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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

This seems like kind of a stretch to be honest. The original story, about a mermaid longing to be human was written in 1837. And that trope in general, not fitting in with the current society, goes back a lot further.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid

I highly doubt current identity politics were on the mind of the original writer when conceiving the story originally.

As for the Ursula stuff, if 'feminist' was the archetype they were going for, they certainly managed to portray feminists in a fairly negative and terrible way. Ursula was not a sympathetic character by any stretch of the imagination.

Nothing wrong if people want to interpret the story that way, that's the thing about good fiction, it makes you think and can tell a different message based on perception, but I doubt it was intentionally subversive and written with those ideas in mind.

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It's "feminism" as expressed through the viewpoint of a gay man in the 1980s. It was hidden inside the villain character, which is precisely what's so subversive about it. You couldn't just come out and say it, but if you gave it a strong beat you could stick it in people's minds.

In the voice of the heroine (or even a sidekick) it would have been too on the nose. In the voice of the villain, it's more engaging.

Feminism has evolved since then, and I don't think the character would be created that way today. Though it is important to realize that the connection between feminism and LGBT issues are interlinked in complicated ways. A gay man's view of what it means to be a woman was different from a woman's view, and is different now from what it was then.

The subversion was definitely intentional. This kind of thing had been going on for years on Broadway. That's why they were brought in. But it's not so much about how people interpret the story as the effect that it had: getting these voices into people's heads. That Broadway musical sensibility was now being introduce to children at a very young age.

I think it is a commonly held view that HC Andersen conceived of TLM after his unreciprocated love interest in his (male) friend. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hans-christian-andersen_n_563...

The link doesn’t support the implication you’re making.

Your link doesn't seem to support what you're saying? It says that he wrote his letter about Riborg (a woman) and sent it to Christian (her brother) as a confessional. After Riborg's death, it was found she had kept Andersen's poems about her.

> After Riborg's death, it was found she had kept Andersen's poems about her.

LOL, brutal.

The link is a different story, but it is often assumed The Little Mermaid was inspired by Andersens affection for the male friend Edward Collin. He was not able to express his feelings, which inspired the mermaid literally losing her voice and (in the original story) having to witness her love marry someone else and not being able to do anything about it.

I don't know if this biographical reading is valid, but the interpretation predates the Disney version and have nothing to do with modern identity politics. If anything, the Disney version tones down this subtext.

The article is very clear that Riborg, the woman he never got over, is in fact a woman, though he wrote of interest in men as well as women. He focused his affections on the unattainable until his death at 70 years of age.

The original Little Mermaid is a very different sort of story.

But I agree with your second point. You could actually read Ursala in a very troubling way—as the queer crossdresser encouraging children to become gay. Lgbt people are infecting the minds of our youth, keep your children away!

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