Featuring Rationalist!Feminist!Determinator!Ariel, fighting against both the machinations of an Ursula with a massively increased power level (think Cthulhu’s little sister) and her violent and patriarchal father, and the society that he defends.
I would like to write this, but I’m not confident that I’ve got the skills or knowledge to do so (specifically I need to read a lot more on feminism, also I’ve never written fanfiction before). Please PM me any ideas about anything that you think might improve the story, whether that’s general writing advice or a specific scene or a character development ark or stuff about feminism I should read or anything else.
This could be absolutely fantastic, the source material allows for a lot of manueverability and I think canon Ariel’s personality would only require some minor tweaking (mostly with the feminism) in order to fit the mold of what I’ve got in mind. View this and her curiousity just oozes off the film. There is so much potential here that it is just ridiculous.
I was worried about it being a huge mess, at first, but putting them out in the open will allow for more criticism and dialogue, so that was a mistake. I was a bit tired when I posted that comment. I’ll post your comments here then.
These ideas are courtesy of MixedNuts, please give him the (+) karma and not me. I’ll take all the (-) karma.
Limyaael’s rants (and everything else on that site).
Think about where she got her ideas from. In the movie everything stems from her humanity hobby and her teenage rebellion against her helicopter dad (who is overprotective but not evil; upping the bigotry sounds worthwhile but making him not genuinely concerned for her well-being sounds like a loss of complexity). If she’s going to have any explicit feminist ideals, why? Did she come up with them herself, or is there a feminist movement, or is she part of a different movement whose ideas she ran away with? Is that movement old, with several waves, or just finding its voice? How divided is it? Is she concerned about straightforward rights, first-wave style, or is she getting into the philosophical significance of gender roles? Is she selfish, as in the movie, or concerned about helping other mermaids/human wannabes/females of all species? How does she relate to her sisters, and other people who tell her “I don’t want to be liberated, thank you very much”?
Intersectionality: is she all about feminism/humanity/whatever she stands for, and if so does she try to make that work for all mermaids, or does she conveniently forget that not everyone is a sheltered princess with no responsibilities other than an occasional concert? Or does she fight for other causes—because she needed to make accommodations for non-princesses, or because she has a general philosophical system she noticed applies elsewhere? If so, what does she do about, say, the absolute monarchy? (Mad props if you dissect the class/race implications of Sebastian’s Under the sea attitude and include the blackfish.)
How is society for people who are neither royalty, working for royalty, or evil mages, anyway?
In the movie, she’s hopelessly naive about humans. In particular, she thinks human women are much freer than mermaids, and it doesn’t really hit her that they don’t know fish are people. Does she start out that way, and if so what happens when she learns it? Once she knows it, what does she do about it? Does she genuinely care about understanding and helping humans or does she just go “ooh, shiny”?
How alone is she? In the movie, her sidekicks don’t share any of her ideas and are pretty much incompetent. Does she look for better allies? How does she value cooperation relative to personal friendship?
Where does she stand, on the diplomat—firebrand—murderous fanatic spectrum? Does that change over time, and why?
Does she have to be straight? (Limyaael’s campaign for asexual female characters has gotten into me.)
What’s the relationship between Triton and Ursula, in terms of power imbalance, current truce (if so) conditions, ability to destroy each other if they sacrifice everything for it and conditions for being willing to do so?
What do her sisters want? How do they feel about Triton, about society, about Ariel being the favorite, about Ariel’s weird ideas, about Triton’s reactions?
What’s Ursula’s backstory? How and why did she learn magic? Why does she use her powers for this specific job? Does she really believe her “but all the while I’ve been a saint” claims (there’s some possible commentary on “People should be able to sign any contract including leonine ones”-brand libertarianism here), or does she use that to fly under some legal radar, or to ensnare her victims? How eager is she to drop the act (and if it’s not entirely an act, how does she justify it) when convenient? Do her victims know that, and how does it affect their willingness to do business with her?
Why do people defend a bigoted society? Some major villains can just be evil, but a whole society can’t; they must have reasons that sound good from their perspective, possibly with complex justifications.
