#ariel/eric

[unseemingowl]

Watched the little mermaid remake with the kids I babysit for. Don't have many opinions on the film as a whole but damn you were right those leads have CHEMISTRY

They doooooooooo! The chemistry is so real. It is 100 pct. the reason it is my favourite of the disney live action remakes (not that the competition is steep given how generally underwhelming the live action remakes are, but y'know).

If you redo a landmark animated film, you gotta give me some of that heat, some of that tension that is one of the few things that animated film struggle to convey quite as well as flesh and blood actors do.

And boy do they deliver. They're that kind of illustrious kind of cinema couple that actually look like they're having fun with each other. The section of the film where they bond and go on their little date is my jam.

The pregnant pauses. The staring. The way they completely short circuit when they touch in any proper way. The way Jonah Hauer King just absolutely towers over teeny tiny Halle Bailey. I'm obsessed. They look so good together.

Thiiiis! This shit here. Stick a fork in me, I'm done.

Only thing that makes me sad is that they're in a PG film, because they're acting peak horny teen pining. That electric, I barely know how to manage how to be in your presence, but I cannot bear to be away from you either.

I want to see what it would look like if they'd been allowed to turn up the dial.

[jomiddlemarch]

Wild uncharted waters

“I thought I was going mad,” Eric said, one arm behind his head, the other resting lightly above the crest of her hip. Ariel had her cheek pressed against his chest, had been listening to his heartbeat; it was a sound she found soothing, reminding her of the sea of her childhood, its reliable ebb and flow. But now he spoke into the night and there was only the moonlight to see by, a faint blue spill across the narrow captain’s bed, the embroidered linens tangled like kelp around their ankles.

“What do you mean?” Ariel asked. They spent the better part of their days asking each other questions, her world as foreign to him as hers was to him, the oddest similarities making them laugh. This was different though. She’d never heard him speak in this tone before, his voice shaded with a darkness that went beyond tears unshed, beyond a starless night with a new moon. She had ventured far afield from where her father had wanted her to go, but there had still been places she dared not swim, chasms light could not find the depth of, the creatures within only perceived through the unequal touch of the water against her skin, a desperate sense of wrongness along her scales and woven through her locs.

“Before you came ashore, before you could speak again, I heard you. I heard you all night, singing without words,” he said.

“Oh,” she said.

“I stopped asking if anyone else heard it after the second day,” he said. “The servants were starting to look at me strangely, my mother said I needed to rest, I’d hit my head and the palace physician agreed with her. I knew they didn’t want me to say anything more. I was scaring them.”

“And were you scared?” she said. This she couldn’t blame on her aunt. She’d sung her siren’s melody and it had roused him after he’d nearly drowned as she’d meant it to, but she hadn’t realized how it would hold him. Bind him. If she had listened to her father and never returned to land, Eric would have been tormented by her voice for the rest of his life, an elusive cadence only he would hear, that he could not help longing for.

“I thought I was losing my mind, Ariel,” he said. “Yes. I was scared. I knew you must be out there, I wanted you, and everything, everyone around me told me I was wrong. That I shouldn’t trust myself. I was scared for the island, the people who’d have a mad king. But I was more scared for myself. For losing hold of myself.”

“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” Ariel said. “I didn’t know it was possible. They don’t tell us anything really about the people on land. Most of it’s wrong that they do say. But I’m sorry—”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” he said. “I didn’t tell you to make you feel bad.”

“But I do,” she said. “I was hurt when you didn’t recognize me that first day, but I knew who I was. Who you were. And you still wanted to be with me, even without understanding. You learned my name. That’s not what you felt, what you went through. You thought I’d abandoned you—”

“No, not abandoned. I thought I’d lost you. I thought you needed me and I was failing you. I couldn’t find you,” he said.

“I’m here now,” Ariel said, reaching up a hand to touch his cheek. It was a little rough, unshaven since they’d set sail, but it wasn’t wet with tears. He turned his head slightly, into her palm. “We’re together and it’s all real.”

“It’s hard to believe sometimes. Night-times,” Eric said and Ariel realized he was making a confession. “I go to sleep with you in my arms and I wake up and I think, it’s a dream. I hear you singing—”

“It’s new,” Ariel replied. “All of it. You’ll see, you’ll get used to me. You’ll be able to tell when your dreams end and it’s just the two of us in this little bed. Did you have them make it so narrow on purpose?”

