Ok but how do you think everything would be powered on alternia? Bioelectricity? Harnessing the ungodly alternian sun? We know Tavros had a windmill but I'd guess that's more aesthetic than function
my immediate response to this was that it seems very silly to insinuate a troll, let alone a lowblood, would have something more aesthetic than function in their hive. but then i remembered that trolls design their hives as tiny babies! so of course it doesn’t do anything. baby tavros just liked swirly things. who doesn’t.
(do you think trolls get a big catalogue of pieces to design their hives out of?? are there trolls out there with garage doors just jutting out of their walls?? is that why sgrubian hives all just have the random flag-sunshield things just hanging everywhere? maybe the parts you get to choose from are expanded upon as you go up the hemospectrum.)
i think the answer to this is pretty simple actually! yes, they use biological energy, and yes, they do also harness the Alternian sun (let’s be real, you gotta be a fool not to). but not in the ways you’re probably thinking of!
DIDJA SEE THAT ONE ABOUT RAINBOWDRINKERS BASICALLY BEING HOLLOWED OUT HOSTS FOR GIGANTIC BLOOD EATING PARASITE WORMS??
ive seen it! i can’t exactly say it’s one of my favourites tho
idk it’s just one of those headcanons that attempts to provide a hard science fiction answer to something, whereas i much prefer the opposite option that just goes “homestuck is a world where the pseudoscience is basically indistinguishable from magic and trolls are just fuckin sick powerful aliens from another dimension”
it’s been a long time since i rly read the concept in its fullest but to me it just raises more questions than it answers and id rather have jadebloods be rly powerful of their own right rather than pin it all on a parasite
Yeah I pretty much agree! Just thought it was a nice weird gross one, lol
I was working on something similar the other day about daywalkers being controlled by a kind of cordyceps fungus. Like cordyceps infested caterpillars, at the end of the fungus’s life cycle they stumble into the caverns and ‘die,’ their bodies dissolving and infecting the newly hatched grubs on their way out. In living trolls, the fungal infection isn’t terribly noticeable. Rashes, dry flaky or discolored skin, mouth sores, hair loss, a weakened immune system, in addition to symptoms like chronic pain, anxiety, and aggression.
The increased aggression urges the host to get into fights in hopes of further spreading the virus through swapping bodily fluids during fights/intimacy, and since the fungus doesn’t really care if the host dies, the additional risk isn’t a big deal. When the host eventually dies, the fungus take full control of the body and begins growing to infest it totally. The body hides under ground at night, and during the day the fungal blooms open to absorb the sunlight and the body wanders seeking additional nutrition to feed the fungus and prolong the limited supply of matter which is the host body itself. It also continues attempting to spread spores through any contact with living creatures. When the body begins to deteriorate too much for the fungus to keep it moving, it limps into the caverns and begins again.
(moving discussion to this blog bc it seems more suited for paragraph format headcanon discussion)
I saw you talking about this the other day in the Discord chat! Though I’m personally more inclined to think of shadow droppers as being plant-based, for a couple reasons.
Firstly fungal zombies are already a pretty common trope in human fiction (The Last of Us being a prominent example), and just personally i’d see using it for Alternian zombies as being inconsistent with how they’ve seemingly been made to display traits opposite to those of pop culture zombies, like coming out during the daylight, instead of burning in it. In pop culture fungi are also sometimes seen as nighttime things, whereas plants are daytime things (Plants versus Zombies, for example, has plants being inactive and being replaced with mushrooms during the night).
In the same vein, the fact that they’re stated as feeding off light is a pretty big indicator to me! Fungi aren’t photosynthetic, but plants definitely are, and it would provide a pretty solid explanation as to why they’re active during the day but not during the night; puppeting a body around takes a lot of energy, and plants get energy specifically from the sun.
The reason my plant zombies hunt down the living is mainly just for nutrients. Continuously feeding off the host body would eventually create the need for a movement of host, which would be really energy inefficient when the host body already has a system for taking nutrient-rich stuff into its body for various processes to break down! and putting roots into the ground would just be really impractical in lots of ways.
I imagine the ‘infection’ spreads mainly by inhaling the seeds, so the growth of the plant is usually pretty fatal and pretty unavoidable if you’re dumb enough to spend your time hanging around zombies.
My rainbow drinkers are a similar case but they operate just by having a plantlike biology of their own; their body runs off pigments (pseudoscience!) which they can get both by ingesting troll blood, which as we all know is heavily pigmented, or by collecting sunlight, which their body turns into pigment.
You know if you subscribe to any kind of ‘troll computers are brains / brainlike / compatible with troll brains’ ideology, you could probably see chucklevoodoos as having applications almost similar to automatic administrator privileges, even just from what we’ve seen in canon; the ability to read and exploit weaknesses, spawn in items and remotely override and puppet the system are all pretty examples.
Basically what I’m saying is, chucklevoodoo users are basically biotech hackers and I’m ashamed the idea didn’t come to me sooner.
