In the 1837 original, the mermaid gets her tongue cut out, feels knives under her feet with every step, watches the prince marry someone else, and dissolves into sea foam. Hans Christian Andersen wrote it right after the man he loved announced his engagement to a woman.
Edvard Collin was Andersen's closest friend. When the engagement news came, Andersen sent him a letter confessing that his feelings were "those of a woman," calling the whole thing a mystery that had to stay one. Collin admitted decades later, in his own memoir, that he could never return that love.
Then Andersen mailed him the finished manuscript of The Little Mermaid.
Read the story with that letter next to it. A creature from a world the prince can never enter. A love she physically cannot speak. A rival from his own kind who wins by simply existing. At the end her sisters hand her a knife: kill him and come home. She refuses, and the sun comes up.
Disney gave her the rewrite in 1989, and the trade finally paid off, fins for a wedding. Andersen never got his revision. He's buried in the Collin family plot, sharing the ground with Edvard and the woman Edvard married.
There’s worms in the beef and there is poop on the lettuce and tomato. Cheese isn’t real and the ketchup gives you cancer. They’ve ruined the burger. And we just watched.
I’m so happy that I read he was okay enough to be cracking jokes while waiting for the emts, because now I don’t have to feel guilty about using those last two pics as reactions to everything for the rest of my life
Where’s that tweet about every video of Mamdani looking like a clip from a Disney movie called KID MAYOR where a thirteen year old just has fun and makes the city better because he doesn’t know that politics is supposed to be awful.