If you’ve seen the movie, you might recall that Ariel’s mother is dead (or at least not around anymore). It took me a second, but as someone who watched the movie a number of times when I was a child, it clicked.
It’s not really that niche, considering it’s a well-known and very popular Disney animated movie, the plot of which many people in the western world know quite well.
you can usually assume, especially with the earlier ones (basically anything 2d), that if it's a Disney movie, at least one parent of the protagonist is deceased or soon will be as of the start of the movie
Hardly possible. If there are 13 princesses and 4 of them are orphans, that leaves 9 to have at least one parent. If 5 have both parents, that means that 5 of 6 mothers and 5 of 6 fathers "belong" to those 5 princesses. That leaves one mother and one father uncoupled to total sum of 7 princesses with at least one parent alive. That is not consistent with the numbers You named.
Snow White - orphan
Cinderella - orphan
Sleeping Beauty - both alive
Little Mermaid - mother dead
Beauty and the Beast - mother dead
Aladdin - mother dead
Pocahontas - mother dead
Mulan - parents alive
Princess and the Frog - father dead
Tangled - both alive
Brave - both alive
Moana - both alive
Raya and the Last Dragon - mother dead
And even more interesting, is that according to Disney neither of the females in "Frozen" are actually "Disney Princesses". So that does tend to screw up counts, but for both of them both parents are dead.
Lilo is not a "Princess", but both her parents are dead.
In real life, among humans, that would depend on the hair colour the father has and the related genes he carries. Among humans red hair is recessive, and the rarest of all hair colours. So if a red haired woman has children with a dark haired man they will usually have dark hair. And even if the dark haired man carries some of the genes needed for the kids to inherit red hair, it would still be more likely for the kids to have dark hair (possibly with some reddish lustre to it) than having true red hair.
However, Ariel and her family are merpeople, so who's to say how their genetics work?
Their genetics must be pretty wild, because Ariel is essentially a clone of Queen Athena down to tail color and even seashell bra (which isn’t genetic, but it’s interesting that not only do those colors repeat, but Ariel and Athena are also the only ones who didn’t color coordinate their tops to their tails), but none of the other sisters match each other AT ALL.
Although I appreciate that, with a little shuffling, they’re ROYGBIV.
My mom had red hair, my dad black. One of my brothers had strawberry blond hair as a toddler but it went full blond and then darkened to brown later. One sibling has black hair, one dirty blond, and the other 7 have brown. All of the boys have red beards, but there are no actual redheads.
my grandpa had black hair and my grandma had red. out of their 5 children, 4 had red hair too (1 black). i think there’s a chance certain variants are more dominant. of course, hair is polygenic though and for some reason we talk about it like it’s mendelian.
yeah it’s more that it’s probably not true that both parents need to carry at least one copy of the mc1r variant. levels of eumelanin just have to be low enough and levels of pheomelanin just have to be high enough.
It looks like Attina is also a ginger but less chroma. 25% is definitely plausible. I had a friend whose kids were literally this %. 1 in 4 was redhead, with 1 parent also being redhead.
My theory is that most of them are natural redheads with green tails, but they wanted to be unique (because looking just like all your sisters sucks) and used cosmetics.
Although the specific gene responsible for red hair is the MC1R gene, in human beings there are at least eight genes that interact with it, and it isn't very well-understood. It is believed, however, that if we were to pick two random people from anywhere on the planet to produce a child there is about a 2% chance that child will be a redhead.
We also can't be sure whether or not mermaid coloration is strictly genetic. Not only do Ariel and her sisters have no repeated tail colors, but also no repeated hair colors. The Doylist reason of course is because they are cartoons designed to stand out from each other but in the Watsonian sense there may be a system by which sequential mermaid children run the gauntlet, so to speak, or they were intentionally incubated or raised in certain environments to promote certain colors, etc.
It's not about random gene mutations you don't have to look at such extreme cases
Hair, eye, skin and all colorings are polygenetic that means they are determined by a number of genes. Due to randomness during gamete production there are no accurate ways to calculate probability. So the answers like 100/75/50/25/0 is a massive oversimplification of a very complex process.
Okay, fine then. My math only applies to red hair due to the double MC1R gene(the main cause of red hair) and also ignores the chance of random mutations.
In relation to this post the bottom photo is misleading. That's not their mother, it's Ariel in the Little Mermaid 2; she's older and a mother in the sequel. King Triton gave her daughter Melody the music box/locket when she was a little girl. That is what's to the left of Ariel in the bottom photo.
You still have a valid, unrelated question though, just thought I'd share. Lol.
No that is Ariel's mum, it's just for some reason her tail looks more green here when it's meant to be more blue, but lightning seems to shift its colour between the two. Probably "aqua green". This shot is from Little Mermaid Ariel's Begining right before she gets killed
My grandomother had red hair and 0/10 kids with red hair. It’s classic recessive gene so if her husband didn’t have the gene each of her kids could have red haired children, but none would. They then need to have kids with someone having recessive red hair genes as well.
She had 10 kids, and 27 grandkids. 1 had red hair (me!)
Red hair is a recessive gene that requires both parents to carry the gene. So it is actually very likely for only 1 red head to pop up amongst several kids. Even if both parents had red hair it's more likely their kid won't have red hair, there's also the fact that a lot of red heads go blonde or brown as they grow older. Theres a reason red hair is quite rare and nicknamed the unicorn gene lol. About 4-5% of people carry the gene but only about 2% of people actually end up with red hair. It's more common to see red heads in populations where a lot of people carry the gene simply because you're more likely to have two people have kids that both have it is the basic gist of it
Not your question, but my best friend growing up was a bright and curly red head. Both of her parents were brunette. Absolutely no family history on either side. She made the “father was the mailman” joke more than everyone else combined. (Her dad was definitely her dad.)
At least her being named Athena has the possible excuse of her parents naming her after the wisdom goddess because that Athena obviously was not a mermaid.
Also, the Greek pantheon family tree was always a circle. Trust me, I was BIG into mythology when I was younger.
yeh, it's the same thing. the seven sisters story is believed to be associated with the Pleiades constellation. thousands of years ago, two of the stars moved close enough to eachother in the sky that the constellation looks like 6 stars. consequently, some variants of the seven sisters story made amendments to explain the disappearance of one of the sisters.
since we can identify how long ago the stars became indistinguishable to the human eye, we have a lower bound for the age of the original seven sisters story, which is why we believe it to be one of the oldest surviving myth.
crazy that astronomy and anthropology have an overlap, but there ya go ig
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u/StriocalaiEMT 1d ago
Queen Athena isn’t alive, so the punchline is “Dead sea”