#(( anyhow. thinking about certain things in the merkingdom.

[royalreef]

(( Shout out to bureaucratized cannibalism, we love bureaucratized cannibalism!

[rxttenfish]

anyhow i've been thinking about the middle royals again and i'm very tempted to go full classical maya influence with them. specifically, the way that middle royals already do go to war with each other and vie for control of communities and resources, moving through the hierarchy of middle royals and either towards the low royals or the high royals depending on their success. i'm thinking now that, although they do have armies to themselves, they probably don't actually fight over specific territory or in battles which are relevant to what they might be actually fighting over — instead opting for "proxy battles" and "proxy wars". specifically, where there's a designated area away from civilian communities and those resources where soldiers and armies are sent to duke it out, with the results of this being a little more abstracted than how it's usually thought.

i'm also quite tempted to have one of the things being vied for during such battles is the capture of soldiers or generals to be taken back and publicly executed, simply because it does track for the merkingdom and makes their other forms of public execution a little less jarring and specific to the low royals... instead, the low royals look like a natural escalation of this, taking it to more extravagant extremes as an outcome of wealth instead of mere cruelty alone (if the middle royals are already making a show of executing their enemies, and you're better off than the middle royals, well, then you have to make an even bigger show of executing your enemies).

on the opposite end of this, i am still debating heavily over the individual communities of merfolk who actually do have some say in which middle royal they are considered under, and can even switch on their own (with certain rules and restrictions, ofc), which can be a major factor of determining this hierarchy of middle royals, and courting specific communities to join you instead of your enemies can be a successful strategy to obtain new political power and sway.

[royalreef]

@weavingroses​ inquired:  👀 ayo what merfolk would mer-brian be

(( “Grouper”, without a doubt. He’s one of the few other characters who I know INSTANTLY what species of mer he would be, and he’s just big, strong, and average enough for me to immediately assign him as “grouper”. 

Which reminds me, I really need to get a better name for them than “groupers”. I always put them in quotes because, while the niche they evolved for ( low-lying coastal ambush predator who is too big to be bossed around by anything else ) is the same niche as groupers AND they have the brown-grey-black-yellow color pattern of some big groupers, I feel like it could mislead people into thinking that my merfolk all have one specific irl species that they’re based after. Which they aren’t, and it’s one of those tropes that REALLY grates on my nerves. I build my merfolk up for certain niches in certain environments, which is how actual evolution works, and there’s something just so uncanny in having this random fish-human hybrid that is ENTIRELY UNRELATED to this other species, even though they act very similarly, steal behavioral and physiological traits from each other, and look exactly alike down to some very fine details. Not to mention how people act like the human biology would have no part in it, nor would they ever consider how human biology conflicts with some given parts that the other included species have, because these traits don’t just exist in a vacuum and mashing them together like that provides a really bad idea of how biology works.

Basically, this is why I keep putting “grouper” mer in scare-quotes, and making a big point of, while these two different species may have converged on some similar solutions to similar environmental pressures because they occupy a similar niche, they are not the same thing and should not be thought of as the same thing. Kinda the difference between mistaking one of them for the other from a distance, and copy-pasting anatomy.

Anyhow, there’s not much to say about the “groupers”, really? That’s why I’d pin Brian as one of them — since my rule for undead is to just treat them as their living counterparts to figure out what mer species they would be. Since Brian would essentially be Some Guy, albeit a very big Some Guy, he gets “grouper”, where the weirdest thing about them is that they’re one of the few mer species with slit pupils, and that they’re actually the most related species to Abyssals. Both them and the Abyssals are the most basal of all the species of merfolk, with their very small upper tail fluke, non-fused earfins, and heavy outer scale coating — but in terms of social conditions inside of the Merkingdom, the Merkingdom has had “groupers” inside of it since long before it became the modern Merkingdom, and they don’t really hold any kind of special social position. Some of them got grandfathered into some very nice positions as Royals, but usually not much mind is given to them.