fishmech:

lime-bloods:

The lawnrings are empty. Blood skims the voids in your porous cranial plates, as if grazing the hollow of a threshed stem, or say, an abandoned cocoon.

The streets are empty. Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox.

lawnrings are presumably the closest thing trolls have to streets, and the setting of Karkat’s rant takes place in his own brain rather than in his neighbourhood so that the line about wind can be replaced with one about blood (though it probably has some implications regarding the interconnectedness of the characters’ homes and their inner worlds); but after using ‘threshed stem’ as a synonym for 'cut reed’, it feels particularly pregnant that a cocoon is compared to a mailbox? particularly because we know by now that a cocoon is a bed, so that’s not just their name for a mailbox. the very next page tells us trolls won’t even have a word for mailboxes because they don’t have mail full stop, so maybe those are just two parts to a joke, but trolls not having mail could be a part of this analogy too…

Lawnrings are yards, not streets. Meenah encounters an Alternian street during the part of meenahquest where she encounters cronus, mituna, meulin, and kurloz.

She comments it’s not unlike Beforus

the lawnring is literally a ring around the hive. use of the term is versatile; Gamzee referring to “those dwelling in more common lawnrings” implies it’s also a double entendre for 'social circles’, and while it might also be colloquially used to refer to what’s inside the circle, it is first and foremost a ring, not just a circle, around a troll’s hive, and the use of the word to parallel 'streets’ on earth, in conjunction with the panel on the same page showing the rings interlocking with each other, makes it pretty clear that the phrase 'lawnring’ refers to a kind of path