hey guys!! wanna see a random art study drawing I did for art class? No? …. What’s that? You want to see more South Park fanart instead of a Little Mermaid-ass looking artpiece? Well, that’s too damn bad.
Now let's have fun with references and scribbled info dump for "The Lighthouse"! And today we start with merfolk Lockdown, which funnily he isn't the main protagonist but is usually a witness and driver of important scenes and plot points.
Here he is part of a small community of merfolk that lives near the shores of a growing town-city, specifically surrounding the old lighthouse and site of interest in these stories.
Our characterization of him is a mixture superficially in the start like the bastard version of Animated but a good bunch is more lighthearted and reluctant like his Cyberverse interpretation.
With his design (and of many others of the merfolk cast) I wanted to show in general how we interpret these critters in this setting: they have more monstrous appearances and behavior to point at how "alien"/strange they are to the human cast. They can't even talk or understand the "dry-land-walkers" babbling! But are fast learners and many of them will show visual traits and/or act very human-like. There are some who even care a lot for humans and even tried to interact with them! But that's a point to touch on in another post.
Still, they are not bad or good: like the elemental spirits in myths, they just have morals that follow nature's course instead of humanity's constructed (and sometimes arbitrary) moral codes. That's why they sometimes will act "wicked" in the eyes of the human cast. But in reality, they are just curious and often scared creatures that only want to guard their territories and explore what their little watery bubble of the world offers them.
Every merfolk has "mystical" abilities related to fast regeneration and/or curative "spells"... that depending on certain factors, don't always work perfectly. They are known too as "weather stirrers" by the townspeople, with folk stories about merfolk "shooing away" whole storms with their chanting.
Did I tell you they can attract land-dry-walkers with their chanting, too? And there are some obscure stories too about people in the town dreaming about them...
90% credit goes to my buddy @nine-tailed-grimm because he got such a fantastic mix of fish for Lockdown! I only put visuals to his idea x)