DIDJA SEE THAT ONE ABOUT RAINBOWDRINKERS BASICALLY BEING HOLLOWED OUT HOSTS FOR GIGANTIC BLOOD EATING PARASITE WORMS??ive seen it! i can’t exactly say it’s one of my favourites tho
idk it’s just one of those headcanons that attempts to provide a hard science fiction answer to something, whereas i much prefer the opposite option that just goes “homestuck is a world where the pseudoscience is basically indistinguishable from magic and trolls are just fuckin sick powerful aliens from another dimension”
it’s been a long time since i rly read the concept in its fullest but to me it just raises more questions than it answers and id rather have jadebloods be rly powerful of their own right rather than pin it all on a parasite
Yeah I pretty much agree! Just thought it was a nice weird gross one, lol
I was working on something similar the other day about daywalkers being controlled by a kind of cordyceps fungus. Like cordyceps infested caterpillars, at the end of the fungus’s life cycle they stumble into the caverns and ‘die,’ their bodies dissolving and infecting the newly hatched grubs on their way out. In living trolls, the fungal infection isn’t terribly noticeable. Rashes, dry flaky or discolored skin, mouth sores, hair loss, a weakened immune system, in addition to symptoms like chronic pain, anxiety, and aggression.
The increased aggression urges the host to get into fights in hopes of further spreading the virus through swapping bodily fluids during fights/intimacy, and since the fungus doesn’t really care if the host dies, the additional risk isn’t a big deal. When the host eventually dies, the fungus take full control of the body and begins growing to infest it totally. The body hides under ground at night, and during the day the fungal blooms open to absorb the sunlight and the body wanders seeking additional nutrition to feed the fungus and prolong the limited supply of matter which is the host body itself. It also continues attempting to spread spores through any contact with living creatures. When the body begins to deteriorate too much for the fungus to keep it moving, it limps into the caverns and begins again.
(moving discussion to this blog bc it seems more suited for paragraph format headcanon discussion)
I saw you talking about this the other day in the Discord chat! Though I’m personally more inclined to think of shadow droppers as being plant-based, for a couple reasons.
Firstly fungal zombies are already a pretty common trope in human fiction (The Last of Us being a prominent example), and just personally i’d see using it for Alternian zombies as being inconsistent with how they’ve seemingly been made to display traits opposite to those of pop culture zombies, like coming out during the daylight, instead of burning in it. In pop culture fungi are also sometimes seen as nighttime things, whereas plants are daytime things (Plants versus Zombies, for example, has plants being inactive and being replaced with mushrooms during the night).
In the same vein, the fact that they’re stated as feeding off light is a pretty big indicator to me! Fungi aren’t photosynthetic, but plants definitely are, and it would provide a pretty solid explanation as to why they’re active during the day but not during the night; puppeting a body around takes a lot of energy, and plants get energy specifically from the sun.
The reason my plant zombies hunt down the living is mainly just for nutrients. Continuously feeding off the host body would eventually create the need for a movement of host, which would be really energy inefficient when the host body already has a system for taking nutrient-rich stuff into its body for various processes to break down! and putting roots into the ground would just be really impractical in lots of ways.
I imagine the ‘infection’ spreads mainly by inhaling the seeds, so the growth of the plant is usually pretty fatal and pretty unavoidable if you’re dumb enough to spend your time hanging around zombies.
My rainbow drinkers are a similar case but they operate just by having a plantlike biology of their own; their body runs off pigments (pseudoscience!) which they can get both by ingesting troll blood, which as we all know is heavily pigmented, or by collecting sunlight, which their body turns into pigment.