Melody

Melody is the protagonist of The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea. She is the daughter of Ariel and Prince Eric, and the princess of her father's kingdom. She is also the only known grandchild of King Triton and the late Queen Athena.

Personality
Melody is sassy but well-mannered and has respect for her mother and others. Her curious and tomboyish nature leads her to collect all sorts of items from the sea, a parallel to her mother at age sixteen only in reverse. Her swimming proficiency and ability to hold her breath for long periods comes from her merfolk heritage. Largely because of her being half-mermaid, she was also seen as somewhat of an outcast, as evidenced by the guests at her twelfth birthday celebration shunning her. She is also shy around boys, becoming quite flustered when a merboy she found attractive tried befriending her in Atlantica. She later met him again after the wall was disintegrated, with both recognizing each other. Despite being tomboyish, she has a princess canopy bed and a girlish style bedroom.

Physical appearance
Melody is a tomboyish 12-year old princess. She has straight black hair, most often tied back with a green hair tie in a low ponytail, pink lips, and aqua blue eyes. She seems to have inherited a fairly even blend of traits from her parents. Most noticeable is her hair (the same color as her father's). She inherited her mother's eyes, nose, and facial structure. It is also possible that she inherited Ariel's beautiful singing voice, which is heard in "For A Moment", a duet between Melody and her mother. Eric also gave her his skin tone, smile, and thick eyebrows. Melody's hairstyle seems like a blend of both of her parents.

For most of the film, Melody is seen in her underclothes, which is a separate pair of white pantalettes and a white camisole; the pantalettes cover the bottom half of her stomach. As a baby, she was wearing a cute, very pretty white and pink dress and her bow also has the same colors. While in mermaid form, she retains her camisole, but her pantalettes and legs are replaced by a salmon tail; her navel is also visible. It is odd that the merteens she meets don't notice she does not wear a typical seashell bikini top like other mermaids. She also has a pink ballgown and a yellow casual dress both with short puffy sleeves. Since she found it, she wears her locket that has her name on it.

Powers and abilities
Due to being half-mermaid, Melody is a skilled swimmer. She also had inherited some of her mother's superhuman traits, namely speed and strength, the latter of which is demonstrated by her scaling an ice wall with few problems late into the film. She also inherited superhuman endurance, as evidenced by her not being crushed into oblivion when forcibly changed back into a human by Morgana despite the depth at which she was. She is also able to speak to aquatic animals, which is implied in the movie to be due to her mermaid heritage as her talking to Sebastian resulted in her being mocked by the guests (as they were unaware of her mermaid heritage at the time). She may have also inherited her mother's apparent aquakinesis, as in the ending of the movie, she and Ariel both proceeded to cause a wave to form from behind them.

The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea
Melody first appears as an adorable infant at the beginning of the film. She is about 8 months old at the beginning, as she can crawl and hold up her head for herself.

Melody's parents, Ariel and Eric are celebrating her birth, and have taken her out on a ship to meet with Ariel's father, King Triton, and six older sisters, Aquata, Andrina, Attina and Adella. Triton presents Melody with a locket which bears her name, meant to remind his granddaughter of her mermaid heritage. However, the celebration is interrupted by Morgana, Ursula's sister. Morgana kidnaps Melody and threatens to feed her to her shark, Undertow, if King Triton does not hand over his trident. Though King Triton almost does so, Ariel and Eric are able to thwart Morgana's plan and Triton blasts Undertow with his trident and turns him into an anchovy. She vanishes, but not before vowing revenge. She is now a threat and until she is captured, Ariel decides that Melody can not know anything about the sea, including her mermaid heritage, Atlantica, and her grandfather (which turns out to be a bad idea). She bans the merpeople from seeing Melody and later has a large sea wall built to separate their castle from the sea. Meanwhile, Melody's locket is tossed into the sea.

Several years later, Melody grows up banned from entering the sea but is ignorant of the reason why. Despite the ban, she loves the sea and regularly sneaks out to swim. This causes a difficult relationship between her and her mother. On her twelfth birthday, while out swimming, she discovers the locket, but she is forced to get back to the castle as she has forgotten about her birthday party. Unknown to her, she is being watched in a crystal ball by Morgana and Undertow. Morgana takes this as the perfect opportunity to succeed at the one thing her sister, Ursula, never could. Later, while Ariel is helping Melody prepare for the party, Melody tries to tell her mother her true feelings about the sea, but are interrupted by Eric, who leads Ariel and Melody to the ballroom.