“No, that’s just the way the bed is on a ship,” Eric said. There was a smile in his voice again and the hand at her hip had moved up to her waist, below the hem of the shift she slept in. The tension in him had receded, the way the tide did, but neither of them understood that very much, the way the sea and the shore met and parted. “If you don’t like it, I’ll have some hammocks put in—”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” Ariel interrupted. “I just wondered. If it was like a dingle-hopper.”

“A dingle-hopper? What’s that?”

“Something I was wrong about,” she said. “Also, a fork.”

“You were wrong about a fork?” Eric chuckled. “How can you be wrong about a fork?”

“I think that can wait until the morning,” she said, turning her head to kiss his bare chest and taste the salt on his skin. He had his own savor, not like the sea.

“I’ll remind you,” he said. Before she could decide whether he was giving her a warning or making a promise, he’d moved and had his lips at her throat, the spot that had once glowed as if she’d swallowed the moon.

“You do that,” she said and then he did. He did and he did and he did.

[fandomkicks]

Eric hugging Ariel before kissing her will always be remembered by me because that’s such a vulnerable moment.

Imagine sitting there thinking you’ll never see the love of your life again and then the next thing you know she’s right in front of you. You can’t think You can’t even breathe or process the fact that she’s really there. The only thing you can do is pull her into a hug just to feel her.

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

What do you think about Ariel from the Little mermaid?

She's a delightful idiot in a beautiful movie.

Little Mermaid is a Story About Two People Fucking Things Up for Everyone

The Disney version drifted far from its source material in a delightful way.

Take ten steps back and what we have is two people making a mess of everything for everyone else. Ariel is sixteen, the youngest daughter, and has a keen longing for adventure with no understanding of responsibility.

Sebastian gets stuck with her for the entire movie and finds out that if he can't get her to marry this human bloke then the sea is doomed and he'll probably be murdered by Triton. Also, he spends the entire film almost getting eaten.

Triton then has to do a deal with the devil to undo his daughter's deal with the devil that gives Ursula ultimate power and leads to the worlds most memorable wedding and the reason why you shouldn't get married on a ship.

On Eric's end, you have his advisor so desperate for Eric to marry anybody that a strange, mute, vagabond woman who can't use a fork and runs about in the nude washes on shore: MARRY HER, SURE, WHATEVER. PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SETTLE DOWN.

And then Eric ends up going for the one who turns out to be a sea witch, that he also doesn't know, because "she had a nice voice." His advisor, by the end of the film, is so happy he's done with this guy that he's crying at the wedding.

Thank god it's over.

Back to Ariel

Ariel is very believably sixteen.

She's curious, adventurous, longs to do something more with her life but feels the world's against her and like she's a black sheep. She keeps these human things with 0 understanding of what the human world is like and sincerely believing that the grass is greener on the other side and the humans must all be wonderful who respect their daughters and let them do what they want.

She then makes a Faustian agreement with Ursula, who is clearly sketch, the condition of which is that she has to have the prince fall in love with her while she has no voice (Ursula telling Ariel she should sleep with him to make it happen) and Ariel says "Okay".

She then lives with the consequences of this but it never quite sinks in that this was a very silly thing to do and she doesn't know this prince.

Not only does she not know him, but he has no idea who she is. She has no voice, no means of communicating with him, and seduces him via a very strange strip to a pond with singing lobsters.

He then dumps her for a woman who can talk and Ariel is devestated.

They get married after spending three days not talking to one another and Eric only just finding out his bride to be used to be a fish person.

Ariel, that's not the basis of a good relationship.

But she doesn't know that because he's handsome, exciting, human, and she's sixteen.

Now that I think about it, Ariel's not too far off from Bella Swan from Twilight. Replace "vampire" with "human" and we have a startlingly similar plot.

[cjbolan]

I think despite their many similarities, the live action Ariel and Eric are pretty different in several ways. Eric takes being royalty much more seriously in that he wants to actually solve his kingdom’s problems, not run away from those problems like Ariel does. This difference would absolutely test their relationship.

They’re like Alex/Henry in Red, White, and Royal Blue. One wants out of politics and the other wants in.

[handsomelyerin]

listen if the little mermaid 2023 did anything right it was ariel and eric... they were already a good couple in the original but fleshing him out and making him drawn to the ocean in a parallel to ariel being drawn to land is so good. and kind of increasing that human vs merfolk tension to make it this romeo & juliet love story. like sorry they kind of slayed there. eric sees ariel turn back into a mermaid in front of him and all he does is hold her tighter. they're both gigantic nerds. he's a foot taller than her. it's incredible.

