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Betwixt The Sheets · History Hit

The Truth About the Little Mermaid

April 7, 2026·43 min·3 clips
The 1989 Little Mermaid film contains a hidden gay torch song written by a man dying of AIDS who couldn't tell anyone.
The ship is already lurching. Kate Lister starts with the Betwixt warning, then admits the team is not exactly in peak sailing shape. That suits the episode. It keeps one foot in cheeky podcast mess while the other moves through folklore, literary history, and emotional ache. Diane is the guide here. Her reading of The Little Mermaid is about longing more than getting what you want. The writer sounds like a lot. Diane describes him as strange, constantly upset, and hard to host, including a stay with the Dickens family that left them desperate for him to leave. Still, she does not flatten him into a joke. The sharper thought is that his loneliness caught something bigger about wanting and being refused. That hits differently. The Little Mermaid feels less like a neat romance and more like a painful fable about eagerness without fulfilment, especially for women and girls. Folklore opens it up. Diane explains that mermaid stories were already moving around, and Andersen's version drew from earlier tales rather than appearing out of nowhere. Undine gets its moment too. That romantic-era bestseller, even nodded to in Little Women, gives another water spirit story about mortal love, sacrifice, and gaining a soul. The same currents keep coming back: mortal love, spiritual change, and longing that gets turned away. Kate keeps the questions plain and lets Diane bring the mythic material back to human feeling. Behind the tails and soul talk, there is a story about wanting so badly it is almost embarrassing, and so common it still hurts.

As heard by us

A mermaid story that becomes a study of longing and rejection.

The Little Mermaid becomes a way into longing, folklore, and the older stories beneath a familiar tale. Kate Lister and guest Diane move from Hans Christian Andersen's sad, strange figure to two earlier sources named in the episode itself: Undine and the Irish mermaid saint…

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Why you'd press play

Hear the older folklore behind The Little Mermaid.

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