It's Why I List "Creative Biology" As An Interest

[bloodyrosemccoy]

So Discovery aired a kind of sequel to Mermaids: The Body Found last week, and just like when the first one came out last year, and with that dragon one some years back, it raises an important and intriguing question:

Dude, am I the only one who thought it was just a really fun sci-fi mockumentary?

The only opinions I've really seen are "OMG I'M CONVINCED MERMAIDS R TOTALLY REAL AND THE GOVERNMENT IS COVERING IT UP" and "TRICKERY! This is naught but a HOAX you fools! It is trashy TV to ensnare unwary minds!" It's like for this particular series people forget that speculative fiction is a thing. Admittedly the documentary format is more prone to being misunderstood than your standard SyFy Original or blockbuster,* but c'mon. They are not trying to tell us The Truth, or to confuse the masses with falsehood. They are being creative and playing with science and story.

Anyway, I was kind of disappointed with the follow-up. I really liked the first one--I'm a total sucker for grain-of-science mockumentaries like that. And given that my school biology notes were covered with speculative attempts to design biologically viable, evolutionarily plausible mammalian mermaids (who are going to show up in OGYAFE 2: Electric Boogaloo), or fungal Mushroom People (y'know, the Super Mario ones), or plant-based fairies (like, say, Terwu'arie from Scatterstone), I would say that shouldn't be a surprise. I love making up critters. Hell, the game Spore was just an extension of what I've been doing all along. Only I do it more thoroughly.

But I am also a sucker for speculative anthropology.** So while the ~*~mysteeeerious mystery*~* of cryptozoology was fun, and I do rather enjoy creepy "found" footage, I would have preferred more of a staight-up metafictional study of their evolution and culture. As long as this IS fiction, I do wish they'd carry the story further. Public discovery, contact, language, all that shit that people think doesn't work as entertainment--I would watch the HELL out of that. ("Since making contact with the merfolk, Dr. Dirk Squarejaw has been living on his boat in the open ocean, studying their lifestyle. He filmed the whole thing. Here are some of the highlights." I WOULD WATCH THAT. I might even skip watching 7 Or 8 Assholes And Mister Rogers, if the two shows were in the same time slot. God, TV is so much cooler in my head.)

... Actually, come to think of it, that was pretty much my wish for Avatar, too. But you knew that.


RANDOM POINTLESS COMPLAINT: It kind of annoys me that they kept referring to the entire species as "mermaids." I hereby propose we come up with a good sex-unspecific term for merpeople that isn't as cumbersome as, y'know, "merpeople."


*Their big mistake was tossing in the Government Coverup. If you're a conspiracy theorist, any debunking of that is only further proof that the debunker is PART OF THE CONSPIRACY. There is no way to argue with the claim that "they had to present it as fiction because otherwise the government/Illuminati/lizard people would have completely crushed it."

**Or anthropoidology, I guess.

Comments

[madripoor-rose.livejournal.com]

I think the first time they aired it there was a flurry of teh stupids enough that the government agency mentioned had to release an official statement.

I'm on the fun mockumentary side. And still laughing that the first spot on the first commercial break for this repeat went to Long John Silvers'.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It only fueled the fire. "SEE? WHY WOULD THEY COME OUT AND SAY THEY WEREN'T HIDING ANYTHING IF THEY REALLY HAD NOTHING TO HIDE?!"

BWAHAHA maybe they figured all the ocean imagery would prime you to be hungry for fish? I'm not sure. I was spared the ads because I watched it on Amazon Insta-watch this time around, but I think I'd have preferred them because either my connection or theirs was making it maddeningly choppy. PROBABLY AS PART OF THE CONSPIRACY.

[acrossthelake.livejournal.com]

I've got to agree. I mean, having seen the one on dragons it's nice they tried to mix it up a bit beyond the fairly standard presentational documentary bit but the whole metaplot about The Conspiracy didn't interest me a ton. I loved the design of the merpeople, though.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

The design was great!

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I remember some similar responses to Troll Hunter. Very frustrating.

Also: Merfolk?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

But what would we do for the singular?

I've heard just plain "mer," but that sounds sort of ... abrupt. Or something.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

"Merson" for the singular? By dropping a syllable from "merperson"?

[willowistari.livejournal.com]

Troll Hunter was amazing. XD

I rather liked the mermaids too. Would have been better without the coverup stuff but otherwise pretty fun speculation.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Troll Hunter really made me wish I knew Norwegian. I was able to catch enough from the cognates with German to get the feeling that I was really missing quite a lot of humour in the English subtitles.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

It might be the slot on Discovery that confuses people - it's really no longer a science channel, but that's how it started, and the reputation still lingers a bit.

[beccastareyes]

I think a lot of my irritation would be because of the 'OMG COVERUP' folks. If something presents itself as a clear fictional documentary, that's fun, but when people are taking it seriously and I have to put on my 'Doctor Killjoy' hat to talk them down (or at least provide an opposing viewpoint for the bystanders), that is not fun at all. Basically 'how many people on the Internet am I going to have to argue with'?

I agree with you: ignoring the coverup to tell a documentary story about what scientists would do if they did find mermaids and wanted to study a non-human aquatic civilization would be a lot more entertaining to me*.

* Heck, one of my professors compared giving a research talk to telling a story in that you have a sort of narrative structure to work around and need to set up all your twists and turns and big reveals and such.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

True. It seems a little like the manufactured conflicts of reality TV: they don't trust the story to be interesting without all the DRAMA.

