Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-4877635-20130614170253/@comment-22525977-20131003020939

I didn't mean to put words in your mouth; " if I turn the TV off, the show, and whatever values it is/isn't pushing, disappear, along with everything else on TV" sounded to me like saying that fiction exists in a vacuum and cannot have a real impact on the real world. Reading over your comment in its entirety again, I can see that's not what you meant and it's my mistake for misunderstanding.

Nor am I trying to make Choc look unintelligent (I certainly don't think she is!). What I am trying to do is point out that her joke could be construed as hurtful, because if I said something that accidentally hurt someone (and I have, far too many times), I'd want to know so as not to do it again. But she's apologized and I've apologized for being hurtful myself, so I'm happy to say no more on the subject, except to add that, Choc, if I made you feel dumb or like I was dismissing or undervaluing your intelligence, I'm sorry.

Back on mermaids:

Mermaids aren't human—they're mermaids, they're a different species, and just by dint of where they live, they have a very, very different culture from any humans (they live underwater, after all—no fire-based technology for them, and technology is a huge defining factor in cultural development). That makes it all the more likely for mermaid-human interactions to go badly, which feeds into prejudices, which makes the next time they interact go even worse, and so on and so on until both groups loathe each other even if the original reasons have been lost to time.

(I wonder what the mermaid->human equivalent of "fish" as a slur is. Apes? Something that invokes dirtiness, since we're largely landbound?)

Leaving aside all hypothetical discussions of gender identity, I'm excited to see how the human->mermaid bigotry will play into Ariel/Eric, since it wasn't present (or at the very least, not nearly to the degree we saw in the premiere) in the Disney version of things or, from what I remember, the original story.