9 Disturbing Origin Stories Behind Famous Disney Characters
5. The Little Mermaid Stabs Herself To Death
Possibly in an attempt to wash the taste of Sleeping Beauty out of everyone's mouth and prove that women can be the ones chasing after their love rather than just being "happened upon" by a strong, male suitor, the story of The Little Mermaid makes baby steps towards the emboldening of the female race in fairytales. Unfortunately, those baby steps involve harakiri. If you're unfamiliar with the term, the act of harakiri (or seppuku, or "Harry Caray" if it's your ignorant uncle mentioning it during a racist rant) involves plunging a knife into one's own abdomen. Don't remember that from the animated film about the singing crabs? That's because Disney had the good mind to tweak a few of the finer points from Little Mermaid's origin story before paying people to animate it. In Hans Christian Andersen's tale, the basic plot point remains the same: a mermaid wants to turn into a human so she can try to woo a prince. But unlike the movie, the costs of making this transition are a tad on the harsh side. For starters, transforming from a mermaid to a human will feel "like a sword passing through" her body, and she is doomed to constantly feel like she's walking on knives and that her toes are bleeding. Also, if she's unable to get together with her ideal prince, she'll turn into sea foam and cease to exist. Unless she murders said prince with a magical dagger and lets the blood drip down upon her feet. Then it's all good, she can just return to the sea like nothing ever happened. So when the inevitable happens, and the prince shrugs her off in favor of another woman (one without a lingering fish odor), the mermaid has a choice to make: stab the prince in his sleep and return to her half-fish self, or evaporate into sea foam. Or, she can stab herself in the gut and die as a human, which would then allow her to live for eternity in heaven. She chooses that last one and commits an act so brutal that it was abolished as a form of capital punishment by Japan in 1873.
