In the ongoing controversy of casting Halle Bailey, a black actress, to play Ariel in Disney's most recent remake of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid, there has been a lot of outrage over race. Matt Walsh even suggested we might consider a more scientific approach and make her transparent like other deep-sea creatures:
Now, a Twitter user has been banned for hateful speech after he posted a video that used AI to turn Bailey into a live-action version of the 1992 cartoon Ariel, complete with light complexion and red hair.
The original poster @vandalibm captioned the post in question:
"He fixed The Little Mermaid and turned the woke actor into a ginger white girl. He says he can do fix [sic] the entire movie when it comes out with 4x A6000 in 24 hours. It's over for wokecels."
The "he" apparently refers to an AI engineer that created the clip. In a follow-up tweet, @vandalibm stressed that he shared the clip purely for "educational purposes," but calling people "wokecels" kind of negates that, and it was too late anyway.
Unlike Matt Walsh who has enough clout to fight back when talking about transparent mermaids, @vandalibm was not important enough to withstand the canceling.
However, the clip still went viral and #NotMyAriel is still trending on Twitter in protest of both this clip and Halle Baily's iteration.
Disney sure knows how to stir the racial divides in the nation!
On the other hand, another trend is growing on Twitter, and it's worth considering when deciding how to react to this controversy.
Black parents are posting videos of their daughters watching the trailer of the The Little Mermaid, and their visible joy and excitement of the race change is worth considering as we navigate the issue.
Here are just a few of the reactions:
I would be curious to know how children that look like the European Ariel are reacting to seeing their likeness erased.
Especially when they are being berated and attacked at school for their skin color in the new national push to fight racism by becoming even more racist.
Probably not nearly as well.
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