I think on-world it’s illegal because when I think of trolls being put under culling scrutiny for genetic material, I tend to think of it as being a one-off coming-of-age event that happens at around 11 sweeps, roughly a sweep before trolls get conscripted.
so on homeworld Alternia it’s a pretty big deal to make sure you’ve got your own partners with which to produce genetic material, so people know you’re the real deal and you’re capable of finding the sufficient amount of breeding partners to keep Alternia’s baby factory running.
of course, Alternia is run by under-12s with supervision from only a relative handful of adults, so there’s not that much to actually stop people from running sex business, especially given that the higher-ups in the Alternian land dweller social order seem far more hedonistic than conservative (let’s be honest, pole dancers are pretty much essential when it comes to clown gangster speakeasies - subjugglator families and their indigo-down lackeys are just gonna keep getting away with doing things deemed illegal by the sea dweller royal court because that’s how Alternia functions).
the main thing that stops it from becoming an issue is the fact that you look like a total loser when you walk out of the brothel carrying a bucket of material mix. it basically means you’re not good enough to find a breeding partner of your own, and that makes you a useless member of Alternian society. everyone’s gonna make fun of you because at the end of the day the idea is to have as much fun as you can while still making time for providing your dues to the empire - and if you’re accepting a sex worker’s contributions as part of your own, you’re clearly losing at the providing your dues part of the game.
I think a big thing that stems from this is sex workers being held with a very special high regard of their own by others, for several reasons. one reason being that in a society run by clown gangs, illegal stuff is cool, the illegal-er the better; and being a sex worker ranks pretty high on that scale. another reason being that people are literally PAYING YOU MONEY to mate with you; it doesn’t get much better than that on the breeding success leaderboard!
basically sex workers are accruing several times as much contributed material as anybody else is and they’re getting PAID to do it. when they walk away from a job with a pail of material in one hand and a wad of cash in the other, that’s a walk of power. which sort of just adds to the shame of being the guy who pays for sex and then comes away from it with their own bucket; you probably either begged or paid a ton of extra cash to have your share of the interpersonal slurry. how much more uncool can you get?
while this specific described practice is probably more of a land dweller thing, since sea dwellers aren’t constricted by the law enough to really have to develop such a culturally intricate practice, I think it’s probably one of the things the Condesce loves most about the Clown Culture she’s so obsessed with - Nicki Minaj (more commonly known as Human! Queen Peixes) literally wrote a song simply entitled “I Endorse These Strippers” and it’s a sentiment she’s supported in several of her other verses. because of this, what’s generally considered “The Condesce Look” in modern Alternian fashion is very likely derived heavily from subjug/highblood/land dweller stripper and sex worker culture.
on the off-world the laws are probably a lot more lax regarding this sort of thing, since anybody off-world has already proven themselves capable of finding a mate and only need to be able to cough up (usually not literally) the required material when the space-local collection season comes around. but the sex workers themselves still hold the same power, and homeworld Alternia doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so many of the opinions held about the industry by trolls in their pre-twelves would persist through a majority of their adult life. (even though most people up there are soldiers and really should be able to agree on the fact that sometimes you just wanna be able to relax).
ANYWAY THAT WAS LESS LIKE MY TWO CENTS AND MORE LIKE MY TWO DOLLARS I hope….. it’s actually readable SOZ
To continue on from the sort of biocomputing theme from last night, I’ve been putting a little thought towards the parallels between Sollux and his own computer.
First off, there’s the obvious thing I’m a little disappointed in myself for missing up until now - the mainframe bees do a little binary eye-flashing thing immediately reminiscent of Sollux’ own inversely-flashing eyes;
In any case a beehive wasn’t chosen for no reason; the produce of the insects’ labour that runs through the heart of the beehouse machines is gold like the blood that runs through Sollux’ own veins. And when you look at him with the deadly concoction he’s got on himself, he really does stare down at it like it’s blood on his hands - compare this page with this deliberately paralleled page.
And with good reason! Because the two (two!) times he’s become too entangled with the stuff, someone he cares about very much has died at his hands - not only this, but each time is a demonstration of his mechanicalness; his being part of a machine, just like the computer bees are.
The first time, he’s under the explicit control of Vriska, and his close friend Aradia is the one put under the beam - the second time, his lusus was destroyed in an energy blast deemed inevitable by a curse that would have all of the lusii killed. If it were not for the overarching fateful forces that are Vriska Serket and Paradox Space, neither of these events would ever have occured.
And I just think this is pretty nicely (though likely unintentionally) symbolic of the role that was later revealed to be not uncommon for members of his caste and trolls of his level of power; becoming part of the empire’s machines. And the idea of the beehouse as a microcosm of the mage’s role in Alternian society gives a lot of food for thought.
On something of a tangent, the fact that the computer bees form little pairs suggests to me that the beehouse mainframes may actually be biological quantum computers! Which, aside from fitting pretty nicely with Sollux’ reality-breaking duality theme, would also allow for some pretty funny connections.
