I'm not the target audience for Disney movies anymore. If I enjoy one that's cool but they're not making these movies to stoke the nostalgia of people in their late 20's.

This is a new Ariel for a new generation, and more power to them for making them how they want to.

If you want to see a movie with a white, red-haired Ariel, well, there's one of those already. Enjoy.

Don't care and not gonna watch it anyway

im pretty sure that fragile microdick Douchetubers like Critical Stinker or Quarterpounder will release one hour long videos about how much this upsets and triggers them...

Objectively I know it doesn't matter, but it was still a pretty predictable move. In fact I remember when they first announced who they cast I said to myself before clicking on the link, "I bet this chick is black." Lo and behold...lol. But again, it doesn't really matter, especially since I'll probably never see it anyway.

MachineJaipur posted...

So Disney's TLM is just a modern day game that looks good?

Hey, don't discount the music! >:V

But kind of, yeah. It's the kind of movie that's super easy to have a kid sit down to and lose themselves in it, but going from a narrative standpoint it was a garbage movie that got as much popularity as it did because the standards were very different when it launched. Thet had some good movies, mind you, but if you were looking for the original story in cartoon form you were never happy with Disney as they have made it a point to butcher the original. You just had to hope they arranged the meat-chunks in an appealing way.

In the end. I don't hold Disney's live action remakes in a high enough regard to even care, but I'm not going to act as if I'm oblivious to the reality that most of these "PoC/minority" castings are partially motivated by certain agendas & to make a statement against the perceived groups the people in charge, don't like.

ellis123 posted...

The Little Mermaid is a tragedy about the folly of trading yourself away for what you believe would be what others want. By trading away her singing voice Ariel loses everything that the love of her life knew her for, causing her to no longer be herself and at the same time no longer being the one that he loved. It has a strong message for having confidence in oneself, something especially pertinant for younger girls due to how our society works.

Disney's, unsurprisingly, has no such messages and is just a vapid love story in which you could make the argument that the villain was actually the tragic hero the whole time. Acting like "lololol, you just hate it due to no suicide" is disengenuous at best as literally the only carry over is that there is a mermaid and said mermaid gets a love interest. You can easily have it not end in suicide and still have a relevant message, heck even a different one would still be fine, but Disney went out of their way to scrub anything "unclean" out of it to the point of having nothing worth talking about beyond the music and the animation (which are both jaw-droppingly good).

It's been so long since I've seen the movie that I honestly have no recollection of the finer plot points of that movie. Doesn't anything happen in the film that touches on that point of Ariel giving up her voice in pursuit of a man?

Sorry, I don't mean to come across as sealioning, I really don't remember.

Neutral -However, I'm not watching it because I don't think Disney movies have been good for a long time anyways, and I don't have streaming services of any sort.

Gainerama posted...

I'm not a fan of forced diversity but if they would've casted Terry Crews as King Triton, I would have approved of the movie.

+1 to the Man you're Merman could smell like. But only if he rides a giant seahorse.

Robot2600 posted...

Inb4 racists

Tc beat you to it.

I don't really care. LOL I didn't see the original for the first time until this year because of my girlfriends kids LOL!!!

bigblu89 posted...

I think the same thing I think whenever they remake anything.

"Kinda sucks that they've seemed to have run out of original ideas, and the ones that are original rarely get any mainstream traction"

or

"Just because they remade something that you loved and 'ruined it', doesn't mean you can't still watch the original. It's a remake, not a replacement."

World of Warcraft III.

The more Ive thought about it, it didnt really make sense to have Ariel be a white redhead in the first place, when the movie clearly takes place in tropical waters, most likely in the Caribbean. But Id say my feelings are mostly neutral/apathetic because the live action remakes/reboots have all been kind of middling at best.

I don't care.

I do like how racists are losing their mind over it though, that's always a positive.

A_Good_Boy posted...

It's been so long since I've seen the movie that I honestly have no recollection of the finer plot points of that movie. Doesn't anything happen in the film that touches on that point of Ariel giving up her voice in pursuit of a man?

Sorry, I don't mean to come across as sealioning, I really don't remember.

It's fine. I, also, don't remember everything about it as it has been a looong time since I last saw it. I mostly just remember various disconnected complaints that I had when viewing it with a more critical eye (ie. wasn't a literal child) mixed with some of the bigger scenes (mostly the musicals, which are excellent across the board).

And yes, she trades up her voice to Ursula. However, that is a skin deep connection as it is never treated as anything more than a literal event. She trades up her voice, and then gets it back when Sebastian breaks Ursula's necklace. There is no message: it is just a string of things that happened. There is no message of "don't lose yourself for another", no "be true to yourself", etc. And if you want to glean a message out of the ending it would boil down to "get a big, strong man to save you from the giant tentacle monster with his spear." Otherwise it's just a generic "love triumphs over all" ending when she gets to live on land happily ever after (until the next, completely cash grab, movie).

Frankly I am 100% on board with not having the exact same set of events + messages with remakes/retellings/whatever, but this is very much a case of the movie being vapid media that accomplishes nothing but looking and sounding pretty. When it came out it was lauded for giving a female character any form of characterization, thus giving little girls a role model, but there is sort of a point where that gets white-washed into moving the movie into a higher tier than it actually was in terms of its value as media. Thus while I won't really complain about something like The Lion King, which was similarly highly inaccurate but actually had a real message involved (even if it wasn't exactly true to the original), The Little Mermaid gets no such protection. Similarly there is a large difference with respect to the appropriation used in Disney's movies in which something like Mulan can get somewhat of a pass (which is what makes the live action one being so crappy in every way that much worse) while something like Pocahontas deserves to be raked over the coals.

I don't care.

I dont care and I wasnt going to watch the movie no matter who was cast for any role because its just another soulless Disney shit remake anyway

Against it

Disney remakes have been crap, this will probably be crap regardless of actress but when its crap, people will say "well its because disney did the race swap"

Disney (outside of marvel) has been putting women and minorities in bad positions

i'm black. i don't really think i care for race changes of existing characters anymore. i'd much rather have new characters that are black and marketed as much as white characters. more thought goes into an original character. i'm much more glad miles morales exists as opposed to like, making peter black. i don't need black peter. i like miles.

that being said, when it happens, cool. if this makes young black girls feel cool and stuff, that's great.

Gainerama posted...

I'm not a fan of forced diversity but if they would've casted Terry Crews as King Triton, I would have approved of the movie.

forced diversity is a meaningless term. you have to put in effort to make a movie with white people in it. that's also forced. it's not like the movie falls out of the sky.