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"Why couldn't she have been the other kind of mermaid, with the fish part on top, and the lady part on the bottom?"
In any work of fiction with mermaids, there's a good chance that a male character will begin a romantic, or even a sexual, relationship with one.
There's just one problem. There is... no obvious point of entry.
That isn't to say, of course, that mermaids are completely lacking in sexual organs. Real fish, of course, have actual genitals. They just aren't compatible with those of a human, let alone easy to find or obvious to point out. A few biologists have a hard time even calling Piscine reproductive organs "genitals" because they are so very different from anything we, as mammals, would recognize. Most fish, quite simply, do not (and could not) have sex, even with each other.
Of course, most writers simply disregard the biological impossibilities. Many writers simply Hand Wave any difficulties by saying that mermaids have the ability to assume fully human form under special circumstances. Alternatively, a sufficiently bawdy work—which one is not unlikely to be if it brings up the Mermaid Problem in the first place—may simply point out that lower half aside, well... She's still got a mouth, ain't she?
This trope mainly deals with the variety where they don't gain human legs. Sometimes this problem may be lampshaded, but others no explanation is given. Compare Non Mammal Mammaries. A good amount of series and fiction writers just have the fish/human separation dip a little in the front (in a U-shape) to allow for the genetalia, or use other methods to get the same result (see H-manga below).
Then there's also the fact that just because her lower half has fins and scales doesn't mean that certain organs have to work the way a fish's does. Even so, even some fish (such as sharks) have live birth, and thus internal genitals. Strangely, this problem is always about sex. Nobody even questions if the top half could breathe underwater, despite the apparent lack of gills.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Magical Pokaan has Yuuma falling in love with a pretty boy... who turns out to be a merman.
- Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch does turn its mermaids human on land... but in the manga, once Kaito gets his memories back, guess what's the first thing he and Lucia do. Underwater. Since it's a shoujo series, it's all offscreen, of course, and the problem is never mentioned.
- The genders are reversed in Slayers
- Not always. There was actually a female fish-person in the third season, although she was about as ridiculous looking as the males, although somehow cuter.
- Many H-series suggest that the tail begins at the upper thigh, rather than at the hips
- One Piece both plays this trope straight, when Brook imagines what mermaid panties look like, until he is told that mermaids don't wear panties, and subverts it in the fact that when a merperson turns 30, their tail splits into a pair of legs and they can walk on land.
- The character Kokoro is actually a mermaid past 30, who married and had children with a human.
Art
- Of course, there is one very disturbing way
 that this can be explained.
- Classical mermaids were often depicted with two fish tails with presumably more or less human genitals in between, to get over this trope.
- In fact, the Mermaid was used as an Unusual Euphemism for a 'Whore' - Mary, Queen of Scots was referred to one by some of her subjects.
- The Starbucks Coffee logo features a mermaid of this type◊. She's essentially giving whoever's looking a free show. Apparently this was too risque (what's a flashing mermaid got to with coffee anyway?), so they zoomed in. Now it looks like a woman's face with too random fin things next to her head. This can lead to confusion to those who don't know the origin.
- Quite a few paintings simply portray a mermaid having her fish tail below the pelvis, allowing her to have a human vagina and butt.
Comedy
- Bette Midler once quipped "The question before us is where's her clitoris?"
- Demetri Martin had a mermaid in an animated sketch in his comedy special, Demetri Martin. Person., that had an even bigger problem: it was a vertical mermaid, which meant that the left side of it was a fish and the right side was a person.
Comics
- Somewhere in Aquaman volume 3, officials in a city of mermaids complain about outsiders "swimming over their eggs". If You Know What I Mean.
- In Milo Manara's City Hunter (not to be confused with City Hunters), there's a scene where Odysseus and his friends go off to catch some mermaids. He ends up with the traditional one, and his friend gets her ugly friend, with the parts mixed.
Film
- Splash used the aforementioned Hand Wave: Madison only had a tail while exposed to water.
- The Boy Who Loved Trolls had a mermaid who had a zipper on her fin, allowing her to easily turn them into legs.
Literature
- The mermaids in Jack L. Chalker's River of Dancing Gods series are 100% mammal (more half-dolphin than half-fish), and when a male character gets involved with one it's explicitly mentioned that their bits are human-compatible.
- Conversely, the mermaid-like Umiau from his Well World series are hermaphroditic, not shy about that fact, and not at all interested in sex outside their species.
- In Fred Saberhagen's Lost Swords series, mermaids don't have genitals, and therefore can't mate. The only reason they exist at all is because of a curse on a human family that causes some of their daughters to be born as mermaids. When a wizard looks for a way to cure the condition he only manages to undo it temporarily, just long enough to get one of the mermaids pregnant. When the wizard dies she's left to worry about what will happen when it's time to give birth...
- The Piers Anthony novel Mer-Cycle has this as a minor plot point (of course). The "mermaid" the main characters encounter is the product of genetic engineering. The protagonist quickly discovers that her 'scaly' fish-tail is actually a series of overlapping plates that can be lifted like a skirt (!?) to reveal her fused legs and human genitalia underneath. How did he find out? He startled her, causing her to jackknife and give him the mermaid equivalent of a Panty Shot. (Oh that Piers Anthony)
- Likewise, an earlier Piers Anthony book (Mute) included a "mermaid" who is actually a mutant woman with legs that are fused from the knees down, allowing her to squat. And yes, he is explicit about why she'd want to do that.
- In Xanth, mermaids and mermen can assume human form, but when they mate with each other, they prefer to do it underwater, in their half-fish shape. When a (human) character asks how it's done, she is told to mind her own business.
