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Sirens Are Mermaids

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Sirens Are Mermaids (trope)
Siren's Lament by Anne Stokes

"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each."
T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

As You Know, mermaids, like all legendary/mythological creatures, can vary in their portrayal from work to work.

However, despite all the differences in mermaid portrayals, they seem to have one thing in common. For some reason, mermaids tend to be called sirens, and are given the ability to sing phenomenally well, to the point of leading unsuspecting people to their doom. In traditional definitions of mythology, the Siren is not depicted as a mermaid-like fish-woman, but as a winged bird-woman hybrid — in fact, the original Greek Sirens were portrayed as a cross between women and songbirds, and could die by drowning.

This trope is an old one; the siren as mermaid was well-established in medieval bestiaries, which illustrated the siren as a half-woman, half-fish and yet classified it as a bird in reference to the Greek depictions. In Thomas Hoccleve's early fifteenth century text, La Male Regle, line 233, speaks of mermaids singing men to their deaths, "as old books tell us." It is also notable that, in many Romance languages, sirens and mermaids are referred to by the same word, typically a derivative of the Latin sirena. In another part of the world, the Filipino sirena were described in what we now envision as the mermaid siren. It could be an example of Lost in Translation that these two words became used interchangeably, displacing parts of both.

Sub-Trope of Our Mermaids Are Different and Our Sirens Are Different. See also Siren Song.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • The Bones Coffee flavor "Salty Siren" features a mermaid in the arms of a skeletal sailor, a sunken ship (presumably the sailor's) in the background.
  • In an early Cap'n Crunch commercial, Magnolia Bulkhead disguises herself as a mermaid and uses a recording of an alluring song to sink Crunch's ship and get his cereal.
  • The mascot for the coffee shop Starbucks is a siren with two fish tails.

    Anime and Manga 
  • Bakugan: Sirenoid is quite clearly based off of a mermaid.
  • Berserk: The Merrow are an all-female race of mermaids who fight using their voices, which Isma's mother calls "singing". They once fought their Arch-Enemy, the Sea God, and managed to seal it away in an island, but the island's residents demonized them for their actions — even extending their Fantastic Racism to Isma, who is half-Merrow through her mother. When the Sea God is eventually freed, the Merrow emerge to fight it again, this time aided by Guts' group. Guts manages to kill the Sea God, and out of gratitude, the Merrow gives Guts and his group a new ship.
  • Delicious in Dungeon: Mermaids can sing songs that hypnotize those who hear it to drag them into water. Apparently they dislike others joining on their song, as Laios finds out when he tries singing along.
  • Hell Teacher Nube: Hayame is yet another mermaid with the ability to create Magic Music.
  • Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, being loosely based on "The Little Mermaid", revolves around the idea of mermaids being good singers.
  • Negima! Magister Negi Magi: Akira Okouchi's pactio name is Siren Valida, while her outfit is more clearly mermaid-themed than harpie.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The witch Oktavia von Seckendorff is an Eldritch Abomination resembling a weird cross between a mermaid and an orchestra conductor. Possibly an accidental example, however, because there are symbolic reasons for this form. Her backstory resembles The Little Mermaid, but with a musician friend in place of the prince.
  • In one of the Puyo Puyo anime shorts, Serilly the mermaid mimics a siren to bring her some friends. Her singing proves beautiful enough to start attracting people to her. Then Harpy comes to Serilly and thinks her singing voice needs work. That wouldn't be a problem, but Harpy herself is notorious for being a terrible singer.
  • Rosario + Vampire: Averted, as Mermaids and Sirens are completely different monsters. The mermaids also never sing (they instead suck the life energy of people), while the Sirens do and from what we see can see from their true form, they are birdlike, resembling angels.
  • Sailor Moon: Sailor Aluminum Seiren is named for a Siren but is clearly filled with mermaid influences, and comes from Planet Mermaid. An overall blue color scheme, a seashell charm on her choker, her attack, Galactia Tsunami, is water based. In the anime it is just her throwing juice boxes and water bottles. Her anime civilian name, Reiko Aya, even contains a pun on Mermaid.

