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Trending supernatural beings come in waves. Twilight and True Blood resurrected vampires. The Walking Dead brought zombies back from the dead. Witches cast their spell. Now, it’s the mermaids’ turn.
It was really a year ago that mermaids took up residence in pop culture, with Guillermo del Toro’s fish-fornicating film The Shape of Water winning the Best Picture Academy Award and, later in 2018, the publication of Melissa Broder’s even more risqué novel on the same topic, The Pisces. Aquaman made a splash at the box office, and Netflix’s Australian soap Tidelands, which stars Elsa Pataky (Chris Hemsworth’s real-life better half) and focuses on the land-dwelling, outcast offspring of mermaids, dropped over the holiday break.
The Shape of Water, The Pisces and Aquaman are preoccupied with monogamous, heterosexual (insofar as human-merperson relations can be considered in such rigid terms) pairings, while Tidelands has frequent and varying depictions of gratuitous—yet still overwhelmingly straight—sex because mermaids are super sexy, OK?
But there’s another, unassuming piece of pop culture about mermaids’ sexuality that may have flown under your radar: Siren. With the second season premiering on Freeform on Thursday, Jan. 24, the series follows mermaid Ryn (Eline Powell) as she inserts herself into the lives of human couple Maddie (Fola Evans-Akingbola) and Ben (Alex Roe), plus the rest of their fishing town’s inhabitants’ lives.
Ryn has an undeniable sexual magnetism, which is evident not only in her folkloric siren song but in her general lack of inhibitions and fascination with humans. Ryn comes between Maddie and Ben—who are never explicitly stated as straight but are initially coded that way—both physically and metaphorically. Instead of being portrayed as a sex-crazed home-wrecker—as characters who are not straight, white or even human so often are—Ryn is written and acted with sensitivity and curiosity.
“Mermaids are represented as much more predatory in other pop culture, so I wanted to really play on the more vulnerable side of the character,” Powell tells Playboy. “[Ryn’s] intrinsic curiosity kind of overtakes that initial feeling of hatred or adversity and actually makes her love people and get closer to people.”
In a season one episode, Ryn picks up on the way Ben and Maddie greet and part ways with each other, by saying “I love you” and kissing one another. Ryn’s utter ignorance to human hang-ups and social conventions about who can express affection to whom, sees her doing the same to both Ben and Maddie. She also sleeps between them in bed and touches areas of Maddie’s body that are coded as sensual, such as her hips, chest and neck, in appreciation of her beauty and their close relationship.
“I would describe [Ryn] as pansexual because she sees beyond gender and really, truly at the person,” Powell says. “That part of it, loving regardless of gender, is a fantastic quality.”
“Even though we’re talking about a pansexual mermaid … the general theme is exploring what is love, what [are] relationships, what is yourself and what is your attraction to others.”
Maddie and Ben are receptive to Ryn’s affections, too, in a refreshing, nonjudgmental way—perhaps an allegory for their own sexual fluidity. Alex Roe agrees, saying in a recent interview, “The way that the mermaids in society work is a slightly more advanced society. It’s a society that doesn’t really see gender differences and feels as though relationships shouldn’t really see sex as a problem.”
Powell adds that the matriarchy of mermaids perhaps better lends itself to exploring “the realm of attraction and love, and dare I say it: Sex is something that gets explored through Ryn specifically, and I love that about our show. And that’s where gender is irrelevant. It is completely about the person.”
Siren is a show that airs on a network formerly known as ABC Family, so there are no explicit sex scenes in the vein of Tidelands. For that reason, Ryn’s pansexuality is “actually a beautiful thing that can be addressed without having to worry about awkward [sex] scenes,” Powell says. Similarly, though Siren’s second season begins with each of the three protagonists having broken away from their symbolic throuple, it would not be out of the realm of possibility if Ryn became sexual with Maddie and Ben at some stage, whether depicted on screen or not. It’s also worth noting that Ryn and Maddie have far more sexual chemistry than Ryn and Ben. Or Maddie and Ben, for that matter.
“I’m not very adventurous, so I’ve never been at the center of a love triangle before, but each to their own!” Fola Evans-Akingbola said in a season two press clip. “Ryn is such a force of nature that most people would want to love her.”
Maria Lewis, cultural commentator and author of the mermaid novel It Came From the Deep, doesn’t see the aquatic creatures as innately sexually fluid, though, as exemplified by the straight couples in The Shape of Water, Aquaman, etc. “I think it’s more likely that the mermaid legend has been adjusted and adapted to fit the beliefs of our time, which is why we’re starting to see more sexual diversity in those portrayals,” she tells Playboy.
In this way, the arrival on land of Siren’s mermaids and their thirst-quenching array of sexualities is emblematic of our emerging understanding and acceptance of people on the gender and sexuality spectrum. “We are living in a world that is opening up to what different identities are out there, which stories we should now hear,” Powell says. “I’m not saying that a mermaid is the story [laughs], but the bigger message is loving beyond very narrow terms of gender.”
The actress adds, “Even though we’re talking about a pansexual mermaid … the general theme [of Siren] is exploring what is love, what [are] relationships, what is yourself and what is your attraction to others.”