The Real Story Behind The Little Mermaid
No Happy Ending Here
Forget the singing crab and the wedding on a ship.
The real Little Mermaid didn’t live “happily ever after.”
She… evaporated.
Hans Christian Andersen’s original story wasn’t about finding true love — it was about suffering, silence, and soul-level heartbreak.
The mermaid (she never had a name!) saves a prince from drowning and falls in love.
But there’s a catch: mermaids have no souls — when they die, they turn into sea foam.
So, she trades her tongue for legs, hoping love will save her.
Except the “legs” feel like walking on knives.
And when she dances? It’s pure agony.
The prince? He thinks she’s sweet but marries someone else anyway.
Her sisters bring her a dagger from the sea witch:
“If you stab the prince and let his blood fall on your feet, you’ll become a mermaid again.”
She can’t do it. She throws herself into the ocean instead.
But she doesn’t die — not exactly.
Her body dissolves into sea foam, and she becomes a spirit of the air, floating among the winds, doomed to wander for 300 years before maybe earning a soul.
No wedding, no “Part of Your World.”
Just pain, bubbles, and existential dread.
About the Creator
Keep reading
More stories from GoldenSpeech and writers in Chapters and other communities.
Fair Exchange, No Robberies
Dark Memoirs - Index There are at least two kinds of people in the world: those who write this half-arsed kind of intro to a story that looks to separate the rare and the norm, and those who realise it's an overused framing device and don't.
By Paul Stewart12 days ago in Chapters
Is there always a change in living when hobbies change how if so?
When life is lived do we do so because we have too or do we do so because of the hobbies that are in it? When our hobbies change in life does life change in the way we live it because of the hobbies in it? Now i know that I just asked two questions back to back but they are both valid questions and really should be answered so I am going to answer them in this post. The answer to the first question is as follows, yes there is always a change in living when hobbies change because we work our lives around the hobbies that we do in them. The more we live the life that we want to live the more we are doing the hobbies that we enjoy, this can include watching our favourite show, reading, drawing the list can go on and on. As we get older for example our hobbies change because we don’t like the things that we used to like oe like other things to go along with all the other hobbies we like to use.
By Louise Barraco6 days ago in Chapters
Comments
There are no comments for this story
Be the first to respond and start the conversation.