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?
tbh I’m pretty sure all aliens are treated like trash and viewed as worst than being a Rust blood. It’s mentioned in Hiveswap that the only thing Trizza hates more than lowbloods is aliens.
one particularly hateful royal does not make a universal opinion.
Trizza is a particularly strict and harsh tyrant; she kills people who don’t laugh at her jokes, but I wouldn’t say that’s a commonly held prejudice. she’s also operating off homeworld Alternia, where she’s likely never even had to deal with aliens.
on top of that, she’s a sea dweller, so I’m willing to take a stab in the dark and say she’s on the higher end of the troll racism spectrum.
So one of the first things I thought when playing Hiveswap was, “Oh shit we’re actually getting a canon globe with the Alternian Continents!” But I never actually took the time to check it in detail, nor compare it to the screen in Dammek’s room, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else do so either.
First let’s point out the obvious, yes, Grandpa’s Globe on the Trophy Room is a globe of Alternia, along with the horned skulls in the hallway, it heavily confirms that Jake Harley did go to Alternia at some point, and came back.
I put the dots that are on Dammek’s Map on Grandpa’s globe, and every single of them overlap with one of the scribbles on it, implying these dots are, indeed, major Alternian Cities, or at least major when it comes to Dammek’s revolutionary efforts.
Specifically, the dots I made in blue are the spots Dammek’s map zooms in, and the green dot overlaps with the X Jude’s device has to point at to get the Attic Key. In Dammek’s map, this spot is not only zoomed into, but it displays what seems like a warning with the Imperial Trident logo. Perhaps the Capital of the Alternian Empire? The ultimate destination for the game?
There’s a lot missing from Dammek’s screen. I tried my hand at emulating what the Alternian map may look like from the bits and pieces you can see on the globes. Obviously there’s a lot of liberties taken given there’s parts that are covered no matter the angle, so it’s hard to tell if the continent on the left is connected to the one on the bottom or not, but I decided to separate them. That being said, the entire South of Alternia seems to be covered by Land. Maybe the continent on the opposite end of the globe to the map we see in Dammek’s Room is Eastern Alternia?
Whichever the case, this is an interesting look at what may be the Map of Alternia! Maybe in Act 2 we get an accurate map.
it’s the substance that typifies the the practice of ectobiology, an act intimately interconnected with fatherhood.
jade, who loses her father, sends a shirt with a green slime on it to john, who loses his grandmother and gets a father instead.
gamzee makara partakes in consuming green slime when his real father figure is absent (an act which could also be seen as a ‘drinking of the kool aid’ of sorts, initiating gamzee’s participation in the patriarchal clown caste that rules alternia).
what’s really interesting is that beyond this blatant imagery, green - especially bright green of the sort that is associated with alternia and john’s green slime shirt - has always been an explicitly feminine-coded colour within homestuck. it’s the colour associated with the space aspect, and the colour of all the space players, and the colour of the cherub sex associated with the motherly protector. so where does the discrepency come from? how can one accurately distinguish between these polar opposite interpretations of the colour? is there a connection?
actually, yeah; we can pinpoint the moment bright green slime makes the transition from feminine code to patriarchal gunk.
caliborn explicitly identifies the feminine blood of his feminine sister with the masculine nasty mayonnaise that pervades the world he comes to rule. why?
because he deliberately appropriates the colour for his own use. the coat, the elves, the mansions that all come to be synonymous with his evil patriarchal influence are all painted with the blood of the dead female, as proof of the domination of Man.
what does this symbolise? I dunno. maybe it’s simple; maybe the green of the patriarchy really is just a token of victory over the feminine. an icon of the appropriation of the female form for male use; similar, perhaps, to the scarlet of red of the royal class of alternia. i dunno. i’m still thinking about it.
Lord English is always associated with black holes because he himself represents a ‘point of no return,’ or an event horizon.
The Horrorterrors are masters over death, but explicitly in the sense that they surpass death and have power over the permanence of death. They have the ability to raise the dead, to preserve the forms of ghosts long after their bodies have died, and to twist and destroy the linearity of time (death) around them.
By killing the Horrorterrors and destroying the afterlife and its inhabitants permanently, English asserts himself as the point of no return, and enforces a permanence in death, for lack of better words. In this act he also, in a sense, breaks the chain of reincarnation, which is a very gnostic concept in itself.
