#snakemen

The impact that the realities of toy marketing have on world building is a personal special interest, and the snakemen are a wild example.

Clearly inspired by the seprent-men that menaced Kull, and later Conan the Barbarian (though mostly through other writers).

Now, the serpent men were a whole species of reptilian humanoids with snakelike heads, though they've got a a lot of vague lizardness going on. Some of them were sorcerers, but they didn't have much variance in their base ability package.

The serpent snake-men, however, were in a toyline where every figure had to have a (at least mostly) unique gimmick.

Now, Skeletor is basically running the UN of Eternian jerks. If he runs across a species of appropriately buff humanoids he tracks down the biggest jerk in their society and forces them to join up. He rarely grabs two goons from the same well. He and his live a lonely life in (ironically) Snake Mountain, but they're exiles and bandits. Demigod exiles and bandits, but still-

On the other hand King Hiss is the king of an entire kingdom of normal workaday snake-folks, AND a squad of superhero snakemen with unique themes and special powers, as well as some thematically appropriate non-snake members, and the occasional robot.

That sounds familiar...

It's exactly what the Eternian humans have going with their champions.

Skeletor and his evil masters are powerful villains, certainly, but the snake men are a rival empire with some demigod champions of their own. The Horde is able to reach similar diversity only because it's packed with individual representatives of various alien worlds.

Whereas the Snake Men are clearly able to get exposed to some magical or scientific hoozit and wind up being a mutated super-being in the process.

They don't have the luxury of being able to show up as Mer-Man, king of the Mer-Men, and just coast on what your mer-mom gave ya. You need a special name-compatible skill or you gotta make a pact with an elder god or get alchemically mutated or have a really bad overbite just to get an interview, and even then you're gonna sit in a design scrapbook for a decade or-

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