In one way, cant one see subjuggilators like,, uh, shit language borders,,, like those knightly (not really knights but kinda) which ruled each their farm village thing, which also fits eith the "ig you are hatched here, you can never leave", since it was near the exact same then, you couldnt leave the farmhousevillage thing you were born in, and had to work there forever.
no, you’re good! i understand what you’re getting at; feudal lords owned large amounts of land and anyone who lived on that land had to work on it and give part of what they made to the lord.
i don’t think it’s specifically subjugglators who fill that role; more likely sea dwellers, who have royal ranks, own a majority of the land, but no doubt lots of land dweller nobility own chunks of that land underneath them.
the territory of the troll empire, which all belongs to a cherub, lord english, is a bunchfold bigger than your typical cherub territory
lord english’s territory borders a whole bunch of other cherubs’ territory, and has already consumed hundreds more
discussion:
what sort of conflicts have happened between trolls and cherubs before??
what do the neighbouring cherubs think about this crazy wingless manchild and his little army of soldier ants grabbing more space for him like he runs the place??
Alternia’s information and communications technology is very alien and hard to understand - and deliberately so! But there are some common threads we can use to form a loose understanding of how Alternian biocomputers work.
Slime
All Alternian computers are generally of the same basic makeup; coloured husk filled with green slime, almost identical to recooperacoons. It’s unclear whether this slime is the same or similar in nature to sopor slime; but the fact that Sollux’ computer has red and blue slime in the same colours as his cocoon indicates they may be closely related.
This slime is piped through husk-coloured hoses into the screen for the computer (and likely somewhere under the desk, the keyboard is attached, too). The exact purpose or functionality of this slime isn’t specified, but other mentions of slime used in computing give us a good idea.
Game Grub magazines apparently always boast of ‘exclusive leaks’. While the associated image positions us to read ‘leaks’ as literal leaks of slime from literal Game Grubs, we can also assume, based on the nature of the magazine, that when a Game Grub leaks, it contains something worth reporting on. i.e. data. So it makes sense that the slime contained within Alternian computers is some sort of data-carrying fluid, which is piped into the screen to be visually displayed (and isn’t piped into the keyboard in the same way, because a keyboard is a data input rather than a reader).
As well as several game grubs, the floor of Sollux’ hardware-littered respiteblock is also home to several unidentified slime-and-husk components. They appear to be sitting atop the hosing, and not plugged into any of it, so their purpose seems to be standalone; perhaps auxiliary and/or portable data storage.
When combining the microphone with his gaming controller, Xefros identifies the inside fluid as ‘pus’; given the fact that the computer slime would appear to be at least partially a discharge from an insect larva, it seems likely that pus is the proper term for the slime inside computers and computer accessories.
Honey
One other type of computer appears on homeworld Alternia; the Beehouse Mainframe. The basic setup is actually almost essentially identical to that of a pus-filled computer; a solid frame is filled with a viscous fluid, and hoses are plugged into various ports on the outside of the frame in order to pipe the fluid into other machines.
The practice of using Beehouse Mainframes is referred to as “Apiculture Networking,” which implies one of the strengths of these computers over pusware is their networking capabilities. The ability of the worker bees, who also produce the honey, to relocate honey by themselves likely has something to do with this.
The honey produced by the Mainframe’s worker bees also has a sort of brain-boosting effect when consumed. This may correspond somehow to the difference in data containment between pus and honey.
Anyway the point of my posts about Lord English and about troll gender so close together was that I’d been talking about it in the headcanon chat and I’ve come to the pretty solid conclusion that it’s English’s fault that trolls even have gender.
If you think about the fact that trolls logically should not have biological sex outside of the mother grub / troll dichotomy, then the idea that trolls developed a concept of gender identity seems absurd. But as it happens, a lot of Alternia is absurd; it’s a near-comical caricature of a fascist dictatorship, because it was engineered that way. So of course it follows that someone (read: the lizard man English and his puppet government) decided that trolls should be gendered.
And there’s precedent for it to be that way! English is from an incredibly binary race (a species one could almost say is composed entirely of binaries), and, unfortunately, as is well-known, his biggest policy is misogyny. Which is an easy policy to carry out when all you’re doing is trolling cherubs and humans, and messing with carapaces; but it’s difficult to do when you’re at the helm of a race who are, for all intents and purposes, non-binary. So naturally, he imposed a gender binary on them, completely arbitrarily.
And it just thematically fits; if there’s an fascist or imperialist ideal that you could possibly apply to a species to make it a dystopia, it’s been slapped onto Alternia; and a completely arbitrarily imposed gender binary is just… one of those colonialist things.