    Asian Animation 
  • Happy Friends: The mermaid in the 10th episode of the 4th season has a beautiful singing voice that can manipulate water. Big M. attempts to use this to his advantage, having the mermaid conjure up a giant wave to flood a ship and hurt its passengers.
  • Lamput: The sirens in "The Siren's Song" play music on instruments to hypnotize people and have mermaid tails.

    Art 
  • Some old medieval artwork depicts sirens as a weird mix of the mermaid look and bird woman look, with fish tails, webbed feet and feathered wings. While with some of them, it's hard to tell if this was the intent (the "scaly fish tails" could just as easily be bird tails with stylized, scale-like feathers), there are others with little room for doubt.
  • The Fisherman and the Siren, an 1858 painting by Frederic Leighton, has a siren with a fish-tail seducing a young man.

    Comic Books 

    Fan Works 
  • Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race: In addition to a plasma staff, Splash Woman can attract robots to her.
  • Pokémon Untamed: The Legendary Sirens are elusive beings with entrancing songs designed to resemble aquatic, rather than flying, mermaid-like beings.
  • Pokémon Uranium: Syrentide, whose Pokédex entry describes sailors being enthralled by their voices and whose attacks include Sing and Perish Song, looks more like a mermaid than a birdlike siren.
  • RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse: The (chronologically) first story features some sirens who get quite stroppy when one of the alternate Mane Six mistakes them for seaponies, and insists that they are something quite different. They're right; see Western Animation for details.
  • Under the Sea (2023): Even more explicit than in the live-action film. Caesura's three days on land without her voice are actually a rite of passage to prove that she can lure in prey (read: make someone fall in love with her) without her Siren Song.

    Films — Animation 
  • In Coraline, the Other Spink sings the line "I'm known as the siren of all seven seas" while dressed as a mermaid.
  • In Doraemon: Nobita's Great Adventure into the Underworld, Doraemon and friends infiltrate the Demon World, where they encounter mermaids which entices their victims with songs, drawing them from the skies into the ocean where they'll be devoured by giant monster whales.
  • In Ice Age: Continental Drift, sirens appear as amphibious lungfish, the prehistoric equivalent of mermaids.
  • The Little Mermaid (1989): Ariel has a beautiful singing voice. Most Disney Animated Canon heroines do, but here it's actually a plot point, since the Big Bad's price for changing her into a human is her beautiful voice. However, this is taken from the original story. Used in a more direct fashion when Ursula transforms herself into a human woman and uses Ariel's voice to cast a spell on Eric, hypnotizing him.
  • Mermaid is about a rusalka, a mythological Russian creature that is basically a cross between a mermaid and a siren. It lives in the water like a mermaid, but it sings and lures men to their deaths like a siren. It also has a fully human body, like a siren.
  • My Little Pony:

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The horror film Killer Mermaid features an evil mermaid as its monster — but she also has powers of a Siren. Namely, she hypnotises men with her singing and a quote about "the silence of the Sirens" is used to describe her.
  • The Last Jedi has a really weird variant in the form of creatures called thala-sirens that live near the Jedi Temple on Ahch-To and provide Luke with green milk. Unlike mermaids or classical sirens, these critters aren't humanoid at all — but they do resemble manatees, which are often considered a major inspiration for mermaid stories.
  • The Lighthouse features a mermaid who, depending on who you ask, may or may not be a siren to the younger character.
  • The Little Mermaid (2023): While Ariel had siren-like qualities in the original film, this version of her is explicitly called a siren with a highly alluring "Siren Song" that is shown through Prince Eric as highly ensnaring to those who hear it.
  • Mermaids (2003): Venus, one of the mermaid sisters, is a Siren and able to hypnotize men though with her dancing and her eyes instead of singing. Her powers however don't work if someone knows that she's a Siren.
  • Miranda (1948) has the titular mermaid also getting a beautiful singing voice that she uses to wow everyone when she's taken on a trip to the London opera.
  • Ondine: Sirens Are Selkies, in this case. Ondine has a haunting singing voice that is said to hypnotize lobsters and fish into the nets.
  • In Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, mermaids also have beautiful singing voice and lure men to death. And one of the mermaids is named Syrena. Justified because it's a human who names her that on the fly so she's viewed as less of a creature.

