royalreef - Tumblr blog

[royalreef]

" ................ I would like if my friends ceased publicly writing upon and speculating about my love life."

"I am an eldritch entity. My existence is literally always to be away from the boundary of knowable cognition."

[royalreef]

"Whatever do I have to do to find a single eldritch entity that is capable of respecting boundaries?"

[royalreef]

(( One of my science podcasts did an episode on Jaws the other day, and it got my brain turning so badly that I still can't stop thinking about the way that I write merfolk as megafaunal predators and the way they interact with much more humanoid characters.

It's about the unpredictability that is still not just random, you know? It's about knowing what you're doing and what to expect and the terms of that social contract. It's about the massive gap between humans and literally any other animal and recognizing this while still meeting them halfway.

You know?

[royalreef]

[royalreef]

Library of Celsus, Ephesus, Anatolia | Ahmet Hamdi

[royalreef]

(( Merfolk do not see humans as prey, potential or otherwise.

First of all, humans don't look anything at all like how their typical food species do. They're strangely skinny and scrawny, oddly shaped, and clearly not at all intended to be something made to live in the water. Merfolk do have fairly bad vision, so there is the possibility that there could be a shark situation of mistaken identity, but they also don't hunt like sharks, being as they're people who take a lot of caution to ensure that they are hunting something properly and that they will minimize any potential harm to themselves and pain to the animal.

Likewise, if they notice something being off, their first urge would be to investigate first. Merfolk, also like sharks, also tend to investigate things using their mouth first, but, again, they're smart enough to wait a moment before putting something in their mouth. They'd approach first, and even if they do not realize that the human is not a normal animal and in fact a person, this would probably still not result in a bite if the human began to freak out at being approached by a merfolk. This is the most likely case, especially since only very few people now know merfolk exist, but also because merfolk are indeed very large and very dangerous marine predators. Most people would panic at one suddenly getting close, particularly since they wouldn't have been taught any languages said merfolk might be speaking.

Honestly, more than any other comparison for interacting with a different species, merfolk would just view humans as... people? To a merfolk, speech and conversation matter a lot on what is a person versus what isn't, and since merfolk have no other analogs to what kind of animal a human might be, they'd just liken humans to "very weirdly shaped merfolk".

Of course, this is avoiding the political slant, and the fact that another major part of what defines a "person" to a merfolk is their social relationship and structures — but this is what the general gut reaction would be, and it serves a nice comparison against the human gut reaction of merfolk being very large, very dangerous predators similar to lions or crocodiles.

( And lastly... Humans just taste nasty to merfolk. Merfolk tend to have a lot of bone in their diet, but even for them, humans have far too much bone and the meat itself is bitter and foul-tasting. Miranda does enjoy the taste of human blood specifically, and heavily decomposed human bodies do taste much more delicious to them, but these are exceptions, not the rule. )

[royalreef]

(( Tying back into what I was talking about earlier — I really think a lot of people undersell the actual feeling of being face-to-face with a large predator that can absolutely hurt you and how instinctual that gut reaction is. But also, that's just a neutral feeling! It's not necessarily going to be what's happening in reality nor what's actually going on on Miranda's end, and she can't control that any more than she can change what she looks like. It's better to actually understand what's happening and to not panic.

[royalreef]

From In Powder and Crinoline : old fairy tales retold. By Arthur Quiller-Couch; illustrated by Kay Nielsen

[royalreef]

[royalreef]

(( Tying back into what I was talking about earlier — I really think a lot of people undersell the actual feeling of being face-to-face with a large predator that can absolutely hurt you and how instinctual that gut reaction is. But also, that's just a neutral feeling! It's not necessarily going to be what's happening in reality nor what's actually going on on Miranda's end, and she can't control that any more than she can change what she looks like. It's better to actually understand what's happening and to not panic.

[royalreef]

(( Merfolk do not see humans as prey, potential or otherwise.

