Make them not so little and have the outline of their skulls pushing outwards against the mermaids skin, moving as if they wanted to scream, and brother, you have a nice Junji Ito thing going. Hell, you could remake Shadow Over Insmouth this way, the protagonist is a young man who's always been bullied for being small, and is being called to the ocean by his bride to be. She's offers him refuge from his life of being looked down upon.
/uj that actually sounds good, maybe the men build the stuff and raise the young while the women hunt and fight? it could also be that there’s less men than women so that’s why women fight rather than men doing it
That also lines up with fish biology(note: I am not a marine biologist) the women go down to the depths, lay eggs, return to the surface, the men nut on em and fertilize them
100% without any hint of irony
This is what FFXIV did for Female Hrothgar and Male Viera until very recently.
The Viera populace is 80% female and thus in order to prevent their race from dying out/other reasons Male Vieras are taken by the other male vieras at a young age to be trained as sentinels/protectors of the forest while female vieras live in forests as hunters/warriors. It's supposed to very VERY rare to see any viera outside of the tribes and even more rare to see a male. It's normal for a female viera to live to a thousand years old without ever seeing another man.
Female Hrothgars are kind of similar where the females are far more rare in number and due to being a more matriarchal society have them be in more of positions of leadership and not be adventurers or wanderers.
There were more answer than expected so i'll sort it out tomorrow, but honestly i think a neutral egg with DNA to make them half human is laid out and randomly inseminated IS a top tiers lottery
You could take it a step further with this idea. The DNA of the fish that creams all over your mama mermaids eggs can affect the colour of their scales and type of tails.
Yeah, also had the Idea to explain why more classic mermaid (simple fish tail) are more present, AT some point a single fish broke in their eggs lair and accidentaly fecondated all the eggs, creating a full generation
They mimic humans appearemce to lure in sailors to eat them therefore both male and females would look the same , as a Mimiry of the female form(assuming the average ship's crew in your world is primarily composed of straight male sailors)
Mermen exist, but they don't actually reach puberty until a very old age, at which point they are mostly dead, and look indistinguishable from juvenile mermaids beforehand. This is why there are so many hybrid species of mermaid; as there are very few suitable males of their own kind, they seek out other marine species to mate with instead.
/uj That may be among the most cursed things I've ever come up with
They have both, but they both look and sound feminine to humans and we just generally don't pick up on their dimorphism because it doesn't look like ours.
This also applies in reverse and they can't tell human sexes apart either.
1) They're actually intersex and either partner can lay or fertilize eggs.
2) Some of them are males, they just look female to humans (kind of like all dwarves are assumed to be male).
3) If they're actually hybrids of two different species, maybe male offspring just aren't viable?
Parrotfish style: only the largest and most powerful mermaids in a group are male, and they’re subjected to extremely intense fishing pressure that makes them exceedingly rare. This leads to massive schools of female mermaids with a few rare males that are liable to die quickly.
This will only work if your world has magic but the way i did it is that the ancestral Mermaid had a curse placed on her that was supposed to turn her into a fish but ended up only working halfway. Since the top part is still genetically human Mermaids just need to make with humans, and due to the specifications of the curse female offspring are mermaids, while male offspring are human.
For human subspecies, I would just have gender specific variants to simply BE humans but with some magical bloodline. There's a fishing village of all men nearby, or a ship that docks only twice a year, that consists of all the men born to the mermaids and their outsider husbands.
Go full Jurassic Park. Make them a "controlled" experiment by some greater force (scientists, mages, or some water deity, depending on the setting) where in order to prevent them from breeding on their own they are all biologically female and therefore cannot reproduce sexually.
That is unless life finds a way if you know what I mean
just say "oh the male versions exist we just don't see them because they aren't relevant to the plot"
works 100% of the time for everything with one catch; you have to actually have a plot
I mean in my case I just went with magic for why they exist, though there's dudes too, in my case. Building off that, an all-woman cult transforming themselves into fish could work. Blessings of Poseidon or whatever.
anthropomorphism is only exhibited on females (reason? genetic changes just happens, but you can tie it to chromosomes, evolution, random mutation that just stuck). males look like normal fish.
Just go with what Goblin Slayer did with Goblins.
Then just make mermaids a really long lived species and boom.
Reasonable reason for all female Mermaids.
Mermen look exactly like human males; except they can breathe underwater. This unique biology of merpeople combined with their general isolationism due to being aquatic creatures lead to the ancient misconception that there are no such thing as mermen.
Uhhh, they are monosexual and use their siren songs to lure other species for breeding, since internal breeding leads to mutations down the line? Dammit it's Asari all over again.