    Literature 
  • In the And Then I Turned Into a Mermaid series, sirens are depicted as being a combination of their songbird and mermaid depictions, being described as mermaids with wings. However, most of them had to cut them off in order to blend in among the humans.
  • In the Anita Blake series, sirens are described as super-powerful mermaids, able to control even their own kind with the power of their voices.
  • Played with in "As a child, I Wanted to be a Mermaid", a Creepypasta posted on r/nosleep, where the protagonist is a young girl who dreams about being a beautiful mermaid, but is actually a monstrous siren.
  • Briar Girls: Miranda tells Lena she grew entranced by the song of the mermaids who lived near her home growing up, and its allure never entirely ends. She later nearly drowns after hearing it again trying to get near the mermaids singing it.
  • In The Dragon Wars Saga, the chief songstress of the merfolk clan encountered early on is named Sirin and the mermaids have command of some kind of vocal music.
  • In Dream Girl by J. Conway Jameson, the mermaid Áine seduces rapists and murderers by sneaking into their rooms at night and singing to them (basically hypnotizing them), then "accidentally" bumping into them on the street and causing them to fall in love with her and her "quirky" ways. Then she kills them and drinks their blood.
  • Full Metal Octopus: Much like fairies, merfolk are master seducers and are able to release intoxicating pheromones to accomplish this.
  • Harry Potter:
    • A tie-in book describes three subspecies of merpeople, one of which is the sirens. They live in the warmer waters of Greece and are the more beautiful kind that human art tends to depict; the other kinds are, from a human perspective, ugly. All merpeople apparently have a love of music, though.
    • There's also a quirk to their music: outside of water, merpeople's voices are loud, unpleasant screeching that humans can only understand if they've learned it as a separate language (Mermish). Underwater, it becomes the hauntingly beautiful music that humans can understand just by hearing it.
    • There's also a variant: the Scottish merfolk in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are called "selkies", which are likewise a different creature in actual mythology. The third type, Irish merrows, actually are mermaids in folkloric tradition.
  • Into the Drowning Deep: Mermaids are capable of perfectly mimicking any sound they hear, such as whale song and human speech, in order to lure prey in. Eventually, they are designated as sirens because mermaid implies they are all female. The study of mermaids is also known as sirenology.
  • Parodied in Island of the Aunts: a mermaid tried to make money by causing a ship to sink, enchanting the captain with her hypnotizing singing voice. Sadly, the times had changed and, instead of gold and treasures, the ship she caused to sink had oil on board.
  • In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, mermen and mermaids sing at the Pevensies coronation and the singing is described as haunting and enchanting.
  • In The Little Mermaid, the mermaid's older sisters like to go to the surface during dangerous storms and sing to ships that are likely to go under. The songs are supposed to comfort the sailors and assure them that the undersea world isn't so bad, but the men can't understand them.
  • In Lost Voices, the main characters are basically humans turned into mermaids, but are given magical voices like the sirens, which they use to lure humans to their deaths. These mermaids/sirens are all formerly human girls who were abused or neglected, and take vengeance on humanity for the mistreatment in their previous lives by sinking ships and drowning people.
  • In Magic By The Lake by Edgar Eagar, the children go on an adventure with a mermaid who "sings down a ship". Martha chastises her for luring men to their deaths.
  • In Mermaid Moon, mermaids use their magical voices to force sailors to jump into the sea and drown. Sanna thinks this is a horrible practice, even though her Aunt Shusha has told her that sailors rape and murder mermaids.
  • In The Mermaid Summer, the mermaid's main use for her voice is forcing people who get on her bad side to crash their boats.
  • Septimus Heap: The Syren is described as a mermaid, and she uses her song for malicious purposes.
