2017-01-20 23:22:02 ¶ ●

I’ve mentioned The New Jake Troll Genitalia Meta™ a couple times but never really posted the full concept on tumblr, so it’s probably about time for that.

First some backstory; I was getting pretty sick of people saying things in Alternian society are clearly unnatural or engineered just because they’re alien. This very often gets used as an excuse to just blatantly ignore what’s written there in the comic in favour of something one personally likes more, and in particular it gets thrown around a lot in reference to their reproductive method. People seem to be convinced that a form of reproduction involving a receptacle could never have appeared in nature.

But trolls aren’t mammals, and I think even the hardcore personal egg-laying activists are aware of this. And non-mammals do some pretty cool shit when it comes to coitus.

For one very relevant example; spiders. Many, if not most, species of spider reproduce in a way that involves what could pretty easily be seen as TWO whole receptacles; the male first ejaculates onto webbing, and then picks up the ejaculate with a specialised tube located in his pedipalp, which then gets inserted into the female and left there (i.e, the make doesn’t get that limb back).

So with this in mind, I gave myself a bit of time to think of how a receptacle-based reproductive system might work in trolls before they invented metal pails. And it didn’t take much thinking at all, actually! It came to me very quickly; trolls have silk production glands among their sexual organs, and during coitus they use the silk produced by the stimulation of the gland to weave a silk sac with which to catch the genetic material after orgasm. It provides a pretty good reasoning for having a manipulable limb-like bulge, too.

Buckets were a thing invented as the empire became too large for a drone to come and pick up sperm sacs as soon as they were weaved. With a bucket, multiple sperm sacs can be held together, and easily stored in a refrigerating device to be given to a drone when he DOES arrive (with his own filial pails in tow, of course, allowing him to carry many dozens of quadrants’ worth of material at a time).

In writing this post I almost wonder if drones use a pedipalp-like organ to take in the sperm sacs and then give them to the mother grub. They’ve certainly got a lot of spare spines on their bodies, and it would be a convenient tie-in with the real life role of insect drones as the impregnators of the queen…

( @tickfleato helped me devise some biological specifics to the process, and drew up some cross-sections of a troll-package-with-spinneret that I’m not sure have been posted yet or not? )