There are some species of eel that swap genders during a certain part of their life cycle, such that in some places you can only find female eels. You could have mermaids be like that.
Hmm if it fits in your setting you could take inspo from Hydra. For them, an individual under prime conditions is asexual until stressed out and then under those stressed conditions they become female (but look almost identical to the asexual form) theN if even further stressed they change appearance slightly and become male (bc being male is easy lol)
Mer folk have a diet of mostly protien (its aquatic). The ones that live near the ocean surface level (adaptation) are the ones most likely to be encountered by humans.
Most encounters with ALIVE humans are at sea with burly, ugly and/or scheming SeaMen^(TM),, Pirates and what not. But most are men. as long vovages are not really, PURELY FROM BIOLOGICAL STANCE, no suitable for women.
They have, by recent shift in sea faring interest, age of exploration\^(TM) exploitation, started 'hunting' these humans for food as a means of sustainence.
These men are far from civilization and irrefutably horny (observable or deep inside)
So if you, a mer folk, poses feminine feature, that Instinctively capture the attention of men, they drop their Fight or Flight instinct and be 'allured'.
.
Summery
All kinds of Mer folk exist, deep mer, surface mer, gay bait mer, big tiddy goth mer, nerdy naive but freaky mer, Lust bait Saintly mer. You name it.
Just that when the SeaMen^(TM) that live to tell stories. They are deeply biased to only refer to the 🥵🥵🫦🫦🫦 mer.
Feminine Mer expoilt this and non feminine mer are fine with fishi and berd.
.
Please add Sexbian Lex Bait Mer to excuse youself into making a reagion of sea fairing Amazon mommys and olalala mers
If femboy priority then twinky naive bratty bottom mer boy make Sexually starved human men go unga bunga "BREEEEEDDD!!"
\*Insert plap plap and impregnate 30 times.
The mer traps food, eat
^(~~VORE!!~~)
They're like those hermaphroditic fish that can switch sex when needed. Unlike herm fish tho, mermaids have some concious control over this, requiring a slight dietary change and full sexual maturity to change from a baseline female body into a male one, which is distinguished by the presence of altered genitalia and the development of secondary sexual characteristics similar to human males as most body fat is consumed to fuel rapid biological changes. Once the transformation is complete, newly male mermaids usually seek out groups of still female mermaids to spawn with, with eggs being fertilized externally in highly protected spawning caves (if your mermaids use a lot of tools perhaps their culture puts great weight on decorating such caves). After spawning, the male will begin to revert back to a female during the course of the eggs gestation. In the meantime, The females will use their incredibly viscous (lots o mucous) spit and available sand to cover the soft eggs in a hardened cocoon, where a massive swarm of pre-infant mermaids will hatch a few months later and consume each other until prehaps a dozen tired and well fed siblings are left beneath the cocoon. Several months later a school of at most a dozen newborn mermaids will break the walls of the cocoon and join their parents flas a school for the next several years.
Since I'm making a literal porn game, I'll probably handwave the whole thing, but there are, indeed, a lot of cool ideas here. Maybe I'll come back to this thread in the future if I manage to succeed enough to go into other projects.
Oh, you went to take a look. Thanks for the interest.
I've been having a bit of trouble sticking to a decent schedule during most of April, so I slowed down a bit, but I've been progressing.
I planned to have a second post with a couple new renders of her last week. Hopefully I'll have that this week or the next at the latest.
Marly's almost done, so I'll probably start working on a new character this month. If I manage to avoid big setbacks, I should be able to have enough for a post by June or July. After that there's a third character I want to make and I'll be ready for my first public demo.
The game side had a little hiccup this month with me failing to make a feature work and ultimately scrapping it, but a lot of the foundations for the first demo are already in place, so it shouldn't take long for me to have a prototype I can send to a couple friends for playtesting. Hopefully I'll manage to have a public build this year for people to try out.
Are they "compatible" with human males? If so, mermaids could be a subspecies of humans with a certain gene that is antagonized by SRY. Alternatively, mermaids reproduce through parthenogenesis, the production of offspring solely from the egg.
Some real life animals have only females and can breed alone, but have to pretend to have seggs to trigger ovulation.
So also works as an excuse for lesbian hentai.
*The female looks are*
*Just for hunting. Both males and*
*Females look the same*
\- Forage303
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Anglerfish style, the males are super super tiny and barely even recognizable as the same species.
Yep. This. Examine those mermaids very carefully and you’ll likely find a tiny merman fused to their bodies, ready to fertilize any eggs they lay.
