zenosanalytic reblogged
Explaining troll society to the bf
zenosanalytic reblogged
Anonymous asked:
on the nature of invertebrother, since trolls are obviously no longer invertebrates, they must have just evolved from bugs. but that leads me to believe that it would be the equivalent of calling a human a monkey?
Pre-evolution or pre-development, troll babies are invertebrates before they pupate -- though I guess the two could be conflated since human babies get referred to as "pink monkeys"... But within that paradigm, the invertebrate reference could just as easily be read as a play on "What's up, baby?"
zenosanalytic reblogged
ok, real quick before i turn this pc off: the matriorb hatches into a mother grub, which consumes troll’s genetic material to lay troll eggs, but can’t produce another matriorb unless it never feeds, and it dies early in the process.
so…. is roxy supposed to make more matriorbs, or something? because i was under the impression that, so long as an item exists, she can’t steal the “nothingness” from it because it has none. The current matriorb felt pretty final! And yet if the Mother Grub makes trolls it can’t make a matriorb, and vice-versa…
if the mother grub dies of old age will trollkind be screwed unless there’s a roxy around to make more? and will she be able to make more even once this one hatches?
once the matriorb stops being a matriorb, will it once again be considered to not exist or will it still exist as a mother grub?
NOW TOODLES I MUST GO
Grow new, virgin mother grub from tissue sample, like with plants and cuttings. Have that one seed a new matriorb. Done!
Or maybe the mother grubs are like those lesbian island lizards–they used to have their own more complete cycle, then they came to rely solely on parthenogenesis, THEN they were co-opted more fully by trolls and are now as hobbled as English bulldogs (thus: there does exist some technological way to save them from dying during orb production, but it isn’t available to teen Jade Kanaya on her own).
Yeah; Clonings def a possibility considering how advanced Troll husbandry and biotech is. Do we know only Virgin Mothergrubs produce matriorbs though? I can’t remember if that was said and I can’t think of a good page to check at the moment (:T
Maybe all Mothergrubs grow a Matriorb as they get to the end of their lives. Or maybe there’s a dif stage in Mothergrub development; like, a way to induce Drones into becoming Mothergrubs, or a phase where they produce Matriorbs before they begin producing Trolls? Or they could be like Queen Ants; they occasionally produce “Princesses” who are supposed to start new colonies(creating a breeding mother with the egg they contain, then taking care of it til they die maybe, unless you go with the all Mothers have Matriorbs theory), along with all the Trollgrubs and Drones. Adult Trolls may have then started inducing the ones they don’t need for replacement into becoming Virgin Mothers as a way to concentrate social control, like mbl suggests.
zenosanalytic reblogged
so what you're saying is, eridan should have dampened his own strong beliefs/desires. But instead, he unintentionally prevented his beliefs/goals/wants from coming to fruition. So now I'm thinking... I know that part of the prince class means destroying only the right things so that they don't end up becoming a villain... but I wonder if princes have to also choose to destroy so that the destructive forces don't 'leak out'. If that makes any sense.
Yeah; my read of him is that Eridan needed(still needs; for Death is Not the End) to learn to see past himself, and that the reason he had a hard time doing that was that his social position had always gratified his ego and rewarded him for putting what he wanted, and how he wanted the world to be, first, without ever thinking about what he really wanted.
> Deep down, Eridan didn’t want to be the genocidal Imperious Sea-Dweller loner or to become “The Destroyer of Hope”, but he did anyway because he never let the people who cared about him help him by just friggin listening for one coddamn minute and honestly doing what they told him to do.
^^^ also, i think, because that destructive, selfish identity is the only one he knows. if he stops being that guy, he’s no one at all. however much his friends are right about his fuckups, none of them ever offer him an alternative. they tell him ‘stop’, but they don’t tell him, ‘be this instead’. they don’t tell him, ‘here is a part of you that’s you, not the poser identity you’re wearing like an oversized cloak you keep tripping over.’ so his only options, as he sees the situation, are to continue to be the bad thing he is, or to cease to be anything at all. kids that age are desperate for an identity, but don’t have the wisdom to define identity for themselves.
it’s like he was trapped in a room everyone was telling him to get out of, but he couldn’t see the door.
(because this is tumblr, i must clarify: this is not an attempt to shift blame for eridan’s actions away from him. it has nothing to do with blame at all. it’s simply a way things were not perfect, a way this very interesting tragedy came to pass.)
