Everybody knows the story of The Little Mermaid: Mermaid falls in love with the land and the prince who rules it, saves him from a shipwreck, trades her voice for legs, almost loses him (and her life) forever, and is finally saved by true love’s kiss. A tale for the ages, right?
It seems there’s a gigantic plot hole in the Disney story. One fan pointed out that the entire plot could have been avoided with ease if only Ariel had done this tiny little thing.
“After 26 years, today I stumbled on a plot hole…that will haunt me for the rest of my days,” Mary Falls of Washington D.C. posted on Facebook. “This changes everything. And it’s not the plausibility of human-merperson relations. Though yet to be proven by science, everyone knows those are the best kind of relationships.”
“Ariel could have saved herself a lot of trouble if she had just learned to read and write,” Mary says.
“She could just scrawl an explanation of her situation for Prince Eric like, ‘Hey Blue Eyes, I saved your life and then you fell in love with my voice, which I could probably get back if you just used your love to try to suck it out of my throat through my mouth here.'”
“But like nicer and in princess language,” she continues.
“Then it occurred to me, duh – they can’t write underwater without special pens, and they’d have to be able to walk to The Sharper Image to get those,” she explains.
But she signed that contract with Ursula.
So, Ariel is completely literate and has excellent penmanship!
“I had to give her the benefit of the doubt and think, well maybe she didn’t want to explain herself cause she was trying to be a cool water fish about the whole deal and take her game to the next level.”
Except she tried to explain herself on the beach while dressed in a sail and miming like an adorable lunatic.
“Crushingly,” Falls finishes, “Ariel absolutely could’ve closed from moment one and happens to be a moron.”
But then, that also means the movie would have been over in five seconds.
I guess some things are better left to the imagination.