Our Mermaids Are Different: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Rave Master]]'' has Celia, a very beautiful mermaid who naturaly falls in love with Haru, much to Elie's displeasure. Her magic is strong but useless in the absence of water. She is the younger sister of the Queen of the mermaids, which of course makes her a mermaid princess.

* ''[[Rental Magica]]'' and ''[[Rosario + Vampire]]'' have both had the dangerous, flesh-eating kind of mermaid. Though ''Rosario'''s, true to its style, appeared as a [[Cute Monster Girl]] beforehand.

* In the ''[[Slayers]]'' anime series, there's a mermaid that's a fish. Literally, just a fish... with tetrapod arms and legs. Not a reverse mermaid. A * whole fish* with legs, arms... oh, and lipstick. There are other merfolk seen in the earlier (1st and 3rd) series; turns out they ''all'' look like fish with arms and legs.

** Their most amusing (and oddly touching) appearance is in a ''[[Slayers]] Try'' episode: a young fishgirl and the shipwrecked sailor she saved are in love with each other, and use a spell that will allow a fishperson to be with a human [[The Power of Love|if they truly love one another]]. The spell actually works, and she changes into a beautiful human girl... {{spoiler|and he turns into a fishman!}}

* In ''The Merman's Children'' by [[Poul Anderson]] merfolk are humanoid, with bluegreen skin, webbed hands and feet, gills and attractive enough that one of them seduces a human woman and has children by her.

* In the ''[[Doctor Who Expanded Universe|Doctor Who]]'' tie-in spin off ''Genius Loci'' one of the characters tells [[Bernice Summerfield]] a gruesome mermaid story in which a fisherman, with a fine sense of the pragmatic, chops a mermaid in two and takes the fish half home as his catch of the day. The bifurcated mermaid turns out to have been the daughter of the queen of the mermaids and hilarity ensues.

* [[Goosebumps]]: Deep Trouble - The main character is rescued by a mermaid before it is captured and almost sold to a zoo by the mean humans.

* In Andrei Belianin's ''Thief of Baghdad'', the main character ([[Fish Out of Temporal Water]] with [[Laser-Guided Amnesia]]) and his friend [[wikipedia:Nasreddin|Nasreddin]] encounter a mermaid, who will only help them if one of them satisfies her. The main character, recognizing the [[Mermaid Problem]] promptly passes the "honor" to Nasreddin. After some time, Nasreddin returns with a smile. When asked, he is surprised that his companion doesn't know that mermaids briefly turn into humans when they want to "get it on".

* ''[[Changeling: The Dreaming]]'' has the Seelie Merfolk and the Unseelie Murdhuacha (pronounced ''mer-RU-ka''). The Merfolk are what one generally thinks about when one thinks mermaid: their lower halfs are of various bony fish (except for House Melsinee, who instead take the form of air-breathing marine mammals and reptiles). The Murdhuacha are [[What Measure Is a Non-Cute?|merged with crustaceans, mollusks, and other seagoing invertebrates]]. When either Kith takes to land, their lower halves automatically turn into legs and they resemble Sidhe with their otherworldly beauty.

** There's also a bit of [[Nightmare Fuel]], as the Merfolk and Murdhuacha are trying to fight off the game's constantly-oppressive force of Banality. Any changeling who succumbs to Banality loses all access to their fae abilities and forgets all about their second life. Imagine being one of them, and coming to in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean... about five hundred feet down.

** [[Mystara]], like most ''D&D'' settings, has merfolk, called "merrow". Its are unusual in that they can breed with humans (solving the [[Mermaid Problem]] via shapechanging by one or the other). The Queen of Aquas, half-sister of the heir to the Empire of Alphatia, is half-merrow on her mother's side.

** [[Forgotten Realms]] got shalarin - humanoid fish-folk supposedly gated from some other world, with big dorsal fins, eyes, gills and all, silvery skin, but with legs and no scales.

** Al-Qadim has shapeshifting (woman/tropical fish/hybrid form) sea nymphs they for some reason named Pahari.

** Not to mention like Real-life Carribean-located water-dwellers, they are very colorful.

* Mermaids are the 'townsfolk' near the Kraken and water crystal in [[Final Fantasy I]]. Apparently, they ran out of [[People of Hair Color]].

* There are merpersons in ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]''. Their bones [http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=25967.0 used to be] worth as much as ''dragon bone'', though now mermaids (as sentients) are no longer butcherable and don't have valuable bones.

* Although Aquell from [[A Witch's Tale]] is supposedly based off of [[The Little Mermaid]], she seems to behave similarly to the mermaids in [[Peter Pan]].

[[Category:Index of Fictional Creatures]]

[[Category:Mythical Motifs]]