Patron Reward, and first specimen for #mermay
Added 2020-04-13 20:23:48 +0000 UTCPatron reward for Nik S, who wanted something regarding classic mermen, and inadvertently prompted me to start 2020 Mermay with a serious effort.
Well, because my passion for Greek mythology makes me mad when it comes to "mermaids."
"Mermen" are often considered a modern declination of a folkloristic figure that should have been mono-gender. Like female orcs or male fairies.
Well, that's maybe true for Nordic mythology or even Mediterranean mythology in the Middle Ages, but in Greek mythology the sole creatures half-human and half-fish were males!
Unfortunately, they were some inviduals and not an entire race, so we don't have a proper name for "mermen".
In Italian and the rest of roman languages we call them "tritons", borrowing the name for the most famous of them. Yeah Triton the God, son of Poseidon.
Triton the King in The Little Mermaid. In the italian dub of that movie the king gives his name to the entire male gender of his species.
Like the male humans were named after King Guy.
So I decided to use all the names of mythological fish-guys (called by Homer, the old men of the sea) to tag all the mermen designs I will create in these days.
Just to show to the world that mermen aren't just the male counterpart to the "real deal" of mermaids.
Here you see the very classic mermen. Human guys with fish tails.
I decided to give them not the name of Triton, that was just the son of that gold digger of Poseidon, but Nereus, the original old man of the sea, son of the primal deities Gaia and Pontos, and brother-in-law of Poseidon.
In this image you can see him wrestling with Heracles and showing to the viewer his big tail and very big nipples.
