Well, everything we see on-panel, actual pesterlogs - those can be trusted. That is, trusted to actually have happened, not trusted to have everyone in them telling the truth (smiling and waving to Aranea, the bs queen). Narration? Narration is unreliable. It’s an established trope, Unreliable Narrator, and it does not make analysis pointless. It makes it more complicated, but also more interesting.

We know already that a lot of what narration told us about trolls at the start of Act 5 is nonsense planted by Dr Scratch - that trolls had a completely different life on Beforus in his absence. Trolls are not nearly as different from humans as their Alternian culture woule have them (and us) believe - they are not more naturally violent, not more naturally solitary. Notable differences include the quadrant system, the lusus system (which, however, hasn’t been developed nearly enough to be taken into account as distinct from human families - we have no idea how young trolls learn speech, using computers and so on… we can handwave it with vague “telepathy” and treat lusus as human parents because that’s how Hussie proposed to treat them - “spidermom”, “crabdad”…) and the hemospectrum aging difference. There’s also powers, but let’s be honest, in fantasy genre this does not count as “notable difference from humans”.

We of course need to take the differences into account when analyzing - but where we don’t know there’s a difference, we have to assume they are the same as humans. Hussie himself encouraged this a lot, stressing how pretty much identical in all but chosen aspects trolls are to humans - they speak the same language, for fuck’s sake, they have the same movies and the same (albeit quadranted) romance novels, they have similar fashion, they have Peter Pan and Tinkerbell story, they have anime culture (at least on Beforus), their cultural idea of “pirate” is pretty much identical to ours.

When narration goes out of the way to call things “troll X” and to point out uncanny similarities between cultures, it’s not good analysis to ignore these similarities’ existence and start with the point “we can’t understand them, they are emotionally alien”.

I mean, it’s never good analysis to start with “we can’t understand it”, by definition. And attitude to other cultures that they are “emotionally alien” is even worse. We always have to start with drawing parallels and guessing analogies, even in case of real-world cultures and species, much less fictional, invented by humans for humans.

And that’s all just theory. The practice is, we see trolls before our eyes and they behave absolutely the same as human kids would in their situation. They get along with humans swimmingly, with barely a couple of cultural misunderstandings (which are still softer than two distinct cultures that never interacted before should have). All their motives for doing what they do are culturally transparent. Individual trolls - especially Beforan trolls - are used as parodies/exaggerations/homages to real-world subcultures. Which would have been IMPOSSIBLE if trolls were emotionally alien.

Your specific phrasing was “And my personal experience of being close to people with BPD definitely informs my feeling that a human who behaved like that could not be trusted, and lacks the psychological capacity for redemption”.

FYI, “a human who behaved like that” is a generalization. And given that directly previously to that you talk about people with BPD, a natural conclusion is that what you mean is “people who behave like they have BPD cannot be trusted and lack psychological capacity for redemption”.

This is generalization.

You are welcome.

Do they seem like “emotionally alien” to you? Or do alloromantic people? I mean, trolls process different things than humans as romantic, but it’s not like humans are a united front on what romantic is or whether anything calls up romantic attraction at all.