Mer-Tropes

Illustration from The Mermaid's Gift, and Other Stories

Over the past couple of years, I have been reading every mermaid book I can get my hands on (and watching a few movies and shows). This started because I wanted to write a mermaid story and was interested to see what kind of stuff was already out there. Mermaids are more popular as a subject for novels and movies than ever before, with a boom in YA novels around the early 2010s, and now another push, with Disney's remake of The Little Mermaid spurring interest in the genre. And in reading, there are some plots that stand out as especially popular. This is not an exhaustive list, but kind of some categories.

Human/Merperson Romance: This is everywhere in stories about mermaids. It lends itself to plotlines about starcrossed lovers. Most of the time when I pick up a mermaid book, it involves a romance between a human and a merperson. This has a looong pedigree in folklore.

• Examples: Splash; Between the Sea and Sky by Jaclyn Dolamore
• Legendary examples: every fairy tale about selkie, mermaid and water spirit brides.

The Little Mermaid Retellings: A specific flavor of Human/Merperson Romance. "The Little Mermaid” is deeply tied to modern mermaid mythology; Andersen’s story is the most influential work of the core mermaid canon, eclipsing stories that came before it. This is The Mermaid Story. Typical points: a merperson falls in love with a human they saved from drowning, and makes a Faustian bargain to become human, possibly losing their voice. This can have a tragic Andersen-esque ending where their love is never returned, or a happy Disney conclusion. Disney character references are common.

• Examples: Mermaid by Carolyn Turgeon, a fairly faithful retelling that delves into character backgrounds and motivations. There are also more loosely sketched reimaginings; for instance, The Twice-Drowned Prince by L. M. Morrison flips the roles by having the prince become a merman to seek his rescuer, and Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen takes inspiration from Andersen but tells an original story woven with West African mythology. Sea Witch by Sarah Henning functions as both a POV switch to the rival bride and a backstory for the Sea Witch. Several books, like To Kill a Kingdom, Kiss of the Selkie, and From the Mouths of Sirens, turn the mermaid’s dilemma of whether to kill the prince into a whole plot. And then there are sequel-to-the-fairytale stories like The Mer Chronicles by Tobie Easton and Disney's Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea.
• Legendary examples: The Little Mermaid is really a literary short story for children, but at this point it's been retold enough that I think we can class it as a folktale of sorts.

OMG, I'm a Mermaid!: The main character transforms into a mermaid or discovers her previously unknown mermaid identity. This can range from books for young kids to serious adult works. It's nearly always a female protagonist - although, rarely, a boy (see The Vicious Deep by Zoraida Córdova or Disney's The Thirteenth Year). This story type usually features secret identity shenanigans with the mermaid attempting to hide her nature from humans.
There are a few subgenres:

• Type 1: Girl is transformed into a mermaid (i.e. H20: Just Add Water; Lost Voices by Sarah Porter). This is actually one of the rarer types of this trope.
• Type 2: Girl discovers she’s secretly a mermaid (i.e. The Tail of Emily Windsnap; American Mermaid). She may initially think she’s an example of Type 1, only to discover she’s Type 2 instead. She is often the offspring of a human/merperson relationship.
• Type 3: Girl is an undercover mermaid hiding her true nature (i.e. Forgive My Fins by Tera Lynn Childs; Sing Me to Sleep by Gabi Burton).
• Type 4: Girl temporarily becomes a mermaid for a few chapters or a TV episode (i.e. One Salt Sea by Seanan McGuire, Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross, or Rise of the Jumbies by Tracey Baptiste).
• Legendary examples: the goddess Atargatis, some versions of the Breton story of Dahut, the Passamaquoddy tale of Ne Hwas, and the Italian fairy tale "The Siren Wife" (Calvino, Italian Folk Tales). For a woman who becomes something like a mermaid and then has to hide her identity among humans, there's the medieval legend of Melusine.

The Captive Mermaid: This comes with imagery of the mermaid in a tank, perhaps shown off in a zoo or a circus sideshow, or studied by scientists. The main thing is that she is somehow contained on land for human scrutiny, in a place where she doesn't truly belong and where she is essentially vulnerable. However, she's often not the main character. Instead, it's a human bystander who sets out to free her and might even have originally been one of her captors. Even if it doesn't actually happen, the threat of being captured for study or display plays a role in many mermaid works.

• Examples: Fish Girl by Donna Jo Napoli, or The Shape of Water for a "merman" example. There's room for variation: in The Mermaid by Christina Henry, the mermaid is a willing performer. And in Bola Ogun's 2019 short "The Water Phoenix," a mermaid rescues herself from an aquarium, defying the trope of the human savior.
• Legendary examples: The captured mermaid is a very widespread concept, from selkie brides to 19th-century newspaper articles. Irish myth has the mermaid-like being Li Ban, who is brought up in a fisherman's net and carried on land in a tub - not exactly imprisoned, but definitely displayed for humans to observe and fight over. And from the 15th century, there's the Dutch story of the Mermaid of Edam, captured after a flood and taught to act at least somewhat human.

The Deadly Mermaid: In a number of stories, the mermaid character is a powerful antagonist whom the human protagonist must defeat through strength or wits. This is also a very old concept, one of the most ancient recognizable mermaid tropes.

• Examples: A Comb of Wishes; Into the Drowning Deep;  The Mermaid Summer.
• Legendary examples: The Sirens in the Odyssey; Breton folktale "The Groac'h of the Isle of Lok"

All of the examples so far have ancient roots (even "The Little Mermaid," although literary in origin, is firmly based in folklore and myth). So it's not surprising that they would be threaded through modern books as well. But there's one idea I very much like that I have barely seen: the story just about mermaids. This is probably for a few reasons; it’s difficult to imagine a serious underwater world and have it be relatable. Mermaids are the Other, and we are much more interested in mermaids as they relate to us. So you're most likely to find stories about merfolk who enter the human world, or humans who temporarily visit an underwater world. Humans visiting an underwater world is pretty common - and found in such stories as Sadko, or the Catalan story of The Girl-Fish - and sometimes paired with a temporary transformation into a mermaid, as in the October Daye series or L. Frank Baum's The Sea Fairies. But examples that truly focus on just mermaids are pretty rare.

• Examples: The Waterfire Saga by Jennifer Donnelly; Ascension by Kara Dalkey

A few other tropes come to mind, but these are the ones that have stood out to me the most. Have you noticed any popular trends in mermaid books? Share them in the comments.