The irony in this, I suppose, is that within Homestuck, black holes aren’t points of no return; they’re just pockets that set up the balls ready for the next game. So it might be less that Lord English is ‘like a black hole’ in that he represents an event horizon, and more that Lord English is the event horizon waiting behind every pocket to consume its spoils for himself.
(Also ‘consumes the sun’ is just a really simple allegory for ‘consuming the son’ which refers to Lord English’s Cronusesque nature).
it’s the substance that typifies the the practice of ectobiology, an act intimately interconnected with fatherhood.
jade, who loses her father, sends a shirt with a green slime on it to john, who loses his grandmother and gets a father instead.
gamzee makara partakes in consuming green slime when his real father figure is absent (an act which could also be seen as a ‘drinking of the kool aid’ of sorts, initiating gamzee’s participation in the patriarchal clown caste that rules alternia).
what’s really interesting is that beyond this blatant imagery, green - especially bright green of the sort that is associated with alternia and john’s green slime shirt - has always been an explicitly feminine-coded colour within homestuck. it’s the colour associated with the space aspect, and the colour of all the space players, and the colour of the cherub sex associated with the motherly protector. so where does the discrepency come from? how can one accurately distinguish between these polar opposite interpretations of the colour? is there a connection?
actually, yeah; we can pinpoint the moment bright green slime makes the transition from feminine code to patriarchal gunk.
caliborn explicitly identifies the feminine blood of his feminine sister with the masculine nasty mayonnaise that pervades the world he comes to rule. why?
because he deliberately appropriates the colour for his own use. the coat, the elves, the mansions that all come to be synonymous with his evil patriarchal influence are all painted with the blood of the dead female, as proof of the domination of Man.
what does this symbolise? I dunno. maybe it’s simple; maybe the green of the patriarchy really is just a token of victory over the feminine. an icon of the appropriation of the female form for male use; similar, perhaps, to the scarlet of red of the royal class of alternia. i dunno. i’m still thinking about it.
gud posd op…
I was thinking of something to this effect the other day too, especially in regards to the moon. It’s only when Scratch (and by proxy LE) comes about to directly meddle with the trolls in the new universe that there’s a green moon (and a notably MUCH bigger moon), directly invading on the space of the pink. It’s LE (the masculine) directly imposing itself on the tyrian caste (the feminine). Which makes sense that on Beforus, a major plot point of the troll’s stories took place on the pink moon (It’s implied that Meenah discovered the game code in some capacity there). After the scratch, the pink moon is pretty much irrelevant to both the history of Alternia and the narrative of the beta trolls.
This is sort of a half-baked re-explanation of what you’ve just said, but what I was getting at with this is that I’d imagine– like with the Ancient Greeks and anyone who drew influence for them (see: most of Europe during the Renaissance, who had huge boners for the Greeks)– the moons as personified and specifically gendered based on this distinction. Like all the moon goddesses, there would be similar myths and deities depicting the green moon as a male and pink as a female. A dichotomy like Uranus and Gaia or something.
The Green Moon is a great example of bright green as a badge of male dominance because Caliborn literally stole it the moon from another Queen, and then went and painted it with his sister’s blood as well. It’s kind of the ultimate example of this symbol. It’s sort of surprising he stopped short of replacing the pink moon entirely; but there was definitely some method to the fact that he left the Alternians with the impression that the Condesce was in charge.
i’d completely fuckin forgotten about it by the time I made this post but there is actually a joke in Homestuck where Caliborn thinks to ‘sex’ something is to have sex with it hghjghg
suddenly was kinda confused about what exactly ‘ragripper’ is meant to mean on Alternia so I looked it up and came across a really great line in Kanaya’s introduction
and on first read it just seems like those are four different professions, and that Kanaya is just a jade of all tracks, but then you think about how treetrimmer and lumberjack are clearly just two names (one Alternian and one terrestrial English) for the same thing…
what Kanaya’s saying is that she works with cloth and with wood, and that she can refer to herself by lowblood vernacular (ragripper, treetrimmer) or highblood vernacular (seamstress, lumberjack) as she pleases because of her unique midspectrum class! i think that’s really cool.
so the implication is that ‘ragripper’ is literally just an Alternian synonym for seamstress (and a pretty fitting one, considering the Alternian aversion to complex fashion essentially reduces the practice of crafting garbs to the act of ripping rags)
a treetrimmer, is, of course, a real thing; it’s not a profession, though, or a thing you do, it’s an implement for trimming trees.
and if you only put a little bit of thought towards it, the fact that the lowblood words for professions are also the names of objects has pretty unfortunate implications if you ask me!!
