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chlorine

2026-10-13 13:20

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Bro this was straight ass.

This was literally just porn, so I'll keep it brief, but the story starts with Ethan—a children's storybook writer—hearing a rumor of a mermaid residing in the village he's staying at. Upon talking to an older woman, he's warned not to go past a specific rock on the beach, but of course he doesn't listen and ends up drowning. At the bottom of the seabed, he finds a pearl that magically makes him able to breathe underwater. He swims back to shore and takes the pearl with him, and while he sleeps, a merman approaches. The merman decides that he'll let Ethan keep the pearl, as he'll just make a new one—a pearl can only be made through intercourse, and the merman does not care whether Ethan lets him or not.

The main reason why this was genuinely just terrible was entirely because of the way the merman was written; I feel like the author wanted him to come across as some attractively dominant man, but it just read as corny. Everything he said, he spoke it in a way that was nonsensically aggressive. It was a total turn-off.

Another thing that I didn't like was that, at least from how I remember it, Ethan suddenly had this complex about not wanting to be alone. The pearl he steals ends up being cursed, and when he begs the merman to save him, his logic is that he doesn't want to die and seal his fate as someone who's always been alone. He wants to continue living and find someone to live for. And maybe I'm just forgetting this being set up in the first chapter, but I swear this huge personality trait came out of left field. It's a shame because I do resonate quite deeply with that, but because it was something that was just suddenly present in the story without any type of build-up or context, it felt incredibly shallow.

In general, that's kind of what this story is: shallow. If it was just shameless rape porn, that'd be one thing, but the story goes hard on Ethan's whole "I don't wanna die alone" thing at the end—in order to lift the curse placed on him from the mermaid's pearl, Ethan needs to transform into a merman. The curse only applies to humans, so if he's no longer human, viola. And the merman makes it appealing by basically going, "If you stay human, you'll die without anyone by your side even if you manage to lift the curse, but if you transform into a merman, you'll have me," and it's like . . . Why would he want you, though? You did nothing but rape him. They didn't even have one single conversation in which they just got to know each other. Everything ended in rape. And yet, somehow, the merman's appeal actually worked on him. Ethan swallows the pearl, transforming him into a merman, and the two live happily ever after.

And to end on one more complaint, I genuinely hate that you don't get to see what Ethan's merman form looks like. Like, you end on him transforming . . . And instead of seeing the transformation, you instead just see panels of the sea's tide. Like. What the fuck? That's insanely underwhelming