First of all, humans don't look anything at all like how their typical food species do. They're strangely skinny and scrawny, oddly shaped, and clearly not at all intended to be something made to live in the water. Merfolk do have fairly bad vision, so there is the possibility that there could be a shark situation of mistaken identity, but they also don't hunt like sharks, being as they're people who take a lot of caution to ensure that they are hunting something properly and that they will minimize any potential harm to themselves and pain to the animal.

Likewise, if they notice something being off, their first urge would be to investigate first. Merfolk, also like sharks, also tend to investigate things using their mouth first, but, again, they're smart enough to wait a moment before putting something in their mouth. They'd approach first, and even if they do not realize that the human is not a normal animal and in fact a person, this would probably still not result in a bite if the human began to freak out at being approached by a merfolk. This is the most likely case, especially since only very few people now know merfolk exist, but also because merfolk are indeed very large and very dangerous marine predators. Most people would panic at one suddenly getting close, particularly since they wouldn't have been taught any languages said merfolk might be speaking.

Honestly, more than any other comparison for interacting with a different species, merfolk would just view humans as... people? To a merfolk, speech and conversation matter a lot on what is a person versus what isn't, and since merfolk have no other analogs to what kind of animal a human might be, they'd just liken humans to "very weirdly shaped merfolk".

Of course, this is avoiding the political slant, and the fact that another major part of what defines a "person" to a merfolk is their social relationship and structures — but this is what the general gut reaction would be, and it serves a nice comparison against the human gut reaction of merfolk being very large, very dangerous predators similar to lions or crocodiles.

( And lastly... Humans just taste nasty to merfolk. Merfolk tend to have a lot of bone in their diet, but even for them, humans have far too much bone and the meat itself is bitter and foul-tasting. Miranda does enjoy the taste of human blood specifically, and heavily decomposed human bodies do taste much more delicious to them, but these are exceptions, not the rule. )

[royalreef]

[royalreef]

Portrait of Lydia Schabelsky, Baroness Staël-Holstein (detail) c. 1857–58,  Franz Xaver Winterhalter

[royalreef]

[royalreef]

Oh, how everyone wishes her wanting to be punished was just a sex thing.

[royalreef]

"Then correct me."

The words come so quickly that it's clear, beyond all doubt, that she has not thought of them. Her body tenses, jerks, settles all at once into a more upright posture better familiar as one that she'd typically wear when wielding her title like a sword. Like how she'd stand when talking business with Vera, or in the moments where she can actually get Damien to talk of his own rule, a thousand moments burned a thousand times over into memory where Miranda is regal, proper, true to her title down to her form itself.

A princess, in every way. Every way what she was born to be.

The word alone must have alit somewhere in her brain, somewhere deep in her mind, pressed her into a sequence that she can do nothing to stop but is so automatic that everything else evaporates from her mind.

Her head turns back to Oz, but it is impossible to think that she's actually looking at him. There's simply nothing there that would be, if it were Miranda staring down at him, meeting his eyes. There's nothing there but the facsimile of gaze, the imagery but nothing to suggest that her eyes weren't simply painted on there, that she wasn't the same as a mural or a statue or a toy with button-blue eyes and nothing within them with the will to see.

She speaks the empty words of a doll, a simple thing with a ring and pull on its back, nothing more complex than a motor and a speaker in her chest and fluff inside her head, and she does so because someone else recorded them in her so that she would have the honor of speech. It's a very cheap trick, but a useful one. An appeasing one, one that all the kiddies have, even if she's no one's favorite, because she can offer basic entertainment and when she's all used up and ruined no one will cry when she's thrown away. Better yet, she doesn't speak until she's spoken to, which is always a nice trick of obedience for stupid toys like her to know.

Her mind shutters, pulls back into itself, and it's clear that Miranda isn't standing there anymore. Or, she is, but only her in the sense of there is something full of blood and meat and coated in enough fear to shock her into a total absence of anything that might understand or process that fear and pain, and that there are no memories here, no intent, no purpose.

Miranda, absent of everything that someone would call Miranda beyond the name.

