2024-09-10 5:41:47 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

dingodad:

> dingodad:

> > when you think of trolls as having an insectoid social structure it can sometimes seem redundant that they essentially have two “queens” in the form of the mother grub and the condesce. and i’ve heard exactly this used as an argument, that “it doesn’t make sense to interpret meenah as an insect queen because the mother grub is the insect queen”. but trolls having what amounts to 12 genders means that, for trolls, what we think of as 2 gender roles are actually divided up between those 12 castes. so while two queens might seem redundant to a human because in our understanding “queen” or “mother” is just one gender, to a troll the role of “mother” has actually been divided into two different roles; the mother who gives birth and the mother who raises the child. which probably has a lot to do with why meenah finds sex and childbirth to be so disgusting!

> looking at it like this could probably go some way to dispelling the confusion around alternia’s “drones”, too. the question (or assertion) i often hear is “how can drones be anything like ant or bee drones - the males of the colony - when it’s trolls, not drones, who are providing the genetic material to the mother grub?” again, what we really see is that sex, reproduction and the social structure have been carefully partitioned from each other: the role of “providing genetic material” has been made totally separate from the role of actually “inseminating the queen”, just as the drone’s role as breeding male has almost nothing in common with the highblood’s role as patriarchal male!

in the vein of Alternia mirroring Sburb: Skaia is basically this same concept blown up to a cosmic scale, a birth-mother divorced completely from the role of “Parent”. Skaia can create, but the scope of its power does not extend to actually raising its children. so when people blame Skaia for the goings-on of Sburb, it comes across as a deeply nihilistic interpretation because it’s tantamount to blaming one’s mother for giving birth to them!