Are you going to have fish be sentient? Are all animals sentient Disney-style? If you are trying to make an at all coherent world, I’d just ditch the sentient fish part. Otherwise, I will honestly never read this because I won’t be able to get over the horror of billions of sentient death just constantly. MOR!Harry panic about snakes right there. That is a really, really, weird world where humans haven’t noticed as well. Fish are really, really, stupid. Hence we eat them en masse before we even started farming.
My first thought is that this will be even more worked than I planned on. These are great questions.
I need to put a lot of time into this, no one should expect the story to get started for at least a few months.
I need actual women or actual feminists to talk to me; I live in a red state and don’t ever see these people speaking up about patriarchy. I’m only familiar with feminism through books, and a couple discussions every now and then. What are the biggest pitfalls that I risk? Whose books should I read?
Tentative advice: Read books by women with female viewpoint characters. Make note of anything that seems odd, especially if you see it from more than one author.
Paladin of Souls and Cordelia’s Honor (I liked this one way more, and the series it’s at the start of is fantastic, though the main character of that one is male) by Lois Mcmaster Bujold
In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker, the start of one my other favorite scifi series.
So if you’re like me, you start reading that book, and almost immediately need to read a bunch of other books, because the main character has read them and how can I understand without reading them? I think I can resist a lot of them, and there’s already a good amount of overlap but when she starts actually mentioning plot points from other books in ways that seem emotionally relevant is when I need to read them. So I can recommend the start of this book but am now reading Triton before I can get back to it.
If I were a very cruel person, I’d recommend Greer Gilman’s Moonwise—it surpasses the formal specifications (female author, main characters are two middle-aged women and two goddesses), but it’s extremely referential we’d probably never see you again, and honestly, it’s probably not particularly relevant to chaosmosis’ quest.
This is going to be really difficult to execute. If anyone else wants this basic premise, please take it. I’d love to read someone else’s take on these ideas or ideas like this.
Also, don’t take this outline as a promise. I reserve the right to completely change the story’s meaning and plot as I wish.
Incidentally, there was a TV cartoon series based on the movie, which takes place when Ariel was younger and hadn’t yet developed her humanity obsession.
I don’t know what to do with Ursula. It’s tempting to make her into the overzealous feminist strawman, but that seems like a weak fight, ideologically, and that’s not a message that I really want to send out. Ursula needs to stand in clear contrast to both Ariel and the patriarchal society which rejects her. It would also be nice if Ursula was relatable.
The best idea I’ve had so far is to make Ursula an extremely jaded and manipulative and pragmatic woman, who neglects what’s good in relationships and focuses but this conflict with the Eldritch horror awesomeness that I had planned. I’ve got vague ideas of how to reconcile the two, but input on this would help a lot.
Having Ursula’s default state be an even more powerful version of her boss form was one of the main inspirations for this fiction. Ursula has the potential to be a really cool character, and she’s shaping the way that I approach my ideas about the mermaid culture and Ariel’s character. I love villains, so I would really appreciate it if people helped me to not screw this one up.
Your link just led to an Aladdin icon, so I assume you had something else in mind.
When I was rereading the thread, it also occurred to me that Ursula was the hard part. My take is that she’s what she is for much the same reason crime bosses are what they are—power, safety, and excitement—with the last two having to be balanced. It might be interesting if there was a family tradition of being outlaw magic users.
However, I’m not a feminist, though I agree with a lot of feminist ideas. I think men and women are fairly similar, and that means some women are going to be very bad news. I’m inclined to think that the status differences between men and women have a lot to do with men being (for reasons that aren’t clear to me) better at group violence. It’s not about the upper body strength.
Ursula could be an outcast from her own society because she’s mean and irresponsible. You could spin a story about her which goes either way—the octos are actually dominant (or at least secure/isolated), and they exile their criminals who then predate various cultures the octos don’t care about.
Alternatively, the mers dominate the octos, and Ursula has ambition and no place inside respectable mer society to use it.
Real world octopi are short-lived. How would that affect their approach to prisoner’s dilemmas? A claim that they’re unreliable because of their short lives could also be used to justify prejudice against them.
However, I’m just noodling here—I’ve only seen the movie once.
Three Words: Little Mermaid Fanfiction.
Featuring Rationalist!Feminist!Determinator!Ariel, fighting against both the machinations of an Ursula with a massively increased power level (think Cthulhu’s little sister) and her violent and patriarchal father, and the society that he defends.
