Hussie listen. No, LISTEN. How the FUCK do the jadebloods know which signs to give baby trolls? Like that’s all I’m saying. how the fuck do they know. it’s gotta be them right? otherwise it’s maybe the drones but those things are mostly meant for killing and I really fucking doubt the empress blesses every fucking grub with a sign personally like she’s the fucking pope or some shit. like there are two plausible explanations I can come up with anx they both SUCK. either 1) the signd are randomly given out and because society has some implicit snd some less implicit expectations of certain signs it shapes you into being a player of that moon & aspect like sure that’s believable but also that’s stupid like hey jimmmm what’s the quota this week I’m workin cerules oh w’re gonna need an actual ass load of scormini’s this trimester, this generation’s gotta be big on martyr complexes or 2) it’s just fate but like. I know homestuck is very self-aware that it’s a piece of media and not real but are we really expected to believe an entire civilization has never questioned what gives them the sign they have. i really think this is something hivrswap should answer but i.. don’t think it will. also why would they even allow lowbloods with blood signs or life signs to exist? even if no one actually knows about aspects there’s still obviously something similar between all of the taurcer signs or whatever the fuck like. that shit is explicitly illegal
also can we talk about the cancer sign? can we talk about it? so like here’s the information we have about it so basically the cancer sign [ “sign of the signless” ] didn’t exist before troll jesus aka karkat’s ancestor aka kankri literally fought for it to exist so first of all are you telling me the lime caste was the only blood cast to have 23 signs instead of 24 before then??? why??? and then if you look at the chart it’s pre-greyed-out like it’s SUPPOSED to be “hemoanonymous.” that anonymisty is FAKE. but let’s put that aside. let’s assume that’s just an homage to karkat or whatever and other trolls with that sign where it colored. do people really need to see it colored in to know what caste it is??? it’s a lime-specific sign! 288 signs might seem like a lot but let me tell you if you grow up in a society that they’re pervasive in knowing them all is not a hard task to undertake! you learn way more than that in the average school week on earth. it’s not hard, even I’ve already done it and I only have a casyal interest.
This comes from the assumption that there’s only 24 signs for each caste, which is false. The Extended Zodiac is a comprehensive thing WE, the audience, have been given to identify the Troll Call Trolls for their Aspect, and to get a Symbol for ourselves after taking the Quiz, but Trolls sharing a Sign is explicitly stated to be very, very rare.
Alternia doesn’t know the association between the Sign and the Moon Sway and the Aspectbound, or if they do know about it, they may simply not care. Societal Expectations based on caste actually come not from the Sign of the Character, but from the True Sign of each caste. All Indigos are held to Voidbound stereotypes, all Jades to Spacebound stereotypes, and so on. That is what causes the harm on the society, the fact that most Trolls actually fit under another Moon Sway or Aspect, but the ‘ideal’ of each Caste is held by the True Sign. They’re forced into boxes they just don’t fit in, and we see this manifest consistently in Hiveswap and Friendsim with characters showing a heavy influence of their True Sign’s Aspect, while pushing for their own.
Similarly with the Lime Signs, Cancer is there as a confirmation of Karkat being a Limeblood Mutant, but there’s gotta be thousands more symbols for each Caste, but it’s just convenient to pin-point him there at long last. In-canon, actually, Karkat wearing the Signless’ Sign was likely due to the Jades that still followed the Sufferer’s Teachings having the Lusus and the Sign ready for him, and like, he should’ve been an on-kill target for any Drone, so I’m calling “Doc Scratch Shenanigans” on that. That, or Karkat literally never leaves home and is just a complete shut-in.
What we DO know, is that the Sign is tied to Genetics. Surnames are called ‘Caste Names’ in Alternia, which heavily implies that not only that, as we thought given the Betas and Alphas, Trolls and their Ancestors always seem to share a Sign, but that it groups these Trolls of the same Caste but common genetic lineage in the same sort of ‘family’ tree. This makes sense given how little Rusts live, for Higher Castes it may be more difficult to see, but Purples can likely outlive dozens of Rust lineages, and see the same sign popping up a bunch of times. So it’s actually possible there’s some sort of genetic scan for the Trolls that make it out of the Caverns that assigns them a Sign depending on their predominant Genetics, Troll Society is after all a sci-fi world with a lot of bio-technological implementation, so that wouldn’t be far fetched.
Drones doing the scanning/assigning would also make sense- They’re aggressive and awful but they’ve also been shown to do menial tasks in rich neighborhoods, and there’s Drones for various tasks such as Building Construction, so not all of them are mindless killing machines.