Although I love the original "The little mermaid" I think that's such an interesting twist on the fairy tale!
Wait no, on the original story it's explained that people on land has a soal and go to heaven when they die, but mermaids don't and turn to sea foam when they die. The witch and the little mermaid made a deal that if she married the prince, she would gain a soul, live on land and later go to heaven. But if he married another she would turn to sea foam, which means she dies. She has a chance to escape this by killing the prince, but she choses to die instead. So in the Disney version she was curious about the life in land itself, but the original mermaid was mostly driven by the desire to have a soul.
In the original the seawitch is neutral or kinda bordering to bad, while she is straight up evil in the Disney version. I thought it was interesting that she was an ally to the mermaid in the manhwa's version.
There is also a twist to the original story that makes it less sad, but it's too complicated to explain.
It wasn't the witch that allowed that, but the spirits themselves that were moved by her sacrifice. The witch would allow her to live as a mermaid if she killed the Prince, but that was after her sisters had pleaded with her and cut their hair off as payment.
For the queen, I never even thought about it. Interesting theory.
I'm having problems to seeing the witches as antagonists. Have they done anything truly horrible for me to dislike them? I'm only at ch. 39-40 but I'm not sure whether I can continue. I see potential in this story, but I dislike the vilification of witches, as they're typically a symbol of female power. Estelle pitted against them, having no strong female character besides her, and being good with swords, which is typically a masculine symbol, just doesn't sit right with me.
To me it's not even clear whether they "possess" a body or just evolve like some sort of pokémon. It's hard to hate them, and therefore also hard to sympathize with the mc and ml. I still like them as characters, but I find the witches intriguing and I want to know more about them as people. Basically, I can't pick a side, but the story clearly picks a side and that makes it hard for me to read.
That's the part I don't get. Do witches replace another person or do another person just bloom out to be a witch? What the princess talked about sounded more like a transformation. If the fiancé was just playing a part, why did she get scared of the tree, and why didn't she try to defend herself? She just looked distressed to me.
He tries to kill them too but yeah, strictly speaking they probably started it. But to me, that's not really the problem either. They are rivals to the throne, so I understand why they are fighting. The problem is that the story seems to frame the witches as antagonists, but they haven't really given me enough reason to hate them, and instead I kinda sympathize with them. It makes it difficult to read.
He is the WORST at communicating SIR, why do you act like you wouldn't be crazy jealous if a prospective fiancé had come to visit Maxi? And now he just leaves like that, ah the foolishness