Before jumping into the meat of this article, let me just remind you all that this is a giant waste of anger. This whole thing is manufactured strictly to make people mad at each other. How do I know? Auli’i Cravalho is not white and she literally just played Ariel for Disney on ABC. Nobody cared. But all of a sudden, American society has to wage war against each other over this issue… meanwhile, the real culprit (Disney) and their mishandling of all of this gets to sneak off into the background.
Yuck.
This whole deal with The Little Mermaid and Disney’s remake is just unpleasant. As predicted, the movie’s prerelease has turned into mudslinging from both sides: one side saying the race-swap is a cynical ploy that offends European fairy tale authenticity, the other side says disliking the idea is racist. So that’s led to all sorts of low-resolution hatred going back and forth. I’m not saying that either side is wrong or right… I’m simply saying that the worst of us from both sides are leading a discussion better handled by cooler heads and more thoughtful conversations.
So how are things going?
One account on Twitter used deep fake technology to race-swap the teaser back to a red-headed, light-skinned mermaid. It was deleted and the two accounts that originated the video were banned.
