ruminating a little more on Watchmen as an intertext with Act 6; with Gl'bgolyb dying along with Alternia, one assumption we might be forced to make is that, like Ozymandias, Meenah was forced to create her own monster when it came to invading the Earth… and that being the case, it’s only natural to wonder if the psychic scream that kept thwarting her attempts to resurrect the trolls was also, like Ozymandias’, a fabrication of her own making (hence the “fakeness attribute” of Jane’s “frightening fauna”)
I’ve wondered in the past if Gl'bgolyb reflects back at Meenah a fear of her own womb (again, in the same way Ozymandias’ monster acts as a manifestation of his homosexual gynophobia). looking at things from this angle, the wording of Dirk’s retelling becomes more interesting: “the thing is a kind of an enigma […] a double edged eldritch horror. As much in her service as it is calling the shots […] Or so the story goes.” like maybe it’s not just Homestuck using Gl'bgolyb as a metaphor for Meenah’s barrenness (baroness), but Dirk himself using it as a literary device for Jake - to whom the frightening fauna are very much real?
or even just that Meenah herself concocted the Gl'bgolyb story to justify why she was for whatever reason unable to conceive. Dirk and the Condesce both have reasons to be acting as “scratch doctors” here, making Earth’s history seem more like Alternia’s even when it wasn’t necessarily..
certainly the idea that the Condesce invented a Vast Glub through technological means is consistent with the story that she used technology to replicate parts of Alternia that were otherwise incompatible with Earth… but it’s hard to tell whether this lines up chronologically? the narrative as related by Dirk suggests that the rise of technology only began after her attempts to replicated Alternia through “ill conceived biotech nonsense” failed, which Gl'bgolyb’s destruction of the troll clones presumably contributed to.
so say we look at this the other way; there was a real second Gl'bgolyb, who was replaced by technology later on. presumably this means the technological tendrils which permeate the “Crocker tier” Jane are merely the updated version of the organic tendrils Meenah used to control people in eons past… which, themselves, no doubt owe their existence to the doldrum flagella of Jane’s favoured fictional beasts. so, reason #2 for Jane’s interest in frightening fauna?
