Listen we all grew up screaming "Part of your world"on the top of our lungs in the living room of our parents. Maybe you are lucky and got the sing along tape for you 12th Birthday or maybe you didn't. I think it belongs into the age old tale of adolesence to believe "this time when i am underwater i will become a mermaid! i am sure of it". Maybe the moon just never stood right. Maybe we all went to the wrong body of water. As time went on we all grew up and so did our excitement about becoming a blue shimmering siren. Nontheless Walt Disneys Version of The Little Mermaid is engraved into our minds. So it was no wonder , when i was first confronted with the more darker version of a mermaid " whose feet felt like splitting apart with every step that she took" . I surley thought that must be the terrifying , altough brilliant, but still terrifying idea of the one and only Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan in his horror fairy tale world of Never After. I can not even begin to describe how wrong I was. Not only is the original text a story about true love. It is a story of longing, to do what ever it takes to reach the one, you want to be with and yet ...never actually reaching him. It is a tale of not beloning no matter how much you force yourself into a shell, that you are not. Not only did this masterpiece take me by suprise, it broke me in some melancholy kind of way. Because the wonderous world of sea creatures and mermaids became a story of adolesence,pain & the ultimate sacrifice

The Little Mermaid has always been my favorite Disney movie of all time. As a kid I always wished I was like her; I wished I had a fish tail just like the little mermaid so I could live under the sea. I know it's the exact opposite of what the little mermaid wished for but I just loved her story so much I even wanted to dye my hair red but of course my parents wouldn't let me because I was still a little kid and way to young to dye my hair. I have absolutely no idea why it took me so long to actually read the original fairytale written by Hans Christian Andersen, which was first published in 1837. Now that I've finished The Little Mermaid I would even call it a dark fairytale. This story probably would have freaked me out as a kid. It's such a dark and sad read, it really made me cry. People has told me that both the original story and the Disney movie are very different and now that I've read the fairytale myself I can confirm that. I really loved the authors descriptions of the mermaid kingdom. I could easily picture it all in my head and for a second it turned me back into my kid-self again and once again I wished I could be a mermaid for a day, only to experience what it's like to live under water. Also the little mermaids sacrifice was much greater though. It took her no time to think about the horrible consequences. “But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more”. The "love" between the little mermaid and the prince is actually the only thing that bothers me a little, not the romance itself though, it's more the fact that the little mermaid hardly knows the guy but is willing to give up on her family and her life and even her voice and also considers to die only to get the chance to make him fall in love with her. Well in the original story it seemed a little more realistic than in the movie though because she had a lot more time to actually get to know the prince. I do believe in love at first sight though, I've always have, this might even be the reason why it didn't bother me in the movie that the little mermaid actually fell in love with the prince after seeing him for the first time but now that I'm so much older I can see what people mean when they say they don't understand how the mermaid could give up on basically everything for a man she's never even spoken to. But on the other hand, it's only a short fairytale and has only about 48 pages so there's not much time to develop a real relationship between the little mermaid and the prince. I think what Hans Christian Andersen was trying to show us is that humanity comes with pain and sorrow and it's true. We feel lots of pain and loss but on the other hand we also feel love and happiness sometimes and it felt like the little mermaid was never really happy. Her dream was it to live on the surface as a human being ever since her grandmother started telling her all these stories. She always seemed kind of lost so there should have been an equal amount of sadness and happiness in her life but it wasn't so maybe that is something that might bother people. “She laughed and danced with the thought of death in her heart". The Little Mermaid really is a dark fairytale I would say and I'm not sure if I would read it to my children until they hit a certain age to be honest because parts of the story are kind of disturbing, for example all the pain the little mermaid has to go through (I don't want to give away too many spoilers though because the original fairytale is very different to the Disney movie). But I loved the story nontheless. This fairytale is certainly something else. There's something very fascinating about mermaids and even though I don't really like being under water (irony?) I really wish I was a mermaid but rather a mermaid from the Disney movie than from the original fairytale though. Although the fairytale is so different to the Disney movie I would recommend any The Little Mermaid fan to read Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale if they haven't already. It has a very bleak and melancholic atmosphere and maybe you won't like it, maybe you will even hate it and still prefer the Disney movie over the original story but maybe you will love it just as much as I did.