The Too-Perfect Mako Mermaids

I had the privilege of watching the Mako mermaids' passionate arguments and teenagerhood mixed with magic as a child. I did not know they lived in Australia—they never mentioned it, and the places they visited were so obviously (not to me back then) childhood fantasy-inspired that I never questioned or mused about their homeland. It was just a place, the Mako island, where they had a bizarre, mercurial volcano. As a child watching a children’s show, I did not put much thought into the production value or details.

Although “H20: Just Add Water” was and is an atrocious show—I cannot remember any interesting storylines or any logical plot points—I still know the characters well and can recall the girls’ chemistry and their beautiful mermaid tails. Until I was 12, every time I washed my dishes, I too worried about flapping on the floor with a tail that I did not have. I imagined the powers I would get after I myself dipped into the Mako pool of magic. I wanted all their abilities, to freeze and burn and move and control and jellify (the horrid result of the show’s later seasons) water, but in my mind, I would remain a gracious friend, albeit too powerful for her own good. Their actions and behavior, obviously and drastically affected by their powers, no doubt would have been the same as mine, if I had a chance to participate in that world.

And boy, was that world colorful. School was not daunting, there was no bullying, and the friendships between the girls were strong, unmarred by competition or jealousy or outside forces, such as paranoid grandmothers, jealous mothers, or lacking social skills on the girls’ part. After school, miraculously unaffected by the sun, they would bike to a café that could only exist on a set—a tiki hut with piss colored floors and not a speck of dirt, tables littered with foamy, pearly milkshakes, gorgeous, crimson virgin cherries on their glass brims. The perfect place for a teenage girl to worship from afar. And yet I did not.

I do not think the showrunners thought this through, but the world was a bit too much. It was too beautiful, too colorful—the water was toxic turquoise and the tails were salamander-skin-orange. And the girls themselves were too beautiful, their lashes too long and dark, their skin too unblemished, too unfreckled, too white. Alienation was not the showrunners’ intent, but they did it marvelously, and when I watched the mermaids splash around and cut through the water with their curvy tails, I did not want to join them. I was in a cramped bedroom, with lime green and pale-yellow wallpaper peeling around me and books stuffed inside boxes, all stacked on top of each other. It was the summer, and I had gone home at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. I wanted something separate from myself, something I could observe, involved but undesiring, and I had the Mako mermaids, who could never be found and were ambitious in a way that’s uncommon in the real world. My ambition was to survive the summer without growing too attached to the fiction I was absorbing it, and I was doing just fine.

The unblemished perfection of a white, heterosexual, seemingly non-religious existence—and I could go on—was the core drive of the Mako mermaids. If they had a motive, as characters often do, it was to maintain that curtain of suburban bliss speckled with magic. If none of your ambitions or feelings match the pattern of the curtain, if none of the Mako girls have the deep, thorny thoughts, and devious intentions you harbor, then you can stay in front of that curtain for the duration of the episode, untouching, unwilling. The curtain bears no resemblance to your uniquely unmagical childhood, which consists of the following non-mermaid related transformations: sexuality clusterfuck, gender weirdness, onset of mental illness, trauma, fear, fearing trauma. Instead, it has all the components necessary to slightly shake, but never disturb or be truly relatable to a watching child.

And yet, I do not regret consuming that show for days on end. What I feel when I look at the stills from the show—and even when I see the disgusting spin-off on Netflix—is immense gratitude that I never let myself get too absorbed. I consumed and thought and twisted and worried, but came out fine. I did not want to be the girls, but I got to know them nonetheless, and their mistakes—too dependent on their magical powers and thus unrelatable to me—became my knowledge. They provided a refuge and succeeded in making it just otherworldly enough for me to want to leave eventually. And if I still occasionally want a tail, well, it’s not because it’s better than no tail. It’s because it’s pretty.

—Max V. Filipchenko-Yeomans '20 is a joint English and Visual and Environmental Studies concentrator in Mather House.