Fun Facts About Sirens

Kind of like my nerdy knowledge of Ragnarok, I happen to know a few things about sirens.

1. Sirens are water nymphs. This makes them cousins to mermaids, although sirens and mermaids are different things.
2. Sirens are bird-human hybrids. They have no fish parts, because sirens and mermaids are different things.
   
3. A siren’s singing voice is so beautiful it can hypnotize people, especially men.
4. The most famous sirens are the ones who sit on beaches and use their voices to make sailors crash their boats into rocks. The worst thing a mermaid has ever done is try to drown Wendy in Neverland (unless you count Ursula as a mermaid, I suppose).
5. The original sirens were created by Demeter; the goddess gave them wings so they could help her search for her missing daughter, Persephone.
6. The original sirens lost their wings when they got into a singing competition with the Muses. The Muses won, and as their prize they plucked the sirens’ feathers.
7. Sirens eat people. Mermaids don’t.
8. The most accurate representation of a siren I’ve ever seen was in Disney Channel’s American Dragon Jake Long, in the episode “Siren Says.” (Yeah, I know, random, but this is how my brain works.) That show also has mermaids, and mermaids are clearly different from sirens.
9. The recent show on Freeform called Siren is about mermaids, except they are depicted as hypnotic and deadly man-eating predators. Although the show is good, it clearly suffers from the common misconception that sirens and mermaids are the same thing.

Look, I’m not saying every story has to get every detail of its chosen mythos accurate to the original subject matter. But this is a pretty basic concept, and so many stories get it wrong. Mermaids are the nice water-related mythical creatures. Sirens are the not-nice ones. There’s no reason to be afraid of Ariel.
We discuss mythos frequently on the Correlation. We’ve pointed out many fandoms that get the facts of Judeo-Christian “mythology” wrong, misrepresenting angels, demons, God, and Jesus. We have high standards for these things because we believe that Judeo-Christian mythology is actually the metaphysical reality of our world. But we should probably hold stories using other mythologies to the same standards; otherwise we’d be hypocritical.
This does not bode well for Marvel. Or other things. That’s an entire sub-section of the blog waiting to happen.