combined with ‘scuttlebuggy’ in the comic, I’m pretty confident that scuttlevehicles are carts pulled by scuttling insects, since ‘buggy’ and ‘coach’ are both words used primarily for horse-drawn vehicles, and as far as we know, trolls use wheels for things, so to use the word ‘scuttle’ for a self-propelled vehicle doesn’t really make sense.
but imagine a giant bug bus that swallows and vomits its passengers at each stop! Can’t sit down too long or you’ll get digested!
hey, nothing says it can’t be both! i, for one, welcome the possibility of a big bug pulling along a huge disgusting larva on wheels.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, now, but I recently rediscvered a couple of pages that sort of have my interest piqued.
If the E%exuctor was expatriated; where the hell was he sent?
It’s clear he wasn’t sent off-planet; but to expatriate is to leave your country of origin, and what could that mean for an empire that spans star systems? It wouldn’t make sense for him to have just been sent to another region; he was exiled for crimes against the Highbloods, who exhibit power over the entire land dwelling population of the Empire. No matter where he went within Imperial territory, he’d still be within the jurisdiction of the people he wronged.
There is one line, though, that implies maybe he wasn’t actually exiled.
What happened, it seems, is that he actively expatriated himself to escape actual punishment (probably by one of the more conventional Alternian methods, like hanging or forking).
Okay, so that sort of clears up one mystery and opens up another can of grubs entirely. How was cobaltblood Spinneret providing indigo Darkleer with any protection he couldn’t already provide himself? Okay, because she
“command[ed] a notoriously deadly fleet of Gam8lignants.” But why does that count as expatriation? Why is her protectorate considered its own nation?
We know that the Orphaner’s conflict with them was labelled a “crusade,” but that he never actually does anything to actively get rid of the Gamblignant fleet; he waits for an excuse, then reports them to the relevant authority (the Grand Highblood, king of land dwellers, in this case). And even then, it’s not an out-and-out crusade that they wage against the fleet; they do it ‘legally’. Civil servants “plaster seizure notices on gam8lignant property,“ and then they send a cop to put together a case against the Gamblignants’ queen and ultimately try to execute her.
‘Crusade’ in itself is a pretty loaded turn of phrase; but what about the stuff they actually do? What does it look like?
The next we hear of the Gamblignants, they’ve been “decim8ed”. Their land has been taken from them, and we can only presume hundreds of them have been killed in Redglare and Pyralspite’s (read: the government’s) raid/s on the fleet. They didn’t need to actually have Mindfang executed; she was gone long enough for them to make their move.
If it wasn’t clear enough already, the conclusion here is that the Gamblignants are representative of a unique culture - I might even go as far as to say ethnic group - within Alternian society. E%ecutor Darkleer was able to seek refuge within their land because he was in with their leader, and because the Gamblignants were allowed to have their own land on Alternia - just until it stopped being convenient for the government.
Eridan’s the embodiment of the ‘English’ aspect of Lord English; he’s the racist, explicitly genocidal military commander, associated with English wizards and obsessed with all the things one might associated with some nasty English coloniser.
It’s all there in their myth roles, too. Hope’s the aspect associatated with Westernism and Euro-Christian religion. Eridan, as the Prince, is an active destroyer; as soon as he lands on LOWAA, he’s killing the natives (whose noted resemblance to Quetzalcoatl could well be very deliberate) despite zero indication that they drop anything or were meant to be killed. Cronus does the same thing - but as a Bard, he’s passive, and instead of being the one to do the deed, he invites destruction by calling upon the land dwelling authorities to commit genocide for him.
Something cool I think I might be onto about Mindfang as the leader of a people whose land was taken from them is that it’s not just obscure lore you have to sift through the comic to find and then be done with; it serves as a parallel to Spades Slick’s story!
Jack and Spinneret are both casino owners - Jack explicitly, but Spin more symbolically - who have English’s men - the Felt and the Subjugglators/their lackeys, respectively - take over the casino.
They both lose their eyes in the process of defending themselves or fighting back against the invasion of their property, and then in the process of escaping the mess they’ve got themselves into, they lose their arms - by which point, thanks to the actions of English’s henchmen, they’re the last member of their people standing.
And then they both spend some time in a manor where a horse-obsessed dude fixes them up with robotic parts - and more likely than not, a centaur butler is present nearby in both circumstances.
