random hot take: nonhuman races in fiction who are just depicted as humans but diFFerEnt are boring. make it stop
i've seen this happen so many times. "faeries" who are just attractive people who use magic. "elves" that look like your typical skinny fair skinned person but with pointy ears. "mermaids" just being women (and its almost always women) with a perfect hourglass figure that just happens to end seamlessly in a smooth fishtail. "demons" literally being hot guys with horns.
like... show some creativity (and let's face it, some realism) y'all. if your mermaid lives underwater, breathes through gills, they're likely not mammalian, so why the tits? "but what if they're like sirens and lure people in by being attracti- " sure. but that's such an old, overdone trope.
give me mermaids that have evolved streamlined, scaled bodies for better underwater navigation, bulbous eyes to see in the dark depths, hell, maybe even rows of serrated teeth to rip into their hapless victims with if you're so bent on basing them off sirens. give me demons that look as scary as they act because they've literally come from hell. give me faeries, nymphs, elves and other nature-dwelling species with elongated limbs to help them climb from tree to tree, skin tones like earthy browns and greens to help them with camoflague. just stop making them look like conventionally attractive people wearing halloween costumes from etsy.
they're nonhuman races, so stop making them gratuitously human.