Trolls sure are interesting!
Mar. 1st, 2013 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_sun_is_upSome more Homestuck ponderings, in list form:
1. Why did Kanaya and Equius pick that particular moment to replace Tavros's legs? Why did they wait until after they'd finished the game and were stuck on the meteor thinking they were going to die soon anyway? Not that the robo-legs would have helped him in-game much, since Vriska's rocket-car and his animal-communing powers already took care of his transportation and combat needs respectively. My only theory is that Kanaya was sick of Karkat being sleep-deprived and cranky all the time, and she figured a nice bloody chain-sawing would terrify him into unconsciousness for a while.
2. Why didn't Kanaya kill *SPOILER* when she had the chance? During the 3x combo showdown, why didn't she kill Gamzee as well as Eridan? I get why she didn't kill Vriska, because old crushes die hard and even Terezi had a hard time killing Vriska so I can't see Kanaya doing it. But why did she settle for merely crotch-kicking Gamzee? She could have saved everyone a lot of trouble if she'd just killed him, and her later remarks about going clown-hunting indicate that she does/did want to kill him.
My guess: Kanaya and Karkat are BFF, and Kanaya knows that Karkat and Gamzee are BFF, so even though she hated Gamzee and knew he was dangerous, she just couldn't break Karkat's heart like that. My other guess is that since Eridan's crimes were a lot worse than Gamzee's, and since Eridan's were more personal for Kanaya, she decided that Gamzee deserved a good hearty crotch-punt, but not the full chainsaw deal. (And then presumably changed her mind once Gamzee started stealing corpses and continued to be a nuisance.)
3. How did the carpenter bots know what kind of house to build Karkat?
The troll kids all have different kinds of houses based on their caste. Aradia and Tavros have small farmhouses out in the countryside, Sollux lives in an apartment complex, Vriska and Equius live in big multi-level mansions, Gamzee has beach-front property, and Feferi lives in a literal castle. But Karkat is off the scale entirely, and he was always trying to keep his blood color a secret to avoid culling, so how did the bots know what level of architectural extravagance he was entitled to? He ended up in a middle-class looking suburban home, so maybe his lusus handled it.
Or maybe he had some help from the followers of the Sufferer. It was mentioned somewhere that those guys had created the red-blooded crab lusii to raise any future red-blooded trolls who might be born, so maybe they also made other plans to care for the Sufferer's descendants. Maybe that's why Karkat wasn't culled as a grub — maybe the Sufferer's followers have been helping him from behind the scenes throughout his childhood, without him realizing it. Maybe they planned to reveal themselves to Karkat once he was grown up and tell him about his special destiny as the Sufferer's heir, but of course these plans went down the tubes once Sgrub caused the apocalypse.
4. Lately I've been spending a lot of time playing through the three Meenah-bound games from Act 6, Intermission 3. Like most people (I assume), I totally tuned out Kankri's endless word-vomit the first time around, but on a replay, it occurred to me that there was some pretty interesting world-building stuff buried under all that pompous bullshit, so I did my best to unearth it. Granted, I don't know how much of this stuff is canon and how much is just Hussie doing his keymash thing. But whatever, imma just roll with it.
First off, Kankri's blather about "pale aromantic, panquadrant demiromantic, gray palesexual" etc was probably keymash nonsense, but it raises an interesting question: does troll culture have alternate sexual orientations? Are there troll asexuals and aromantics? Being a troll asexual would suck pretty hard because you'd get culled early on by the bucket drones, but what about troll aromantics? Are there any trolls who are solely interested in red/black relationships but have no interest in pale/ashen relationships? If so, they'd at least avoid culling, but would they be considered weird or even defective for eschewing the pale/ashen quadrants? And what about polyamory within a quadrant, having more than one moirail or kismesis — would that be acceptable, unconventional, or taboo?
Kankri also mentioned that troll lifespans vary wildly across the hemospectrum, and that high-bloods can outlive dozens of generations of mid-bloods or hundreds of generations of low-bloods. This explains a lot about how the high-bloods were able to stay in power over thousands of years — it'd be hard for a low-blood crusader like the Sufferer or the Summoner to make a lasting mark on society when his lifespan is so dwarfed by that of his oppressors.
