#handler connla

“Hi! I love your work on Raikou because ohhhh my gods her design is a dumpster fire. I wanted to know if you’d be willing to do mermaid from SMT IV? She apparently has separated legs and stuff and would love to see what you’d do with her lmao

Thanks!”

My first thought upon receiving this drop-off was “oh my lord, someone’s descaled her!”

Monster types always, and I mean ALWAYS get some of the worst care out of all Animes. It’s no surprise though given they’re only considered cool and trendy when stripped of most of their genuinely monstrous traits! This mermaid is a good example of that. You can see that her old handler CLEARLY stripped her of most of her scales to make her more appealing and likely went so far as to split her legs to a certain degree. You can see that they’re still partially fused from the knees down...

It took quite some time and work, but...

I had to go through and separate her legs entirely for her own sake as she was having just the worst time trying to swim with the partial job her last owner did on her. It was truly heartbreaking to do but in the end she’s better off for it. Then came the rest of the process, which had to be handled delicately.

Removing a lot of scar tissues left behind by the vicious descaling process allowed for rounds of medication to be administered that eventually promoted new scale growth! You can see here her natural scale growth pattern has returned!

We keep her pretty much exclusively in as big of a salt water tank as we could afford but I do plan to either rehome her or look into sending her to a bigger sanctuary more suited for her needs. Monster types are a peculiar breed as they tend to more closely resemble the Monsters their type is named for genetically speaking than their fellow Animes! This can make them extremely challenging to keep up with for unsuspecting adopters who think they’ll behave like their Non-Monster Anime counterparts.