During the party, Melody dances with a young prince, but trouble soon arises when Sebastian accidentally ruins the dance and destroys the cake. She comes over to him to see if he's alright, but everyone starts to laugh at her for talking to crab. Humiliated, she runs out of the ballroom in tears and goes back to her bedroom where she again looks at the locket she found earlier. Ariel comes in to try and comfort her but becomes distracted when she learns that the locket has her name written on it and opens the locket to reveal a picture of mermaids swimming in Atlantica. She confronts her mother about it, noting that Ariel has told her that Atlantica was only a fairy tale. Ariel takes the locket away and is shocked to learn that Melody has been sneaking out into the sea. Enraged, Ariel forbids her from ever the entering the sea again - just as her own father did to her years ago. Hurt that Ariel refuses to give any answers, Melody takes back the locket and runs out of her room. Wanting to find answers about the locket and its meaning, she takes a rowboat and runs away from home despite Sebastian's protests.

Meanwhile, Melody is lured to Morgana's lair by Undertow. Morgana uses a potion to turn Melody into a mermaid, which excites her. However, the spell will only last a few days. While on the ship, Eric watches as Triton turns Ariel back into a mermaid by using his trident to search for and find Melody. Morgana explains that she can make the transformation permanent if she has the trident, which she claims Triton stole from her. She asks Melody to retrieve the trident. Unknown to Melody, she is lying and only wants the trident for her own evil purposes. However, only a descendant of Triton can remove it from its resting place, and Melody is ignorant of Triton's connection to her.

While searching for the trident, Melody tries to use the map Morgana gave her, and due to the ticklish sea kelp, the whale she rides sneezes, forcing her off of it, and the map gets broken. Later on, she befriends a penguin named Tip, and a walrus named Dash, and they join her in her search. They manage to sneak into the palace and make off with the trident before Ariel, Flounder, Sebastian and Triton arrive. On the way to Morgana's lair, Ariel and Flounder remind Scuttle to get to Triton and Sebastian. Melody returns to Morgana at the same time that her mother arrives. Ariel attempts to explain the situation, but Melody, understandably angered at Ariel's decision to hide Melody's mermaid heritage and finding out that her life was a lie, gives Morgana the trident.

Afterward, while revealing her true colors and the truth to Melody, Morgana takes Ariel hostage and traps Melody and Flounder in a cave by sealing the entrance with a thick layer of ice. She leaves them two to die and makes an ice tower where she fights Sebastian, Eric, Triton, and the others. Soon afterward, Morgana's spell on Melody wears off. she reverts her human form, starts to drown, and falls unconscious. Fortunately, Tip and Dash get Undertow to ram into the ice and help Flounder carry Melody to the surface. There, she awakens.

While Morgana is using the trident to make Ariel, Flounder, Sebastian, Triton, Tip, and Dash to bow down to her, Melody realizes that now she can climb on Morgana's ice tower because she is now human and has legs. She secretly sneaks up behind her and takes back the trident, causing the others to be freed from her spell. Melody tells her to stay back but turns the wrong side of the trident to her. She grabs Melody's leg and pulls her to her in order to take the trident back, but Melody stabs her in the tentacle with it. Melody then manages to toss the trident back to Triton but gets pushed off the ice cliff by Morgana. She screams, falling to her doom, but Dash saves her at the last moment; she falls onto his soft stomach and lands safely. While catching his trident, Triton angrily confronts Morgana and tells her that never again will she nor any of hers threaten his family before imprisoning her in a block of ice.

Later, Melody has regained consciousness and reunites with Ariel and Eric. She apologizes to her mother for what happened, but Ariel replies that she and Eric are the ones who are truly at fault, as they realize they should've been honest with her about her mermaid heritage instead of keeping her in the dark about it. Melody explains that she never meant to hurt anyone, but thought she would be better at being a mermaid than a girl; her mother, however, explains to her that it doesn't matter whether she has fins or feet - she and her father love her they way she is (their very brave little girl), and express how proud they are of her. Triton and Melody then officially meet other, and Triton offers to allow Melody to become a mermaid permanently or to stay with her parents and let things return to normal. Melody refuses the offer, instead choosing to destroy the sea wall, so that everybody from land and sea, could be together again.

