I know it is quite a difficult concept for people to get but merged mining does not make a child coin more or less independent. All that is happening is one us effectively reusing the same hash power with some clever mathematics. Scrypt merge mining can be done against any coin, so you can merge mine LTC and VIA or DOGE and VIA, in fact, you can merge mine as many coins as you want together choosing one as the parent. Other than that, there is no particular connection. It simply requires pools to configure full nodes for all coins concerned, then configure the mining pool to merge mine them.