While volume 1 already proved that Naru wasn’t the only merperson to have made a contract with the sorcerer Mellow to have human legs, I must say that I wasn’t expecting there to be so many undersea characters making their way onto land!
In addition to Naru and Ryou we now have newcomer Loa, seen on the cover for volume 2, who seems to have his own reason to wish for legs, but right now he’s here to keep an eye on Naru to try to prevent Nami for falling for Naru (on Mellow’s orders). This is since again, if Naru doesn’t convince Nami to fall for him within a year he will turn into sea foam, reminiscent of the Hans Christen Anderson telling of The Little Mermaid.
Loa isn’t even the last of the new merpeople to join the cast and having so many merpeople turn into humans at once made me start questioning the underlying mechanics of how exactly this magic works. Initially, while reading the first volume, I took Mellow at his word that he needed to extract a price from Naru in order to make him human and that taking some of his looks could be a two for one deal for Naru. Taking Naru’s looks could be both a symbol of taking Naru’s vanity (i.e, making him human by making him be humble and without any of the privileges of his underseas life) and a way to give him an actual shot at hooking up with Nami (Nami would be even more suspicious of an adult Naru with the exact same circumstances, and she’s already still pretty suspicious of teenaged Naru!).
But as of volume 2, I’m not so sure about this interpretation. Mellow is masquerading as Naru in the undersea palace but I can’t tell if Mellow needed to “use” what he took from him to pull this off or if Mellow is simply taking advantage of his absence and if I’m overthinking this entire concept of prices and conditions (especially since Naru returns to normal in salt water and would certainly challenge Mellow as soon as he saw this imposter).
For me this all matters since, now that I’m having doubts about how this magical trade seems to have worked, I’m also having doubts about the consequences of Naru failing to make Nami fall in love with him. Mellow said that Naru would turn into seafoam but by the end of volume 2 we have another character who is also fated to turn into seafoam if they don’t get Naru to fall for them! I can’t imagine Mermaid Boys ending with an one true threesome, which would technically fulfill Mellow’s condition, but I also can’t imagine this story killing off one or more of its current cast members given its current tone.
Overall this is still a pretty light-hearted story — Yomi Sarachi is clearly more interested in having Naru and Nami fall for each other more than anything else — but without these conditions, there are no stakes! Sure Mellow could have been very serious and the merpeople really will turn into seafoam if they don’t accomplish their goals, but what that means to me as a reader is “so the characters will have a big showdown with Mellow at the end of the story, how typical.” I can’t believe that I, a huge fantasy fan, am saying this, but I think Sarachi might need to tone down the fantastical elements in order to focus on the romance since that’s where the real heart and draw of the story lies!
I’m still certainly prepared to give volume 3 of Mermaid Boys a shot but, since this series already didn’t have an amazingly strong start, my hopes for the story have decreased a bit more. Now I’m simply hoping for a solid romance with a satisfying resolution (since it is an age-gap romance and frequent readers know how leery I am of those) and hoping that the fantastical elements stay to the side of the story. A story that literally contains the name of a fantasy creature in its title, oh dear.