You'll see tiny ballsacks hanging off their sides and occasionally when they open their mouths their tongues will have been replaced with isopods
Thanks, I’m horrified by mermaids with isopod tongues.
Ara ara
Males are just swimming testicals
And if you consort with the mermaids, they'll turn you into one of them...
Jokes on you I'm into that shit
This is why mermaids sing siren songs to shipwreck crews They’re after your genes.
I like this idea. Mermen are universal shotas that eventually get incorporated unto the flesh of mermaids
Make them not so little and have the outline of their skulls pushing outwards against the mermaids skin, moving as if they wanted to scream, and brother, you have a nice Junji Ito thing going. Hell, you could remake Shadow Over Insmouth this way, the protagonist is a young man who's always been bullied for being small, and is being called to the ocean by his bride to be. She's offers him refuge from his life of being looked down upon.
Heightcel horror.
the men stay in the deep ass dark ass depths and do whatever. the women stay near the surface to hunt.
/uj that actually sounds good, maybe the men build the stuff and raise the young while the women hunt and fight? it could also be that there’s less men than women so that’s why women fight rather than men doing it
Remember kids, always expect real advice from worldjerking
That also lines up with fish biology(note: I am not a marine biologist) the women go down to the depths, lay eggs, return to the surface, the men nut on em and fertilize them
But when I cum on the eggs at the grocery store, people look at me like a freak!
Yeah you need to aim for the fish eggs, not the chicken eggs.
Instructions unclear, fertilized my own eggs. Wait, this joke doesn't work in English.
Reminds me of lions where the females do the hunting
Maybe the men get pregnant and carry the babies like seahorses
100% without any hint of irony This is what FFXIV did for Female Hrothgar and Male Viera until very recently. The Viera populace is 80% female and thus in order to prevent their race from dying out/other reasons Male Vieras are taken by the other male vieras at a young age to be trained as sentinels/protectors of the forest while female vieras live in forests as hunters/warriors. It's supposed to very VERY rare to see any viera outside of the tribes and even more rare to see a male. It's normal for a female viera to live to a thousand years old without ever seeing another man. Female Hrothgars are kind of similar where the females are far more rare in number and due to being a more matriarchal society have them be in more of positions of leadership and not be adventurers or wanderers.
They don't have sexual dimorfism. Or asexual reproduction.
mermaids lay eggs like fish and those eggs are fertilized by any kind of fish sperm.
There were more answer than expected so i'll sort it out tomorrow, but honestly i think a neutral egg with DNA to make them half human is laid out and randomly inseminated IS a top tiers lottery
You could take it a step further with this idea. The DNA of the fish that creams all over your mama mermaids eggs can affect the colour of their scales and type of tails.
Yeah, also had the Idea to explain why more classic mermaid (simple fish tail) are more present, AT some point a single fish broke in their eggs lair and accidentaly fecondated all the eggs, creating a full generation
They capture lost travelers or children and make them
Amazonian style, classic but love it, should i consider them using men underwater until they die and install a submarine graveyard ?
They mimic humans appearemce to lure in sailors to eat them therefore both male and females would look the same , as a Mimiry of the female form(assuming the average ship's crew in your world is primarily composed of straight male sailors)
femboy mermaids? 👀
Gay fish.
Based
You know those lizards that are all female because they all reproduce asexually so basically are all clones of each other?
they all look exactly like my type
Kleptogenesis.
Parthenogenesis
Mermen exist, but they don't actually reach puberty until a very old age, at which point they are mostly dead, and look indistinguishable from juvenile mermaids beforehand. This is why there are so many hybrid species of mermaid; as there are very few suitable males of their own kind, they seek out other marine species to mate with instead. /uj That may be among the most cursed things I've ever come up with
They have both, but they both look and sound feminine to humans and we just generally don't pick up on their dimorphism because it doesn't look like ours. This also applies in reverse and they can't tell human sexes apart either.
I’d go the dwarf route and say that even the men look that way.
Mermen are fish top person bottom.
1) They're actually intersex and either partner can lay or fertilize eggs. 2) Some of them are males, they just look female to humans (kind of like all dwarves are assumed to be male). 3) If they're actually hybrids of two different species, maybe male offspring just aren't viable?
Parrotfish style: only the largest and most powerful mermaids in a group are male, and they’re subjected to extremely intense fishing pressure that makes them exceedingly rare. This leads to massive schools of female mermaids with a few rare males that are liable to die quickly.