  • Sirena: The heroine is one of the actual Greek sirens... and a mermaid. Of course, even the humans of her time have gotten a lot of the facts wrong about her and her fellow myths.
  • Siren Novels: The sirens don't have fins, but they need salt water to survive and can stay under water for long periods of time.
  • In Voyage of the Basset, the mermaids can sing with haunting beauty. In a variation on the usual presentation, they're actually friendly and sing to get their pet sea serpent to save boats from being dashed on the rocks.
  • In Watersong, sirens (descendants of the Muses who were cursed by Demeter) are a combination of the classical versions of mermaids and sirens. They have three different forms: On land, they're human. In seawater, they're half-human, half-fish. When they need to fly or (more importantly) feed on the mortal men they lure with their songs, they're bird-women. They have beautiful voices and appearances only in their first two forms; the third form is a case of One-Winged Angel.
  • Xanadu (Storyverse): All of the transformed sirens who retain the ability to speak become exceptional singers and gain the ability to create magic through their song.
  • Xanth: In The Source of Magic, the Siren is a mermaid with a voice that lures all men who hear it to her.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The pilot for the otherwise unaired Aquaman (2006) TV show introduces what probably would have been recurring enemies — sirens that are basically really ugly mermaids.
  • Charmed (1998) has a notable subversion. The fifth season featured two episodes pretty close together, one dealing with a mermaid and the other dealing with a Siren. Though in this case the Siren doesn't really match mythology, either — she still has hypnotic singing, but looks fully human and is actually a vengeful dead woman who comes back as a demon.
  • Face/Off: In a season 9 challenge the effects artists are tasked with creating a siren character, but all of the animals they are assigned to take inspiration from are either fish or aquatic invertebrates.
  • The Faerie Tale Theatre adaptation of "The Little Mermaid" has a scene where the mermaids discuss how humans can't seem to tell mermaids from sirens, though they are completely separate species.
  • Fantasy Island (2021): Here, mermaids also draw mortals to them like sirens, which Isla does with Ruby. It's also noted (by Elena, a Latina) that in Spanish the word for mermaid is "sirena", thus the whole language does this.
  • H₂O: Just Add Water: Cleo had a reaction to the full moon's reflection and gained a singing voice that is able to hypnotize all the boys in town, much to her dad’s displeasure. Lewis explains that "she's a Siren, just like the mermaids in mythology whose singing lured sailors to their deaths". Funnily enough, that's the only episode of the show that doesn't feature the girls transforming into their mermaid forms.
  • Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure: Sirena once heard a North Atlantic mermaid's siren song on an online video and became a siren herself. In this case, she becomes violent and possessive of David, attempting to lure him to the ocean so they can be together forever (which will erase his memories and eventually kill him), took exception to her friends trying to stop her, and gained poofy hair. Mimmi and Ondina have to drown out her siren song with their own magic singing voices, and it's mentioned that siren songs are (rightfully) forbidden for South Australian mermaids.
  • Once Upon a Time (2011): Averted. The mermaids are separate creatures from sirens. A siren shows up in the episode ''What Happened to Frederick'', appearing as a beautiful shapeshifting lady in a lake (without a tail). Mermaids (including Ariel) show up in Neverland. However, mermaids do have alluring singing voices, and at least one is encouraged by her father to lure ships onto rocks.
  • Siren (2018): A subset of the mermaids have a captivating song, which can have extreme or even deadly effects on humans.
  • Averted in Supernatural, where sirens are gray, hairless monstrous humanoids in their true forms (and use a Glamour to appear in whatever disguise their victim desires most). Mermaids aren't seen or mentioned in the series, apart from one zanna (Not-So-Imaginary Friend) with the form of a mermaid.
  • Wednesday: On land, sirens are basically humans with a Compelling Voice. In water, they turn into the traditional half-human half-fish mermaids/mermen.

