I’ve made at least two separate posts about guns on Alternia here before, but I’ve been thinking about it some more and I’m pretty sure at least if there IS an existing industry / manufacturing community of bullet-based firearms, it was developed BY lowbloods for use AGAINST lowbloods.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned at least once before that I don’t think bullets would really be able to do anything to a highblood. Repeated machine gun fire into one was a minor inconvenience. An early weapon like a musket or even something more advanced like a revolver? No chance.
Lowbloods, on the other hand, probably are physically weak enough to be able to sustain permanent injuries from getting a bullet inside them. They’re also probably technically minded enough to come up with that sort of thing and realise it has more powerful applications than a bow, which is the highest martial technology highbloods can apparently muster.
chiropractor is a pretty big deal job on Alternia because of all the neck pains old as balls highbloods get from their horns. as a result, they’ve always got lots of clients and are pretty well-paid.
Energy harpoons and related legendary weapons like Ahab’s Crosshairs are another story altogether.
I’m pretty sure that seadwellers are the only ones who know how to manufacture them and/or find them, and it’s the main weapon they use to keep the land dwelling castes in check. I’m not sure how many people have seen Slumdog Millionaire, but there’s scenes early on where a child obtains a gun and is suddenly able to manipulate adults into doing essentially whatever he wants, and I think getting your hands on an energy gun, as a land dweller, would be similar to that; an energy gun can kill anybody, no matter how physically strong, so if you manage to pick one up from a seadweller, you’re king in the land dweller world.
Until the sea dweller authorities get you, at least. So you’re probably most likely going to keep it a secret at times when it isn’t necessary to show your full power.
The way Slumdog Millionaire portrays the Indian culture of gang crime and politics is a pretty big inspiration for how I view land dweller culture. I’ve talked before about how I see all land dwellers as being in poverty or in impoverished conditions under the rule of wealthy, racist seadwellers, and it basically all lines up with that; the purplebloods, and to a lesser extent their blue lackeys, DO have lots of power, but it stems from organised crime and social influence (with the possession of a blaster being a big possible addition to that Arsenal) rather than having anything we would recognise as actual political power.
I think it’s most likely that canon troll claws and horns are keratin.Troll teeth are shown as being white (though that could be stylistic) but in particular this panel with the handmaid shows her skeleton without horns. Instead, there are divots where horns should go.
Plus, keratin horns instead of bone allows for pale horn manicures to be more of a thing <3
On a tangential point, I completely didn’t take notice of the Handmaid’s bedsheets with hearts, spades and larva on them. I love it.
Makes you wonder, though, like, did Scratch make / have that made for her? (He definitely has a gang member who’d be capable of making it). Or did he acquire it from the homeworld? Because obviously trolls as a society don’t have bedblankets, but you’d think Scratch would have had something made with a more Felt theme to it. Though of course, it’s possible Scratch wanted her raised around things that would make her more familiar with the Alternian world she’d have to deal with later on in life.
Though that possibility just makes me wonder about the decking out of her room in general. Why’s it so… fancy? Why’s it such an obvious fuchsia colour? Look at the room it was obviously based off;
Obviously Ms. Megido’s stuff isn’t just a darker version of Ms. Lalonde’s, but it’s not a Megido colour either. Look at the two compared here (rust atop and the upholstery colour below);
I’m honestly beginning to think that, obviously having had another sign painted onto the head of the bed, at least some of this stuff was repurposed from an earlier girl-protege of Scratch’s, who later went on to become a handmaiden of the Lord…
I’ve mentioned The New Jake Troll Genitalia Meta™ a couple times but never really posted the full concept on tumblr, so it’s probably about time for that.
First some backstory; I was getting pretty sick of people saying things in Alternian society are clearly unnatural or engineered just because they’re alien. This very often gets used as an excuse to just blatantly ignore what’s written there in the comic in favour of something one personally likes more, and in particular it gets thrown around a lot in reference to their reproductive method. People seem to be convinced that a form of reproduction involving a receptacle could never have appeared in nature.
But trolls aren’t mammals, and I think even the hardcore personal egg-laying activists are aware of this. And non-mammals do some pretty cool shit when it comes to coitus.
For one very relevant example; spiders. Many, if not most, species of spider reproduce in a way that involves what could pretty easily be seen as TWO whole receptacles; the male first ejaculates onto webbing, and then picks up the ejaculate with a specialised tube located in his pedipalp, which then gets inserted into the female and left there (i.e, the make doesn’t get that limb back).
So with this in mind, I gave myself a bit of time to think of how a receptacle-based reproductive system might work in trolls before they invented metal pails. And it didn’t take much thinking at all, actually! It came to me very quickly; trolls have silk production glands among their sexual organs, and during coitus they use the silk produced by the stimulation of the gland to weave a silk sac with which to catch the genetic material after orgasm. It provides a pretty good reasoning for having a manipulable limb-like bulge, too.
Buckets were a thing invented as the empire became too large for a drone to come and pick up sperm sacs as soon as they were weaved. With a bucket, multiple sperm sacs can be held together, and easily stored in a refrigerating device to be given to a drone when he DOES arrive (with his own filial pails in tow, of course, allowing him to carry many dozens of quadrants’ worth of material at a time).
In writing this post I almost wonder if drones use a pedipalp-like organ to take in the sperm sacs and then give them to the mother grub. They’ve certainly got a lot of spare spines on their bodies, and it would be a convenient tie-in with the real life role of insect drones as the impregnators of the queen…
( @tickfleato helped me devise some biological specifics to the process, and drew up some cross-sections of a troll-package-with-spinneret that I’m not sure have been posted yet or not? )
@zeetrollplays reading your input to the genetic material sac post!
I’m more inclined to stick with the idea of a weaved pitcher with which to catch the material mainly because it has a sort of narrative to it; a silk ‘pail’ is a clear predecessor to a metallic (or plastic?) one, and certainly makes the pail seem like a more natural progression. Which is sort of what I was going for!
An internal coating process definitely has its own merits, but lacks the continuity I had in mind when spiders were going through my head.
