Broken Troll Worldbuilding discussion

[VASKA]

I do think we have a retcon in the books. It seems to me like Hiveswap, Friendsim, Pesterquest, etc are making moves to be internally consistent with each other, but not necessarily the comic. And to an extent, that's to be expected, since the comic is laughably inconsistent with how lore works. I do think the whole point of the Hiveswap, as a prequel and as a fountain of spin-offs, is to generate "deep lore" for the more cerebral, theorizing/memorizing fans, but to be able to do that, you're going to have to selectively ignore a lot of stuff and alter a lot of other stuff to make that lore consistent and plausible, "cutting away the fat" as it were. Now, is this a good move? I like it, but I also recognize it's going to be messy, so it's anyone's call and we won't know until it's all over.

[thorondraco]

I do think we have a retcon in the books. It seems to me like Hiveswap, Friendsim, Pesterquest, etc are making moves to be internally consistent with each other, but not necessarily the comic. And to an extent, that's to be expected, since the comic is laughably inconsistent with how lore works. I do think the whole point of the Hiveswap, as a prequel and as a fountain of spin-offs, is to generate "deep lore" for the more cerebral, theorizing/memorizing fans, but to be able to do that, you're going to have to selectively ignore a lot of stuff and alter a lot of other stuff to make that lore consistent and plausible, "cutting away the fat" as it were. Now, is this a good move? I like it, but I also recognize it's going to be messy, so it's anyone's call and we won't know until it's all over.

And presumably HS^2 could be consistent with this stuff too. It feels as if they are planning on linking Hiveswap into HS^2, though who knows if this was the plan is hard to say. Far as we know they didn't decide to do that until late 2018 after Viz fucked them over and before they released the epilogues.

The links already existed the moment Marvus made his debut in friendsims, foreshadowing the Three pillars. And now the link is a literal character. The MSPA reader himself is in fact, technically speaking, a Hiveswap character. He has a hidden impact on Hiveswap's story cause he was used to make sure the actors were in a certain place for Joey. And now he is literally fucking up Homestuck.

This honestly fits in a weird way. Hussie was a chaotic and somewhat internally inconsistent writer and now two relatively more rational authors are fighting each other for control. Thus they would have the world become more internally consistent.

[calamityCons]

Homestuck becomes more and more of a clusterfuck the longer it continues and tries to remain within one nominally contiguous narrative reality, in my humble opinion. If Homestuck decided to just bite the bullet and say “Hiveswap is an alternate continuity with minor or surface continuity with the original Homestuck” in the same way something like Transformers or Marvel Comics have “alternate continuities” within their canons, I think it would be a good idea.

Like. I think it would make things a whole lot easier and we can evade future continuity snarls and errors by just outright going “This reality is similar but significantly different than the original webcomic” in the same way Transformers G1 is separate but similar to the IDW Transformers continuity. It can also be a completely new concept of the original starting from scratch, like the difference between Miles Morales as Spider-Man and Peter Parker as Spider-Man, Gwen Stacy as Spider-Woman, Spider-Man Noir, etc.

[JakeMorph]

I think AUing hiveswap would be totally counter to its entire purpose of expanding Homestuck's universe. Not to mention loads of people who backed the Kickstarter were already furious that the game they backed wasn't literally a video game adaptation of Homestuck or a completely immersive SBURB simulator, lol. I would understand if some people were a little upset that the big project Andrew has been working on for all these years now was Just Some AU.

[thorondraco]

I think AUing hiveswap would be totally counter to its entire purpose of expanding Homestuck's universe. Not to mention loads of people who backed the Kickstarter were already furious that the game they backed wasn't literally a video game adaptation of Homestuck or a completely immersive SBURB simulator, lol. I would understand if some people were a little upset that the big project Andrew has been working on for all these years now was Just Some AU.

Weirdly enough it would also go against the common themeing of homestuck if it was just an Au. The norm in most media is stuff like videogames and comics are all noncanon. Side content with no influence on the main story.

Homestuck is always bout subverting such things and emphasizing the Atypical. It does that even to itself, perhaps hinting that the determinism nature of paradox space is not what it seems. What better subversion of side content than it becoming incredibly important to the main content?

Course i have no idea how it could at this point. But it just being AU would just be, well, typical.

[calamityCons]

Just because it is typical does not mean it is bad or inherently detrimental to homestuck as a franchise. And if Hiveswap and the Friendsim remains a part of Official homestuck Canon In The Same Universe And Continuity, then the questions I brought up must be addressed eventually or it will make me and many others very frustrated.