Trivia

 * Melody is the first Disney character to be the child of a Disney Princess.
 * Melody is the first human/mer-person hybrid in existence.
 * It should be noted that Melody's bedroom is the same room as Ariel's guestroom when she first took human form and was staying with Prince Eric.
 * Although Melody inherited a lot of Ariel's traits in both personality and appearance, her mixture of black hair, thick eyebrows, and blue eyes make her a perfect blend of her parents.
 * Despite the unpopularity of the sequel, Melody has a large fanbase. In fact, Tara Strong says Melody is her favorite character that she's ever done the voice for.
 * Melody means "song" in Greek.
 * Since it was Morgana using Ursula's magic that turned Melody into a mermaid, it is unknown if salmon would be her natural mermaid tail color.
 * In a rather amusing coincidence, Tara Strong would later voice two of Ariel's sisters in the prequel The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning.
 * Although Melody is a princess by birth, she isn't included as an official Disney Princess in the franchise, because of her young age and status as a heroine of a direct-to-video film. However, her mother is.
 * On a related note, not counting Descendants, Melody is so far the only character to be the child of one of the Disney Princesses.
 * Melody is currently the only known grandchild of King Triton.
 * Like her mother, Melody has two friends, Tip and Dash, but unlike Sebastian and Flounder, Tip is a penguin, while Dash is a walrus (a marine bird and marine mammal opposed to a crustacean and a tropical fish).
 * Having taken over for her mother from the first Little Mermaid film, Melody is the third child of a predecessor's main character to take over as the protagonist in a sequel, with the first being Nicky Ferris (taking over from Sharon McKendrick in The Parent Trap II), the second being Kiara (taking over from Simba in The Lion King II: Simba's Pride), the fourth being Scamp (taking over from Lady in Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure), the fifth being Jane (taking over from Wendy in Return to Never Land), the sixth being Patch (taking over from both Pongo and Perdita in 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure), and the seventh being Sam Flynn from Tron: Legacy (taking over from Kevin Flynn).
 * The first dress Melody is seen wearing is pink, which is the same color of the first dress her mother wore in the first film.
 * Melody's dream was the opposite of her mother's; while Ariel was a mermaid who wanted to be a human, Melody is a human who wanted to be a mermaid.
 * Melody also shares the same worries for not being a mermaid, and she wishes to tell her mother what she feels, but she says to Sebastian she would never understand her. In the first film, Ariel wishes to be human, and she tells her worries to Flounder and also tells Sebastian that her father would never understand her fascination with the human world.
 * Melody also inherited her mother's speed. While Sebastian tries to convince her to return home for her birthday party at the palace, he says, after Melody goes into the water again, that she's like her mother. In the first film, he tried to tell her mother to take her head out of the clouds and convince her to not think about the human world.
 * When Melody finds the musical locket she had gotten when she was a baby, and her mother finds the music box of her late mother; they recognized the melody.
 * Melody makes the same back pose when she is transformed into a mermaid, just as her mother did in the first movie.
 * Similar to Ariel's relationship with her father, King Triton, Melody initially had a strained relationship with her mother, due to Ariel not allowing her to enter the sea (unaware at the time that Ariel was trying to protect her from Morgana; this ignorance caused her to believe that her mother hated the ocean) despite this, they have a mutual love and adoration of each other as mother and daughter.
 * It is unknown why Melody was unconscious after she landed on Dash when Morgana pushed her and she recovers in her father's arms just like Ariel in the third movie, when she was hit by Marina. Melody was conscious when she landed on Dash, but when Morgana's lair and the icicles collapsed, she was unconscious when Tip pushed them both out the way.
 * Melody is the first sequel hero/heroine who runs away from home to see another world like the ocean. The second is Scamp, who runs away from home to live the junkyard dog life. Jane from Return to Neverland is not included, since she did not run away to Neverland.
 * Coincidentally, Tara Strong, Melody's voice actress, later voiced the Ariel parody character Princess Clara from Drawn Together, who resembled an adult version of Melody in all but eyebrows.
 * In addition, Strong would later voice the character Elisa from Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, who, coincidentally, had a sister/stronger alter ego named Ursula.
 * Melody's hairstyle for most of the film appears to be almost similar to child Ariel from the flashback sequence of the TV series' episode " The Evil Manta".
 * She does share some similarities with Kiara and Scamp.
 * The three of them are the protagonists of their films.
 * They are stubborn and headstrong.
 * They all runaway from home for certain reasons.
 * Melody ran away because she wanted to be part of the ocean world.
 * Scamp ran away to live the junkyard dog life.
 * Kiara ran away to find Kovu after her father Simba exiled him.
 * They have a strained relationship with their parents for Melody (her mother), for Kiara and Scamp (their fathers), but make amends with them at the end of their films.
 * Melody and Scamp both have socialized and interacted with main antagonists of their films (Morgana and Buster), while Kiara only briefly interacted with Zira.