Well, that didn’t last long. It seems my faith in Hollywood to tell a decent story bereft of identity politics has come crashing down faster and more calamitously than Dumbo’s first foray into the skies.

Like all good love affairs, they end abruptly, and my relationship with Hollywood was over before it started. Only last week I was heaping praise on a new animated feature that, to put it bluntly, knocked me for six. The ink had barely run dry when my attention was drawn to a video doing the rounds on social media. It turns out Disney had released a new trailer for their latest movie. And people were not happy. Twitter was plagued with a maelstrom of emotions. A cacophonous racket of competing voices throwing personal insults and death threats at each other. At one point, I was expecting Elon Musk to hit the meltdown button and head to Mars. It would appear that the corporate dream factory is back to business as usual.

Set for a May release in the US, The Little Mermaid is a live-action remake of the 1989 animated classic about an aquatic ginger-haired princess named Ariel who dreams of becoming human and falls in love with a handsome prince. Except this is a remake. And in this new ‘reimagined’ version, Disney has resorted to progressive casting. Ariel is now portrayed by a black actress.

The two-minute promotional video has been met with near-universal disdain. The trailer has been ratioed into oblivion, receiving three million dislikes compared to just 600,000 likes. The Little Mermaid is now the ignominious holder of the title of the most disliked trailer for any Hollywood film in history. To give this some perspective, the 2016 Ghostbusters remake received roughly half this amount of dislikes.

Sure, it’s a victory for diversity, equity, and inclusion advocates and a blatant piece of social justice pandering, but let’s face it: it is going to bomb at the box office. But it has become clear that, with Disney, the profit motive doesn’t matter when you’re trying to be all lovely and inclusive.

To break with tradition and, more importantly, common sense, I am going to attempt something different. Rather than adopt my usual critique about how the entertainment industry is pushing dangerous and divisive identity politics on an unsuspecting public, I want to try and see this through the lens of intersectional activism.

Perhaps we should welcome Disney’s adoption of diversity hiring. In a world where we are hyper-attuned to political correctness, it is no longer socially acceptable to hire young, ginger people. After all, these are people who, according to South Park’s Eric Cartman, have no soul. As such, gingers are declassé. Especially if they are white, extremely wealthy, and constantly whine about wanting privacy. So should we be watching them depicted in movies as royalty? It gives children false hope. And hope is the cruellest of emotions. In 1989, ginger children all over the world went to the cinema and watched Ariel as she struggled with the fame royalty bestowed on her. Do we want to fill these children’s heads with dreams of monarchy? Ginger people don’t get to be royalty anymore…

I showed the new trailer to my niece, who promptly told me it looked terrible. Well, she is obviously racist. But hey, at least I’ll save money on the tickets and two hours of my life.

Good luck with this one, Disney. I really thought we were getting somewhere.