since we have this no gendered species tag thing, shouldnt we alias them away to something else? like merfolk or something. and then whatever they are aliased to should imply humanoid and marine.

Mermaid is almost a generic enough term that it borders on being "good enough" as far as gender neutrality goes.

The other option, merfolk, is more of a Wizards of the Coast thing but I don't know if it's trademarked or not (I doubt it). Either way this could be an viable option as long as the WotC version doesn't have connotations of it's own.

Agreed with the implications as well.

Summary:

• marine, humanoid
• merfolk, mermaid, merman

more like murr-maid amirite

I have looked at this several times wanting to suggest it before, but wasn't sure what the strange other creatures currently tagged under merfolk were. I guess this thread answers that question.

So I think combining mermaid/merman into something like merfolk is a good idea. It also happens to be a fairly common gender neutral term for them anyways.

But should the WOTC species be disambiguated to something like merfolk_(WOTC)? It looks like some of the older WOTC art would qualify for both tags, but then they redesigned their species to have legs later. Which isn't typical of most other versions of mermaid/merman/merfolk and makes me wonder if it at least the legged ones should stay tagged separately in some way.

As weird as it sounds, it might be worth it to implicate merfolk_(wotc) to merfolk to make it a bit more obvious (because they will probably get tagged with both anyways).

Come to think of it, this might be an option for those pesky Monster Hunter wyverns too...

Disclaimer: This isn't a very well thought out plan.

furrypickle said:
I have looked at this several times wanting to suggest it before, but wasn't sure what the strange other creatures currently tagged under merfolk were. I guess this thread answers that question.

So I think combining mermaid/merman into something like merfolk is a good idea. It also happens to be a fairly common gender neutral term for them anyways.

But should the WOTC species be disambiguated to something like merfolk_(WOTC)? It looks like some of the older WOTC art would qualify for both tags, but then they redesigned their species to have legs later. Which isn't typical of most other versions of mermaid/merman/merfolk and makes me wonder if it at least the legged ones should stay tagged separately in some way.

I wasn't ok with the idea until you brought up maybe using merfolk_(wotc). Now I'm totally for it. +1

Well...
There's also the lizardman and lizardfolk tags. Most modern RPGs use the latter term, so we'll probably have to combine and disambiguate those too at some point. (Lizardman is mostly tagged for the Soul Calibur character, but there's some generic lizardmen in there too.)

so are we gonna alias merman and mermaid to merfolk then?

Mutisija said:
so are we gonna alias merman and mermaid to merfolk then?

I think this is probably what is going to happen, but the humanoid tag is still kind of pending right now. I know that Pickle had some sort of plan for these, but I don't know the details. I'll let you know as soon as I do.