2024-01-06 5:23:36 ¶ ●

i’ve long held that there can be no proper discussion of all trolls as “male” without acknowledgement of the drones, but for the first time i’m also wondering if this was deliberate reasoning for the drones’ existence? Alternia’s drones arise from a lineage of machine enforcers in fiction (Terminator’s terminators and the X-Men’s sentinels are both evoked in Homestuck if only in a very indirect fashion on the part of the latter), which in Homestuck is necessarily analogous to a machine patriarchy. so in contrast to this - as well as by analogy to the social structure of colony insects - i would argue trolls are almost necessarily feminine.

last night’s Matrix rewatch in particular highlighted to me the sort of compromise Alternia’s drones have with their trolls; Alternia’s drones are biological insomuch as they require the biological processes of organisms like trolls and mother grubs to breed - in not dissimilar a way to English keeping a facade of matriarchy around his empire so long as this compromise continues to be convenient for him. but by the time the drones arrive on Earth, this pretense has seemingly disappeared entirely. drones no longer enforce reproduction in any meaningful way; they are, essentially, drones for drones’ sake.

i guess implicitly the ultimate robotification of the troll empire, as with the shedding of superfluous biological elements like caste and, eventually, trolls themselves, is all English-as-Terminator’s design. by forcing reproduction and adherence to the design on pain of death, the drones even act out on a microcosmic scale what English does on a universal level; the culling drone becomes an avatar of the inevitability of death that English represents. i ponder, even, if the idea of a drone as a male insect born from an unfertilised egg is alluded to at all by Caliborn as a male creature born from a failure to absorb his feminine half?