It also makes me wonder about troll culture's obsession with "one true love" and how you're supposed to have a singular destined soul-mate for each quadrant. What if your destined soul-mate is on the opposite end of the spectrum to you? You'll only have a short time together and then the higher-blooded half of the relationship will be shit out of luck. Actually I bet that provided fodder for plenty of angsty melodramatic troll films and books — we're star-crossed lovers, not just because we're from different social classes, but because I'll have to live most of my long-ass life without you. I bet Karkat ate that shit up with a spoon.
Speaking of Karkat, a lot of fans place him at the bottom of the spectrum, below Aradia, but has that ever been confirmed? I mean, couldn't he just as easily be at the other end, above fuschia? Or maybe he's outside the spectrum entirely. The Sufferer was executed, so we don't know what his natural lifespan was, and Karkat displays neither the psychic powers of the lowbloods (which all three of the lowblood Hivebent trolls possess) nor the homicidal rage of the highbloods (which all of the highblood Hivebent trolls exhibited, except for Equius who implied that he would have been like that if not for Nepeta's influence). Actually his style of house, position in the zodiac, and lack of both psychic powers and murder-mode indicate that Karkat's a green-blood at heart.
Finally, Kankri's remark that "we aren’t like humans, whose species bizarrely enough includes highly specialized roles for both sexes in the process of reproduction" which reinforces my and many peoples' suspicion that the trolls are hermaphroditic. And lol @ Kankri being creeped out by the idea of Porrim hitting on him and saying that it made him kind of understand that weird human taboo against incest.
5. Somebody on TV Tropes made an astute observation about why the trolls' storyline abruptly turned into a slasher flick: The sopor slime ran out! This wasn't just bad for Gamzee, who went into withdrawal and had nothing to keep his murderous urges in check — it was bad for everyone because they had nothing to calm their freaky troll nightmares. So everyone on the meteor was wandering around being increasingly on edge from sleep deprivation, alien night terrors, or a combination of both. No wonder Eridan and Vriska snapped and started killing people. In fact, it makes me wonder how long it was since the slime ran out, especially since Gamzee's habit of eating it would make it run out a lot faster than usual.
1. Why did Kanaya and Equius pick that particular moment to replace Tavros's legs? Why did they wait until after they'd finished the game and were stuck on the meteor thinking they were going to die soon anyway? Not that the robo-legs would have helped him in-game much, since Vriska's rocket-car and his animal-communing powers already took care of his transportation and combat needs respectively. My only theory is that Kanaya was sick of Karkat being sleep-deprived and cranky all the time, and she figured a nice bloody chain-sawing would terrify him into unconsciousness for a while.
2. Why didn't Kanaya kill *SPOILER* when she had the chance? During the 3x combo showdown, why didn't she kill Gamzee as well as Eridan? I get why she didn't kill Vriska, because old crushes die hard and even Terezi had a hard time killing Vriska so I can't see Kanaya doing it. But why did she settle for merely crotch-kicking Gamzee? She could have saved everyone a lot of trouble if she'd just killed him, and her later remarks about going clown-hunting indicate that she does/did want to kill him.
My guess: Kanaya and Karkat are BFF, and Kanaya knows that Karkat and Gamzee are BFF, so even though she hated Gamzee and knew he was dangerous, she just couldn't break Karkat's heart like that. My other guess is that since Eridan's crimes were a lot worse than Gamzee's, and since Eridan's were more personal for Kanaya, she decided that Gamzee deserved a good hearty crotch-punt, but not the full chainsaw deal. (And then presumably changed her mind once Gamzee started stealing corpses and continued to be a nuisance.)
3. How did the carpenter bots know what kind of house to build Karkat?
The troll kids all have different kinds of houses based on their caste. Aradia and Tavros have small farmhouses out in the countryside, Sollux lives in an apartment complex, Vriska and Equius live in big multi-level mansions, Gamzee has beach-front property, and Feferi lives in a literal castle. But Karkat is off the scale entirely, and he was always trying to keep his blood color a secret to avoid culling, so how did the bots know what level of architectural extravagance he was entitled to? He ended up in a middle-class looking suburban home, so maybe his lusus handled it.
Or maybe he had some help from the followers of the Sufferer. It was mentioned somewhere that those guys had created the red-blooded crab lusii to raise any future red-blooded trolls who might be born, so maybe they also made other plans to care for the Sufferer's descendants. Maybe that's why Karkat wasn't culled as a grub — maybe the Sufferer's followers have been helping him from behind the scenes throughout his childhood, without him realizing it. Maybe they planned to reveal themselves to Karkat once he was grown up and tell him about his special destiny as the Sufferer's heir, but of course these plans went down the tubes once Sgrub caused the apocalypse.