Trolls having binary genders is ridiculous because it’s just part of the endless set of ridiculous rules deliberately placed onto Alternia to make it ridiculously dystopian.
i think it’s good to note that in fascist and communist totalitarian societies, gender roles are hyper-realised in expectations and propaganda
so forcing those below you into certain roles based on gender roles also stifles their abilities and further limits them, which is why it also makes sense that a gender binary would be forced onto the alternians
exactly! this is kind of precisely what Porrim was angling at when she talked about this; at least on Beforus (but pretty clearly on Alternia too), the strongly-enforced gender binary acted to suppress and railroad the jadebloods, who are essentially the most powerful caste in physical terms.
no doubt it works in a very similar way amongst lowbloods.
the situation with the Handmaid sums up pretty well how gender and the idealisation of servitude play into caste dynamics and the suppression of lowbloods specifically.
we all know how powerful Damara could have been - and we know she displayed some signs of rebellion as a young child - but the fact that she was reared for her specific role as a Handmaiden by a pair of nasty clown men from a very young age ensured that as an adult, the idea of fighting back never even crossed her mind.
true! I talked a little about the Handmaid over on @lime-bloods, but it’s definitely important that even in folklore, the powerful rustblood woman is still just a maidservant to a bigger, buffer clown man.
i think it’s good to note that in fascist and communist totalitarian societies, gender roles are hyper-realised in expectations and propaganda
so forcing those below you into certain roles based on gender roles also stifles their abilities and further limits them, which is why it also makes sense that a gender binary would be forced onto the alternians
exactly! this is kind of precisely what Porrim was angling at when she talked about this; at least on Beforus (but pretty clearly on Alternia too), the strongly-enforced gender binary acted to suppress and railroad the jadebloods, who are essentially the most powerful caste in physical terms.
no doubt it works in a very similar way amongst lowbloods.
@kitschtrolls this tends to be how I see the matron role being sold to young jadebloods; not just for the obvious reasons we’re talking about now, but also because how the hell else are you going to want anybody to do that job without lying? it’s a maternity ward in a cave but it’s just one giant disgusting worm-shaped mother constantly giving birth to babies by the thousands and the babies try to eat each other and also you’re working there because the government doesn’t want you finding out you’re a plant vampire. it’s horrible.
the thing with jadebloods is that, since they’re a) rare and b) not supposed to visit the surface once they start their cavern job, you can basically straight up lie to them. you can say that their future is gonna be pearly marble hallways and a lifetime of fun platonic gal pal girl scout shenanigans in nun costumes, and if it turns out the hallways are made of dirt and the nun costume is a surgical jumpsuit, there’s not really much they can do about it! as long as they start out believing what they’re going to be doing has some divine significance, they basically enslave themselves.
though no doubt the way domestic servitude is sold to lowbloods is similar; there’s no better way to encourage people to be housewives than to make the life of the housewife out to be the end goal. you can probably imagine the sort of 60s-style domestic propoganda that’d get churned out by an empire run by alien Betty Crocker.
GUESS WHO JUST CALCULATED THE ACTUAL SIZE OF A SNAKE CHERUB’S HEAD.
I was chatting with some friends about how Aranea says the Cherubs are an AU in length (The distance between the Sun and Earth), and I decided to check how big the head alone would be if that were the case.
Yeah.
For reference:
Earth’s Diameter = 12,742km
Jupiter’s Diameter = 139,822km
The Sun’s Diameter = 1,391,400km
Cherub’s Head Length = 1,094,102km
Cherub’s Head Width = 436,641km
For the people asking how I got the measurement of the head and if it could be just a really thin but extremely long snake-
I used this image since you can see the entire length and the heads are clearly visible.
there is some sort of psionics test that yellowbloods at least are subjected to, and those who score low end up doing menial labor. I almost wonder what the high-scoring ones do.
Also ceruleans can be factory owners, apparently. Good to know.
I’m not sure exactly what the context for this is, but I’m assuming the ‘bet’ part of this implies that this is in Xefros’ imagination, and not necessarily high-tier canon? In which case I doubt low-test yellowbloods actually get put to work doing this kind of menial labour.
Also worth noting that low-test does not necessarily mean ‘scoring low on a test’; it’s a term generally used for fuel (wow, great implications there!) that means ‘with low volatility,’ i.e. maximum required energy input and minimum energy output, i.e. shitty. So while these yellowbloods might fail on a theoretical, hypothetical test, this doesn’t necessarily imply that they are being explicitly tested (though obviously the best way to test for low-test individuals would be testing them, but there’s also the possibility of yellowbloods choosing employment for themselves based on their own experience with their powers… anyway I just thought this was a fun fact).
Additionally possible that the ceruleans aren’t necessarily ‘factory owners’ by employment, they just happen to have the rights to sell things produced by lowbloods because of their blood.
