If there were a literary fairy tale that was going to teach you that not all love is healthy, it would be Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. Despite what Disney told you, Andersen's mermaid is obsessed with her prince to the point where she sleeps on a cushion outside his room like a dog (worse than a dog, really; mine sleeps on my bed) and ultimately kills herself, turning into seafoam for the chance at a human soul in a few centuries. Andersen painted this last as worth it based on his Christian-centric 19th-century worldview, but the story is irredeemably dark when read with modern eyes. That's something that Mitchu (and presumably original author Chi pa rang) is very well aware of, and their take on the merfolk tale owes its dark roots to Andersen's obsessive mermaid.

In some ways, The Merman Trapped in My Lake is a gender-swapped The Little Mermaid. Mel is the merman in question, given as a gift to a terminally ill teenage girl named Servaine Noxirel. Servaine at first keeps him in a tank in her room before freeing him in the lake on the family's estate. As her death draws nearer, she plans to free him in truth, returning him to the sea from which her father snatched him, but she dies before she can do that. A century of revolution and reform keeps the surviving Noxirels (a branch family descended from an illegitimate son) from returning to their ancestral home. And when someone finally does, it's the original Servaine's namesake, a young woman who not only shares a name, but also an appearance with the merman's original person. And who should be waiting for her but Mel?

To call this an unhealthy love story may be a bit of an understatement. Certainly, Mel and the original Servaine had a serious power imbalance in their relationship, and it isn't clear if Servaine loved Mel the way he loved her. The first volume is mostly a flashback to the first Servaine's story, and it makes it clear that she knew that Mel had an almost hypnotic power over humans – every maid or guard she sent to deliver something to Mel in the lake became enthralled by him and obsessed with making him love them. This understandably made Servaine question her own emotions where Mel was concerned, and there's a sense that even though she wanted to free him in the sea, a piece of her also thought that letting him go would be freeing herself from any potential spell he cast on her.

As for Mel, he seems to have truly loved the first Servaine – albeit with the possibility of Stockholm Syndrome playing a part. Like Andersen's mermaid before him, Mel yearns for Servaine to the point of being willing to sacrifice himself, albeit in a different way. Neither of these volumes hints at the presence of a sea witch to transform his fins into legs, but they're also a bit cagey about how Mel came out of the lake in the first place, and volume two further aligns him with Andersen's maid when it reveals his forbidden fascination with the surface folk. But no matter what his base feelings, when the second Servaine arrives at the mansion, Mel is waiting – and he seems convinced that she's his Servaine…and he's been hoping for her “return” for a long, long time for reasons that may not be rooted in love.

Each day Servaine the second spends in the mansion, the more dangerous Mel seems. He wants her to stay in her room. He has moments of lucidity when he knows she's not the original Servaine but never acts on them, and generally, he acts like a combination of a jailer and a lover. I have to wonder how much of his confusion is an act, because if his love of Servaine's ancestor grew from his captivity, he might be deliberately trying to replicate that to make this Servaine fall in love with him. He may have gone mad, but there's still genius lurking in his mind.

R.PPOBI's art does an exquisite job of bringing this story to life. There's a doll-like quality to the faces that enhances their beauty rather than make it uncanny, possibly because the entire story is so uncanny itself. The different ways the Servaines dress and wear their hair speak of the century that's passed, and the shading on Mel's fish tail seems deliberately designed to make us think he's naked in an almost cheeky way around obvious fanservice. Oddly, he only has nipples in merman form, but that's more than we often get on that front. Backgrounds are similarly lush, and there's just a beautiful attention to detail on every page.

Romances don't need to be healthy in fiction to be enjoyable. It's entirely possible that The Merman Trapped in My Lake won't have a Disney-happy ending. But the ride there will be as full of ups and downs as the sea on a rough day, the kind that carries seafoam until it fades into the sky like a mermaid gaining a soul.