Giant Oarfish, Pig Butt Worms, and Other Freaky Creatures From the Deep

Every mermaid should know about these deep-sea creatures.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/strange-deep-sea-creatures/

16th century mermaid

From an article on sea monsters from Wired.

This woodcut from 1562 shows that mermaids were already associated with a comb or brush and mirror. They either lured sailors to their doom or foretold it. They are probably depicted as oversize here in order to show the details. Notice the snake-like fishtails. No knees here.

There is a sea chanty (actually a sea ballad) about the crew of a ship preparing for death after sighting a mermaid. The Hard Tackers perform a version of it here.

Mermaid Controversy Makes Splash At FishHawk Pools

I woman has been banned from wearing her mermaid tail in a community pool.
http://bloomingdale.patch.com/groups/around-town/p/mermaid-controversy-makes-splash-at-fishhawk-pools?icid=maing-grid7|htmlws-main-bb|dl2|sec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D346238

Review - The Mermaid's Knight

This book begins in the modern-day world where Leah Sunderland has just been killed in a traffic accident. Fortunately for her, she has a fairy godmother. Unfortunately, the godmother is hung up on fairy tales. She offers Leah two choices - ascend to Heaven or gain a second chance through a fairy tale. Leah takes the second chance and allows her fairy godmother to choose the fairy tale.

The next thing Leah knows, she is the Little Mermaid in medieval England. This is not the Disney version, either. The original by Hans Christian Anderson had a harder edge.

Leah has a month to get a specific nobleman to love her. If she fails then she dies for good. And she has some handicaps. She cannot speak of course. Worse, her legs are weak and become painful the longer she is away from water. She is also naked but that never hurts when trying to seduce a nobleman.

Love is never easy and Leah hits numerous obstacles along the way.

This is a light romance, suitable for young adults. It does have some explicit love scenes.

There is not a lot here for mermaid-lovers. Leah constantly slips away for a nightly swim but that seldom rates more than a sentence and there are no other mermaids in the book. Still, the ebook is cheap and it is an enjoyable read.

The Physiology of Mermaids

What should a mermaid look like? The image I grew up with was human from the waist up with a flexible fishtail covered in green scales from the waist down. I mainly saw this in comic books such as Superman's college girlfriend Lora Lemaris. Disney's Little Mermaid also used this model.

There are a lot of questions here. I'm not sure when green scales became the standard. Fish come in all colors but silver seems to be most common. I suspect that a comic book colorist decided that green looked good and used it. That happened with the Hulk - he stared out gray but marvel's cheap printing process had problems with that color so he was switched to green in the second issue.

The underlying structure of the tail is a question. It is usually shown with a horizontal fluke. That implies that under the scales the mermaid is closer to a dolphin or seal than a fish. It also has a bearing on how the mermaid swims. A horizontal fluke means an up and down motion. A vertical fluke means a back and forth one.

Live action mermaids have to make allowances for the human legs inside the tail. This can be minimized by extending the length of the tail. Splash, H2O: Just Add Water, and Pirates of the Caribbean 4 all did this.

In contrast, many modern paintings of mermaids show the tail bending where the knees would be. Some modern paintings also show well-developed buttocks which only make sense if there are fused legs inside the tail.

Most fish have additional fins. Should mermaids? Should their upper half be totally human or should they have some fish characteristics like fins on the spine or arms? How is this reconciled with a horizontal fluke?

Should their eyes look human or should they be enlarged in order to see in the murky depths?

I've asked before but how do they breath? Gills are the used most often. Would a mermaid have gills in her neck or chest?

Review - Boundless Sea

Boundless Sea is the third of the four-book Sacred Breath series by Nadia Scrieva.

The Sacred Breath books deal with a race of sea-breathing humans. Unlike traditional mermaids, they have legs. The also have an extra set of lungs, increased endurance, and a resistance to cold. They have extraordinary long lives as long as they stay underwater but they age normally in the air.

This series has been growing increasingly darker and darker. The first book was fairly light. A few characters died along the way but we barely knew them. The second book was much darker with a major character being killed and sent back in pieces. Much of the book involved the capture and torture of Visola by her estranged husband. By the end of the book, the two are reconciled but Queen Aazuria has been kidnapped.

While the first two books were a continuous narrative, there is a gap of several months between those and the third book. In the interim, the undersea kingdom of Adlivun has revealed itself to the outside world.

Most of the book deals with the fallout of this revelation and the abduction and likely death of Aazuria.

As with the other books, the characters are well-defined and there are no gaping holes in the plot. At the same time, watching the main characters falling apart because of Aazuria's disappearance is not pleasant nor are the details of Aazuria's imprisonment. This book does not take any shortcuts or easy outs.

I'm not sure how this series is marketed but it is definitely not a teen romance series.

Hopefully things will come to a happier resolution by the end of the fourth book.

H2O - Just Add Water Season 3 - story arcs

Warning, everything here is a spoiler.

The third season of H2O - Just Add Water was very different from the first two in many ways. The obvious one is that there were major changes in the cast. There were also major changes in the way the show was written.

The first season presented the girls as women with super powers who also happened to change into mermaids when wet. They used their powers regularly, often in trivial ways. In several episodes they were not even shown as mermaids. The second season split between the two. They still used their powers but they were shown as mermaids in every episode.

The third season was the opposite of the first season. Every episode had the girls as mermaids but they only used their powers occasionally.

Continuity was handled differently. In the first season there was a lot of background continuity. This involved things that were easily picked up by the audience like Zane seeing a mermaid tail. Except for the season finale, major plots were not carried over from one episode to the next. The second season had some story arcs that spanned multiple episodes but there were still many stand-alone episodes.

By the third season, continued story arcs were the rule rather than the exception. The season almost feels like chapters in a novel where the first season was a series of stories about a set of characters. The episodes are also much more serious. There is only one out and out comedy episode involving a floating bubble of water with a fish in it. Strangely this was shown out of sequence and continuity is so tight that this is painfully obvious.

There were two major story arcs. The first was about a tendril of water that formed in the moon pool during the full moon. It is featured in all five full moon episodes and is part of the A or B plot in most other episodes.

The second story arc is the romance between the new mermaid Bella and Will, a free diver (someone who competes to see how deep he can dive). It takes the entire season before they actually get together and the romance is handled very realistically. Bella was interested in Will from the beginning but it took him a while to reciprocate. After learning that she was a mermaid he became so excited with that side of her that she broke off the relationship for a while. There was also some question about which mermaid Will was interested in after Rikki saved his life. This was a great contrast to Emma's "I hate you, let's date" relationship in the second season.

Rikki and Zane's relationship evolved and eventually fell apart. Zane reopened the juice bar, naming it after Rikki and having her managing it. It was obvious that she did all the work while he played. As always, Zane managed to screw up their relationship then tried to fix things after they broke up.

Apparently Zane really needed Rikki's management. After she left he was regularly shown actually working at his desk instead of playing. Even with that, the bar was on the verge of closing within a few weeks of Rikki's departure.

Rikki as a character grew the most during the show's run. By the third season, she was the most mature character in the cast (although she still blew off studying and was skeptical of science). All of this was consistent with her character.

After being the center of the second season, Cleo got little attention in the third season. She still fought with her sister. Her divorsed father met someone new and got married. Lewis left for America and Cleo took over his role as chief scientist for the group.

All told, the season was better-written and more realistic that the first two. There were few cringe-worthy moments or relationships played just for laughs.