Mermaid overload

Have you seen what’s on primetime free TV lately?  I‘m talking to someone like me who have no cable subscription and is thus condemned to watch crappy programs aired by crappy stations.

Mermaids, mermaids (sirena in Tagalog), I have had enough of mermaids. How many mermaids have been shown and re-booted and re-shown again and again on free TV?

Many claim that Dyesebel is the original Filipino mermaid as drawn and conceptualized by Mars Ravelo. Maybe in comics but not in literature. Dyesebel is just a re-creation of Ariel,  the little mermaid. I have nothing against Mars Ravelo but there was once an initiative to have him named as national artists for his comic characters and for his contributions to visual arts. But personally, I think he does not deserve the honor because he did not create anything original and most of his works are just copied and recycled DC or Marvel superheroes.Imagine his name being put aside names like Amorsolo, Botong, etc.

I do not know if there’s a local equivalent of the mythical mermaid since we have no Tagalog word for it (yes, if you have no name for it that means it does not exist, at least in the head) and sirena sounds Hispanic so I suppose mermaids are brought here by the ocean crossing Spanish colonizers.

What is bothering is how free TV has two mermaids TV soap opera being aired at the same time slot by two competing channels. I know what a network war is, but this is insane!  

How many theme can there be with mermaids except that of a mermaid falling in love with a terran. 

Even if you add more antagonists, protagonists, elements stolen from varied 

classic literature (have you eve wondered where Iago got his name?), the story is the same. How many endings can there be?  

Two: 

Tragic: where the mermaid got unrequieted love and she died an old mermaid and her ghost ended up singing a lot atop an atoll or a rock island or something luring sailors to their doom.

Classic: where they lived happily ever after. The mermaid loses her fishtail for normal legs, or the man becomes a merman and loses his nromal face for a fish face. 

I suggest they follow the new trend, mash up. Instead of retelling crappy love stories, i suggest they become creative and do something interesting about mermaids.

Here are my suggestions:

Dyesebel fighting white collar crime like the PDAFScam. It would be interesting to see a mermaid wearing power dress in the courtroom lashing out legal jargons with a terran lawyer. What will make this more interesting is the setting, the court will be held in swimming pools!

Dyesebel and a ZUMA love story. This will be a good mash up. Here we have two iconic Filipino comic characters, one a badass immortal snake god and the other a hmmmm...mermaid.  The plot is very simple: Dyesebel is sunning on the shore and then she saw ZUMA shediing his reptilian skin and hanging his sheddings on mangrove branches. They had eye contact and rght there and then they fell in love.
 

There'll be a lot of twists and antagonists, but in the end they overcome, got married, had children and lived happily ever after. They became very succesful circus operators.

Why not try an evil mermaid?

Dyesebel as a minion of Janet Napoles and the three Notorious Senators. The story can begin like this: Janet Napoles invested a portion of his PDAF kickback in Dyesebel's underwater realm...and the rest is easy enough.

I'm hungry...