@matty-m inquired: what type of merfolk would the Interdimensional Prince be?(not a particular niche pick, but he's been on my brain a lot lately)
(( The first and main issue to labeling the Prince as any given type of merfolk is the fact that we don’t know very much about him and the place where he comes from. Yes, I know he has an ending of his own, but this doesn’t really clarify much in this issue, since we would need to know about inner-kingdom politics and history.
The first and only thing we have to go off of is his need to find a proper marriage candidate, which does help in determining his position in the Merkingdom’s hierarchy of royals, but it doesn’t so much as help with species.
The merfolk who become suitors and enter into the suitor system are primarily Middle Royals, with a heavier bias towards Lower-Middle Royals. There are far less Low Royals in the system because they usually have otherwise guaranteed positions and very few options for upward mobility, alongside there just naturally being fewer of them.
They’re also all the non-inheriting children of their lineages. See, since Merkingdom inheritance switches into going to the youngest as you move from High Royals to Middle Royals and Low Royals, any given royal can decide that, if their heir is unsatisfactory in some way or they don’t want them inheriting their position, then they can simply have another child.
This has the side effect of producing a lot of children who couldn’t cut it as an heir or are otherwise unfavored in their given family lines, and their families have to decide what to do with them. They could give them some meager position within the family itself, or, they could use these children in a different way to bolster the reputation and position of their family inside of Merkingdom politics.
The families will then pressure and push their children into entering the suitor system. When someone becomes a suitor, they will select a given Lower-Middle or Low Royal heir in which to become a suitor of, and enter the Suitors’ Court of that royal. These Suitors’ Courts effectively work as pools of potential partners for that inheriting royal to select from and to secure their position in furthering the family lineage. Suitors can switch which royal they’re suitors under, but this is discouraged, because when I say they’re Courts, I do mean this in a literal way.
There are a lot of politics involved in governing Suitors’ Courts, and these politics determine hierarchy within the potential candidates. A royal can select any potential suitor within their court, but it’s discouraged for them to pick a lower-ranking suitor within that court, because the higher-ranking suitors are still royals with royal families behind them.
If a higher-ranking suitor feels scorned by their royal, then they can still pull on strings to politically punish that royal, justifying that they were unduly and unfairly judged and that their royal is not acting with the best interests of their family line at heart. If their families feel a royal has scorned a suitor that they sent, then they can begin to refuse to comply with that royal, souring political arrangements and poisoning favor for that royal and even potentially starting to bully them in the royal’s other Courts, if enough other royals likewise take their side or feel as though the royal is not acting with their best wishes. Especially since the family lineage of the selected suitor reaps additional benefits from the family the suitor has married into and can be used as a pawn in further negotiations, this isn’t a zero-sum game for them.
But this isn’t the only factor. There’s also the issue of the politics among suitors themselves and inside each Suitors’ Court. Suitors do not naturally form this hierarchy, even though they already come with their own available resources from their family line and their existing ranking within the system of royals. Suitors are encouraged to enforce this hierarchy over each other, trying to deliberately deter other suitors from getting in their way or working against their best interests to secure a position as a Low Royal. Suitors will even make subordinates of other suitors or form inner-Court coalitions in order to better increase their chances, and see no issue with doing whatever they can to force another suitor from their position.
Those higher-ranking suitors get first dibs on interactions with their chosen royal, better resources with which to convince their royal that they’re a more suitable candidate, and even resources at their disposal to try and force their royal’s hand in picking.
So, I think it goes without saying that the Prince would be one of these non-inheriting royals who was forced into the suitor system, obligated to pick another royal to convince to marry him so that he and his family can reap the benefits of a higher position within the hierarchy.
This is a little ironic considering he’s effectively a parody of The Bachelor, and this would make him moreso one of the candidates on The Bachelor rather than the titular bachelor himself, but I can’t see him behaving the same way he does if he was the inheriting royal in this situation. Most royals don’t feel positively towards their Suitors’ Courts, and it’s not hard to imagine why, and they often end up putting off marriage (in the not-quite marriage definition for what Merkingdom royals actually do) as long as they can.
However this also doesn’t tell us any more about what species of merfolk he would be either. He likely wouldn’t be a “vampire” merfolk, a “grouper” merfolk, an arctic merfolk, or either Mediterranean species, as all of these are extremely rare to see even as Middle Royals, and would immediately be lowest in the pecking order in any Suitors’ Court. I also don’t see him being an abyssal either, since abyssals have almost all crammed themselves into the ranks of the Low Royals and slowly lost genetic diversity from there.
Most reasonably, I think the Interdimensional Prince would likely be a Pacific Reef Merfolk, simply for the sake of retaining his bright and flashy colors, as they have multiple subspecies with different coloration that can be used to tell populations apart.
Reef merfolk are a little worse at swimming than their more pelagic cousins, having longer, thinner bodies that are better at weaving through shallower water — but they also have historically ventured out onto land more often than other merfolk, often scavenging from shorelines or seasonally moving inland for stretches of time. This isn’t true of them anymore, due to greater historical movements within the Merkingdom itself, but it does suit him as the closest merfolk come to inhabiting an “interdimensional” role.
Some of the largest and most populated cities in the region were founded primarily by them and their cultural groups, and they’re some of the most densely populated merfolk. Most of them first gained power through being major hubs through which the nomadic groups would visit with and trade, but retained their power through military might and technological innovation through specialty cultivars of sedentary organisms, able to grow them far larger and for far longer.
