hi this is jake, i ramble on about alternia and the rest of the homestuck universe, and i’m making an attempt to run a blog where i can contain these various ramblings.
so feel free to send me an ask about anything you want to discuss, and help me get this blog started!
kinda fascinating the implication that gold was only a symbol of royalty on alternia because of a cultural association with seadwellers.
like in hivesbent only seadweller characters ever wore any of it, even though there were other (namely highblooded) characters who were by all means wealthy and yet didn’t choose to wear a single piece (i’m thinking specifically of mindfang here, but you could probably think of other examples).
and then when troll society springs up again, without any reason for a seadweller royal class to exist, the crowns they gift to their creators are made of a much more trollian, chitinous-looking material, even though from what we can see humans still seem to value gold as a royal metal.
my first guess was of course ‘maybe gold just isn’t as rare in the alternian empire, because of interstellar colonisation maybe?’ but that isn’t consistent with the apparent differences in the value of gold between Earth-C human and troll cultures.
so it just seems that for whatever reason, trolls don’t value gold like humans do, and that any perceived real value of gold (for indeed, it doesn’t even have uses in circuitry in a world where technology is purely biological) was invented purely perhaps by a leader of seadweller royalty, who wanted to make herself feel rich in a world where nothing has real value because everything belongs to a collective empire?
Some highbloods can get psionics just because that’s a thing that happens sometimes with highbloods!
All trolls have the proper biological infrastructure for psychic powers (a psychic organ in the brain, various ‘piping’ accompanying the nervous system, etc.); it’s just that different castes and caste groupings have different likelihoods of developing different forms of psychic expression. In the cast of cobalt trolls, sometimes this manifests itself in an ability to read and manipulate other trolls’ brains.
In the words of Aranea Serket;
So the power itself seems to be the ability to simply access another troll’s mind, and what exactly the user chooses to do with this access is entirely up to them. In some cases, it can be used to actually take control of the mind, and in other cases simply to observe the things happening there.
The user of the powers can choose to train themselves in any aspect of this power, and with more training and practice, this ability becomes easier and easier to use. For a troll who practices a lot in reading the emotions or thoughts of another troll, it may become natural to them over time to the point where they do it without intending to. In extreme cases, the same might happen to a troll who dabbles in mind control a lot.
Vision Eightfold seems to be a completely separate thing that enables one to see through certain mystical barriers (such as the exterior of a juju like the Magic Cue Ball). Its exact nature is unknown, but one can extrapolate certain likelihoods based on implications about similar mutations; namely Vision Twofold. The main application of Twofold was allowing its user (namely Sollux) to see not only into the future, but also into the real world - thus subverting the Blind Seer fate that befalls oracles who do not have the same mutation, like Terezi Pyrope (who only had vision Onefold, because her sight was destroyed).
So one can assume that Vision Eightfold allows the user to see into seven realms or facets of reality in addition to standard visual sight. Whether this must include the same facets that Twofold includes (i.e. possible futures) is unclear, but the fact that Aranea states she doesn’t have precognitive vision (in the page linked above) would suggest that this is not the case.
One very likely explanation is that Eightfold allows the user to see into the realms of probability (tying into seven additional realms, as a lucky number) - possibly meaning users of Eightfold are able to see into seven possible futures, and make calls on which will be the most likely outcome of a situation based on which outcome occurs in the most possible futures. This works well with Mindfang’s ability to see into the Magic Cue Ball; magic balls are objects that operate on a basis of probability, having a dice on the inside, so it is most likely Mindfang was actually able to see which result the Cue Ball’s dice was most likely going to land on, rather than actually being able to see what the dice landed on.
(Though of course, being Magic, the Cue Ball’s dice always has a 100% chance of landing on something, i.e the right answer. Which means for all intents and purposes, in the case of the Cue Ball, Mindfang could see the answer.)
Of course, it would be absolutely plausible for a troll to use their Vision Eightfold to predict what someone is thinking or feeling; and in this case the lines between the powers could become blurred in individuals like the Serkets. Likely the Serkets do actually use these powers in conjunction and they are intertwined rather like scent and taste - but another troll with only a nose would still be able to smell, and a troll with only a tongue would still be able to taste. So to speak.
I’m inclined to agree with your general point, but not with everything specifically.
For starters I don’t think anyone is really in a position to say ‘why would the empire put x in the hands of children???’ because the empire left the entire homeworld and birthing ground of the kingdom in the hands of children. They basically put 50% of the entire population’s education in the hands of children, and also put a bunch of dangerous animals in the hands of children. The empire essentially put children in their own hands. Even if they didn’t leave factories or blueprints around for developing stuff, the wiggly little fuckers would figure it out eventually anyway.
An important distinction should also be made between ‘gun’ and ‘hyper powerful laser weapon’ such as Ahab’s Crosshairs. Yes, there’s a reason none of the other trolls have guns, but that reason is that Ahab’s Crosshairs is a legendary weapon. In the context of Homestuck, you can’t manufacture those, unless you’re a god, given the power or resources of a god, or an alchemist who already knows how to make one somehow. Same case as the Flourite Octet. It’s a
magicsuperscientific gun. It’s a special case.Guns proper (metal, shoot bullets, boom boom rattatatata) I don’t have the same problem with, for the exact reason I specified earlier; clearly they aren’t any more effective than a sword or a club or a bow, on Alternia, or else everybody would be using them. For a bunch of losers who can just take smacks to the skull, slams to the back and various cuts and limb losses like it’s fucking nothing, what do you think a bullet is going to do? Gamzee didn’t seem to think it was really anything serious.)
