Week 3 Animated Narratives Jingyi Zhang

This week, I’ve learned to explore the diversity of stories from one plot. To keep working on the story of the little mermaid. Through the content of the third week of the course, I went to read the original The Little Mermaid. I saw the tragic ending of the protagonist of the story, which reminded me of many other fairy tales, they all have sad endings. Like The Little Match Girl, and The Snow Man. So what if we give the audiences a second chance to make the decisions for the character, are they going to do what they think is right, and going to the endings they wish? I’m thinking to make an interactive web page, each page is a short video/ image combined with the narrator. In some specific scenes, the audiences can make they prefer the plot. Going back to the story of the little mermaid, when I set her ending as "she killed the prince and returned to the sea forever", then divergent thinking might turn the story into this:

The little mermaid has longed for human life since she was a child. In a shipwreck, she saved the prince of a human country. The prince has been looking for his savior after he recovered from a serious illness. The little mermaid who learned of this found the witch and exchanged her lovely singing voice for legs. Even if the pain was like a needle stick when walking, she was willing to meet her love. However, the prince was distinguishing the truth through the singing voice. He asked the little mermaid to sing the song that saved him while waiting for him to wake up. The little mermaid who lost her voice couldn't make a sound, crying and returning to the sea, thinking of the prince by the sea day and night. One day, the prince heard the familiar voice again. He searched for the sound and saw the little mermaid with a mermaid tail sitting on the sea reef. "Monster! Guard! Attack!" He ordered the guard to stab the little mermaid. The fear of the unknown made him forget to think. The little mermaid’s love for the prince turned into hatred. She found the witch again and exchanged her beautiful long hair for a dagger. She killed the prince and returned to the sea forever.