Problems with pronouns

[Ireth]

In a short story I'm working on, the human MC winds up in a community of merfolk. The MC has been raised to believe merfolk are demons, little better than beasts who slaughter humans without mercy.* So it would make sense for him to refer to them with the dehumanizing pronoun "it", regardless of each merperson's gender -- which, to be fair, the MC will have trouble figuring out anyway. My trouble is, with every single merperson being referred to as "it" or "the demon with [physical descriptor]", it has potential to be enormously confusing. Any thoughts on how to keep things clear? If anyone wants/needs a specific example, I'll gladly post an excerpt.


*He's partly right -- they DO kill humans, and they have no particular qualms about it, but a) they aren't demons or beasts, and b) the killing is a necessary part of their way of life. It is both a coming-of-age ritual for youths and a means of increasing the population; the humans they drown are reanimated as living merfolk, who are expected to mate with other merfolk. The majority of the drowned-and-reanimated merfolk are male, as live births typically result in a gender ratio skewed heavily toward females.

EDIT TO ADD: Another major issue is a language barrier between the MC and the merfolk, which they only begin to attempt bridging toward the end of the story. Communication is thus very difficult, and the MC isn't interested in learning any of the merfolk's names for a while.

 

[X Equestris]

The only thing I can think of is limiting the number of merfolk present at any one time. That might help limit some of the confusion.

 

[Ireth]

Unfortunately the circumstances of the story make that nigh impossible, but thanks for the suggestion. I'll do my best to limit the number of merfolk he directly interacts with, though. That might help.

EDIT to add specifics: (spoilers for my entry to Phil Overby's Diversity Challenge)

Spoiler

The MC goes fishing and encounters a group of young merfolk who try to drown him as part of their coming-of-age ritual. MC stabs a merman in self-defense with a metal-headed spear, and a mermaid drowns him in revenge. She then has him revived/transformed into a merman himself. When MC wakes up, he's surrounded by angry young merfolk and older priestesses. Before he can get a handle on what's going on, the mermaid who drowned him hauls him off to see the merman he stabbed, inside a grotto full of concerned merfolk (i.e. the rest of their pod). Only after that does the MC attempt to introduce himself and find out the name of the mermaid who drowned him rather than ineffectually asking things like "Who are you? Where am I? Why did you do this to me?!"

 

[Nimue]

It can be a little grating if not done carefully, but you can use physical descriptors as nicknames, like "the greenish one," "the dark-eyed one" or even "Fish-Scales" or "Whale-Voice" for merfolk with those particular characteristics. The thing is, once you've established their nickname, don't vacillate between characteristics. If you call one of them both "the golden-eyed one" and "the stripe-tailed one", it's just going to get confusing.

Sorry I don't have better advice than that, I think that really is going to be a difficult scene to write!

 

[Ireth]

Nicknaming by physical descriptors could be hard. They all have silver eyes and weedy-looking hair, for one thing. Hair and scales do come in a variety of colors though; green and brown hair is most common, with red being less common and purple being least common. Their looks vary from "slightly human-ish" to "slightly fishy" depending on whether they're pure merfolk, or a changed human, or a child of the two. Pure-blooded merfolk have either silver, sand-beige or catfish-grey scales, with no patterns or stripes; changed ones come in any color humans do. Mixed-bloods have intermediate colors.

I like the idea of nicknaming by tone of voice, but that is one thing that is really impossible. The MC is deaf, and his sign language is a huge factor in the language barrier. (For the record, the mermaid who SPOILER drowns him is deaf too. Her sign language is completely different.)

 

[Penpilot]

You could just make up a Merfolk pronoun to be used in place of him and her/ he and she.

 

[Ireth]

That was more or less my intent with using "it", but like I said, it just ended up confusing.

 

[Penpilot]

If it's really causing major confusion, maybe keep it simple and just use regular pronouns.

 

[wordwalker]

It seems like this is only partly a pronoun issue; maybe his fear is great enough to call a group of sentient but hostile beings a belittling "it."

The real question is how to distinguish them with something similar to names, and I think Nimue's got it right. When he's been sitting with them for some time, his mind will start forcing distinctions onto them just to show how he's struggling to keep track of them. "The one who grabbed him," "the one that won't look at him," "the gentler one," and all the ways terms like that could start to simplify in his head into nicknames. It's a bit awkward, but the scene is about being awkward, at the mercy of people he can't deal with normally and has to.

 

[Nimue]

I'd agree with wordwalker--he would be forced to develop distinctions between them, even if they're not as clear as eye color or hair color. If he can't perceive any differences between individuals, then write it that way, that he has no idea who's interacting with him or what an individual has done. They would simply be a crowd.

 

[Ireth]

Part of the problem here is that he doesn't get the chance to sit with the merfolk for a long period of time. As soon as he joins the merfolk, a very angry mermaid starts chewing into him (metaphorically) while he's still trying to orient himself; she then hauls him off to another part of the merfolk's village, where he ends up among more merfolk than he can count or differentiate from one another. And there's still a language barrier between him that prevents the MC from fully understanding why he's there or what's going to happen to him, or why the merfolk are so angry at him.