Personally, I always interpreted Saleen as someone who hated to loose at anything, someone who liked “winning” games that hurt people. She was a mean girl who liked competition, which is why she was a villian in my mind. I never thought of her as the first female human Jasmine met, strange. And thanks for touching on the fact she kept touching and holding onto Aladdin when he kept pulling away; it was creepy and indeed seemed forced, which was wrong.

I just meant she was the first woman that Jasmine speaks to at length in the series, which surprised me upon realizing. As for her human/not-human-ness I more brought up her human-ness in comparison to Ayam Aghoul, who was pointedly more exaggerated and cartoony like a character like Genie is, which makes the threat he poses seem less serious and therefore his advances toward Jasmine a lot easier for some audiences to swallow (a la Pepe Le Pew, basically), but Saleen wasn’t scaled back in the same way, appearance-wise. She looks normal when Aladdin meets her. She is a conventional, human beauty. The threat she poses isn’t a threat that needed to be covered up because a female antagonist is with few exceptions considered to be as threatening as a male, even when doing the same things. (In this case, invading their target’s personal space in a very inappropriate manner.) 

((Those girls are from a brothel. Perhaps he wished to frequent it or did when he could. That woman is a madam.))

–mozenrathoftheblacksand

In reference to my headcanon about the ladies in “One Jump Ahead” here. Considering I’ve seen a few things label them as “harem girls” (and a harem is not a whorehouse like most westerners believe it to be – this was an assumption brought over by ignorant white imperialists who didn’t understand what a harem was), I really don’t think that’s the case. (I think the lyrics identify them as harem girls but I’m not sure.) A harem is a sacred space where men aren’t allowed – the word translated literally ties to “haram” or “forbidden,” and according to wikipedia, this is a space where young women were raised in preparation for marrying noble and royal men, or the living quarters of the wives of polygamous individuals, etc, but to add onto that: 

“A Muslim harem does not necessarily consist solely of women with whom the head of the household has sexual relations, but also their young offsprings, other female relatives, etc.” (x)

So no, my money’s on them being sisters and the woman in that scene being their mother.

Conclusion: I thought this episode would unsettle me less than the last one and I was wrong.

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And I think it bothered me as much as it did because I took such a hard look at the last one. This is still one of the episodes I remember liking a whole lot as a kid, and it does help to establish some things within the overall series continuity. 

Jasmine doesn’t have as strong a reaction to Sadira later because after this experience, she probably trusts Aladdin a whole lot more, for instance. 

To my knowledge, Saleen pops up in just one more episode that Jasmine is entirely absent from, which kind of ticks me off. They seemed like the nemeses here, not Saleen and Aladdin. As I said in the intro, I can understand why she wasn’t used more because both of her plots revolved around her trying to basically make Aladdin belong to her. 

Not even love her. Belong to her. 

This can be a bit old hat after a while. Personally I would have liked to have seen more episodes where she and Jasmine square off in a way that doesn’t involve fighting over a man, because there are other things that women adversaries can fight over, and the fact that Jasmine outsmarted her should have made her stick out as a formidable enemy.

I’m not sure what episode I will be doing next, but I’m tempted to dive into the first Mechanicles episode – if anything because Ayam Aghoul left a bad taste in my mouth, but Mechanicles is one of the more “cartoony” villains that’s done well. 

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You can tell that Dan was going for a female character with his “waiter” voice and either the animators didn’t get it or they weren’t allowed to do it.

When you watch the episode and listen to his voice and you’ll be able to tell what I mean. 

Also, while all of this is going on, Jasmine is using her brains and kicking ass.

Jasmine is trapped in the grotto, which is apparently enchanted so that she can basically go anywhere that there’s a source of standing water.

This is an enemy that Jasmine can’t fight directly because Saleen’s magic has put a barrier between the two of them. So she has to be smart to win this fight. Her first goal is, of course, to get Aladdin’s attention and show him where she is. 

Also thank you, animators, for remembering she’s underwater and not animating tears, here. I really appreciate when you remember the little details.

She also has to deal with a killer octopus. 

Getting around him largely involves finding ways to outsmart him. 

And appealing to his standards as a hairdresser. 

And outswimming him despite that I’m pretty sure this is her first time deep-sea swimming. 

Wat. 

Okay, there is a point, here, where someone needs to recognize she’s being inappropriate.

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So now we’re going to talk about when it’s important to tell people it’s not okay to invade your personal space. I mentioned in the last post that Aladdin may have this need not to be disliked (specifically by girls, it seems) that makes him hesitate to push others away right away. He’s used to being homeless, so when people are nice to him it’s important to not ruin the first impression. 

However, he also keeps sending obvious signals, short of outright saying so, that he doesn’t want this person to touch him. 

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The more he pulls away (and he does, several times) the more forcibly she pulls him back. 

On one hand, if he tells her to stop, he knows it will be perceived as rude – because this is rare instance where, because she is perceived as a “royal” – regardless of his gender, he is not in the position of privilege here. On the other, there are people watching him (including his friends who are given to being jackasses that laugh at any deviation from standard masculinity) who will want to know why he doesn’t want to be touched and fawned over by the hot woman. 

I also understand that even if they wanted to try to send a message about not touching people without their consent and to listen to nonverbal cues that mean “no,” they might not have been able to get any episode into production that involved the same thing happening so blatantly to Jasmine. “The Spice is Right” comes really fucking close, but we’re also seeing this, here, coming from somebody that Aladdin doesn’t know is the bad guy. (They also made Ayam Aghoul more cartoony so that his advances would be less threatening and harder to tie to real people. Saleen is not like that. This is a conventionally attractive, seemingly normal woman and her attentions are perceived as totally normal if a bit boy-crazy. This and the last episode display facets of rape culture.) 

I really don’t know how to feel about this, and I would love readers’ thoughts on this, because I don’t think this was intentional by the writers, but think about the messages these kinds of things send to kids who watch the show. 

I am also really bothered by the fact that even though Aladdin is sending all these obvious cues that he’s not comfortable, and even though his friends are closely watching, Iago thinks that he’s a “lady killer."