Hot on the heels of Disney’s flop, Pinocchio – which has received near universal disdain and mocking – Disney thought now would be a good idea to show the world the first teaser for their The Little Mermaid remake. Consume!
Great Triton’s Beard!
The Little Mermaid is a beloved fairy tale written by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen that was first published in 1837. It’s probably most famous for the 1989 animated classic from when Disney were masters of their craft.
Gone are the days of awe inspiring animation, wonderful storytelling and timeless songs. Instead the magic that was once synonymous with Disney has been replaced by soulless CGI, heartless performances and “the message”.
In their attempt to deflect from the feeling they may be a spent force, Disney seem to have mastered a new art, the art of Fan-Baiting. One of the most common fan-baiting tactics is the deliberate race or gender swapping of a character to build up controversy, therefore free PR.
The Little Mermaid teaser landed with a thud. To date, the teaser on YouTube has 795K likes and 2M dislikes. On the back of Pinocchio‘s abysmal 34% Audience Score, it’s clear that audiences are growing tired of current Disney’s approach to things.
The Noisy Minority
Once the trailer was revealed and audiences caught their first glimpse of Arial, a majority of people were less than impressed. In another example of Gingerism, Ariel is no longer a white girl with flowing red hair. She’s now played by Halle Bailey, a woman of color. Different to traditional depictions of the character including how Hans Christian Andersen described her in his story.
Of course, this has instantly become a new battlefront in the ongoing culture war. Twitter exploded, as it does, with an abundance of virtue signalling. Meanwhile, if you were less enthusiastic about the film then there were accusations of racism, white supremacism, and literally Hitler. The Twitter hive mind was in overdrive.
One often used line of defence was that it was just a story and that mermaids are not real, therefore Arial’s appearance was a moot point. While “y’all” were getting upset and a culture battle raged, Disney no doubt sat back and wet themselves in the excitement at all the free publicity.
However, as frequently happens, the virtue signal was about to tie itself up in knots of hypocrisy and eventually check-mate itself.
TenGazillion And His AI Machine
While hive minds were screaming into the Twitter echo chamber, a user called TenGazillionIQ went about his business. His business was using AI to reverse race swap black Arial into white Arial. A user called Vandalibm revealed TenGazillion’s efforts to Twitter and then the bomb went off.
Suddenly, the same Twitter-verse that had stated that mermaids aren’t real and therefore can be any ethnicity had an online meltdown that a mermaid was a different ethnicity. If virtue signallers didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.
Many of these people were actually tagging Disney into Vandalibm’s tweet and encouraging them to go after him for copyright. Magnificent.
Twitter dutifully did their bit and suspended both TenGazillion and Vandalibm’s accounts. Something about violating their rules. The Twitterverse celebrated the accounts being closed but it was too late. The cat was out of the bag and the world is now aware.
TenGazillion claims that if he has 4 x A6000s – I presume these are computers – he can process the entire movie. Predictably a GoFundMe was set up for this.
Either way, it seems respecting the ethnicity of the character is a highly selective.
Gingerism
So why do Hollywood hate gingers? This latest shameless PR stunt from Disney is just another in a long line of Hollywood studios replacing ginger haired characters with black actors.
Recently we’ve had (now cancelled) Batgirl, Mary Jane Watson in the MCU and even little orphan Annie from way back in 1885 couldn’t escape a “reimagining” in 2014.
With only 140 million ginger people in the world, that makes up less than 2% of the population. So it’s obvious that regardless of their token virtue signalling and “representation”, the simple fact is that Disney and Hollywood do indeed hate minorities.
Checkmate bigots.
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