one of many things i realised shortly subsequent to my Problem Sleuth reread is, believe it or not, that Rose Lalonde’s grimdarkness and Kanaya’s rainbow drinkerism might be closer parallels than what is currently understood.
of course, we can all tell that rainbow drinkers are undead. they’re vampires, and Kanaya awakens into one after being shot through the torso with a laser and very clearly being dead for a time. but nothing really yells ‘undead’ about the grimdark transformation upon first look.
while it might seem a bit of a stretch to hark all the way back to Problem Sleuth for such a specific bit of lore, it can’t be ignored that rainbow drinkers are very obviously derived in nature from PS’ candy corn vampire, with an incredibly high fastness state described, of course, as vampire fastness. the vampire’s skin even stays #ffffff white despite the fact that even the frankenstein form has a different skin colour and the zombie’s skin grayness is even more obvious in this form, indicating that pure white skin is a trait associated with vampirism.
additionally, if we can infer from this that grimdarkness and rainbow drinkerism are similar states, then Rose’s quick death at the blade of Jack Noir’s sword could be a pretty valid indicator of the extent of rainbow drinker survivability; but of course, a vampire’s defense always lay in its ability to dodge attacks, anyway. its only weakness isa very fast attack.
if we are to place any merit in the idea of grimdark as undead, then it could possibly lend some merit, also, to jane’s conception that her life magic would have an effect on undead, considering the duality of the life and void aspects.
boondollars are only a sburb thing because they were a crockercorp/skaianet thing first. that's why certain humans and, well, probably a lot of alternia(and potentially)some of beforus was capable of earning them and scaling the echeladder before the game, because crockercorp/skaianet existed before sburb did. opinions?
this is kind of a difficult thing to reach a definite answer about because even the statement that skaianet existed before sburb did is problematic. like, skaianet developed sburb from code written into the walls of the frog temple, which sburb itself sent back in time, and it seems pretty likely the rest of skaianet’s product was either derived from this code or swindled from sburb worlds itself during grandpa’s travels (or from alternia! hiveswap will definitely shed some more light on this particular topic).
the same sort of paradox comes up with sylladex cards. obviously they’re an absolutely vital point of sburb to the point where a majority of the game’s infrastructure involves the reading and production of them, but they’re also an important part of everyday life on homestuck earth to the point where you get books with fetch modi included in the back page. sburb is intrinsically connected with the worlds of homestuck to the point that getting rid of sburb basically breaks down every bit of worldbuilding; but is this because the worlds develop in a way that benefits sburb, or because sburb creates worlds rich with its own mechanics? personally, i’d say that that you can’t unlink the two concepts, but…
this ask has given me a thought. caliborn as the lord of time is, of course, the lord of time and as such responsible for many deep-rooted time-related phenomena. currency itself seems to be a concept related to the time aspect, and we do know that caliborn is responsible for creating a currency of his own. it seems like a kind of silly thing to do if a currency already existed, so, is it possible that as lord english, caliborn introduced his currency to the worlds under his influence and it become boondollars at some point? it would certainly be fitting for Lord “Analogy For Anglo-Saxon Colonialism” English, i think.
i woke up at about 6am this morning, saw this notification, and answered with the first thing that came to mind. upon some further consideration, i believe “moons out harpoons out” both works and is thematically appropriate for alternia.