Given that bugs and insectoid things replace most things on Alternia that would be non-insectoid on Earth, perhaps the inverse is also true.
Like if you leave food out in the open for too long, a group of little birds will start flying around it picking it to pieces. Or you lift up a little rock and all the tiny armadillos hiding underneath curl up into balls. A crop is ruined by a swarm of bats eating all the leaves.
I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time agonising over the reason hive stems exist, given that they’re full of hexagons (some full?) and seem to only have living space attached to the outsides;
The first, most fanwanky idea that springs to mind is that the stem is somehow involved in the production of sopor slime; an important substance in troll society that helps (them) not be such complete idiot(s) all the time. But the fact that Sollux doesn’t really seem like he’s doing any actual work there doesn’t exactly credit the idea very much - all the trolls living there can only be kids, anyway, so any actual production probably doesn’t actually happen on the homeworld like this.
More likely the whole thing is probably just a really, really big computer, and the green shit in the hexagonal columns is the same sort of data slime that leaks from a game grub. Hey, maybe there’s actually some big data maggots down there somewhere. That’s what hive cells are for, right?
Sollux probably has some big government surveillance equipment churning and gurgling away right underneath his residence and has no idea. His hacking could just be doing work for them. The irony grub doesn’t stop from leaking.
More likely the whole thing is probably just a really, really big computer, and the green shit in the hexagonal columns is the same sort of data slime that leaks from a game grub. Hey, maybe there’s actually some big data maggots down there somewhere. That’s what hive cells are for, right?
Sollux probably has some big government surveillance equipment churning and gurgling away right underneath his residence and has no idea. His hacking could just be doing work for them. The irony grub doesn’t stop from leaking.
another simpler but less fun possibility is that that is simply how carpenter drones build, they are insectoid after all,
Except that literally every single other hive doesn’t look like that, and the whole reason bees uses hexagon is because of the fact that they offer optimum storage space. The droids wouldn’t build things like that if it wasn’t for a useful purpose.
I feel a little silly for taking this long to put all the pieces together in my head, but Lord English is definitely a parallel to Joseph of Genesis; he’s an Egyptian king-themed figure, who wears a coat of many colours, and was ultimately brought back up in his sarcophagus by another messianic figure. And this gives some pretty good insights into a question I’ve been mulling over for a long while; if Doc Scratch and Lord English are supposedly the Mirthful Messiahs of Alternia’s clown cult, how? What exactly are they Messiahs to?
Taking into account all the parallels, Lord English is pretty easy to place. Joseph was basically the man driving the story behind the Israelites arriving in Egypt, and behind making sure they were treated well, as a high-ranking member of the Egyptian court. One Joseph died, though, and the next Pharaoh came into power, the Egyptians started to see the Israelites as a threat, and they were placed into harsh conditions as second-class citizens. Joseph was buried in a sarcophagus as an Egyptian, but made the Israelites promise to pull his sarcophagus from the ground when they moved back to their homeland, and bury him there.
From here, it was the job of a different figure to rescue the Israelites from Egypt; a guy we’re all probably familiar with, called Moses. Moses was the guy who lived through much of the enslavement of the Israelites, and had to watch from his palace, having grown up as the adopted child of the Egyptian royal family. When the time came, his job was to enact several plagues unto the Egyptian people and then pull Joseph’s sarcophagus from the ground, to carry it with him back to the Jewish homeland.
Anyway the point is that if you take into account this relationship between Joseph and Moses, you could pretty easily come to the conclusion that Scratch is intended to be the subjugglators’ Moses, watching over their struggles from his palace on the Green Moon.
Here’s how I see it being; Lord English was the king of subjugglators, and at some point, he led the subjugglators (and their land dweller compatriots?) to land owned by the sea dwellers (probably a bunch of islands). English became good friends with the sea dwellers’ empress, and for a while the subjugglators / land dwellers lived prosperously alongside the sea dwellers.
And then English disappeared, for some reason. Went into occultation, or on a journey through the underworld, or something. And the empress started treating the land dwellers really badly (mainly by getting the subjugglators to subjugate their lower classes, but like… that’s not really important to the purplecentric narrative LMAO), and is still treating them badly to this day. But somehow they got wind of this other dude, who is waiting somewhere to come down and save them when the time comes, by smiting the sea dwellers, bringing Lord English back, and taking the souls of the faithful to a promised paradise planet with a Vast Honk, where English and Scratch can both lord over them mirthfully.
(Also some wicked rowdy minstrels will be there as well.)
This scenario also places some extra duality onto the pair; Doc Scratch is the living messiah, destined to die, and Lord English is the dead messiah, to come alive - a Once And Future King, of sorts (the Once And Future King being King Arthur, who was supposedly king of England a long long time ago and will someday come back to rule over the English peoples again - which is actually pretty fitting, given all the references to King Arthur’s sword surrounding English himself).
Anyway researching subjugglator stuff made me stumble across a whole bunch of bullshit about their religion so expect a breakdown of canon mentions of the cult soon.