4. Lately I've been spending a lot of time playing through the three Meenah-bound games from Act 6, Intermission 3. Like most people (I assume), I totally tuned out Kankri's endless word-vomit the first time around, but on a replay, it occurred to me that there was some pretty interesting world-building stuff buried under all that pompous bullshit, so I did my best to unearth it. Granted, I don't know how much of this stuff is canon and how much is just Hussie doing his keymash thing. But whatever, imma just roll with it.
First off, Kankri's blather about "pale aromantic, panquadrant demiromantic, gray palesexual" etc was probably keymash nonsense, but it raises an interesting question: does troll culture have alternate sexual orientations? Are there troll asexuals and aromantics? Being a troll asexual would suck pretty hard because you'd get culled early on by the bucket drones, but what about troll aromantics? Are there any trolls who are solely interested in red/black relationships but have no interest in pale/ashen relationships? If so, they'd at least avoid culling, but would they be considered weird or even defective for eschewing the pale/ashen quadrants? And what about polyamory within a quadrant, having more than one moirail or kismesis — would that be acceptable, unconventional, or taboo?
Kankri also mentioned that troll lifespans vary wildly across the hemospectrum, and that high-bloods can outlive dozens of generations of mid-bloods or hundreds of generations of low-bloods. This explains a lot about how the high-bloods were able to stay in power over thousands of years — it'd be hard for a low-blood crusader like the Sufferer or the Summoner to make a lasting mark on society when his lifespan is so dwarfed by that of his oppressors.
It also makes me wonder about troll culture's obsession with "one true love" and how you're supposed to have a singular destined soul-mate for each quadrant. What if your destined soul-mate is on the opposite end of the spectrum to you? You'll only have a short time together and then the higher-blooded half of the relationship will be shit out of luck. Actually I bet that provided fodder for plenty of angsty melodramatic troll films and books — we're star-crossed lovers, not just because we're from different social classes, but because I'll have to live most of my long-ass life without you. I bet Karkat ate that shit up with a spoon.
Speaking of Karkat, a lot of fans place him at the bottom of the spectrum, below Aradia, but has that ever been confirmed? I mean, couldn't he just as easily be at the other end, above fuschia? Or maybe he's outside the spectrum entirely. The Sufferer was executed, so we don't know what his natural lifespan was, and Karkat displays neither the psychic powers of the lowbloods (which all three of the lowblood Hivebent trolls possess) nor the homicidal rage of the highbloods (which all of the highblood Hivebent trolls exhibited, except for Equius who implied that he would have been like that if not for Nepeta's influence). Actually his style of house, position in the zodiac, and lack of both psychic powers and murder-mode indicate that Karkat's a green-blood at heart.
Finally, Kankri's remark that "we aren’t like humans, whose species bizarrely enough includes highly specialized roles for both sexes in the process of reproduction" which reinforces my and many peoples' suspicion that the trolls are hermaphroditic. And lol @ Kankri being creeped out by the idea of Porrim hitting on him and saying that it made him kind of understand that weird human taboo against incest.
5. Somebody on TV Tropes made an astute observation about why the trolls' storyline abruptly turned into a slasher flick: The sopor slime ran out! This wasn't just bad for Gamzee, who went into withdrawal and had nothing to keep his murderous urges in check — it was bad for everyone because they had nothing to calm their freaky troll nightmares. So everyone on the meteor was wandering around being increasingly on edge from sleep deprivation, alien night terrors, or a combination of both. No wonder Eridan and Vriska snapped and started killing people. In fact, it makes me wonder how long it was since the slime ran out, especially since Gamzee's habit of eating it would make it run out a lot faster than usual.
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Date: 2013-03-02 04:24 pm (UTC)1. Hmm I never really thought of that, though my first instinct is to chalk it up to the fact that, contrary to what many fans seem to think, Hussie doesn't have every single detail forever planned out and it got thrown in a bit. Although, I'm not sure that everyone got together before that, either--they got together to fight the Black King, and just before the big boss fight is the worst time to (re)learn anatomy, but otherwise I think they al met each other but not at the same time, so it could have been the first real opportunity.
