Something mind-numbingly dumb happened recently, and I want to talk about it. Unless you ve been
living under a rock, or, y know, unda da sea, you ll probably be aware that one of the things
Disney announced at the recent D23 expo was a live-action The Little Mermaid remake. You ll
probably also be aware that, in a development literally nobody could have predicted, a large
and specific section of the internet summarily shat themselves in anger. But it s fine guys,
they re not racist! They re the sensible ones, with valid concerns! We re all just
overreacting or at least that s the general stance of right-wing commentator and noted
TERF Matt Walsh. Instead, if we look at the situation with facts and logic
in mind, we ll see that Ariel shouldn t be dark-skinned, because of mermaid science.
Alright, in fairness, that s taken out of context. But only a little
Walsh is supposedly responding to a viewer letter calling Halle Bailey s casting, I shit you not,
white erasure . Don t worry, viewer, you haven t been Mandela Effected into a timeline where the
little mermaid was a famous historical hero of the whites, of whom all historical records have
been burned what the viewer meant was this: Now the viewer seems to have mixed up Denmark with
Atlantis, and that s understandable, they ll probably look fairly similar in a few decades
time, but the rest of this is pretty silly. First, as someone with a Masters in English
Lit this here? Yeah, that s just not true . Stories often are reflective of experiences,
sometimes that s on purpose and sometimes it isn t, but unless we re talking about,
I don t know, an autobiography, at most, that s only ever one purpose among many. But, yeah,
Walsh just agrees with all this tripe, and then he adds his own take, which is where things start
to get spicy. There s two main parts here. First, Walsh says he d be fine if we all agreed
race doesn t matter in casting, just like the good old days. Racial bias in the film industry didn
t exist in the 90s, apparently, but, here s the thing. As far as I can tell, there s absolutely
nothing to suggest Disney began the casting process with the intention of selecting an actor
of colour. To the best of my knowledge, this is an example of precisely what Walsh claims to have no
issue with. Now, is it possible that Disney went into the pre-production of this film hellbent on
casting a non-white woman in that lead role? Sure. But I can t see any evidence for this at
all. It s not like this is some pre-established pattern - they ve cast plenty of white leads in
previous live-action remakes. So if Walsh here is just assuming this wasn t colourblind casting,
Bailey wasn t simply the best pick for the role, based on no evidence then there s really no other
conclusion to draw here than that Walsh is only fine with colourblind casting when it results
in white lead roles. So this whole first part is very hypocritical and also pretty damn racist.
But then we get to the snippet that went viral. The mermaid science! The secondary objection Walsh
has to this casting is because it s not realistic that a MAGICAL MERMAID, as a creature living
beneath the waves, could have dark skin. And I don t really know what to say here except that this
is fucking moon-man talk! In a story utterly rife with things which make zero biological or physical
sense, like sentient crabs, and undersea speech that sounds like this instead of this, zeroing in
on the skin colour of, again, a MERMAID, as the thing that needs to be scientifically accurate
is honestly pretty deranged. Especially since it isn t even true that everything that lives in the
depths of the ocean has pale, translucent skin. Now, Walsh and his defenders insist upon a few
caveats with this clip. First, that it s not just against Halle Bailey s casting, that Walsh also
says the little mermaid should be translucent, so it s criticising equally the original animated
design. And if you severed the soundbite from all context, then maybe there s a shadow of a
point here. But the soundbite doesn t exist in a vacuum it s part of the rambling agreement
Walsh gave to that viewer concerned about Little Mermaid 2023 as white erasure. At the very minimum
this point is implicitly criticising Bailey s casting. And second hey, don t worry guys,
it was a joke. It was a joke! Matt was just joking! Dude, he was joking! It was a joke!
And, hey, you know what? Maybe it was a joke, but if it was What s is the joke here? What s the
punchline? That no one should care about mermaid skin colour, that it s dumb to get hung up on it,
because it s always unrealistic? In that case, who s he dunking on here except himself and the
caller? Because while the mermaid science line may not have been fully sincere his agreement
that this is a big deal, that this is white erasure? That, seemingly, was.
Clearly, the answer is: Walsh didn t put that much thought into it. The purpose of this,
joke , was to function as a quick, easy, correct-sounding secondary justification for
his position that in the abstract, casting black actresses in roles like this is fine, but it isn
t fine in this example, for reasons but also to function as one which could be collapsed down, at
a moment s notice, into that standard Just Kidding Brah, Why So Triggered? defence, an umbrella which
shields not merely the joke from criticism, but the joke s context, too Walsh s vague problem
with Bailey s casting, and his deeply hypocritical assumptions about this film s casting process.
There is one further point I d like to make about this clip of Walsh. In agreeing with the viewer
take that fairytales are supposed to reflect the lives of their writers, in attempting to view
the upcoming film simply as evidence for some racial casting conspiracy, in doubling down on
that sincerely or not - with the whole scientific melanin mermaidology angle, Walsh makes explicit
his utter missing of the point. Look, readers and critics have come at fairytales a whole bunch of
ways over the years fancying them expressions of some undying human spirit, or expressions
of unconscious psychic processes, zeroing in on the linguistics or narrative structures of
the stories or a million other ways besides. And these approaches often do bear in mind material,
or social factors the links between these stories and the real world for instance the ways these
stories reproduce existing inequalities, or the social functions these narratives may have served
within the communities from which they emerged, so this isn t at all to say that these stories,
and the way we tell and re-tell them, doesn t intersect with the real, with culture, with
politics, with identity. It s just that what makes them fairy tales is the way these stories find the
real within the unreal. Without that fantasy, the transcendence of the mundane, the imagination of a
world where things don t always follow the rules of reality they wouldn t be fairy tales. Mermaid
science isn t just a dumb take, or a bad joke it s antithetical to this film, the story it s based
upon, and the rich history of that story s genre. Look, it s fine to dislike the trend of
live-action remakes, their bland production design, and the artistic stagnation that on some
level they undoubtedly represent. That s where I stand! I m not gonna see this film, I haven t gone
to see any of them. And criticism of these films for being uninteresting, being bad on a technical
level, or for, like plenty of other reasons, is fine so long as it s done in good faith. But on
a wider level, that isn t what s happening here with the response to this remake s trailer. I
don t know who needs to hear this, but good faith criticism is not the same as devoting
hours upon hours of your life to making ragebait content using lazy dogwhistles because I m sure
a handful of people did make videos critical of the Beauty and the Beast or Cinderella remakes
when their trailers dropped, but not this many, not with the same malice, not with the bigoted,
anti-woke focus. The vitriol around this remake is way worse than it was for any previous one
of these that s just a fact. And, come on, we all know why. So, if you re looking for a tidy
conclusion? Racists are stupid, fairytales aren t real life, mermaids aren t scientific, and as
for Matt Walsh s show? If you re after intelligent takes you re probably best off looking elsewhere.
Thanks for watching, and hey, maybe leave a like if you feel like it. This isn t my typical style
of content, but I ve done videos like this before, and I ll probably do some like this
again. Big up as always to my patrons onscreen now especially Kevin Douglas and Ian Fyfield. Peace.