Indeed, it is want that rises up, swells in her. A want to be punished. A need to be hurt. It is thoroughly tainted through with a sickening over-application of self hatred, but it acts as fuel for the hurt, crawling back to the pain and the agony and staring into its abyss until nothing else remains but it and her. It swirls with the fear, chokes it, breeds with it.

Miranda was made to be hurt. She was made to be hurt because it's good for her to be hurt, because it's bad when bad things aren't hurt, hurting is what makes things good again. If she can't be hurt to satisfaction, then she must be discarded. Bad things that cannot be good things must be gotten rid of forever, because then the bad things would keep being bad and everything would get bad too.

She's good. She's a good princess.

Good princesses don't scream.

Those hands are so still now, in Oz's palms. They tilt, showing their own pale yellow undersides, the soft pads where the scales have been filed down so as not to scratch nor catch. The claws do not curl. The teeth are not bared, except in the moment it took to speak, as they formed the right shape to make the right sounds.

None of this is happening on command. Something's been tripped, some deeper mechanism hearing the correct command to come into play, and the body is able to be moved and manipulated as need be. Positions would be held, mantras would be happily recited. Everything was as it should be.

It's stopped breathing. Or, has it? It doesn't know. It's too stupid to remember how to breathe, so it's a good thing it has to come automatically, or else it would die without someone else to tell it what to do. It's not thinking either, recording these memories only to forget them again later, which is good. No one needs things like it to remember. They just need it to do what it does, and not make mistakes that can't be fixed.

He let her think. Reminisce, remember, fear. Voices in his head whispers about her thoughts, her feelings, how they taste - delicious, despite it all, and he knows it is no matter how much he keeps reminding the more chaotic part of him that no, no it isn't, it's disgusting it's bloody disgusting shut up shut up SHUT UP--

--he blinks, taking a deep breath, closing his eyes for just a second before focusing once again on hers, once again quiet, once again not daring to speak up unless she allows him to, or says something that he finds worth interrupting. Not gallant at all, maybe, but he found those kind of interruptions comforting, whenever he started rambling about this and that and everyone's phobias, his own included. They brought him back with his feet on the ground, sometimes much more slowly than others, but eventually he managed to find comfort in those interruptions.

"Miri...?"

Not an interruption yet, if we don't count his attempt at bring her back to the present, instead of dwelling on her memries. It's... more of a reminder that he's still there.

Focus on me, my princess. Focus on me.

"I won't leave. I-I promise, I won't."

His grip tightens ever so slightly.

"And... i-if you need to be corrected, then I'll... I'll do it as you truly deserve it: I'll correct you patiently, and calmly, and I'll do it because I want you to be happy and-- and us to be happy, and not because you deserve it, and not like--!"

--he rambled. He started rambling, and found himself unable to stop himself before letting too much slip. Oz tenses, inhales sharply, closes his eyes again.

"...not like that."

And when he opens them, this time, he looks down.

"You didn't deserve that.

You... don't. Deserve that."

[royalreef]

"I must admit, I am partial to hooking, myself." Her voice is soft, velvet, pressed forward and along her tongue so that it's polished by each and every one of her teeth. It rumbles in her chest as she speaks, deep and rich and even, befitting her shape, the slope of her neck and the mount of her back.

It does not dwell on how strange it is, she thinks, to speak of claws like this. This is not to suggest she feels no love for them, no, nor that she does not find them adept multi-tools in a wide assortment of scenarios. Rather, it is very strange to speak of them as something unique, as something that is not a simple given, mundane and not worth mentioning.

But, again, she does not speak of this. She understands when something is simply her problem when she sees it, and she adjusts accordingly.

"Something in the way they pull and tug and fight around you, attempting to flee as first thought and only realizing secondarily that they are willingly tearing themselves apart in the act. It is nice to truly get in there and pull them in tighter at the core whilst they fight it... But crushing is truly so delightful too, I do not think I could ever really pick a favorite! Is variety not truly the spice of life, after all?"

"Claws can do a multitude of actions besides snipping and crushing. Although, those are my faaaavorite things to do with them."

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