She takes a fork and begins to brush her hair, she realizes that she’s doing something weird and puts it down. Then she sees Grimsby with his pipe and thinks it’s a musical instrument so she’s blows in it and gets smoke all over his face. She’s embarrassed, sure, but she doesn’t stop being adorable or curious because of that
I think people miss that about her character. Ariel never apologizes for herself, she drags Eric around the kingdom, being all kinds of excited. She’s not trying to play it cool to impress him, she’s literally being herself 100% of the time.
She’s stays true to herself, doesn’t change her personality for anyone (not even her dad who’s literally a sea king) (or a guy who needs to fall in love with her) and I think that’s important.
People focuses too much on the physical change but never considered that her personality stays the same.
So it looks like Sinema, having gotten her requisite pound of flesh for her billionaire hedge fund buddies (basically, they agreed to keep the carried-interest tax loophole and replace it with an excise tax on stock buybacks), has finally agreed to support the Inflation Reduction Act, otherwise known as the $740 billion “pretty much Build Back Better but we are calling it something different” bill that Manchin and Schumer came out with. If/when it passes, which could be as soon as this weekend, the Democrats will have achieved – with a 50-50 Senate with two habitual Manchurian candidates, a four-seat House majority, a rampantly fascist opposing party, a Supreme Court openly bent on destroying democracy and personal liberty, and an active criminal investigation into the previous administration – at least the following:
The American Rescue Plan, aka the first post-inauguration $1.9 trillion Covid relief package, which was the largest investment in the working class since the New Deal;
The bipartisan infrastructure bill, which is the first major structural and transportation modernization and systemic overhaul for the country since the 1970s;
The first significant gun safety legislation in 30 years and since at least the Clinton administration;
Multiple executive orders now signed on protecting abortion rights and access to reproductive care, including travel out of state if necessary;
A bill in the works to officially codify same-sex marriage and thus protect it from SCOTUS;
Reauthorization and improvement of the Violence Against Women Act, including strong new protections for LGBTQ+ and Native American victims of domestic abuse or sexual assault, including the ability for Native courts to prosecute non-Native offenders for sex crimes for the first time in history;
Finally (FINALLY) making lynching a federal hate crime;
The largest climate legislation ever passed in America (this bill), which also establishes a federal minimum 15% corporate tax rate and lowers healthcare costs, including for essential medications like insulin, by, like, a lot;
Passage of the PACT Act, aka expanding healthcare for disabled veterans exposed to burn pits, also the biggest expansion in this field for a generation despite Republicans briefly killing it in an outburst of pettiness;
Consistent big packages of support for Ukraine, rebuilding of foreign alliances, huge bipartisan support for including Sweden and Finland in NATO (hahahaha fuck you Josh Hawley);
The CHIPS act, which creates tech and manufacturing jobs in America and was made even sweeter by how thoroughly they fucked over McTurtle to do it (since oh boy does he deserve a taste of his own medicine);
Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on SCOTUS, and not an awful white supremacist stand-in like Clarence Thomas, but a genuinely progressive and thoughtful jurist;
Cancellation of almost $6 billion in student loans for the poorest and most defrauded borrowers, such as those who attended scam for-profit “colleges”;
And so on and so forth!!!
So like. Please tell me more about how the Democrats are incompetent, their leadership is bad, they are in Disarray TM, you are a terrible person if you support Biden or give them any credit at all, and you’re just not excited to vote because they haven’t done anything. Like yes! There is a lot more to do! Despite them suddenly deciding to play ball on this particular occasion, Manchin and Sinema still need to be made irrelevant as soon as possible! But as I said, this is happening with the thinnest of imaginable Congressional control, as the other party is literally trying to destroy democracy in real time before our faces. That is not irrelevant.
Also: ruby-red Kansas curb-stomped an attempt to outlaw abortion rights, and approximately 77% of the entire country supports this current bill. The generic Congressional ballots have all shown major movement toward Democrats, and frankly, I have a feeling that we have only just started to see the full impact of post-Roe fallout. So if you get off your asses, quit whining, and put the work in, we could actually win the midterms and then do EVEN MORE!