verseblack:

So I know we’re all  convinced that “The Shape of Water is going to end with all of us sobbing enough tears to allow the fish creature to swim comfortably through the theater.  But I started wondering about what a happy ending might look like.  And that got me thinking of magical little coastal Maine towns, such as Storybrooke and Haven, towns filled with fairy tale creatures, places where a lady and her fish fellow would just be par for the course.

A place where Elisa might help out with families who had married selkies, running after children and being an understanding ear to those whose partners spent months away in the sea.  I imagine her teaching sign language to sisters whose adventures left them with diamonds or toads falling from their lips whenever they spoke (as Neil Gaiman says, jewels are sharp and cold and can be as uncomfortable as snails in the mouth).  There would be young lovers who traded their voices for legs (or tails, or wings) and would need to be able to communicate.  I think of whole families who fled Hamelin, only to find that the music of the Pied Piper followed their children across the ocean and the centuries. They would fill their children’s ears with wax and for 15 years would have to speak with their fingers.

And I imagine the whole town discretely respecting the “do not disturb” signal of Elisa’s red shoes at the end of her dock.