[nessa007]

#they both just really love items and objects! THE LITTLE MERMAID (2023) Dir. Rob Marshall

[be-loved-moon]

[arcanejude]

inject it

THE LITTLE MERMAID (2023)

[nathsketch]

I have a new one in the works! Can you guess who will it be this time?

They’ve been requested by many of you quite a few times! Long overdue! 🌸

Find me here: Instagram | Website & Portfolio 

[unseemingowl]

Rating: E

Pairing: Ariel/Eric

Summary:

Far away from the formality at court, there are new sights, new dances and new words to be discovered with her husband. Ariel makes proper use of all of it.

[jomiddlemarch]

into a mist will go the belief in harbours

Eric had always known he didn’t belong.

Not as a member of the royal family, nor a proper island native, born and bred to the sound the waves made breaking on rocky Kwadril Cove. His mother smiled when she recounted the story of his first taste of the salted porridge babies were traditionally fed, how he’d spat out every last spoonful and they had to commission an entirely new wardrobe for his nursemaid Annora. Eric had learned to frown in a wry manner and make some anodyne comment about preferring tannia cakes with genpil chutney.

They’d kept part of the shipwreck he’d been found in, the splintered wood refashioned into a series of elegantly gilded picture frames to hold small paintings of the king and queen, the private villa across the bay that was the royal retreat, the family portrait where he was perched on his mother’s knee in a bonnet and white dress trimmed with handmade lace. He was meant to take comfort from it, the remnants of his first life salvaged and improved, the colicky orphan who’d been transformed into a perfectly charming little prince for the kingdom to coo over.

“You were the answer to your mother’s every prayer,” his father the king had said so often Eric knew the shape his lips took with every word. How long a pause there was between your and mother’s. They had thought he would not remember what he had lost to attain his position, but though he did not have a single memory to sustain him, Eric still carried that first aching grief and the second one that came of needing to conceal it beneath a smiling visage and endless cheerful gratitude. He’d learned very early not to ask any questions about how he’d been found; he mustn’t try to discover any detail that hadn’t already been deemed worthy of inclusion in the story that was told, the one that included a terrible storm, a foundering ship, the baby wrapped in a scrap of sail, the old fisherman who’d fetched him up from beneath a wave that would have finally drowned him.

“You were meant to live. Meant to come to us,” his mother said so often Eric knew it would hurt her if he argued or asked why. Why had the mother who’d borne him been swept away without holding him in her arms? Why was he the sole survivor and where had the ship he’d been born upon come from? The mother who’d nursed him, the father who’d sired him, they couldn’t have meant for their child to be taken from them, to a life far different from whatever they had known. He knew he did not want to hurt his mother the queen nor disappoint his father the king and so he said nothing, saving his questions for maps and the journals of explorers that were kept in the palace library. He rambled as far afield as the maids and palace guards would let him and if he woke in the night with a clawing feeling of dread, he confided in no one, for no one wanted the confidence of the prince, only his stalwart figure waving from a verandah.

It had almost been a relief to fall into the sea, the ship burning around him. He’d known he was too far from the lifeboats to be saved and the ocean asked him to be nothing but himself, a nameless man of no people, welcomed to the darkness. He had almost remembered something when he woke on the shore, something besides the woman’s haunting voice, the rich sunset color of her hair. Some fragment from his life before, when he had been ordinary, a child who could not hope for a jeweled diadem, a navy to command, bound to his wealth and power like a mermaid to the ocean’s depths. He had spent his whole life being Prince Eric and he sometimes wondered whether he fell in love with Ariel first because she didn’t know who he was any more than he ever had himself.

@silvercaptain24​ had wondered about the lack of Eric backstory angst and I felt called upon to oblige...

[ericxariel]

#i will never get over the way eric doesn't let go of ariel here #he's in shock at first but then pulls her closer #and holds her tight 😭 THE LITTLE MERMAID (2023) Dir. Rob Marshall

[dearest-alexander]

THERE WAS ONLY ONE CHAIR because presumably, the queen doesn't understand Eric's fascination & servants keep away out of respect for him. So, there's no use having chairs around since nobody hangs out with him here. The implication that he must've felt alone for years until, well, her. They're twin souls. I'm gonna sob in the corner real quick.

AND

This should not be applauded, but that mofo knelt on the floor afternoon 'till evening so she can sit (or not, she might be sitting on a box here) on the only comfortable seat in his library. like a fucking gentleman. 

A prince on his knees, literally and figuratively. gddamn it, disney.