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 Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2009 8:23 pm
The Anatomy of a Mer
This guide provides a broad explanation of how a mer’s body works, is put together, and the logic behind their arrangement.
Table of Contents
1. Table of Contents
2. Forward
3. The Basics: What they have, and what they don't
4. Body Structure
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Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 9:15 am
Forward
A mer is, essentially, a chimera. A chimera, when using the scientific definition, is an organism whose body is made up of a collection of dissimilar DNA, merged into one organism. Generally, there are definitive areas within the body that reflect one set of DNA or another. They do happen in nature, although in most cases, the dissimilar DNA is still of the same species. But the idea of completely different species combined so is certainly not new, and not foreign to science.
The Mers themselves are a more integrated than simply patching pieces together, and that is really what makes them better. I could go on with the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo for a while, but let’s get down to what you really want to know.
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Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 9:18 am
The Basics: What they have, and what they don’t
All mers, regardless of what their template species, have the ability to do the following:
• breathe out of the water
• stay on land unaided, with only perhaps a jug of water to drink from now and then
• talk, in and out of the water
• reproduce with other mers, and humans
• swim
As you can see, breathing something that they can all do: they’re still at least part human, after all. Of course, the first two things listed are there mostly as roleplaying conveniences, although they are perfectly justifiable within the context of the Mer Co story.
There are few things that mers can’t do. “Walk” is not necessarily one of those…as a lobster ‘mer’ would have legs, albeit rather small and probably not too swift on land. That being said, walking is definitely not an option for most. Mers can’t talk to fish, either. Fish aren’t that bright. If they could figure out the language, a dolphin mer might be able to talk to dolphins…but since there is almost no context to figure it out, that is nigh impossible.
Mer Co might want to figure it out, however.
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Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 9:19 am
The Body Structure
In most cases, the body structure of a mer comes from combining like parts of a sea creature and a human. In general, there is a preference toward preserving more human aspects the further toward the head you go, and more fish toward the tail.
(Images for this section will be added later.)
As they are the most common, we’ll focus on fish for this explanation. In general, fish have a few fins: they have pectoral fins, pelvic fins, caudal fins, and a varying amount of dorsal and ventral fins (that have a variety of names, but the specifics are unimportant for that).
The biggest thing to note about those fins is that they are the fish’s limbs. The biggest ones of them, pectoral, pelvic, and caudal, all directly relate to things that you can find on a human being.
The pectoral fins come off of the fish’s pectorals. Pectorals are the chest. Pectoral fins are, therefore, the fish’s arms. As such, in nearly every case, the pectoral fins are replaced with human arms, which will often reflect the patterning of the fins.
Pelvic fins are, as you might guess, the legs. So, mers still have ‘legs,’ they’re just not very useful as that.
Caudal fins are not exactly analogous to any human part, but they are the tail, and it is not hard to find where the tail goes.
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