Ok but I feel like they didn't "make her black", they just casted an actress who happened to be black to play her. We don't get annoyed because Hollywood gave a character brown eyes instead of blue, or made them taller than they're supposed to be, so why is it such a big deal that she has a different skin color??

It feels like patronization over anything else. Oh, you didn't have time to create a popular black character? Just take a popular white character and hope making her black is popular too. Do the work, Disney!

Agreed. Thank you for putting into words what i couldn't articulate. It irked me but i wasn't sure why!

THIS. YES.

You mean the way the industry grabs every and any character and makes them white, regardless of their originally created race? It is a mermaid, get over it. You white people have been living in a world that has told you and continues to tell you over and over again that you are the default. Your need for a mermaid, a MERMAID, to be white and stay white is because deep down in your heart you are racist. Otherwise, you wouldn’t care at all.

I like this idea

This is your issue in a made up tale about a mermaid that loses her voice and gains feet by magic?

well if we continue down that line, evolution would have turned a memaid into a fish. A human torso is just not the hydrodynamic, as it was never intended to swim but is performance optimised for a life on land, just like the mamals that developed into whales came to look like giant fish.

All that is assuming that mermaids are on the human evolutionary track at all. It's just as (fictitiously) possibly that they are some kind of mammalian sea creature like dolphins, whales, walruses or seals that just so happen to have evolved more human-like upper bodies. In that case, those animals are generally brown, gray, and black. As for humans, the Inuit and other indigenous people of the extreme Arctic and subarctic are brown or even dark-skinned. So "north" doesn't necessarily equal "white." Not every cold, snowy, or low light region created people that look European. Nor is Europe somehow a one-to-one representation of undersea conditions. Climate does select for various features, but natural selection is not straightforward. The why's and how's of natural selection are often mysterious or only become clear after the fact. Yes, it's possible that some climates selected for light skin because people with light skin survived and those with dark skin didn't. Or vice versa. It's equally possible that group divisions arose and those with light skin choose to migrate and thrived in Northern regions. In the end, it's really a question of imagination and not science. Nature is so amazingly diverse and beautifully wacky that sometimes you read about a creature and just think 'how can that thing possibly exist?" Look at the platypus. That shouldn't exist, but it does! Why is everything turning into crabs? No one knows. There are microscopic water bears just chillin in the most oppressive environments on Earth. If you expect biology to conform to expectation and rules, you've always going to be disappointed. I, for one, can see how a darker skin tone could be of great help in hunting under the sea.

I've read this argument but the truth is there are some very brightly colored things living in the Mariana trench, some things that are black, and somethings that are a bright glowing white.

Mermaids aren't real, they can be any color on the planet.

Hey, I might be wrong, but I’m not trying to offend anyone. I’m just trying to stay pragmatic and share my point of view, which is, if I’m not mistaken, the whole point of the discussion. So tell me I’m wrong, I’ll be glad to find out WHY I’m wrong, because that way I can learn from it. But downvoting comments about evolution?

This is the dumbest racist bs I’ve heard yet. Your ‘science’ is off.

THANK YOU

Absolutely! I was thinking about that as well. We see Ariel frequently sunning herself on rocks and chatting with the seagull. The 'there's no sunlight under the sea, so she should be pale' idea doesn't even work within story canon. True, we only see Ariel doing it, but everyone in her world knows about land-dwellers. If she really lived somewhere like the Mariana Trench and never came near the surface, humans would seem like aliens.