Starbucks holiday cups insult mermaid cultists everywhere

I am sooo angry about these coffee cups! How dare Starbucks depict a mermaid… with TWO TAILS! Apparently I’m not the only one upset by this affront.

“This is outrageous,” says ruler of the seas, King Triton. “I cannot believe my daughter posed for these!”

The controversy started when national coffee chain Starbucks released a red holiday cup sporting the sea princess, Ariel, with two tails. As does most human garbage, many of these cups washed into the ocean, where King Triton’s Jamaican servant, Sebastian, stumbled upon them.

“I have always told Ariel that cappuccino is better when it is wetter,” says the succulent crab. “These pictures, they are obscene and promote a body image unattainable for many of our young mermaids.” Since Princess Ariel’s ascent to the human world and her transformation into a bipedal fish eater, many young, impressionable mermaids have been undergoing tail bifurcation surgery, or “tail splitting.”


“These cups are just more evidence of the human world co-opting and completely corrupting the traditional mermaid,” states Laura Lauper, 26 years old, who plays Ariel at the Disneyland theme park. Lauper has been a Little Mermaid fan since she saw the movie as a little girl twenty years ago. “People are like, ‘You’re so childish. I can’t believe your favorite movie is a cartoon.’ They think I should’ve outgrown my belief in mermaids a long time ago, that people shouldn’t take make-believe things so seriously. I just tell them, ‘Well, you can’t prove they don’t exist.’ I think it’s blasphemous.”

Not everyone agrees with the controversy. “It’s not even a split tail. It’s her fins,” says Starbucks customer-of-the-month Donny Pinkerton. “And who cares? The coffee’s hot. Ariel’s hot. People just need to cool off with all this political correctness. If you want to believe in mermaids, fine. Just don’t tell me how a mermaid should look on my coffee.”

In other camps, environmentalists see a different side to the issue. “Perhaps the more alarming problem here is the influx of human garbage in our earth’s oceans,” says Fujimoto, a once-human wizard/scientist who now lives underwater with his daughter, Ponyo. Fujimoto is responsible for maintaining the delicate balance between land and sea. “And do you hear anyone complaining about the devastating impact of coffee processing plants on our waterways and aquatic ecosystems? Humans are disgusting.”

Personally, I could care less about the environment when it comes to my coffee addiction and belief in traditional mermaids. Starbucks, or any company for that matter, has no right to put whatever branding they want on their products if it violates my mermaid religion.

And what does the fashionista, the social butterfly and irresponsible Princess Ariel have to say for herself? “I’m a freaking make-believe character, people. On a freaking coffee cup. Grow up!”

Starbucks refused to comment.