2. I'm not sure if she knew he was murderous? There's no reason she wouldn't think so, but it could be construed as Eridan basically being the only one she had any motivation to kill and everyone else being a bit wrong place/wrong time.
Not to mention what's the point it's not like she could keep the clown down.
3. Man who fucking knows with Karkat? He did mention to--Terezi? Or Nepeta--that he had a bunch of abandoned hives nearby. ("You could move out of your freaky tree/cave hive and squat in one of these things.") Although I'm definitely of the opinion that there's a higher frequency of symb69ls in jadebloods than in any other caste so I could definitely see him getting help there.
To jump out of order a bit, I dunno man. He's definitely below Aradia in terms of blood privilege (for want of a better word) but common theory is that he's a mutated limeblood. This is supported by zodiac position, and I guess also some stuff that Calliope said, which admittedly isn't the most reliable source but could tie into a theory about how Karkat does have a psychic power along the lines of "able to shoosh raging highbloods with a single pap" which would make sense as a limeblood trait if a theory about limebloods and sopor slime is true. (No matter what, I would consider him in the lowblood range, if just out of a stubborn sense of maintaining "highbloods have all the lifespan but lowbloods have all the numbers," which is kind of like ???? I don't know as much about the light spectrum which I guess is a better analogue but looking at the ROYGBV color wheel literally entire the lowblood half is crammed into the lowest three.)
That said, there's loads of speculation on Karkat being secretly at the top and having poorly-formed gills and being able to take over the throne through some loophole so if you're into that don't fret.
4. I'm going to try to skip over Kankri as a character because that could go on for a bit but if I don't tell my laptop I loved it.
The lifespan thing is also confirmed in the ancestor storyline, somewhere, in all that text that I honestly didn't read the first time through and I didn't read as well as I should have when I went back. I have no doubt that this makes some great tragic romance stories, and actually literally does with the magic of fanfiction.
Personally, I'm not wholly convinced that sexuality is a factor in troll reproduction. The reproductive system is described as: drones arrive, demand "genetic material," cull you if you don't give it, take it to the mother grub incestuous slurry etc. etc. But there is genetic material in every cell in your body, so it doesn't necessarily have to be sexy--it might not even have to be haploid cells, maybe the mother grub is so important because she somehow induces meiosis. Maybe it's just a blood donation kind of thing. It's not as sexy and I'm not about to deny anyone that, but if I had to headcanon it one way or another I'd imagine that there are activities that can be enjoyed in some parallel to sex but aren't reproductive.
It's also said that the more passionate a relationship, the more viable the produced genetic material is, which I think ties into the "one true pairing" culture--only have one partner because you need to be passionate. In that way aromanticism would be highly undesirable, possibly moreso than asexuality. (There are asexuals who have sex, and in fact in this situation I imagine only the most sex-repulsed would refuse, but the romantic viability thing is probably involuntary--otherwise everyone would fake it and it wouldn't be an issue.)
Polyromanticism within a quadrant would be frowned upon at best, of course, whether directly related to the drones or linking to the "one true pairing" mentality. One of the primary uses of the ashen quadrant is to prevent caliginous infidelity, after all. (Of course, personally I find that the ashen quadrant breaks a bunch of combos and it may be socially acceptable to be in multiple ashen relationships. Actually it is probably expected to be in multiple ashen relationships because you have at least one where you have an auspistice and at least one where you are an auspistice.)
As much as I like to think that trolls are hermaphroditic, I can't really feel that being supported in canon. They do have a lot of gender roles, and while those could be a universal constant I (possibly due to my own gender) don't really see gender as being something that would exist without a sexual dichotomy. The remark you listed does have implications that trolls also have two sexes, though that could exist solely in secondary characteristics or anything else.
5. Man I don't even know what to think about Gamzee this isn't really my area of expertise. My instincts say "but if that were the case then it would continue to be the case during those three years," but there is at least one alchemiter on the meteor (I believe that was how Eridan made his science wand?) and Gamzee had a pie in his sylladex at some point so obviously the code wouldn't be impossible to attain even if it had to be reverse-engineered, though it could be difficult if nobody thought to keep a code/punch a card/hold onto a totem. And of course there would have been a period when they had to ration it, or it got distributed around all those chests and had to be recollected/searched for, or they just forgot because they thought they were going to die and were kind of in limbo not sure what to do.