    Mythology 
  • In Irish folklore, merrow were beautiful mermaids who fell in love with mortal men and bewitched them into following them beneath the sea... where they used their magic to keep their husbands alive under the sea so they could live Happily Ever After. According to some stories, they could take on human form and live on land for a while, but eventually they would want to return to the sea, and so would ultimately move the family back home.
  • The Sirena of the Philippines appear to be directly inspired by this trope, being mermaid-like creatures who sing lovely songs to lure people to their watery graves. They have a few cousins, however, including the Siyokoy (a male variant that looks more like a resident of Innsmouth than a merman) and the Mambubuno (a two-tailed merperson which comes in male and female variants, lives in caves and prefers to put its prey in a trance as its "spouse" over killing them).
  • Averted in Slavic folklore — while mermaids are present, the relevant creature is Sirin — one of the birds of Paradise, which possesses bird body, but woman's face and breasts, as well as enthralling song.

    Pinball 
  • Fathom (1980): The mermaids don't do any singing, but they definitely take sadistic glee in leading divers to their watery doom.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Cardfight!! Vanguard has the clan Bermuda Triangle — a clan of Mermaid Idol Singers. Their similar counterpart are the Battle Sirens from the Aqua Force clan, which are mermaids and uses their voices for various effects, from attacking to boosting their soldiers.
  • In Dungeons & Dragons, sirens are aquatic creatures with an enchanting song, a humanoid torso and the tail of a shark or serpentine fish. 1st Edition and 2nd Edition averted this trope, depicting "sirines" as completely human-looking and distinct from merfolk, which had no special song-related powers. 3rd Edition split the difference, offering merfolk that still lacked innate song-based powers, but had Bard as their favored class.
  • Magic: The Gathering goes back and forth with this trope. On the one hand, there's the merfolk card Seasinger, which is modeled after a mermaid and allows its player to take control of another player's card, representing the siren's enthralling song. On the other, they have a separate "siren" creature type, which is represented by winged humanoids instead.
  • Averted in Pathfinder, which goes back to mythology and makes its sirens woman-headed birds and well-distinct from the setting's mermaids.
  • In Rifts, the Psiren is a creation of the Lord of the Deep, and can have the lower half or either a fish or a sea lion.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! has Deep Sea Diva, a mermaid with a heavy musical motif that can summon other monsters to it from the deck like a siren.

    Theater 

Examples by creator:

  • William Shakespeare:
    • The Comedy of Errors alludes to this trope with the line "I'll stop mine ears against the mermaid's song."
    • In Henry VI Part 3, Gloucester claims that "I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall."
    • In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon's story of the magic flower for the love potion includes a mermaid's beautiful singing, though she calms the sea rather than allures anyone to death.

Examples by work title:

  • In EPIC: The Musical, an adaptation of The Odyssey, the sirens are implied to be mermaids, as they are mentioned as having tails. That doesn't mean that they can breathe underwater, though, as they all drown after Odysseus cuts off their tails.

