partially in conversation with Malo’s response to this post, but i think not really enough to justify turning it into a full-size thread:

in contrast to that last post, in which I position Alternia’s drones as a class of patriarchal machines who have essentially hijacked the reproduction of (implied feminine) trolls to perpetuate themselves The Matrix-style, i have in the past suggested that drones being made to participate in troll reproduction with no genetic representation of their own amounts essentially to “getting cucked” - or even to being physically emasculated - which malo alludes.

this latter idea wasn’t so much part of my broader understanding of sex and gender among trolls as it may be for Malo, so it didn’t really occur to me as I explored drones as patriarchs. but ultimately the two gendered views of drones are not so difficult to synthesise. trolls-as-(organic-)female can be responsible for the emasculation of drones-as-(robotic-)male; but as with all things on Alternia, this veneer of female empowerment no doubt only serves to obscure English’s patriarchal machinations behind the scenes.

perhaps i’m not entirely right in suggesting that a drone being born from an unfertilised egg serves as a parallel to English being born without a female half: instead maybe being born without genetic material is “being cucked” in the same way Cronus “got cucked” when English’s possession spell (read: genetic material) bounced off him and went into someone else? (or perhaps these two ideas are not so irreconcilable anyway; pattern dictates that if Caliborn is ever going to cuck anyone, he’ll do it to himself first, and it is indeed nobody’s fault but his own that English lacks his feminine other half.)

by being genetic blank slates, drones could well be the “avatars” of English in much more real a sense than I suggested in my last post; in the same way that Cronus was marked for possession with a scratch across his face, or Jack Noir pulled his eyes out to replace them with billiard balls, the drones have been scooped out and made empty shells ready to potentially host English at any time. so long as we’re thinking of drones as a Matrixesque army of robot oppressors, we should continue to keep in mind that robots are puppets, and that both of these things can at any time be one English’s vessels (ala Lil Cal) or his voyeuristic eyes (which is of course the textbook understanding of a “drone”).