so how do you think troll social issues intersect with their interactions with alien races enslaved within their empire?
are aliens with brown blood treated as brown blooded trolls are? teal blooded aliens? purple or violet blooded trolls?
are aquatic races treated as waders? how aquatic does a race have to be before they are considered one? how are non-troll aquatics treated by aquatic trolls versus land dwelling trolls?
how are aquatic races with non-royal blood colours treated?
are alien slaves with psychic power considered viable starship pilots?
possibly they’re just not as viable as troll pilots because trolls have been bred to ideal, and troll psions are simply superior.
viridian-trolls:
lime-bloods:
so how do you think troll social issues intersect with their interactions with alien races enslaved within their empire?
are aliens with brown blood treated as brown blooded trolls are? teal blooded aliens? purple or violet blooded trolls?
are aquatic races treated as waders? how aquatic does a race have to be before they are considered one? how are non-troll aquatics treated by aquatic trolls versus land dwelling trolls?
how are aquatic races with non-royal blood colours treated?
i think the enslaved aliens would be treated with about as much dignity as rustbloods, since they are “infererior species” even if they’d be aquatic purplebloods
because that’s the whole point of enslaving an alien race - they’d NOT be treated as equals to any troll
of course i don’t think any of the aliens would be given the dignity of being considered equal by any troll! moreso with the complicated social interactions between troll classes, it seems likely that some aliens would be considered better than some trolls.
sea dwellers themselves, for example, are seen as another race; so would an alien race that doesn’t show the same mutations that are disliked about royal trolls (fins and gills, for example) be seen as better than a sea dweller by certain land dwelling nobility?
and of course all troll castes would have traits associated with them that are seen as good; cold, blue blood is seen as good, and warm, red blood has negative connotations. so surely trolls would be influenced even in little ways, even subconsciously, to think certain things about aliens that display traits they see as good or bad?
lime-bloods:
so how do you think troll social issues intersect with their interactions with alien races enslaved within their empire?
are aliens with brown blood treated as brown blooded trolls are? teal blooded aliens? purple or violet blooded trolls?
are aquatic races treated as waders? how aquatic does a race have to be before they are considered one? how are non-troll aquatics treated by aquatic trolls versus land dwelling trolls?
how are aquatic races with non-royal blood colours treated?
#okay but trolls are SO PROUD and as a whole believe themselves to be better then anyone else #(obvs not applying to individual trolls) #(just like as a unit trolls r proud bc of the empress) #so ANY alien would be lower then the lowest rust blood and maybe even mutants #besides werent aliens killed as soon as possible to make room for troll colonies #like i LOVE the idea of trolls and aliens coexisting but no not a chance #*points at alpha earth in dirk and roxy’s time* (via @aquatariuswriter)
i beg to differ!
troll pride isn’t necessarily inherent to their being; it’s based on traits and on otherness. trolls pride themselves on having traits that make them good, and hold themselves over other beings who have traits seen as bad. a higher blood typed troll says the hemospectrum, or their personal blood coloour, makes them better than other trolls; land dweller nobility are simply obligated to be at odds with royals because they are of the sea dweller race; they talk of physical ideals for those of higher bloodlines and how certain things are unbefitting of other bloodlines.
of course, like I said to viridian-trolls, it is unlikely to think that, for the most part, a troll could ever see an alien as equal or greater to them, or even equal or greater to the troll race as a whole; but if we know trolls hate certain traits and like other traits, does it not follow that an alien with good traits ranks higher to a troll than another troll with bad traits? an example even exists in canon; we know equius doesn’t like sea dwellers, which are other trolls, but does love musclebeasts, which are a non-troll species they share the planet with.
on a final note, there’s no evidence to suggest alien races are immediately subject to genocide as soon as their planets are absorbed into the empire; the process is referred to only as ‘conquering’ and she is described as having the power to kill ‘millions’. there is no doubt many, many aliens die under alternian colonialism, but nothing suggests that they are entirely wiped out. considering the empire has a total of 1 reproductive hub for the troll race itself, i’ve no doubt aliens are very valuable as slaves to them.
the case of future Earth-2 is far from rule-defining; remember that when the Condesce arrived there, she had no other trolls with which to populate the planet. she was working from scratch. earth wasn’t a colony world; it was an attempt to rebuild a home she had lost.
what’s more, it’s very clear that she made an active attempt to rule over the humans as subjects, even selecting an heiress among them and trying to make them reproduce the same way as trolls did. she never exacted deliberate genocide on humans; they just died off as a result of attempts she made to rule them, like modifying them to mirror the troll blood type system. while it’s true that we’re not really given a justification for her melting the ice caps and flooding the planet over her rule, it is pointed out to us back in Act 5 that the Condesce’s usual participation in colonisation was very brief. the ordinary process didn’t involve the condesce beyond greeting; ergo, the Condsce didn’t even have any experience doing what she was trying to do.
i realise that my ‘final note’ has consumed well over two thirds of the total post and i apologise for that LMAO but i hope i got my point across
viridian-trolls:
lime-bloods:
are alien slaves with psychic power considered viable starship pilots?
possibly they’re just not as viable as troll pilots because trolls have been bred to ideal, and troll psions are simply superior.