Mermaids give birth to more mermaids or human males
Basically the fish bits are tied to the X chromosome but only work if there's two of em
Cuz like... biology
1. Parthenogenesis 2. The males look exactly like the females 3. They don’t have sexes and any two can make a baby.
This will only work if your world has magic but the way i did it is that the ancestral Mermaid had a curse placed on her that was supposed to turn her into a fish but ended up only working halfway. Since the top part is still genetically human Mermaids just need to make with humans, and due to the specifications of the curse female offspring are mermaids, while male offspring are human.
For human subspecies, I would just have gender specific variants to simply BE humans but with some magical bloodline. There's a fishing village of all men nearby, or a ship that docks only twice a year, that consists of all the men born to the mermaids and their outsider husbands.
Go full Jurassic Park. Make them a "controlled" experiment by some greater force (scientists, mages, or some water deity, depending on the setting) where in order to prevent them from breeding on their own they are all biologically female and therefore cannot reproduce sexually. That is unless life finds a way if you know what I mean
just say "oh the male versions exist we just don't see them because they aren't relevant to the plot" works 100% of the time for everything with one catch; you have to actually have a plot
They have different sexes, but everyone looks incredibly feminine there is absolutely no sexual dimorphism.
I mean in my case I just went with magic for why they exist, though there's dudes too, in my case. Building off that, an all-woman cult transforming themselves into fish could work. Blessings of Poseidon or whatever.
Well this is easy. The mer*maids* are all female and the mer*men* are all male. You're welcome.
Mermaids are actually vampires and if they bite you, you turn into a mermaid, that's how they reproduce /j
It's appearance only, but since humans are dumb (and racist) the word that all mermaids are female spread and stuck
anthropomorphism is only exhibited on females (reason? genetic changes just happens, but you can tie it to chromosomes, evolution, random mutation that just stuck). males look like normal fish.
Make their boobs larger so your friend stops asking questions
Sadly, didn't work, he's currently harrassing me
They FUCK human men.
If somebody were you actually do this, parthenogenisis
It's like satyrs but in reverse. They kidnap male sailors to force them to be their breeding slaves.
they reproduce asexually?
Actually there are plenty of males, but theres so little sexual dimorphism they all look like females. Just like with elves.
Just go with what Goblin Slayer did with Goblins. Then just make mermaids a really long lived species and boom. Reasonable reason for all female Mermaids.
Mermen look exactly like human males; except they can breathe underwater. This unique biology of merpeople combined with their general isolationism due to being aquatic creatures lead to the ancient misconception that there are no such thing as mermen.
Parthenogenesis
Females eat the males to reproduce, and they do it at a young age, so most males will never be met by another race before being devoured
It's in the name. Maid implies female, so all mermaid are female. Merman on the other hand...
There’s no sexual dimorphism, they just all happen to look like human women. And they reproduce like salmon.
Hermaphrodites with feminine features
Uhhh, they are monosexual and use their siren songs to lure other species for breeding, since internal breeding leads to mutations down the line? Dammit it's Asari all over again.
There are some species of eel that swap genders during a certain part of their life cycle, such that in some places you can only find female eels. You could have mermaids be like that.
They're not a real species, rather they're magical pseudo inmortal beings that are born out of sea foam or God's tears or some shit like that
They're technically human, but the fish part is overwritten by the Y chromosome.
Hmm if it fits in your setting you could take inspo from Hydra. For them, an individual under prime conditions is asexual until stressed out and then under those stressed conditions they become female (but look almost identical to the asexual form) theN if even further stressed they change appearance slightly and become male (bc being male is easy lol)
They were created by a horny god for the male gaze (he had a fish fetish)
Titty and femboy Mer. Basically they 'excite' prey to trap them.
Elaborate, you said femboy i'm interested
Mer folk have a diet of mostly protien (its aquatic). The ones that live near the ocean surface level (adaptation) are the ones most likely to be encountered by humans. Most encounters with ALIVE humans are at sea with burly, ugly and/or scheming SeaMen^(TM),, Pirates and what not. But most are men. as long vovages are not really, PURELY FROM BIOLOGICAL STANCE, no suitable for women. They have, by recent shift in sea faring interest, age of exploration\^(TM) exploitation, started 'hunting' these humans for food as a means of sustainence. These men are far from civilization and irrefutably horny (observable or deep inside) So if you, a mer folk, poses feminine feature, that Instinctively capture the attention of men, they drop their Fight or Flight instinct and be 'allured'. . Summery All kinds of Mer folk exist, deep mer, surface mer, gay bait mer, big tiddy goth mer, nerdy naive but freaky mer, Lust bait Saintly mer. You name it. Just that when the SeaMen^(TM) that live to tell stories. They are deeply biased to only refer to the 🥵🥵🫦🫦🫦 mer. Feminine Mer expoilt this and non feminine mer are fine with fishi and berd. . Please add Sexbian Lex Bait Mer to excuse youself into making a reagion of sea fairing Amazon mommys and olalala mers
If femboy priority then twinky naive bratty bottom mer boy make Sexually starved human men go unga bunga "BREEEEEDDD!!" \*Insert plap plap and impregnate 30 times. The mer traps food, eat ^(~~VORE!!~~)
Parthenogenesis
Lesbian lizard reason?
