2024-05-03 5:40:01 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

dingodad:

> dingodad:

> > i’m still so mad at how disastrously hiveswap managed to seemingly un-worldbuild the jadebloods. like pre act 2 i could have told you with pretty good arguments from the text what the role of the jade caste is in alternian society but now i struggle to get anyone to give me a straight answer on whether jadebloods even live in the caves taking care of the mother grub anymore. like can you tell me?

> ok a disclaimer that our sources on this do largely come from i) doc scratch’s ancestor intermission and ii) act 6 information about beforus. so i’m going to preempt any comments about how this information may not be reflective of current-day alternia: THERE IS ESSENTIALLY NOTHING NEW IN PARADOX SPACE. EVERYTHING THAT CAN HAPPEN IS EITHER A VISUAL OR SUBSTANTIVE REPRODUCTION OF SOMETHING THAT HAS ALREADY TRANSPIRED ON A TIMELINE. alternia, beforus and scratch’s fanfiction thereof are all reflections of each other, intended to weave together into a universal truth which broadens the reader’s understanding of the text!! which is to say in simple terms: unless the text outright tells us or gives us some other reason to believe alternia has changed in the time since the dolorosa and kanaya, I am going to assume the information we are given remains meaningful.

> TO THAT END: since this isn’t the first time i have made a post along these lines, once and for all on the record, here is my assessment of the role of jadebloods as outlined by homestuck 2009-2016, in which there is a lot more to go off than people often seem to believe (“homestuck has no lore!!” - the clueless poster 2009-ongoing).

> the Dolorsa belongs to “the rare class assigned strictly to serving the mother grub in the caverns, forbidden from visiting the surface”; from Act 6 Intermission 1, part 1, they are “the caste almost solely devoted to tending to the mother gru8, hatching the young and proliferating the 8rood”, and according to Kanaya they “Tended To Spend A Lot Of Time In The Brooding Caverns Where A Convenient Source Of Light Was Often Handy” (A6I3, part 3). the last part is important; basically the entire point of rainbow drinkers, as far as Kanaya is concerned, is that they glow because they live in dark caves.

> Kanaya herself might stand out as an exception to this, but I think there are obvious reasons as to why that would be. for one thing, she is the exception; she never came from the caverns in the first place, she landed on Alternia from space. she never underwent trials, she never went through the process of building a hive with her lusus - she lives in a copy of Jade’s home, grown from a seed - and even that she was chosen by her particular lusus is “an event so rare as to elude documented precedent.” she is in the truly unique position of having been raised by a mother grub rather than being the nanny of one.

> (there is also some implication that Kanaya having been raised in daylight played into some deliberate plan on Scratch’s part: “What would you say if I said a dutiful girl raised in the daylight was protected by a bulb-headed guardian, and learned to glow in the dark after death?” this lines up with something we’ve known about Alternia’s undead from the beginning, which is that they “feast on the light and the living” - seemingly rainbow drinkers perform some kind of photosynthesis. this could be seen as contradicting Kanaya’s speculation above, or it could simply be that these vampires follow the same basic rules as glow in the dark stickers (and perhaps the very reason they’re usually kept underground is to keep them unpowered?) - but the basic premise that Kanaya’s living situation was specifically engineered and not the norm remains.)

> perhaps more importantly, I also think it’s pretty clear within the context of the rest of the trolls that Kanaya is not yet in the position to be playing the assigned role of her caste. just as Karkat aims to be a threshecutioner and can expect to be sent off into space for this role when he reaches adulthood, working in the caverns is obviously something that awaits - or would have awaited, had other plans not intervened - in Kanaya’s future. crucially, it has only ever been the “vast majority of adult trolls [who] are off-planet”; there is some minority of adults who stay behind, and, being the smallest minority among the castes, the jadebloods are an obvious candidate for that. in short being isolated underground is the jade caste’s own version of being isolated among the stars (quite plausibly, I should reiterate, because being exposed to the sun offers them an undue advantage in the struggle of the castes(/sexes) of Alternia’s society). all the other big rules of Alternian society - chiefly that a) after the Summoner’s rebellion the Condesce decided troll adults and children were to be strictly separated from each other and b) that once a young troll pupates into their mature form they emerge from the brooding caverns to stake out a life of their own - make it clear that once they move down there, jadebloods are auxiliatrices for life. ultimately, Scratch’s remark about the Dolorosa being forbidden from surfacing only makes explicit what is already clear when you put together all the other pieces.

> so when i see the word “cloister” used in reference to jadebloods what comes to mind is already pretty familiar to me; it comes naturally to draw connections between the sequestered subterranean jadebloods and catholic monasticism. i just don’t really understand what Hiveswap is saying when it uses that word. like, i would like to. it just is not clear to me like it’s clear when i read Homestuck