#that ones probably a mistake buuuut i mean....its not totally impossible

[pcktknife]

you have to yell when you refer to them

star rail changing all the aeons pronouns from they/them to THEY/THEM is so funny. its most likely the same as how He is capitalized when referring to god in christianity but the sudden change makes it seem like someone on the team is really pissed about the constant misgendering and is not so subtly trying to correct everyone using the wrong pronouns

[12freddofrogs]

I've recently rewatched The Little Mermaid, and I have come to a new headcanon: mermaid culture literally has Love At First Sight.

We all know that Ariel is staring at Eric wistfully from the first. There is an immediate connection there. But what's more noticeable is everyone's reaction when they realise. Sebastian has a dramatic jaw drop when he sees Ariel singing at him - the kind of response one might have if you know its possible she really is in love.

More tellingly, Sebastian very easily agrees to help Ariel win him. A sixteen year old girl (who, granted, has always loved above and has a current painful argument waiting at home) ran away from home to be with a guy she has never actually spoken to. And Sebastian - practical, pragmatic Sebastian - agrees that if he takes her back she will be “miserable for the rest of [her] life.” 

Again, there are a couple of other factors like that her lifelong passion is going to be shattered, but still.

And there's also Triton. Remember the line “Daddy, I love him!”? He accuses her of losing her senses, snapping that humans can't love her back, but he never implies she can't be in love after that first meeting. (Triton knows that's the first time she met Eric - Sebastian told him everything.) Its the response that she's making a mistake, that she shouldn't love a human, but I think he'd have said everything the exact same if he discovered Ariel and Eric had been meeting secretly for a year. Triton never once brings up the idea she can’t be in love with someone she doesn’t really know. 

Plus, “Daddy, I love him!” is a pretty strong statement. It could definitely be a starstruck teenage girl who’s more interested in shutting down her father than really analysing her feelings, buuuut  it certainly doesn’t hurt my headcannon here. 

It also explains certain other areas of the plot. If Ariel grew up in a world where you fell in love at first sight, getting “the kiss of true love” seems a lot easier. From her perspective, Ursula is giving her a tricky task, especially if she can’t prove who she is, but it’s not impossible. Again, maybe she’s just a sixteen year old girl who isn’t thinking things through, who is fresh from her father destroying her study and would rather do anything then go home again. But there’s the possibility she thinks it’s a lot more straightforward than Ursula intends. 

But this all leads to my second point - I think this Love at First Sight goes both ways.

Eric is immediately drawn to Ariel. Like, he’s declaring that he’s going to marry this strange girl who rescued him from drowning. He has spent less time with Ariel then she has with him. Ariel at least saw him playing with his friends, discussing love, indicating that they were similar. Eric decided that he has met his soulmate based on a song, a brief glimpse, and admittedly saving his life.

He knows he’s in love with this mysterious girl. And then he’s spending time with this mute girl in his castle that has the same connection, leaving him conflicted. Because he’s never felt like this before, and now two separate girls are bringing this out in him. He’s in love with both of them - he just accepted he was in love with the singer first, and doesn’t know what to do. 

Frankly, I’d believe that once Ursula realised love at first sight works both ways, she used it to concoct her own love. That could be why she needed Ariel’s voice. Eric wasn’t going to respond to anything but that.

I don’t think it would apply in all situations, of course. Ariel plays ‘He loves me, he loves me not’, which wouldn’t make sense for her to know if all love was requited. The couple in the Poor Unfortunate Souls song would have just talked to each other if they knew the other loved them (which doesn’t mean that they weren’t love at first sight, just that it’s possible to fall in love the slow way here). But maybe it still exists.  

Can you imagine what this would mean for their world? The ideas of sirens would make total sense, because sailors would fall in love with people in the sea and be irresistibly drawn back to them. Maybe some would spend their lives on the docks, wishing they could see that face one more time. Maybe others would refuse to believe it was real. Still others probably went back into the sea in a desperate attempt, giving the real legend of sirens. There probably wouldn’t have been many cases of it, but it must have happened. 

Maybe Ariel is just a teenage girl fascinated with the surface, and got the chance to meet an attractive boy. Maybe she just had a normal crush, and ran away because her father made her home seem unbearable and being with him made more sense. Maybe they just got lucky and turned out to be perfectly well suited for each other.

Or maybe The Little Mermaid could be a perfect soulmate au.