It’s hard to say which of these correlates with which - is the Psiioniic’s ‘mentally gifted class’ yellowbloods as a whole, or is it the gifted mutants of which he is one? are yellowbloods as a whole exploited as pilots, or just the powerful freaks? is “mage” a job, or just a descriptor for psions? - but I thought it’d be helpful in context.
looking for stuff about Alternian ‘mages’, I did find an excerpt that seems to pretty heavily suggest taking a title-name (Mindfang, Dualscar, Darkleer) upon adulthood is considered a ‘nobility thing’
I feel like one of the reasons kismesitude is the way it is might be for like… historical reasons? Specifically with regards to ancestor folklore.
You look at the way Vriska specifically mirrors her ancestor and a sort of pattern emerges; she strikes it up with Terezi because there was a known rivalry between Mindfang and Redglare. She strikes it up with Eridan because Mindfang and Dualscar had a known rivalry.
A similar trend exists in real-life folklore; tribes and clans (which on Alternia, I suppose, consist of a single person) are bound together by shared ancestry - i.e. the ancestors of their families were lovers - or put at odds by rivalry - i.e. the two families might have an ongoing feud between them because of something that supposedly went down between their family heroes (which is something evoked in Homestuck itself, where trolls tend to gravitate toward killing those who killed their ancestors).
When you’ve got really definite ways to refer to those relationships - matespritship for lovers, kismesitude for rivals - it becomes really easy to define the way your bloodline is tied with the bloodline of another person. Me and Troll X are destined to cross paths because our ancestors were lovers; me and Troll Y are intertwined because our ancestors had a famous fight.
It fits in with the sort of ‘genetic destiny’ highbloods seem to believe in pretty well; wherein Eridan acknowledges that the concept of an ancestor does have a genetic basis, but that there’s a big destiny aspect to it as well. I think because of this, a lot of ancestor stories that were literally just about normal rivalries get labelled and identified as ‘kismesitude stories’ for ease of understanding; Redglare and Mindfang were clearly never in an actual intimate relationship, but if Vriska claims they were in a kismesitude, she can found a genetic basis for her connection to Terezi.
there are two main avenues of interpreting the headcanon that lowbloods form groups that share an “ancestor” (it wouldn’t be called that, obviously, because lowbloods just explicitly don’t believe in those)
those being a) it’s one of the symptoms of lowbloods spawning in huge numbers and being more community-oriented while highbloods are rare and individualistic
and b) that it’s a result of historical omission of lowblood folklore and history; the process of systematically killing and stunting lowbloods before they can achieve greatness and then reducing those who do to mere footnotes resulting in a ludicrously disproportionate, nay, nigh-inversely proportionate ratio of highblood folklore heroes to lowblood folklore heroes
while trolls in the same bloodline sharing last names is convenient in stories where it needs to be made clear who’s related to who, I’m still convinced that the whole of a troll’s 6-6 moniker comes from lusus sounds, and as such two ‘related’ trolls would have completely different names if it weren’t homestuck (where Jane Crocker and Nanna have the same given name despite being raised by different parents).
what I think is a stronger idea is that this is the reason it’s a noble tradition to give yourself a title. when your name’s Abcdef Ghijkl, and your supposed ‘ancestor’ is called Mnopqr Stuvwx, it’s hard to make it clear that your identities match; unless there happen to be pictures available of this ancestor, then the only thing really publicly linking the two of you together is your sign, which, theoretically, you could share with hundreds of other trolls of your caste.
but when your ancestor swapped out the unmemorable Stuvwx for something really indicative of who they are in life and the legacy they’re going to lead, like, say, Mindfang, then not only is that easy for people to remember, and something that’s really gonna get recorded in history books, it’s easy to just take that title for yourself and make it really obvious that you’re the second Minfang.
lowbloods don’t need that; they know they’re only going to go down in history, if at all, as Rustblood #98523988, and that if they’re lucky enough to get more than a number jotted down in the factory catalogue, it’ll just be their hatchname scribbled in.
there are two main avenues of interpreting the headcanon that lowbloods form groups that share an “ancestor” (it wouldn’t be called that, obviously, because lowbloods just explicitly don’t believe in those)
those being a) it’s one of the symptoms of lowbloods spawning in huge numbers and being more community-oriented while highbloods are rare and individualistic
and b) that it’s a result of historical omission of lowblood folklore and history; the process of systematically killing and stunting lowbloods before they can achieve greatness and then reducing those who do to mere footnotes resulting in a ludicrously disproportionate, nay, nigh-inversely proportionate ratio of highblood folklore heroes to lowblood folklore heroes
not to mention, of course, the fact that highbloods’ lower populations mean that broodmates sharing signs is way less likely than it is for lowbloods. when you have a neighbour with the same sign as you, it’s hard to say that you’ve got some sort of destinial similarities binding you together.