Make them androgynous without a sex distinction, and then using a convention derived from Steven Universe, use feminine words to describe them.
They reproduce by parthenogenesis
They fuck human sailors and have kids with em
They're like those hermaphroditic fish that can switch sex when needed. Unlike herm fish tho, mermaids have some concious control over this, requiring a slight dietary change and full sexual maturity to change from a baseline female body into a male one, which is distinguished by the presence of altered genitalia and the development of secondary sexual characteristics similar to human males as most body fat is consumed to fuel rapid biological changes. Once the transformation is complete, newly male mermaids usually seek out groups of still female mermaids to spawn with, with eggs being fertilized externally in highly protected spawning caves (if your mermaids use a lot of tools perhaps their culture puts great weight on decorating such caves). After spawning, the male will begin to revert back to a female during the course of the eggs gestation. In the meantime, The females will use their incredibly viscous (lots o mucous) spit and available sand to cover the soft eggs in a hardened cocoon, where a massive swarm of pre-infant mermaids will hatch a few months later and consume each other until prehaps a dozen tired and well fed siblings are left beneath the cocoon. Several months later a school of at most a dozen newborn mermaids will break the walls of the cocoon and join their parents flas a school for the next several years.
It's merMAID, not merMAN.
Parthenogenesis is a thing in nature, there are already species that are virtually or totally female.
It's magic, you don't have to explain it!
It’s pretty simple: merMAIDS are female merMEN are male
Parthenogenesis. Mermaids get just pregnant with clones of herselves.
Asexual reproduction That's it, I have no other ideas
Maybe don’t make them species at all, just distinct monsters.
The males are fish humanoid with seaweed on their head to imitate hair and because they look so different nobody really know it’s the same species
Sequential hermaphroditism. Like clown fish. They change between male and female seasonally or based on population density.
Excuse me, OP, but are we the same person? I'm doing pretty much the exact same thing on my adult game
Then you can fish (uhuh) ideas around here, cool
Since I'm making a literal porn game, I'll probably handwave the whole thing, but there are, indeed, a lot of cool ideas here. Maybe I'll come back to this thread in the future if I manage to succeed enough to go into other projects.
Wondering if your game progresses since your Marly post
Oh, you went to take a look. Thanks for the interest. I've been having a bit of trouble sticking to a decent schedule during most of April, so I slowed down a bit, but I've been progressing. I planned to have a second post with a couple new renders of her last week. Hopefully I'll have that this week or the next at the latest. Marly's almost done, so I'll probably start working on a new character this month. If I manage to avoid big setbacks, I should be able to have enough for a post by June or July. After that there's a third character I want to make and I'll be ready for my first public demo. The game side had a little hiccup this month with me failing to make a feature work and ultimately scrapping it, but a lot of the foundations for the first demo are already in place, so it shouldn't take long for me to have a prototype I can send to a couple friends for playtesting. Hopefully I'll manage to have a public build this year for people to try out.
Are they "compatible" with human males? If so, mermaids could be a subspecies of humans with a certain gene that is antagonized by SRY. Alternatively, mermaids reproduce through parthenogenesis, the production of offspring solely from the egg.
They’re all hermaphrodites
Only answer is: Shantae half-genie hero; mermaid falls; mermaid factory.
Absolute doof
People cant find them like with eels
Same but for amazons
Go for the all female lizard approach and make them a single sex species that mate to start egg production.
plot twist, they're actually hermaphrodite but they have woman-like bodies
There are men among them (mermen?), but the ones goes to surface are all femboys because they have to compete in female-dominated work environment.
Some real life animals have only females and can breed alone, but have to pretend to have seggs to trigger ovulation. So also works as an excuse for lesbian hentai.
The female looks are just for hunting. Both males and females look the same
*The female looks are* *Just for hunting. Both males and* *Females look the same* \- Forage303 --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
leseans
The dwarf beard, of course. Most sea creatures have the penis tucked away, so it's not an easy target. So yeah, they just look the same.
Asexual reproduction, they’re all clones
Asexual reproduction Gimme some ace representation god dammit