Thing is: would there BE alien psions? And if they were any superior or equivalent to trollian psions, I don’t think their species would be conquered easily - they’d more likely be nuked from orbit because Condesce had no qualms against eradicating one of her own species’ castes when it was too difficult to rule over, so she’d have even less issue with commiting genocide against another race, even if it would be valueable as psychic batteries.
Alternative, of course, would be to make them into a client state with privelages that usual conquered species lack, like some independence, maybe even colonizing or spacefaring technologies, and leaving them be so they’d see trolls as benevolent overlords rather than monstrous conquerors… but it doesn’t seem to fit Condesce’s personality. She’s cunning and brilliant when she wants to be, but she’s also incredibly wasteful (especially with her own ‘human’ resources), and makes stupid mistakes like trying to force humans to reproduce like trolls with no means to actually genetically modify them (even if trollian bioscience is likely advanced enough to do so). So, yeah, I can’t really see this.
But the entire idea that psions would be harder to subjugate flies in the face of how Alternian society works on a basic level; if the majority of the troll race are lowbloods, who are most likely to have psychic powers, then I see no reason why a psychic alien race couldn’t be dealt with in the same way.
Psychic trolls seem pretty vulnerable to other psychics attacks, for example; Aradia, when properly prepared, could easily beat the shit out of a highblood with her powers, but she was totally obliterated by a goldblood jacked up on mind honey. And even said goldblood’s powers, despite being exceptional, were easily countered by a sea dweller with a laser harpoon. If the alien powers were mental rather than energy-based (like Vriska’s powers as opposed to Sollux’), then highbloods could counter that with their superior mental fortitude.
And none of that is even to consider the sorts of unintentional side-effects of colonisation, like diseases that trolls are immune to but certain aliens are not.
The new information about sopor slime we got in Hiveswap really puts the recooperacoon situation in a whole new light. It’s less like a handy safety measure to safeguard against daytime trauma, now, and more like ‘the government is literally putting its people on toxic drugs to make them conform’.
If you interpret the Alternian race’s daymares as coming from the chucklevoodoo dolls planted in people’s minds, then it further becomes ‘either flood your body regularly with this harmful substance, or put yourself through regular psychic terrorism at the hands of the cultist government’
It potentially goes even further to add another possible layer of deliberate lifespan shortening of lowbloods at the hand of the establishment; Hussie specifies that the placement of chucklevoodoo dolls specifically goes toward lowbloods, meaning that their incentive to use slime is even higher. It could be even worse if you follow the headcanon that lowbloods’ higher reliance on their brains means they need more sleep than higher castes.
And it all provides a bit of explanation to the fact that not even the above-water dwelling sea dwellers have recooperacoons in their blocks.
THANK YOU /SO MUCH/ for the sopor slime post i don't have the ability to look into hiveswap myself and that just!!! brought in some super super exciting tidbits and possibilities as far as imperial world building goes thank you so much that made my day
No worries, anon! Providing insight into how Alternia might work is, of course, the purpose of this blog! Don’t shy away from any other inquiries you might have!
How do you think disabilities,physical or mental are treated throughout the castes? Like, loosing limbs and stuff is probably common, brain damage too. But like being "born" with one less eye could possibly get a grub squished in the brood caverns right?
Unfortunately, yeah. Alternia has a policy of culling disabled individuals, so it seems pretty likely they’d be disposed towards getting rid of trolls who are going to biologically pass on disabilities to future broods.
The thing with trolls, though, is that they go through a pupation process that usually involves a complete reconstruction of the body. While I’m no biology expert, it seems likely that it’d be hard to say with certainty that a grub will retain the same mutations after pupation; a grub with two perfectly healthy eyes might come out of the cocoon with only one, and that’s where it becomes harder for the empire to regulate things.
An obstacle from there, of course, is the cavern trials; we can only presume that the trials are designed to weed out trolls who aren’t perfectly tuned for combat and survival. But the trials likely don’t have a 100% success rate.