A Black Little Mermaid?

The pop-culture wars keep bumming me out.

When it comes to diversity and race-swapping in adaptations and remakes, everything feels like a hot-button controversy these days. I think it’s all a little bit silly, and it’s all a little bit more nuanced and complicated than everyone makes it out to be.

Halle Bailey is playing Ariel in the Disney live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, and this has some people very upset, others mildly upset, and another group gleefully wagging their fingers at all the racists.

The most important thing when you’re a pop-culture warrior is finding a suitable enemy to hate, not the movies and TV shows and video games themselves. The key is to find someone to demonize as “woke” or “racist” or whatever, when the truth is often that A) most people don’t care that much about this crap and B) usually everyone is a little more complicated than we think when we make snap judgements about people.

Personally, I don’t care one way or another about a black Little Mermaid. Mermaids can be whatever color you’d like them to be. Frankly, I think it would be more interesting if she had scaly, blue-green skin and looked totally alien. Some mermaids are horrific creatures; others seduce men into the sea. There are many mermaid myths out there. Hans Christian Anderson wrote the story upon which The Little Mermaid is based, and the character was undeniably white in that story—"she had as pretty a pair of white legs and tiny feet as any little maiden could have"—but did her whiteness actually matter?

Nowhere in the story is she called Ariel. Her hair is described as thick and long, but never red (or any color, for that matter). There are no singing crabs or treasure-hunting seagulls to be found. Stories are changed and adapted all the time, and sometimes that means hair color is changed, or skin color, or gender or age.

I’m more concerned with changes to a story like Snow White simply because the character’s name is actually based on her being as white as snow, and making her darker than that feels . . . a bit like poking the bear for no reason. What’s the point? Why not do something actually interesting and make her an albino.

Cash Grab

A much, much bigger concern of mine is the whole Disney live-action remake project itself. None of these films is better than the animated original. Even the best, like Beauty And The Beast, pales in comparison (though the animated Beauty And The Beast is in a league of its own).

I’d much prefer to see original content. Enchanted remains my favorite live-action Disney movie (of the classic princess variety) in a very long time, and I’m very excited (and a bit trepidatious) about its sequel. I’d prefer to see more original content with great music and fun stories and characters rather than these drab live-action remakes that invariably suck the color and life from the originals and, when compared, are ceaselessly mediocre.

The worst part about the new live-action Little Mermaid trailer wasn’t the race-swapping, it was the dreary, dark underwater world itself. It shows just how much less vibrant and colorful the live-action remake is than the original. At least Bailey can sing, and at least they avoid the weird water bubbles from Aquaman but it just looks lifeless and drab compared to the splashy, bold colors of the animated film. And that’s Disney’s live-action remakes in a nutshell. I skip most of them these days because I have no desire to replace the originals with the new in my mind and anyways, life’s too short.

Hostile Takeover

I think that some of the backlash here is clearly racist, but I also think there’s a contingent of fans that really sees these efforts—not just at race-swapping, but at making big, fundamental changes to things they love—as an assault on their hobbies and a rebuke of their very identities.

A lot of the older fandom sees the efforts by corporate entities and social justice activists as one and the same, or at least part and parcel. Soulless corporate greed and ‘woke’ activism come hand-in-hand these days, as the former panders to the latter in everything from ads to big fantasy adaptations—or at least that’s the perception many have.

Think of it like this. Many in what we will call the Old Fandom see efforts by the New Fandom akin to how you might view a hostile takeover.

It’s not hard to see why, even if the reactionary nature of the Old Fandom can itself often come across as ugly and intolerant.

While I’m all for more diversity and a more equitable tolerant world, including within geek fandom and pop-culture writ large, there’s a right and wrong way to go about it. There’s a way to move forward while also respecting what came before, a way to welcome in a new and diverse community without consigning all of the Old Fandom to the same deplorable basket. When you throw out everything that came before, you invariably lose something important. But change is necessary and inevitable. This is the tug-of-war that every culture faces over time.

Too often we see nothing but total derision and mockery of the Old Fandom, and that creates bitterness and hostility (and vice versa). When that also leads to subpar remakes and adaptations, people start to associate the cultural stuff with the quality stuff, when in reality the quality is mostly subpar because these big corporations spend the budget on special effects and marketing, rather than on scripts.

I’m not sure how we move toward a new and better path, to be honest. We’re all so entrenched and so certain that we’re right and the other guys are wrong, that any sort of armistice seems like a pipe-dream at best. But I want to believe—and I do believe—that most of us aren’t pop-culture warriors (I’m trying to be a happy warrior until I can hang up my sword, in any case).

We just want good stories. We just want to have fun. And we’re not sure why everyone is so angry all the time, or why these giant corporations with all this money keep screwing the pooch. Maybe we can’t all get along, but that doesn’t mean we need to demonize one another, either. Like Bill and Ted remind us every so often: Be excellent to each other. And party on.

I made a video about this on my YouTube channel as well:

Thanks for reading and watching! Be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts on this whole kerfuffle. You can find me everywhere I’m online at my official website.