Sasà Donnarumma

follow me <3

(( I'm still thinking about putting Miranda's new weight at something much closer to 1,000 lbs... Would you love this fish if there wasn't a chance in hell that you could pick her up? If she's a half ton of marine predator who can push you around like a toy? Would you still love her if she was the world's greatest weighted blanket.

💋 perhapst.

[ get kissy ; ACCEPTING ]

i want to be touched

want to you to pull me closer when we kiss, want to hold your hand in crowded places, want to cuddle up to you when we sleep, want to hold your face and just look in your eyes, want to feel your warmth when you hug me, want hide my face in your neck, want to sit on your lap and feel your hands around my waist.

" ................ 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."

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

(( 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?

Library of Celsus, Ephesus, Anatolia | Ahmet Hamdi

(( 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. )

(( 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.

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

(( 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.

(( 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. )