The Meridean People
It’s common for stories of fantasy worlds to divide people up into various races. Since the days of J.R.R. Tolkien, these have become somewhat standardized: elves are tall and thin, dwarves are short and stout and a bit dour, and so on.
Usually, even if the traditional names aren’t used, the individual races still conform more or less to the expected stereotypes… and usually, when you scratch the surface of any given race, they’re still pretty much just people, that is to say, just like humans… except that the members of each race conform to certain stereotypes.
In other words, the only difference between fantasy dwarves and a short, stout, stubborn, gold-hungry human who likes to drink and fight is that there’s bunches of the dwarves; they aren’t individuals.
The world of Meridea is more like the real world, in that any concept of “race” is purely an arbitrary distinction of tribe, ancestry, or nationality. It’s a good deal less like the real world in other ways, though… the people are still quite fantastic by our standards, in a variety of different ways.
A native of Meridea may be oddly shaped, or have strange eyes or even extra sensory organs, or be covered in fur or feathers or scales. They may have extra limbs. They may be able to breathe water, or fly unaided. These features are hereditary—each child is born with a mixture of his or her parent’s traits—but not linked to race. A winged woman with scaly skin might have siblings with a similar appearance, but as each of them marry and mate with different people, the subsequent generation will produce considerable differences.
Thus, while the Merideans can be just as nationalistic and territorial as people in real life, and just as nasty to each other on the basis of real or imagined differences, there’s very little sense that, for instance, the blue furred people must stick together against the green feathered kind.