TALES OF A BISEXUAL MERMAID

(may or may not be inspired by me breaking my finger and having it taped up, chipping the bone in my ankle and hurting most of the toes of the same foot 😅)

i tweaked the plot just a bit but same scenario lol. hope you enjoy!

"Hands!" Carmen yelled, plating the finished bolognese for Tina to grab, nodding at the perfected response. It was busy today, far busier than he expected with the stormy, summer weather, but he couldn't complain. The team was moving like a well oiled machine, customers were happy, and even Richie was in a good, upbeat mood.

"Corner!" Sydney announced, turning the corner abruptly, hand on the store's phone. "Chef, I need you."

I keep thinking about their first meeting, and the impact Ariel had on this man. The film really emphasized her siren powers. Like molten metal her song filled his lungs, heart and soul. And her voice, her touch, her being would forever be sealed inside him. Locked away. Prince Eric so desperately wants to find this mystery woman, to the point of almost going mad. And here, Ariel, the woman he’s been searching the whole surface world for, sits before him. A part of him so desperately wants it to be her. When she touches him, he becomes so serious. Shocked. Jonah captures his yearning exquisitely with his expressions. Every fiber of Eric’s being lights on fire with her single small caress. Something about it so familiar. He would know. Her very being has been seared into every cell of his. Everything else in that moment ceases to matter… because for a split momentary second… he finally found her.

I love how Ursula is able to hypnotize Eric to marry her, but like, only barely? Like, yeah, he tells his mom that they’re engaged and he stands next to Vanessa sometimes?

But like…

Grimsby asks him if he wants to get married and he’s just kinda like 🤷🏻‍♂️

Ariel disappears after he’s been hypnotized and, despite the enchantment, he still worries about her and wants to find her

Vanessa is actively being attacked by animals and he does absolutely nothing, but then Ariel appears and he immediately runs to her.

This is gonna be a long post.

For a little bit of background, I am a mixed race person, half brown and half white. I was raised in a Muslim family and am still closeted around them.

I started to have issues with Islam at around 12 or so, when I first started to get the idea that I might be gay. Now I never would have admitted that was my reason. If you had asked me I probably would have said “logic” or something. Because of that I went hard into atheism and atheist circles.

Now people hate to admit this but ex-Muslim spaces are predominantly right wing. Ex-Muslims often see the left as “too tolerant” towards a religion that hurt them. This was the only community I had though, and I read through everything. I was 13.

The other thing that people hate to admit is that, especially when you’re young, being mixed race is so damn hard. If I acted “too white”, following my mother’s German/Austrian traditions, I was accused of hiding my true nature. But if I acted “too brown” I was just another camel jockey. So I hid my “Indian” customs from others and tried passing as white. Especially online.

So I’m not saying this is all youtube’s fault or anything. I was raised to believe that the brown half of my family was lesser and stupid. And with my hatred of Islam, I believed it doubly.

Then came Anita Sarkeesian. I was watching pewdiepie and from there my recommendations were all set. If I’m remembering the pipeline it was pewdiepie - Philip Defranco - Chris Ray Gun (sp?) - Thunderfoot - Sargon - etc. But I was pretty much acquainted with all of the right wing youtube of the day.

Funnily enough, I found her through Thunderfoot. That got me into antifeminism, and more specifically, GamerGate.

I was primarily on the subreddits KIA (Kotaku In Action) and TIA (Tumblr In Action). Both made fun of the SJWs. I kid you not, I would gleefully wait for “Sanity Sunday”, where the people would talk about how feminism is disgusting, cultural appropriation is fake, the wage gap isnt real, etc. I would scroll through this tag for hours.

I got most of my youtube recommendations from those subreddits. This led me from GamerGate to more fascist lines of thinking, such as watching videos about why BLM is a terrorist organization, why all muslims were evil rapists, and why I was fundamentally right to reject my Indian heritage and follow my “correct” heritage.

From here I delved into “race realism”, and I believed it all. I had to. This was the only community I had felt safe in. One of the fash guys even offered to shack me up at his house if my parents kicked me out for being atheist. I was 15.

To say that again, I was 15 and believed that white was right, blue lives matter, “we wuz kangs”, etc. I never would have called myself a fascist or a Nazi. How could I? I used my brown skin as a token, so that people could point to me and say: “See, we aren’t misogynistic and racist! We have this brown girl right here.” But I believed in all the things the Nazis did. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. I will never pretend I didn’t.

But then something happened. I admitted to myself, and to a few others, that I was gay. And suddenly, the homophobia that I had molded myself in, it didn’t fit right. I happened to, by accident, click on the reddit thread of GamerGhazi, the opposition to GamerGate. And after a long bout of introspection I found out that they were accepting of gay people, that the things I had been experiencing were common, that maybe, just maybe, we didn’t need a white ethnostate.

I don’t want to be dramatic but that accidental click saved my life.

From there it was a road of recovery. I deleted all my old accounts, made new ones, and started to read leftist theory. I found better friends, cut out old people. So now, just about two years later, I’m healing.

Here’s the prompt list I’m using in case anyone wants to join me in this challenge:

I live in the general region of the world where Black Sails takes place, and I have been thinking about the geology of Nassau a lot since watching the show. It started off as the assumption that Nassau would have the same geology as where I live based on location and Teach talking about a spring on an island in the area, and the other day my geology professor confirmed it when he pulled up a map of Nassau and the surrounding islands to talk about this specific kind of geology. Everyone in the show is always talking about how the island is unstable and impermanent because it is sand, but the lack of stability and permanence goes far deeper than that: it is in the very geology of the island itself. The geology of this region of the world is karst limestone, a porous rock that holds water in it and allows for springs like the one Teach mentioned to exist. It is also incredibly unstable. It forms sinkholes easily when disturbed, and even when this is not the case it is constantly changing, as limestone erodes easily. The island itself is just as unstable as the social and political events that play out on it. It is not only the superficial sand on the beach that is unstable, but the unchangeable nature of the island.

And then there is Flint. Flint is a type of chert. Chert come from limestone, the thing that makes up the island. Chert is formed through pressure that cause the features that defined it as limestone to disappear, but it’s mineralogy does not change. Flint the character is of Nassau in the way that flint the rock is of limestone. Flint is what James McGraw became because of Nassau. This feels like a too-obvious poetry situation. I could write it out, but you can see it so what’s the point?