In reading “The Little Mermaid”, one might be prompted to feel sympathy and occasional astonishment. The Little Mermaid is a mythical and inhuman creature. She has an otherworldly aura, while at the same time, being a curious young girl. Her struggle to gain mutual feelings of love from the Prince prompts the reader to feel sympathy, maybe even frustration, as she has sacrificed so much while a gloom fate awaits her. Leaving her family, losing her voice, feeling physical pain, and ultimately losing the one she loves, “The Little Mermaid” is filled with tragedy. 

This exists within the Disney adaptation as well, but much less so. Ariel suffers less than her written counterpart, and is able to be with the Prince she sacrificed for. She is followed to land by friends, who are sea creatures reminiscent of home and able to guide her. Musical dance and sing breaks lighten the mood, and Ariel is not shown to be in any physical pain with her newly-gifted legs. She struggles through a brief encounter with Ursula, but it amounts for only a small portion of the movie before she defeats her and is reunited with Prince Eric. 

Both versions of “The Little Mermaid” are easily recognizable and contain many of the same themes, but the Disney version is, unexpectedly, much more lighthearted.

The story of Little Red Riding Hood is easy to arouse the sympathy of the reader. The first thing that needs to be said about the background of the story that is easily overlooked: Little Red Riding Hood goes to visit her grandmother alone, why does she go alone and where are her parents? When you think about it, you will find a surprising fact, that is, her parents may no longer be alive, or abandoned her, otherwise we can not understand how they can allow a child to risk doing such a thing alone.

In addition is the size difference between Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, the wolf is a very aggressive animal, as a small child with almost no ability to resist.

In such a premise, the wolf does not take a direct attack on Little Red Riding Hood – this is the cruelest part of the story: it maximizes its own interests through deception, and also destroys the only good things in the story (Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother and the affection between them). The reader can only feel powerless anger from the beginning to the end.

When reading The Tale of the Tiger Woman, the reader will experience the feelings of sympathy, empathy, repulsion, and confusion. The repulsion will affect the reader due to the girl realizing that her brother was killed and eaten by the tiger woman when the tiger woman gave her a snack “but in fact it was a human finger, cold and clammy” (CFT 27) and when the girl noticed that what “she thought was a rope was a long intestine” (CBT 27). The reader feels sympathy/empathy for the girl due to the situation she is in as well as the fact that her brother has just died. The feeling of confusion will come from the fact that when the girl gets in a tree to try and escape the tiger woman and instead of the tiger woman going up the tree herself, the tiger woman leaves to get other tigers to do it for her which allows the girl to escape. The question in many readers’ minds might be like that of my own; “If the tiger woman is actually a tiger, why did she not go up the tree herself?”