- Meanwhile, in Incarnations of Immortality, a mermaid states that "My scales are only external; I am mammalian inside." Of course, the mermaid in question was a Half Human Hybrid born from a wizard's curse that made her father see human women as fish and fish as human women. So Yeah...
- A classic Frederick Brown short horror story had a protagonist who fell in love with a mermaid. It wasn't until after he successfully petitioned Triton to turn him into a merman that she informed him merfolk spawned like fish.
- Alida Van Gores' 1989 novel Mermaid's Song takes the dolphin-based mermaid route straight into soft-core porn territory.
- Wittily averted in John Ringo's ''Emerald Sea'': "Blood Lord" Herzer Herrick tries to use the Mermaid Problem as an excuse for his lack of romantic adventures among the merfolk (Herzer eventually gets over his shyness) Later Elf-babe Bast comments on their obvious genital slits. Interestingly, it's the post-partum aspects of mermaid reproduction that form the major Mac Guffin of the story.
- For the curious, the problem was the mer are warm blooded and their babies don't have nearly enough body mass to avoid succumbing to hypothermia if they spend too much time in the water. Since the adults are about as helpless as seals on land (an explicit comparison is made to baby fur seals) mer babies have to be raised in protected nurseries if they're going to have any hope of survival. So anyone who seizes the nursery caves could hold the entire species hostage.
- The classic L. Sprague deCamp short story Nothing in the Rules features a dolphin-based mermaid who was sufficiently compatible (and sufficiently drunk) to share a "romantic interlude' with the protagonist in the back of a limousine.
- In deCamp's Reluctant King Trilogy a mermaid and a human attempt to have sex. Since the mermaid is dolphin-based, finding the opening isn't a problem. However, almost drowning is.
- The sea people in Vonda McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun have two "tails" (actually hind limbs adapted for swimming) and human-like genitalia. Sea people are aquatic humanoid mammals (and, apart from their aquatic adaptations, have a lot of anatomical similarity to humans), not hybrid creatures.
- In Francesca Lia Block's short story "Mer" from the story collection Nymph, the title character, Mer, and the protagonist, Tom, solve this problem elegantly by exploring the obvious alternative.
Live Action TV
- This scene from Scrubs
- Parodied in Red Dwarf. When the crew were in a VR machine, Cat waved to his new girlfriend, who was a mermaid. She had a fish head and human legs. When asked, "Shouldn't it be the other way around?", Cat responded, "No! That's the stupid way around."
- Craig Charles' little-known sitcom Captain Butler also parodied this. He asks the mermaid girl-of-his-dreams to have sex with him — so she lays a pile of eggs and leaves him to inseminate them. Not exactly what he had in mind...
- On How I Met Your Mother, Marshall asks Barney if he'd make out with a classic mermaid or an inverted mermaid. Barney answers, "That depends. Is she fat?" Marshall responds that since she's part fish, it's the good kind of fat.
- This brings up another thing about mermaids. Since they have breasts, that makes them sea-mammals. However, sea-mammals typically need a considerable amount of fat for health, whereas mermaids are typically portrayed as being very slim. Older depictions, such as rennaisance paintings are a bit more realistic as the models were typically somewhat full-figured.
- Ricky Gervais parodies the hell out of this trope in animals.
- The Night Gallery episode "Lindemann's Catch" explores this with tragic results.
Music
- [1] The infamous "Poxy Boggards" sing about this in the rather explicit song, "Nelly the Mermaid"
- "...Her hips were a swayin', she was a work of art, the sad irony, her legs wouldn't part!"
- It gets dirtier... "...They asked us to follow, so we turned and headed south, they had no lower half... but they still had a mouth!"
- Shel Silverstein's song "The Mermaid," recently covered by Great Big Sea, is about this problem.
- T-Pain claims to have done it with a mermaid somehow in The Lonely Island's "I'm on a Boat".
Real Life
- Nadya Vessey won't have to worry about the Mermaid Problem, as she's just wearing a prosthetic mermaid's tail (which tvnz doesn't want you to see).
Tabletop Games
- In the old World Of Darkness, Changeling: the Dreaming's mermaids reproduced by kissing, and were understandably shy about doing so. However, they still had sex, and frequently, since no pregnancy would result.
- It's worth noting that they grow legs on land.
- Castles & Crusades resolves the problem by giving mermaids mostly human legs and butts, except, with scales and fishy-fins starting on the upper thighs.
Video Games
- In Harvest Moon DS, there's a cutesy mermaid named Leia (Retasu in the original, which was probably changed because, yes, she's an Expy of that Retasu) whom you can marry. She never gains human legs, and manages to get pregnant despite living in your duck pond and being unable to leave the water for extended periods of time. Also, the pregnancy resembles that of a human, even though she's part fish. The child is normal enough, but still, It's best not to think about any of this for too long.
- At least the "Best Friend" pregnancy makes sense. The Harvest King impregnates one of you by magic, because he can do that sort of stuff.
- In Kingdom Hearts, Sora turns into half dolphin, which actually averts this, since cetaceans have mammal genitalia. So any porn fanfics involving Sora as a merdolphin and a human are actually correct. Hope you can sleep at night knowing that.
- Sidesteped in Yggdra Union. The mermaid-esc Undine race are a One Gender Race that reproduce via some kind of reincarnation fueled via a macguffin. Needldess to say when this gets stolen, all hell breaks loose.
Web Serial Novel
Webcomics
- And this strip from "Penny Arcade".
- Here's one in Atland.
- Solved in Boobs Ahoy, where it turns out that their navels function as genitalia.
- Invoked in, of course, Accidental Centaurs. The heroes are turned into mermaid in order to cross the sea, and Alex says how he looks forward to weeks of kinky mermaid sex. Sam asks him if he remembers exactly how fish have sex. Cue the disappointed Alex.
Western Animation
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