(”Jake, Gamzee is immune to everything!” i’ll fight you dude)
My ‘issues’ with conventional guns on Alternia are more contextual. Like, Alternia’s history is obviously vastly different. Highbloods never needed guns to oppress people; they’ve got chucklepsychics at their disposal for that exact purpose, and also they’re huge and essentially unstoppable, physically speaking. So for that reason, guns wouldn’t be mass-produced in the way they are on Earth. I see their creation as being delegated to individual gunsmiths and produced in much the same way any other weapon, like a sword or sickle, would be made.
In conclusion some trolls have guns but that doesn’t really give them any real advantage over a troll with a sword, because trolls.
The way I like to look at it is that Alternia operates on video game logic (and was essentially engineered by Doc Scratch to be as such).
There are legendary weapons, which are rare, and only a couple of people can have them - usually people who work for them (FLARPers, for example). They’re powerful and obviously give an immediate advantage to anyone who can get their hands on one; but they’re not an immediate win, especially against someone with a weaker weapon who has actually trained in combat in order to catch up (see; Eridan with his white wand versus Kanaya with a standard lipstick chainsaw).
And then there are guns. To use a gun is just to play a gun-user character. A gun-user isn’t more powerful than any melee warrior, or any mage; they just have different strengths and weaknesses. A gun-user can fire quickly and deals some relatively heavy hits, but they have to reload, are limited to what they can carry in terms of ammunition, and are considerably disadvantaged at close range.
These facts aren’t helped any by the fact that I tend to think of Alternia’s firearms as being more like futuristic biological spacemuskets and blunderbusses than the equivalent of today’s assault rifles and such, but that’s probably an elaboration for another post.
Sure, the comic says the lusus naturae act as the trolls’ parents, but it also says things like this;
…the young troll must learn to function as a sort of zookeeper.
…and it’s clear from just spectating the interactions between trolls and their lusii in canon that it’s very much a mutual hand-claw-possession. They angst over feeding and taking care of their lusii in general.
The lusus is more than an ‘animal parent’; it’s the alien equivalent of a vicious hunting dog, devoted to its charge to the death, and this is only made all the more clear by the fact that trolls continue to employ their lusii well into their adult roles.
There’s a reason trolls seem to bring their lusii almost everywhere with them, even when it’s just leaving the house!
They stop you from getting fucking killed, dude.
To return briefly to the topic of firearms on Alternia - there’s a post somewhere on tumblr dot org about guns in Middle Earth, and why it’s so much better for the elves to use bows, specifically. It’d be a pain for me to find the post, but I remember the basic gist, and the same basic logic applies pretty well to Alternia too.
Guns rose to superiority over bows because you can mass produce a bunch of guns and give them to a bunch of dudes and they can just run out there and kill people with little to no training, because guns shoot and do damage at the pull of a trigger.
This is great when you’re up against a bunch of archers who are limited in that they need to be trained for some time before they’re proficient with their weapon; but on Alternia, archery is the highest form of martial art for highbloods, who are physically strong enough to both use a bow really well and also resist a lot of bullets.
Obviously a musket isn’t going to be very effective against a big strong highblood, especially given that by the time you get to reloading the thing, there’s going to be an arrow or a juggling club in your skull. If you invent a weapon that pretty much penetrates an inch or less of highblood flesh and not a whole lot else, you’re probably not going to continue research and development on that line of weaponry; it’d be a waste of time.
So who’s going to actually develop guns on Alternia? Lowbloods have no real use for them. Highbloods have no real use for them either! So I definitely see guns on Alternia as more like “”hobby weapons””; things that trolls build and use individually because their combat strengths and weaknesses suit them. Which is essentially how I see weapons working on Alternia in general.
I don’t think there’s really that much of a distinction between the two phases; the lusus is a “”domesticated”” animal whose job is to raise the troll as its own child, and that involves both defending their mutual hive and feeding them (even beyond the point at which the troll can feed themselves, which is where we get the lusus dragging ‘useless’ dead things hive from - they are very much valid food, just not as good as pizza you can order from a store).
I think 4-5 is a pretty unlikely cutoff point too since that seems like the age whereafter trolls would start to venture outside their hives a lot more, and we can see pretty plainly that trolls bring their lusii places.
I have analysed the lusus/troll relationship at some length before, but the more I read into it the more close the bond seems to be. In fact it’s seeming very much like the reason any trolls are violent at all is because they were literally raised by violent monsters, teaching them how to survive.
jadebloods like to give names to the grubs who scamper around their caverns, in the tongue unique to them, taught by the mother grub herself in skeletal whispers. it’s said that knowledge of one’s “original name” grants one great power.
Yeah! Thinking about Guidestuck was one of the things that initially got me thinking about how tightly-woven the relationship between troll and lusus really is.
The bits of worldbuilding we did get about scarvenrot’s interpretation of that Alternia were a really good example of how interchangeable the two roles really are - though the curse of the ATH code meant that all of the Hivebent lusii had to die before getting into the game, we can easily imagine Redglare doing a similar thing with Pyralspite.
The troll/lusus relationship is very much a cultural exchange. The lusus bestows upon the troll the ways of the wild, provides them with services that help them survive in a wild and vicious world, and teaches them the advantages of being independent; in return, the troll bestows upon the lusus the ways of civilisation, provides it with services that help it survive in a civilised world, and teaches it the advantages of being able to depend on someone.
The Alternian empire is half the way it is because of the animals that make up 50% of its population.
Red honey as a result of bees feasting on cherries
