Mergucket AU, Mers obviously don't like/trust humans cuz of the mer hunters and whatnot, but what about the fact that mers kill boats of humans? the Merguckets seem pretty blasé, casually talking about drowning folk. Not really sure how they can claim the moral high ground on that. And surely this comes up between the Merguckets and the Stans when the time they worked for Bill pops up. I cn't imagine it would sit alright the Stans that Merguckets claiming betrayal like they hadn't killed humans.
True enough, the MerGuckets are sirens, and sirens kill humans by the shipload.
But unless they have motive, sirens don’t seek out ships. In the original drabble I wrote ages ago, Fiddleford warned the Stans that they were sailing into mer inhabited waters. The MerGuckets (and sirens in general) only ever sink ships that venture into their territory. There are better ways to deal with intruders, and the MerGuckets don’t really have an excuse for killing humans as frequently as they do, but the MerGuckets aren’t like mer hunters.
Mer hunters seek out mers to kill. They kill for sport, and in the viewpoint of merfolk, sirens only kill for protection; to protect their home, colony, etc from humans. Mer hunters set up traps for mers that venture on shore, and map out where mer colonies are. If a mer hunter comes across a school (how merfolk refer to the family they build with their mate and guppies), the parents are killed and any guppies or eggs are stolen, with the intent of selling the parents’ scales as well as the guppies and eggs. Entire colonies have been decimated by mer hunters before. As a result, merfolk automatically target any human that comes into their territory, on the off chance that they are mer hunters.
And, generally speaking, sirens won’t drown human children or infants. Some merfolk will do that, but they’re in the minority. Human children or infants are typically rescued from a sinking ship, and either given to a human family discreetly (they try to find relatives or close friends of the child) or adopted by mers.
There’s a lot of bad blood between merfolk and humans, and the killing from both sides only exacerbates it. Yes, the MerGuckets have killed humans before, and talk casually about it (which is a cultural thing), but they don’t seek out humans, or kill children. None of this excuses the fact that the MerGuckets are killers. But they have a code. Mer hunters don’t. So yeah, Stan and Ford call the MerGuckets out on their hypocrisy. And the MerGuckets admit that they’ve done shady stuff. But they wouldn’t do what mer hunters do.