I would like to write this, but I’m not confident that I’ve got the skills or knowledge to do so (specifically I need to read a lot more on feminism, also I’ve never written fanfiction before). Please PM me any ideas about anything that you think might improve the story, whether that’s general writing advice or a specific scene or a character development ark or stuff about feminism I should read or anything else.
This could be absolutely fantastic, the source material allows for a lot of manueverability and I think canon Ariel’s personality would only require some minor tweaking (mostly with the feminism) in order to fit the mold of what I’ve got in mind. View this and her curiousity just oozes off the film. There is so much potential here that it is just ridiculous.
PM’d a bunch of ideas, but I dunno why you don’t want them public.
I was worried about it being a huge mess, at first, but putting them out in the open will allow for more criticism and dialogue, so that was a mistake. I was a bit tired when I posted that comment. I’ll post your comments here then.
These ideas are courtesy of MixedNuts, please give him the (+) karma and not me. I’ll take all the (-) karma.
Limyaael’s rants (and everything else on that site).
Think about where she got her ideas from. In the movie everything stems from her humanity hobby and her teenage rebellion against her helicopter dad (who is overprotective but not evil; upping the bigotry sounds worthwhile but making him not genuinely concerned for her well-being sounds like a loss of complexity). If she’s going to have any explicit feminist ideals, why? Did she come up with them herself, or is there a feminist movement, or is she part of a different movement whose ideas she ran away with? Is that movement old, with several waves, or just finding its voice? How divided is it? Is she concerned about straightforward rights, first-wave style, or is she getting into the philosophical significance of gender roles? Is she selfish, as in the movie, or concerned about helping other mermaids/human wannabes/females of all species? How does she relate to her sisters, and other people who tell her “I don’t want to be liberated, thank you very much”?
Intersectionality: is she all about feminism/humanity/whatever she stands for, and if so does she try to make that work for all mermaids, or does she conveniently forget that not everyone is a sheltered princess with no responsibilities other than an occasional concert? Or does she fight for other causes—because she needed to make accommodations for non-princesses, or because she has a general philosophical system she noticed applies elsewhere? If so, what does she do about, say, the absolute monarchy? (Mad props if you dissect the class/race implications of Sebastian’s Under the sea attitude and include the blackfish.)
How is society for people who are neither royalty, working for royalty, or evil mages, anyway?
In the movie, she’s hopelessly naive about humans. In particular, she thinks human women are much freer than mermaids, and it doesn’t really hit her that they don’t know fish are people. Does she start out that way, and if so what happens when she learns it? Once she knows it, what does she do about it? Does she genuinely care about understanding and helping humans or does she just go “ooh, shiny”?
How alone is she? In the movie, her sidekicks don’t share any of her ideas and are pretty much incompetent. Does she look for better allies? How does she value cooperation relative to personal friendship?
Where does she stand, on the diplomat—firebrand—murderous fanatic spectrum? Does that change over time, and why?
Does she have to be straight? (Limyaael’s campaign for asexual female characters has gotten into me.)
What’s the relationship between Triton and Ursula, in terms of power imbalance, current truce (if so) conditions, ability to destroy each other if they sacrifice everything for it and conditions for being willing to do so?
What do her sisters want? How do they feel about Triton, about society, about Ariel being the favorite, about Ariel’s weird ideas, about Triton’s reactions?
What’s Ursula’s backstory? How and why did she learn magic? Why does she use her powers for this specific job? Does she really believe her “but all the while I’ve been a saint” claims (there’s some possible commentary on “People should be able to sign any contract including leonine ones”-brand libertarianism here), or does she use that to fly under some legal radar, or to ensnare her victims? How eager is she to drop the act (and if it’s not entirely an act, how does she justify it) when convenient? Do her victims know that, and how does it affect their willingness to do business with her?
Why do people defend a bigoted society? Some major villains can just be evil, but a whole society can’t; they must have reasons that sound good from their perspective, possibly with complex justifications.
Are you going to have fish be sentient? Are all animals sentient Disney-style? If you are trying to make an at all coherent world, I’d just ditch the sentient fish part. Otherwise, I will honestly never read this because I won’t be able to get over the horror of billions of sentient death just constantly. MOR!Harry panic about snakes right there. That is a really, really, weird world where humans haven’t noticed as well. Fish are really, really, stupid. Hence we eat them en masse before we even started farming.
