#(( but suddenly she WANTS this and. hnnghh. scary. it was too scary for her by far.

[royalreef]

(( It's been such a hot minute since it's happened, that I forget that most people who follow this blog don't know what happens when Miranda sincerely catches a crush and knows it, for once!

In short: if Miranda ever does manage to genuinely fall for someone and wants them, then, firstly, she's going to panic. Miranda is someone who, yes, is very confident in herself and believes that she has a right to every good thing in life, but that definition of "good thing" has been severely biased by the Merkingdom. The only things she really indulges in actively wanting and pursuing are things that the Merkingdom tells her she is supposed to want and pursue in the first place, things that are acceptable for a royal to want and things which are "normal" for them to want. This is why she doesn't actually mind dating, so long as she gets to treat the other party as a disposable toy for her to do what she pleases with — because it is common for royals to seek relationships like this, and because it helps to reinforce their place as royals.

Sincerely, very sincerely, wanting and caring for someone and actually feeling something for them, does not help reinforce this system. It leaves her vulnerable, either by other royals catching onto this, or through the other party not being well-equipped to handle the entire situation (in all the ways that it can go wrong). It is treating someone as an equal who the Merkingdom does not agree is an equal, and, even worse, it is giving Miranda a priority above the Merkingdom itself which she might hold greater loyalty to. That in particular is especially bad, given how much of Merkingdom politics is a reflection of their social dynamics to begin with.

This is why it takes so long for Miranda to admit it to herself. To do so is to admit she's not doing what she's supposed to do, that she's being bad, that she's failed in some fundamental level to be what the Throne demands her to be, and that's a lot of heavy stakes working against ever realizing when she likes someone. It has to get so bad and so intense that Miranda effectively has to admit to herself that she has done something that, in her mind, is severely wrong, and there's no way to avoid it or forget about it.

Thus, she tends to panic fairly bad. She is scared, she wants something and she was not supposed to do that, and every last moment of her life as Crown Princess is telling her that she very well might die because of this and that she will very much deserve it if it happens. It's very hard for her to connect this as anything other than a bad thing, and this is even harder to deny because Miranda liking someone also endangers them as well.

The Merkingdom will not tolerate such risks and threats, especially not to their Crown Princess, and other royals will innately view anyone who has Miranda's attention as a threat to themselves and their livelihoods. And if Miranda sincerely cares about someone, then she doesn't want them to get hurt because of her, which is made even worse by how convinced she is that she might be the one to hurt them too. Miranda's as much a royal as any of the others too, and all of Miranda's prior history of dating begins to work against her, reminding her of how easy it would be to dispose of them or harm them.

Secondly, this does present in a heightened and extreme want to bite her person of interest.

Contrary to what's above, this isn't actually a royal thing. It's a merfolk thing. They have many different ways to bite each other with many different connotations, and one way that they bite each other is both notoriously intimate, and tends to leave a recognizable bite mark on the other party, thus physically indicating that the two of them are close.

It's just a quirk of how merfolk attraction works then, that they focus so much on wanting to bite someone else when they're especially into them. It goes back to their social bonds, reinforcing them and helping to establish a new and closely tied bond, and helps secure it by gesturing to all other merfolk as a part of the social landscape that they all have to navigate. A merfolk who is especially down bad for another merfolk translates this idea as a need to bite them and be bitten back in return, to claim them as "theirs" and to be considered "mine" in turn. It's not really possessiveness nor territorial behavior, not in the way we'd understand it, but a deep and intense need to belong to someone, and a desire for that belonging. It's as much a physical thing as having a house that they live inside of, and is one of the fundamental desires behind merfolk building their miivt'ia and other relationship hierarchies.

This is intense for merfolk to begin with, being hypersocial and needing near-constant contact and interaction with each other. It is especially intense for Miranda, who is deeply repressed and cannot easily confront these desires and emotions in herself, and who perceives this sensation as being nearly painful in its intensity.