PART OF YOUR WORLD

IMAGINE IF IN HANS CHRISTIAN Andersen's The Little Mermaid, when its heroine is asked to trade in her voice for legs so she can woo her mortal infatuation on shore, she simply barked back:

- CLARISSE LOUGHREY

"Well, why can't the prince grow a tail instead?" Novelist Andrzej Sapkowski, in his tales of the Witcher, has delighted in turning fairy tale presumptions on their head, wielding a searing-hot poker against the kinds of cultural norms they enforce - chivalrous knights, feral creatures, wilting maidens.

In his short story "A Little Sacrifice", taken from the 1992 collection Sword of Destiny, monster slayer Geralt is hired to translate Duke Agloval's marriage M proposition to Sh'eenaz, a ferociously beautiful mermaid, into her own deep-sea dialect. She refuses to drink the potion that will turn her tail into limbs. He won't undergo the witch's spell to turn his limbs into a tail. The would-be lovers have reached a stalemate, and Geralt is left without his due payment. Frankly it's every freelancer's worst nightmare.

Now, finally, Sapkowski's "A Little Sacrifice" will grace the small screen, thanks to Netflix's new feature-length anime adaptation The Witcher: Sirens Of The Deep. The story's a long-time favourite of the show's writers' room, according to executive producer Mike Ostrowski, who's worked on the series since season one and co-wrote Sirens Of The Deep with Rae Benjamin.