The Mermaid War - Initial thoughts and brainstorming

This is going to have a bit of a different format than usual.  It's from a comment thread that was at Ana Mardoll's ramblings where I had scattered thoughts across multiple posts and I'm just going to repost several posts here.

[It was stated that a contest favored "real world fiction".]

So you mean that the idea I had Tuesday about a sprawling epic set around 1200 BC, telling the story of the Bronze Age Collapse that destroyed nearly every civilization in existence at that time (and severely damaged that few that did survive), called The Mermaid Wars wouldn't go over well?

It's probably for the best, I couldn't write it by February 5th even if it would be favored.

Anyway, Tuesday it suddenly hit me, all we have are a few cryptic references to the Sea Peoples, no one really knows where they came from, clearly it was a massive mermaid invasion.

[Ana Mardoll: This makes sense, but how did the Merpeople fight on land? Do they have transmogrifying abilities?]

I haven't quite figured that part out yet, but I have a feeling that the reason that the merpeople don't rule the world now is that the last act of the doomed civilizations was to work together, probably by means of some sort of hastily thrown together team/fellowship/thing, would be to somehow drive the merpeople back into the sea, and if there is, say, a network of magical thingys that allow the merpeople to take on humanish form and in so doing wage war on land, destroying that network might be a decent way to do it.

It probably wouldn't contain the conversion:

"But there are thousands of them now."

"Yes but the system is only triple redundant so all we need to do is take out four of them in critical areas and the entire system will collapse."

Because that sounds too modern.

[Mime_Pardox, in response to Ana's question: Ooh, I know! They arrived on land, died from a fatal inability to breathe, and then their rotting corpses brought pestilence upon their enemies.]

Or, you know, Mime_Paradox's idea slightly modified. Some sort of War of the Worlds narration about how via millions of years of work we have gained the ability to sustain ourselves on air and thus the land is our birthright and yada-yada-yada they died because they weren't as lungfishy as they thought and by the time they realized that months/years of exposure to air would lethally poison them it was too late.

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Actually there are so many different things you could do. Even if I am picturing them with tails (though there might be something to be said for tentacles) they don't actually have to have legs to fight on land anymore than we need wings to fight in air. They need 1200 BCE steampunk technology.

(Which they stole from Atlantis when it sank. Or maybe not. Probably better if they came up with it on their own.)

[Pause]

Though I should say that the original idea was to have everything as close to historical as possible with the one glaring exception being the mermaid armies. And I was just picturing them having the ability to breath in and out of water and having the ability to switch from having a tail to having legs. I have not figured out how they would be driven back into the sea in that setting.

[Dash1: Um "Invasion of the Really Pissed-Off Nereids"?]

Oh my god, yes. It's right around the date of the Trojan War so Thetis, pissed off about the death of her son, rallied all of her siblings on a campaign to kill all the land dwellers. It's not about conquest, it's about rampant destruction as a coping mechanism.

"You'll pay for the death of Achilles!"

"I'm from Egypt, I don't even know this Achilles person."

"I DON'T CARE!"

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