    Video Games 
  • Bendy and the Ink Machine: The posters for the In-Universe Siren Serenade cartoon show Alice Angel as a mermaid.
  • In Bloons Tower Defense 6, the bottom path upgrades for Mermonkeys (monkeys with mermaid traits) allow them to use songs to confuse bloons like a siren.
  • Defense of the Ancients includes a Siren hero whose ultimate spell is to sing the opposition to sleep and whose character model is a mermaid.
  • Hades II: Scylla and her Sirens are a band of merfolk whose crooning tunes lead Melinoë Down the Drain through Oceanus, although Scylla herself has a somewhat different design to the more typical mermaids that accompany her, which is likely a nod to her origins as an entirely distinct sea monster.
  • Heroes of Might and Magic: Mermaids appear as neutral creatures in Heroes of Might and Magic IV, VI, and VII, and have a chance to temporarily hypnotize creatures they attack. The ability is even named Siren Song in the sixth game. A part of the Chaos campaign in IV has a sailor warn you about mermaids, and how they lured the rest of his crew to their deaths.
  • Legend of Mana: Averted but acknowledged. Mermaids and Sirens are different species, mermaids being fish-tailed humanoids who can teleport via bubbles and sirens being beautiful harpy-like creatures that look like a cross between birds of paradise and women. The two species are friendly with each other, however, and are implied to be distantly related in some way. Both also seem to share a passion for singing around the ocean.
  • The Legend of Zelda: In a little bit of Fridge Brilliance, the Zora (read: merfolk-like fish people) evolve over time into the Rito (bird folk). Medli, one of the main Rito in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, even plays a harp, though luckily not to coerce anyone to their doom.
  • Lone Siren: The titular Siren is actually a mermaid.
  • Luminous Arc 3: Elulu's job class is Siren, but also bears a lot of traits similar to mermaids.
  • Mabinogi: The Sirens fit this to a tee, and they're bad guys.
  • Mega Man 9: Referenced with Splash Woman, who's basically a robot mermaid and has an attack involving singing to summon fish to attack Mega Man.
  • Panel de Pon: Referenced by Neris, a mermaid-like water fairy whose name is "siren" backwards and who is said to like singing.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon: Primarina, Popplio's final evolution, is referred to as a sea lion and a mermaid, but also has the distinctive singing feature of sirens. It is also part Fairy-type.
  • Sea of Thieves: Sirens are essentially the "evil" versions of Mermaids; instead of helping you get back onto your ship and storing underwater loot for you, they attack you while you're in the water and trying to raid their shrines.
  • Shantae and the Seven Sirens: They're called "sirens" in the story, and almost all of them are mermaid-like creatures, with the majority of them having the upper body of a cute girl or beautiful woman attached to a lower body based on some form of aquatic life. The seeming exception to this is the Angler Fish Siren, who just looks like an anthropomorphized anglerfish.
  • Shin Megami Tensei: Mermaid is described as luring sailors to their doom with her voice in her demon profile and/or NPC dialogue across several games. In V, the animation for her Secret Art Stormcaller Song shows her singing.
  • In Soda Dungeon, the Water Temple mermaids are surrounded by hearts. Sirens appear as undead mermaids. In the Lair of Despair, the Harp mermaid sits on a rock and plays the harp like a Siren.
  • Soul Sacrifice Delta: Downplayed with the Siren, an Archfiend with fish scales and musical attacks, but has a pair of legs instead of a tail.
  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: Sirens (and their stronger kin, the Lamias and Ekhidnas) appear this way... at least at a distance. In fact, their beautiful female upper bodies are a means of luring prey (read, unwary sailors) along with their voices. The deception drops when they attack, revealing the true, monstrous form beneath. They can both swim and fly but are rendered practically defenseless if knocked onto solid ground.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Naga sirens are a caster class of naga that specialize in hypnotism, specifically through their alluring voices. They play with this, since they have the general body shape of a mermaid and are clearly trying to evoke that image, but are actually aquatic Snake People. The fins on their head do make them more fishlike however, unlike the more powerful Naga Sea Witches that are Gorgeous Gorgons with a head of snake hair.
    • Battle for Azeroth somewhat confusingly introduced actual sirens as a separate creature, which lure men to their death with their singing. Here they have birdlike wings for arms but a fish tail, combining the two popular depictions into one Composite Character.

    Webcomics 
  • In Hark! A Vagrant, a mermaid aims to drown a sailor with her frilly singin'. Mermaids matching this trope make a few other appearances, including one longer story arc (where no mermaid singing is heard, but is referred to, along with their tendency to drown people).
  • In Myth, Amphitrite is a subvertion. Amphitrite is pretty much a mermaid (and in side art, she's drawed with a fish tail, to boot) but she's actually deaf tone and a horrible singer. Even the Muses' instructor, Apollo, couldn't help her and he had to made up the whole "you sing better underwater" to avoid her singing disturb land and Olympus. But now, the underwater realm have to suffer her.
  • The Noordegraaf Files: Inverted, as sirens are stated to be bird people, and the whole "why we refer to mermaids as sirens" thing explained above is then stated. The closest thing to mermaids are Nereids, which are half-squid, not half-fish.
  • In Siren's Lament, they prefer "siren" over "mermaid", seemingly as a more politically correct term.
  • Unsounded: The Red Cost: Waterwomen/llemulin love to drown people, sit about and pose alluringly when they're trying to lure people into the water, and one sings Tree's song back at him while staring at him from a rock in the bay.

    Web Videos 
  • Cryptobiology: Rather than being Bird People or something that has convergently evolved to resemble such, sirens are instead sarcopterygian fish that have evolved to target hominid prey through the use of aggressive mimicry, and as such resemble mermaids through convergent evolution. While they still resemble mermaids from a first glance, they do sport a defined pair of pelvic fins which are not normally associated with traditional mermaids (which is made much more apparent in their updated artwork).
  • In the webseries Mermaid Miracles, the sirens are mermaids bent on the destruction of the human race.

