kinda fascinating the implication that gold was only a symbol of royalty on alternia because of a cultural association with seadwellers.
like in hivesbent only seadweller characters ever wore any of it, even though there were other (namely highblooded) characters who were by all means wealthy and yet didn’t choose to wear a single piece (i’m thinking specifically of mindfang here, but you could probably think of other examples).
and then when troll society springs up again, without any reason for a seadweller royal class to exist, the crowns they gift to their creators are made of a much more trollian, chitinous-looking material, even though from what we can see humans still seem to value gold as a royal metal.
my first guess was of course ‘maybe gold just isn’t as rare in the alternian empire, because of interstellar colonisation maybe?’ but that isn’t consistent with the apparent differences in the value of gold between Earth-C human and troll cultures.
so it just seems that for whatever reason, trolls don’t value gold like humans do, and that any perceived real value of gold (for indeed, it doesn’t even have uses in circuitry in a world where technology is purely biological) was invented purely perhaps by a leader of seadweller royalty, who wanted to make herself feel rich in a world where nothing has real value because everything belongs to a collective empire?