Yes! That’s a really good addition to this post that never occurred to me :p I sometimes try to make a similar point regarding Terezi and Vriska; that, while Vriska’s actions are totally her own and T isn’t responsible for them, Terezi pre-Revenge-Cycle seemed to have been more interested in directing Vriska’s violence than in wondering whether being violent was good for her in the first place. She felt she could “tame” Vriska by giving her a “Just’ outlet(one that aligned with Terezi’s interests), but she never stopped to ask whether the sort of violence-for-fun they were committing could ever be Just, or what effect that sort of life(and presenting justifications to someone who desperately wanted them, like Vriska) was having on Vriska’s personality and outlook, or whether someone so acclimated to violence and so convinced it was a personal necessity could ever really be “controlled” so long as that violence was still on the table.
I guess the general point of all this is that you can fail to be a perfect friend to someone -sometimes for entirely understandable reasons, and sometimes for personally unflattering ones- without also being culpable in the tragedies those friends bring about, or which they bring down onto themselves (:/
To be fair, Alternia is a world where murder is commonplace and an accepted part of society. Trials (or at least the determination of guilt) in their court systems often don’t happen before executions. They are a society that is devoted to intergalactic conquest and presumably genocide, as well as one that at a young age is introduced to the concept of sex (even if it unnerves them), not to even mention the hunting and feeding taught and required by lusii, often requiring the death of wigglers. This is not a society where Terezi would ever think it IS unjust to act as they do (and mind you, they are playing a ****ing videogame, and death being involved is apparently an inherent and casually accepted risk in Troll games). The only reason she objects to the way her “sister” goes about things is because there was not even a pretense of evil/nefariousness in the people they killed. (It was a roleplaying scenario, but I’d like to think she wanted to think their guilt would also be genuine) Yes, one should view all of them under the lens of them being teenagers going through problems growing up, but you also have to realize their entire CULLture is developed to effectively indoctrinating them as child soldiers. This is not to say I don’t agree and appreciate with your zenosanalysis of the characters (and I do, especially with regards to Vriska), nor with this current thread considering Eridan. However, I feel my comment here is warranted. (Oh, and as previously suggested, a good deal of confusion and culture shock may have been leaking into Terezi’s mentality in recent sweeps due to the influence of the Humans- particularly Dave, which may or may not have changed her personal idiom when it comes to Justice. )
This is true; you can’t lose sight of the cultural side of this, or forget that, at that point, Terezi may have been questioning aspects of the system she was romanticizing(her desire to kill people who “deserved it” in someway, rather than just those deemed fair-game under Alternia’s twisted legal system) but she was still accepting even for herself that violence -and specifically caste-based violence considering the Teal=mid-level enforcement bureaucrat statement Mindfang makes in her journal- was acceptable.
But to say that a pov which rejects violence and the killing of other children was not possible is to over-state this case, I think.
zenosanalytic reblogged
If I recall correctly, each universe has multiple groups of kids attempt to succeed at sburb (I think the trolls mention the redundant nature of reproductive systems) though of course only one can succeed. There were three other walkthroughs posted besides Rose's, after all, meaning others definitely got their hands on the game and potentially made it into the Medium before failing. Do you think these kids, if they made it in, would have had ectobiological clones?
I’m supposed to be doing something right now but this is just such a cool question I can’t get it out of my head. I want to say that they would, but I’m afraid they would only exist in a quantum kind of way, so let’s go step by step because I’m not sure where I’m going to end up with this.
Each group of a universe’s kids that manages to get one player into the game spawns their own Incipisphere, including an ectobiology lab. However, all of the players we’ve seen so far already were ecto clones born during their own future sessions. If a universe has multiple potential groups of players, it would stand to reason that each group should have its own lab, meteors, and clones.
But only one of the universe’s sessions can succeed, and as the others fail their potential future Incipispheres collapse into non-existence, canceling the creation of the clones that would become the players…
Yeah, I think what we come back to is that time is both non-linear and highly scripted. All of the groups that succeed and have clones do so because they already succeeded, so each universe in fact has only one potential group.
Rose mentioned that the other walkthroughs didn’t seem to make it much past the entry point; the software must have been accessed by kids who weren’t “players” (because they never had been and never could be).
I wonder if release method may be dependent upon the species as well.
Trolls are social but taught to be clannish, so it made sense for The Game to come to them as a "Secret" only one group of hatefriends exploited; having their more tech-savvy members create or discover a potential source of advantage over other Troll-kids wouldn't have seemed strange enough to arouse suspicion.
Humans, being more social, would find it a bit strange if they and their friends were the only ones to receive an in-development game, so to encourage them to approach it as something innocuous, a wider release would be necessary. Unless you were dealing with someone who was a bit of a classist, like Jane; to a person like that, it would only make sense that she would have exclusive access to some new product, particularly a Crocker-Corp one.