You know what? I was gonna leave a rant in the tags but fuck that.
If you try to avoid the inherent queerness of The Little Mermaid, then that is erasure.
"But Red, don't that mean the original film is erasure too?"
Yes! But at the very least the OG film has other things going for it as an original piece of media. But this movie is meant to be a reinterpretation of the film. And while having Ariel played by a black actress is certainly a step forward in the right way (especially since personally I've always felt it doesn't make sense for there to be light-skinned mermaids,) its obvious that Disney is using their allowance of one (1) mildly progressive thing to cover for the way they are trying to dance around the lack of queerness in this film.
The original story was written by a closeted gay man, and is widely considered to have been inspired by the feelings that come from loving another man that you know will never love you back. When gays and sapphics obsess with mermaids it's not just because we're all monster-fuckers, it's because queerness has been a part of mermaids since the beginning.
And it's a bad thing that this isn't present in the original, but at the very least the original had Ursula. An iconic character whose design and vocal performance was heavily inspired by Divine, an icon in the drag community. And Disney hasn't been opposed to drag... when it's a joke.
But when it comes to using a drag queen a serious performer, for a character that can only be improved by being played by an actual drag queen, suddenly they don't want to touch it, not even in the make-up department.
"Well maybe they don't want the only queer character to be the villain!"
Didn't stop them from doing just that in the live action Beauty and the Beast. You could argue that maybe they just don't want to make that mistake again, but the obvious solution is not to remove all gayness from their films, it's to have an actual gay protagonist. They don't even have to change Prince Eric's gender to do that, just make Ariel bi. Have her reference or show attraction to females as well as males. Hell, that would be the kind of easy-to-edit-out representation that disney loves these days. But if they're doing it, they certainly don't want people to know about it like they did every other time they put a gay in a thing.
We haven't forgotten Florida. Or how they screwed over The Owl House. We did forget Strange Worlds, tho, but how could we not? Their own movie, which actually did have an honest-to-god-not-just-in-implication-or-innuendo gay protagonist, strangely got the shaft in terms of promotion and distribution the way no other animated film of theirs has been in years.
Even now, when almost every other media company has finally, begrudgingly, allowed queerness into their media, Disney remains three steps behind at all times. Still stuck on vague girlbossiness and wanting pats on the back for occasionally letting non-white people do things while everyone else is making art that is unabashedly, unashamedly black, queer, anti-capitalist, and so on.
They would rather this, rather stay behind the curve just to not tick off bigots, then give anyone else the barest table-scraps of representation. Corporations already don't care about us, but of them all I'd argue that Disney is one of the biggest ones. They'll gladly take our money, but they will not recognize us as human.
