MERFOLK
Sometimes a person who reeks of fish is just a person who reeks of fish.
Mermaid -- Merman -- Sea Witch
Mermaids appear in the folklore of the British isles, although similar creatures can be found in legends all over the world. They had the upper bodies of women and the lower bodies of fish (or, in earlier accounts, dolphins). Ideas of how mermaids act are split down the middle - they're sometime seen as innocent (as in FF1), sometimes as femme fatales that lure sailors to their deaths (an idea that FF3's mermaids build upon). The former appears to have been fed by legends of more benevolent water spirits and Hans Christian Anderson's 1836 children's story The Little Mermaid, while the latter is influenced by the sirens of Greek mythology - around the middle ages, mermaids and sirens were confused to the point of becoming synonymous.
IMAGE: Image of a mermaid from Heraldic Dictionary
The male counterpart to the mermaid, and is sometimes depicted in a similar way: human from the waist up, fish from the waist down. However, this isn't always the case - more often than mermaids, mermen are seen as being outright monsterous, with finned, lizardlike bodies (as in FF3). They are also more often associated with evil - a German legend tells of a merman who traps the souls of drowned sailors in pots.
IMAGE: Image of a merman from Heraldic Dictionary
The sea witch appears in Hans Christian Anderson's 1836 children's story The Little Mermaid. The titular mermaid asks her for the ability to walk on land with legs, but also has to cut out her tongue. Later on, when the mermaid is dying (because, erm, she'd been living on land for too long without getting married), the witch prepared a magic knife for the mermaid to use to kill the prince that she loved, thereby giving her back her fishtail and preventing her death. But she resisted the temptation, and as a reward, was turned into an air spirit. The sea witch was not described in the story, but was, presumably, a mermaid.MERMAID
MERMAN
SEA WITCH