My first thought is that this will be even more worked than I planned on. These are great questions.
I need to put a lot of time into this, no one should expect the story to get started for at least a few months.
I need actual women or actual feminists to talk to me; I live in a red state and don’t ever see these people speaking up about patriarchy. I’m only familiar with feminism through books, and a couple discussions every now and then. What are the biggest pitfalls that I risk? Whose books should I read?
Tentative advice: Read books by women with female viewpoint characters. Make note of anything that seems odd, especially if you see it from more than one author.
Recommendations, anyone?
Sunshine, by Robin Mckinley.
Paladin of Souls and Cordelia’s Honor (I liked this one way more, and the series it’s at the start of is fantastic, though the main character of that one is male) by Lois Mcmaster Bujold
In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker, the start of one my other favorite scifi series.
Among Others by Jo Walton.
So if you’re like me, you start reading that book, and almost immediately need to read a bunch of other books, because the main character has read them and how can I understand without reading them? I think I can resist a lot of them, and there’s already a good amount of overlap but when she starts actually mentioning plot points from other books in ways that seem emotionally relevant is when I need to read them. So I can recommend the start of this book but am now reading Triton before I can get back to it.
If I were a very cruel person, I’d recommend Greer Gilman’s Moonwise—it surpasses the formal specifications (female author, main characters are two middle-aged women and two goddesses), but it’s extremely referential we’d probably never see you again, and honestly, it’s probably not particularly relevant to chaosmosis’ quest.
However, I’ve started a reading group about it.
My book queue is already functionally infinite so adding another infinite to it doesn’t really harm me :)
“The Omniscient Breasts” might be a somewhat useful post when writing female characters.
Is this going to be based of the Disney film or the Hans Christian Andersen story?
Mostly Disney, but I might borrow things from HCA.
You might want to look at the various tales and plays named Undine, too.
This is going to be really difficult to execute. If anyone else wants this basic premise, please take it. I’d love to read someone else’s take on these ideas or ideas like this.
Also, don’t take this outline as a promise. I reserve the right to completely change the story’s meaning and plot as I wish.
Incidentally, there was a TV cartoon series based on the movie, which takes place when Ariel was younger and hadn’t yet developed her humanity obsession.
I don’t know what to do with Ursula. It’s tempting to make her into the overzealous feminist strawman, but that seems like a weak fight, ideologically, and that’s not a message that I really want to send out. Ursula needs to stand in clear contrast to both Ariel and the patriarchal society which rejects her. It would also be nice if Ursula was relatable.
The best idea I’ve had so far is to make Ursula an extremely jaded and manipulative and pragmatic woman, who neglects what’s good in relationships and focuses but this conflict with the Eldritch horror awesomeness that I had planned. I’ve got vague ideas of how to reconcile the two, but input on this would help a lot.
Having Ursula’s default state be an even more powerful version of her boss form was one of the main inspirations for this fiction. Ursula has the potential to be a really cool character, and she’s shaping the way that I approach my ideas about the mermaid culture and Ariel’s character. I love villains, so I would really appreciate it if people helped me to not screw this one up.
EDIT: Removed faulty link.
Your link just led to an Aladdin icon, so I assume you had something else in mind.
When I was rereading the thread, it also occurred to me that Ursula was the hard part. My take is that she’s what she is for much the same reason crime bosses are what they are—power, safety, and excitement—with the last two having to be balanced. It might be interesting if there was a family tradition of being outlaw magic users.
However, I’m not a feminist, though I agree with a lot of feminist ideas. I think men and women are fairly similar, and that means some women are going to be very bad news. I’m inclined to think that the status differences between men and women have a lot to do with men being (for reasons that aren’t clear to me) better at group violence. It’s not about the upper body strength.
Ursula could be an outcast from her own society because she’s mean and irresponsible. You could spin a story about her which goes either way—the octos are actually dominant (or at least secure/isolated), and they exile their criminals who then predate various cultures the octos don’t care about.
Alternatively, the mers dominate the octos, and Ursula has ambition and no place inside respectable mer society to use it.
Real world octopi are short-lived. How would that affect their approach to prisoner’s dilemmas? A claim that they’re unreliable because of their short lives could also be used to justify prejudice against them.
However, I’m just noodling here—I’ve only seen the movie once.