It adds a layer of meaning, too, to Aradia’s prophecy that ‘TICK TOCK” is the sounds that’ll “accompany the ultimate demise of the tyrant less an arm and an eye,“ which was pretty nebulous upon first read. Obviously it refers to Captain Hook, and the clock-swallowing crocodile who ultimately ate him; and in Homestuck, Captain Hook is Mindfang. But there’s little value in a weighted phrase like that if it only refers to a long-dead background character. I think this phrase is actually one of the things that’s meant to seal Spinneret and Jack’s thematic ties. Both of them were tyrants, or rulers in their own right, who saw their empires fall to the ticking time god that is Lord English.
This has a pretty real relevance to the greater plot of the comic, actually, because as the continuation of Spinneret’s legacy, Vriska is then set up to be the one who continues to mirror Jack’s story. Her desire to be the one to knock down the 8iggest 8ad ultimately is a manifestation of the revenge both she and Jack were after; to get back at English for that casino, which never stopped being a thing.
There are two types of dragon lusii, pseudodragons and true dragons. Pseudodragon is basically a catch-all term for any vaguely-reptilian creature that is big and scary and will bite your face off. True dragons are basically the same, but typically have some extraordinary psionic ability, like Pyralspite’s eye beams/explosions(? in that one flash it’s a beam, but on Jake’s island the same type of dragon just makes an explosion. Could just be that the power manifests differently from individual to individual, or can be applied differently.) This psionic aptitude also makes them more susceptible to animal communion.
i imagine it’s kind of like when an animal is called a dragon on earth (komodo, bearded, etc). it obviously is not a dragon, but is named so for its superficially reminiscent reptilian qualities.
i reckon alternia has a bunch of flying reptiles, some maybe related to dragons, some not, which just get called dragons in common language for the same reason.
it probably helps that the comic implies, gently, that, like rainbow drinkers, dragons are considered myth (”In case it wasn’t clear, dragons are real.” is a direct parallel with ”In case it wasn’t clear, magic isn’t real[.]”, which refers to the long-running gag where things that clearly are/aren’t real are erroneously denied as being actually/not actually real); it makes perfect sense for a troll to see an animal that isn’t a dragon and go “that’s a dragon!” because they actually don’t know what a real dragon is like, exactly.
I also think that given their airborn nature (and apparent above-ground breeding habits), it’s likely that true dragons (eudrakonia?) aren’t actually part of the lusus population; the pyrope line is just sort of a fluke that was allowed to happen because dragons are smart enough to choose to be custodians if they want to.
Yeah, Terezi’s case is weird because her lusus hasn’t even hatched yet! Reading over the wiki entry for it made me realize how odd it was, and how much it deviates from the typical lusus/troll adoption system. I could definitely see them as having developed independent of lusii. And then, pseudodragons could be trollkind’s efforts to recreate the mythical depiction of dragons through breeding programs, the same way lusii like Aurthour are the attempts to reproduce musclebeast-like traits. Trolls WOULD be the kind of people who want their lusii to look like a Super Cool Mythical Animal What Shoots Fire From Its Eyes.
Which would also account for a much wider range of forms a pseudodragon could take, the same way depictions of dragons across cultures varies wildly (lindworms vs Chinese loong vs the typical four leg, winged western dragons)
I think the fact that dragons are powerful psions (able to commune with trolls from a young age as well as obviously having some kind of thermokinetic abilities) is also a part of what makes them not lusii. For the most part lusii tend to be just dumb “””harmless””” animals, and there’s no way the empire would ever officially assign someone an animal with the ability to cut through ships with its eyes and eat megaspiders whole.
this is a pretty atypical way to talk about lusii, which, as far as we know, share a blood colour within a species. the implication that a dragon would tend to only raise nobles supports both the idea that they aren’t of lusus naturae stock and that the empire would never reasonably let any old person have control over one.
the “in this era” comment is puzzling, but I think it’s pretty easy to explain it as a reference to mythological times; Mindfang can imagine some king in a bygone millenium being raised by a dragon, sure, in the same way we can imagine King Arthur had fought a dragon, but the idea that some slave to the subjugglator council is just riding around on one and cracking down on petty crime? absolutely ridiculous.
most of all the fact that Mindfang thinks she can go out and capture it for herself is what sets it apart from a normal lusus, I think. like having a dragon is less like having a lusus and more akin to having a status symbol.
So the 288 signs that make up the “canonical extended set of troll symbols” are not the troll zodiac. They are a human zodiac, because a world’s starsigns are influenced by that world’s creators.
