One of the twists they may put on Ariel is that she has the ability to change back and forth.
I’ve wondered about that too, but am leaning towards no, just because on this show, magic always comes with a price, so I can’t see them letting her have the best of both worlds. If she wants to use magic to do something so drastic, she has to accept the full consequences of it.
So I suppose it would be more metaphorical that even if Ariel literally goes from mermaid to human, the best part of her was a capacity to love and make friends with those different than her, and that never changes. The saddest bit of DIsney/Andersen is this idea of Ariel sacrificing her family’s love for romantic love. Ideally, it wouldn’t be such a choice, but stories thrive on conflict.
Yeah, I could see them playing up her traits that make her human-compatible, which would in turn make her seem less mermaid-compatible. If the merfolk really are nasty pieces of work who hate humans, Ariel could be portrayed as quite the outcast, maybe even to the point where it’s actually not safe for her to remain as a mermaid.
In the Disney tale, there was fear from the humans and the mermaids about each other. It isn’t played up a lot, just a little bit in the Disney version, as Ursula is the main villain, not Triton. I mean, humans eat fish. There’s the whole sequence in the movie about poor Sebastion running from the chef.Imagine it going the other way, with mermaids hunting humans –and hey, Halloween episode!
What do merfolk eat? I could buy that the Disney merfolk are vegetarians, considering Ariel’s BFFs are talking sea creatures. But the type of merfolk who drag humans to their deaths, I’m guessing they’d eat any other underwater critter they could get their hands on. I could still see those types of merfolk not liking humans though. Fishermen are gonna catch merfolk in their nets now and then, and that’s gonna create animosity.
As for the Halloween ep, that’ll be ep 5. Last year we got Frankenstein, maybe this year we’ll meet some vicious mermaids?