Sing me a bawdy song, make me merry (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
the_sun_is_up) wrote2013-03-01 12:30 pm
the_sun_is_up) wrote2013-03-01 12:30 pm
Trolls sure are interesting!
Some 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.