    Western Animation 
  • American Dragon: Jake Long: Averted, as both mermaids and sirens are present and are quite different from one another.
  • Arthur: Averted in the episode where D.W. retells The Odyssey, with herself as Odysseus. The sirens are just random girls dancing to "Crazy Bus", a song that D.W. became obsessed with in an earlier episode.
  • Disenchantment: Played with — the mermaids aren't called sirens, but play the siren legend totally straight, to the point where The Odyssey's "wax or tied up" strategy is used to combat them. Later subverted when it turns out that they're actually the walruses from a neighbouring island that are the sirens.
  • DuckTales (1987): Averted in "Home Sweet Homer". The Sirens turn out to be disembodied heads mounted on tentacles, which are atop the head of a much larger, uglier monster.
  • Elena of Avalor: The Sirenas, a race of mermaids who charm sailors and sink ships with their song.
  • Family Guy: In one episode, Peter remembers how he lured sailors to their death with his siren song... dressed as a mermaid.
  • Jason and the Heroes of Mount Olympus: The sirens are not only depicted as mermaids, but also live on land and move around via Ghostly Glide.
  • The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack: Coincidence or not, the mermaid queen reincarnates into a flying version called a "skymaid", becoming more like a siren. This could also have been a reference to the original ending of "The Little Mermaid".
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: "Rescue At Midnight Castle" features the Seaponies, the first characters to get a song. It's very reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley Number, and they would always appear singing a chord of "shoo be doo" in the remainder of the episodes.
  • Popeye: One of the King Features cartoons has Popeye mesmerized by a siren who's basically a wily mermaid with a harp; it takes Olive to snap him out of it.
  • The Simpsons: In "Tales from the Public Domain", when Homer retells the story of The Odyssey, Homer (as Odysseus) and his army are led to the Island of Sirens who sing a parody of "Copacabana". However, they are turned away when Sirens turn out to be Patty and Selma.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: The sirens from "Welcome to the Bikini Bottom Triangle" look exactly like mermaids, but for some reason, they are about the same size as any typical Bikini Bottom resident.
  • ThunderCats (1985): A mermaid's song entrances Tigra, the obvious purpose of this being to lure him to her and get him to hold still so she can feed on him; the shot of her vampiric fangs right before the break to a commercial is one of the most chilling in the series.

    Real Life 
  • This trope is so widespread that many languages simply do not have distinct words for sirens and mermaids — in Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Latin, Romanian and Portuguese, the word for mermaid is respectively sirena, sirène, sirena, syrena, syreni, sirenă and sereia.
    • Averted in Finnish, where seireeni is explicitly a woman-waterfowl hybrid (usually a swan). A woman-eagle hybrid is harpyia. A mermaid is merenneito, maiden-of-sea. Likewise in Russian "Сирин" (sirin) is a woman-bird hybrid which has inherited the etymological and the musical aspect.
    • German even has three different words for mermaids — "nixe" (probably etymologically a "water spirit"), "sirene" and "meerjungfrau" ("ocean virgin"). According to The Other Wiki, the first one would be approximately the sirennote  (nobody except a poet when hearing "sirene" will think other than "police siren", thus that word is obsolete) but the two are used as effective synonyms.
  • It's popularly held that manatees (Order Sirenia) are often mistaken for mermaids. Although manatees don't look very much like humans, they do have their nipples located under their flippers, which might cause them to be mistaken for a woman.
  • The salamander genus Siren was also named in reference to this trope—it's the only animal that has human-like arms and a fish-like tail.
  • December Diamonds, a company that makes mermaid ornaments, has one mermaid ornament whose female half dresses like a cop. They call her "Siren".
  • There is a congenital deformity called Sirenomelia, in which the legs are fused together like a mermaid's, and parts of the urinary, lower digestive, and reproductive systems fail to develop properly. Most individuals with this condition die before or shortly after birth; to date only a handful of survivors are known.
  • The Starbucks coffee house chain uses a half-woman, half-fish creature for their logo and mascot, which they say is a siren rather than a mermaid due to the tails. The image is likely based upon the mythological figure of Melusine, who was a woman with two snake or fish tails. It's easier to see in their original logo, which is in full view and much less stylized.

 
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In "Song of the Sirens", Ulysses and his companions have to escape from a large group of sirens preying on them. Their queen, Aglaope, has her sights set on Ulysses as he tries to resist her songs.

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Main / OurSirensAreDifferent

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