I feel like I had a very different experience watching The Little Mermaid when compared with other kids. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie. My sister and I played mermaids at the pool for years, but I don’t know if I necessarily connected with Ariel as a character. I always felt overwhelmed and anxious that Ariel was behaving like a brat, explicitly going against her father’s wishes. The «But Daddy, I love him!» of it all did not resound with my 8-year-old self, who respected authority a little too much. There are a lot of cartoons where kids’ lousy behavior gets enabled by their permissive parents (hello, Caillou), but I don’t know if The Little Mermaid is one of them. Maybe King Triton was actually kind of a bad guy for blowing up his teen daughter’s grotto of human stuff. If you loved the Disney princesses who explicitly disobeyed their parents, you’ll love these Disney memes.