Seriously, we need more stuff likethe original Dinotopia. Just some audience surrogate checking out a new place/civilization and going, "WOW!"

[beccastareyes]

Or, heck, there are plenty of narratives one can tell about a place that are not 'Brave Maverick Scientists versus Government' or 'Humans are Selfish and Can't Have Nice Things (except the Protagonist)'. My go to example is the movie Apollo 13. The conflict in that lacks an antagonist: it's a bunch of very smart people working to save three lives, with the emotional drama being mostly family worry and the astronauts' feelings about missing the Moon (something they'd been training for)/possibly dying the farthest from home that any human has been.

Basically, it was a Characters versus Nature conflict, rather than Characters versus Characters/Organization.

The other example I have is most of Miyazaki's films: even the ones with Characters versus Characters make sure that it's not a solution that can be solved by 'Well, Protagonist is obviously right'; actual drama, rather than 'Antagonist is a Jerk'*. Because how do you settle a dispute between the forest gods and spirits and animals and a community of human outcasts that were saved from poverty by iron mining? You find a way for the humans and forest to work together, which mostly means getting them to actually treat one another like people and use their words, not their bullets/tusks & teeth.

* Or, in reality TV, 'Everyone is a jerk'. I recall listening to a podcast where someone was talking about reality TV and sie noted that sie liked one program (Syfy's Face Off) partially because it showed the contestants mostly being friendly and helpful to one another even as they competed, rather than trying to focus on backstabbing and interpersonal drama.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

In one of my Avatar Could Have Been Way Better gripefests, I rattled off all the possible plots that would have been more in-depth and engaging than the one they came up with: Off the top of my head: lost wanderer human falls in with Na’vi, humans and Na’vi band together to save Pandora or Earth from some outside threat, humans decide to save Pandora from some outside threat while remaining unknown to the natives, Na'vi do that for humans, Na’vi and humans establish trade, etc., etc..

Even now, about six other ideas popped into my head. Maybe Eywa gets sick and the humans with their medical technology team up with the Na'vi's in-depth knowledge to solve the problem? Or the Na'vi can bring their knowledge to Earth to help fix it! (Also, I wish they hadn't made it so that humans and Na'vi couldn't really interact without Avatars. It would've been kinda fun to see half-size humans frolicking around with their big blue buddies.)

Of course, the awkward thing about humans is that we really CAN'T have nice things a lot of the time. But call me a Star Trek optimist, because I really want science fiction to show the OTHER possibilities. Be a role model!

[shadesofmauve]

My best high school art project was a colored-pencil mermaid picture, in a gorgeous background copied from national geographic (shh, don't tell, they're copyright demons), in which I spend scads of time and brainpower designing a mermaid whose fish tail went the RIGHT WAY, with a vertically oriented tale instead of a horizontally oriented dolphin/whale tail, as commonly drawn.

Mermaids. Serious business.

(Then I wasn't allowed to have it in the school art show because it showed naked breasts, 'cause I thought the seashell thing was stupid. Too titillating with the tits. Art teacher still gave me an A, though.)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Is that the one on Epilogue? (I ... found you on Epilogue at some point.) Neat!

I went the opposite direction and just plagiarized the shit out of cetaceans for my merfolk. I always wanted their tails not to be fused legs, but rather extended spinal columns. I had a whole rationalization for how that would have evolved.

[shadesofmauve]

Yes, it is! One of the two, anyway -- the sea-cave one. Don't remember how I painted the other tail.

I kind of forgot about epilogue. And Elfwood. I have very old artwork up there and no idea what my logins are.

Spinal-columns beat fused legs any day. I didn't think about evolution because at the time I was going on the theory that merfolk were the mid-form of were-fish -- they had gills and extended spines-into-tails, but retained arms because arms are useful.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hadn't been on Epilogue forever, and then last week I started browsing it again for some reason--and then THIS WEEK it just radically changed its format. It was jarring. But I did remember your artwork from there!

I had a few rationales that were less evolutionary and more magic-ish, too. One was a sort of Lamarckian evolution, actually--some shapeshifting humans saw dolphins and were like, "Let's meet them halfway!"

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Naiads? Undines?

[tay421.livejournal.com]

I'm just going to raise my hand and wave it wildly and hope you understand it as "ME TOO, TO EVERYTHING".

I have some species of sorta-merfolk in my Bag Of Stories I'll Probably Never Write, although admittedly, due to their entire concept, their design is more fetish fodder rather than built from existing biology for the sake of realism. But since Mermaids: The Body Found, I've been slowly developing the stuff I would have wanted to see more of. Contact stories get most of the development though, since I do like to keep them as cryptids. But I have considered post-discovery scenarios, too, and even a backstory. I'm not sure if I'll post or even write those things, though, because, well, I'm afraid to ruin the ~*~mysteeeerious mystery*~* for the people who have been closely following said project(s).

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Contact stories and cryptids can indeed be fun--and if they're part of a larger world, they work especially well. I justreally like to dive in further.

I think I've seen a few merfolk types you put on DeviantArt? Or maybe I'm thinking of another species ...

[tay421.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I certainly do, too. It's been very, very hard keeping them mysterious. X)

And you probably have! I don't have much on deviantART though, since a lot of the images I've done for them aren't quite appropriate for all audiences. I thought I had more here but apparently I do not.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

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