It's interesting that the article mentions Hans Christian Andersen's “The Little Mermaid” as an example of a story that was “sanitized” by removing the part where Ariel is forced to choose between killing her prince or turning into foam on the waves.

But Andersen's story was itself a sanitized version of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's “Undine”, a fairy/morality tale in which a water spirit marries a human knight in order to gain an immortal soul. In that story, her husband ultimately breaks his wedding vows, forcing Undine to kill him, and losing her chance of going to heaven.

Andersen explicitly wrote that he found that ending too depressing, which is why he made up his whole bit about Ariel refusing to kill Prince Erik, and instead of dying, she turned into a spirit of the air, where if she does good deeds for 300 years, she's eventually allowed to go to heaven after all.

Even as a child, it felt like a cop-out to me. But my point was: “The Little Mermaid” is itself a sanitized version of the original novella, adapted to the author's modern sensibilities.