Discussion Main / SirensAreMermaids

Of the examples, only one is described as "subverted," with two others being "averted." There are a dozen other examples, which I'd hardly call a "very low number."

I'll probably move some of the examples to Enthralling Siren, but the rest don't deserve to be cut.

My main point (on the cut proposal) wasn't that there were few examples — I could actually name many, many, many more — but that the trope wasn't in fact the trope it claims to be at all. (In other words, it was a question of accuracy — only problematic here because the trope claims to be correcting a point of accuracy itself.) To my mind, the so-called trope as it stands would be similar to a trope called something like "Hydras Are Western Dragons," which then proceeded to argue that in its original incarnation in the earliest Greek accounts, the hydra was a legless serpent without wings, and then list several examples of later hydras in folklore with legs and/or wings as "mistakes"/examples of the trope (of which there are very many examples, many introduced shortly after the creature entered the literature). Thus, my point is that the mermaid/bird-person confusion was introduced into the literary/folkloric tradition so early on (hundreds to thousands of years ago), that to call it a trope of error (i.e. a subtrope of Sadly Mythtaken) is absurd, because it catalogs as ERROR hundreds of years of simple VARIATION on a folkloric/mythic creature. (As we all know, this variation was always a part of mythic cycles.) If we actually did track every example of a mermaid siren, we'd have too many, not too few. Would it invalidate the trope if I troubled to locate a genuine classical example of a mermaid-siren?

Sorry: by "this variation" there towards the end, I meant "this kind of variation," not this particular variation.

Finally, by citing the relatively few number of examples, I was more suggesting that the loss of this trope wouldn't be a massive blow to the project, and it seems to largely have been the pet project of one intrepid troper on a mission.

Perhaps the trope needs a new and different description, but I think there's a legitimate trope here and it's better to sort out these sorts of problems on Trope Repair Shop than simply going to the Cut List.