sindri42:

takashi0:

lethal-cuddles:

lethal-cuddles:

crimepit:

guys listen

mermaids would have to be dark-skinned and chubby to survive in the ocean 

water isnt a great means of protecting oneself from the sun
theyd have to be very dark if they were shallow mermaids and they didnt want to be constantly sunburnt
and they may be paler if they lived deeper in the water but theyd have to be buff and/or chubby as hell to resist the water pressure and cold of the deep sea

what im saying is pale-ass white skinny mermaids are just unrealistic

I’m sorry… are you trying to apply “realism” to the concept of mermaids?

Anyway, all mermaids are good mermaids OP, die mad about it.

Can everyone who reblogged this uncritically do me a solid and stop pretending y’all are any better than Neil Degrasse Tyson? Because this thinly veiled “stop writing things in ways that don’t line up with my fetishizing wokeness” bullshit makes you even more insufferable than him.

Water is pretty much the best damn radiation blocker there is. Why do you think tanks of water are what we put between goddamn nuclear reactors and the squishy people operating them? You think a whale gets sunburnt? No. The only factors deciding skin color underwater are camoflage versus attracting mates and prey (or warning about poisons).

Now, aquatic mammals are generally pretty chubby, because they need insulation between the massive heat sinc of the ocean and their hot little mammal organs. But reptiles don’t care. Crustaceans don’t care. Fish don’t care. Cephalopods don’t care. You ever seen a chubby shark? No, because their insides are built for whatever temperature the water they live in is, and they gotta be sleek to move efficiently and quickly.

So a mammalian mermaid would be pretty chubby, unless she was exclusively in tropical waters and fairly near the surface (or volcanic vents). But a mammalian mermaid would also not have any scales on her tail, and could not breathe underwater. A mermaid which is mostly fish, or shark, or eel, or serpent would most likely be built svelte, for speed and flexibility. Or built like a tank or a pincushion, to prevent predation.

Her coloration would be mostly based on what she eats and what tries to eat her and where she lives. Tropical fish are bright shiny colors to be sexy. Poisonous fish are bright dangerous colors because it’s usually preferable to not get eaten than to kill the guy who ate you. Deep sea fish have glowing bits to attract curious idiots, so they can eat them. In the open ocean most things are sorta greyish-blusih, dark on top and shiny underneath to avoid standing out too much with no cover around.

Of course the biggest question when you’re thinking about what a mermaid looks like is why she resembles humanity at all. And barring straight up magic (which we can’t logic at until and unless we know more of its rules), the most probable explanation is that they’re trying to attract humans for some reason. Most likely to eat us. So they’d evolve to have face, hair, and torso as close as they can get to the beauty standards of whatever culture they live near, hands and arms built for an extremely strong grip, tail big enough and powerful enough to drag you under once they latch on, and lots of big pointy teeth hidden under their pretty face.