(Second paragraph redacted because wow it was unnecessary)

[TH4NK YOU B3N]

i think the implication was that violence is so normalised on alternia that a violent game involving dressing up and roleplay would be like a "girly" version of violence. in fact with the context that alternia's version of femininity was supposedly based on calliope's version of femininity, this makes even more sense: calliope was obsessed with dress up and fanfiction and all sorts of shit caliborn found totally detestable.

god that is really fuckin good. it's like the neopets of murder. i am throwing away my old headcanon that is like the one from 2011. i think the venom sac thing is dumb

I do think we have a retcon in the books.

You mean the Homestuck books published by Viz? Do you have an example of a retcon?

I like the idea (from Pesterquest) that Karkat has a bunch of empty hives around his hive for him to move to whenever a drone blows one up, but in the comic he claims that one of his neighbors was "culled" and tries to invite Terezi over. And I'm pretty sure Hussie didn't think at all about why Nepeta lives in a cave if trolls are meant to design their own hives.

"Think about Lord English's motivations for changing things on Alternia" basically translates to "It's a satirical parody of Human Earth." And that's not a satisfying explanation on its own. Other people can think about it but won't arrive to the same conclusion that you do unless they already share your political views.

[VASKA]

"in the books" is a turn of phrase, so "at some undetermined, but likely inevitable, time"

[JakeMorph]

And I'm pretty sure Hussie didn't think at all about why Nepeta lives in a cave if trolls are meant to design their own hives.

not all trolls are going to do what they're "meant to" do, especially if they fall from the sky on meteors rather than actually hatch out of eggs.

"Think about Lord English's motivations for changing things on Alternia" basically translates to "It's a satirical parody of Human Earth." And that's not a satisfying explanation on its own. Other people can think about it but won't arrive to the same conclusion that you do unless they already share your political views.

this is... always going to be the case with politically charged media, though. a guy who thinks authoritarianism rocks is probably going to think "wow, this rocks!" or "wow, this book is wrong!" when he reads 1984, but that's obviously NOT the authorial intent. that doesn't make 1984 badly written or inherently unsatisfying.

[TH4NK YOU B3N]

this is... always going to be the case with politically charged media, though. a guy who thinks authoritarianism rocks is probably going to think "wow, this rocks!" or "wow, this book is wrong!" when he reads 1984, but that's obviously NOT the authorial intent. that doesn't make 1984 badly written or inherently unsatisfying.

You can give an unsatisfying explanation to any book! Glad we agree on this.

[JakeMorph]

You can give an unsatisfying explanation to any book! Glad we agree on this.

this isn't an explanation being "given" to Homestuck, though, its THE explanation, in the text, and has nothing to do with the political viewpoint of the reader

[TH4NK YOU B3N]

Yes, it makes sense in the context of Homestuck, but that doesn't mean you can get away with not explaining how something is satirical if you're trying to have a discussion. And you don't. You explain your interpretation of why FLARP is a girly game, and that's good. Other people aren't going to figure that out right away, so your quest isn't going to end there.

Doc Scratch is a biased narrator, trying to convince you that it's natural that lower castes to have shorter lifespans than higher castes (discounting all the murder that's happening), which is why one is lower and one is higher. But the Helmsman, a member of a lower caste, is able to live an unfathomably long life because of Condy's "generosity." He is given access to better resources, but only because it means she can milk more labor out of him.

So there's this confusing idea that the discrepancy in natural lifespan is artificially enforced by economic factors, that the rich build up a ridiculous number of advantages over time. The sudden reveal of Condy's absurd lifespan illustrates how stupidly rich one would have to be to have billions of dollars. Time is money and money buys time.

This sort of theme is continued in Artchop troll's route, where it's shown that she had a "heal your bones instantly" machine, and in Tavros's pesterquest route, where it's revealed that the castes get inequal stipends. You could say that they're hinting at it much harder than Homestuck did because evoking feelings of futility and powerlessness better suits the agenda of Doc Scratch.

That's me explaining to myself how the lifespan discrepancy isn't racist even though it's being revealed to me through a practitioner of scientific racism. It's not that intuitive.

[Dream Muttman]

Could you summarize what you meant? I'm honestly confused by some of the wording.

[calamityCons]

Wait, wait, wait. When did this discussion become about racism? I’m a little lost here.

The lifespan differences are a thing that make very little sense to me because if they’re the same species then there really shouldn’t be such a thing. Then again, the same species having different blood colors is something that is difficult to accept on a biological basis, and whether one can accept that as just “trolls arent real so why not” or come up with some scientifically sound concept for why the colors vary but in truth the blood is the exact same just with superficial levels of “color gene” or something...

I’m losing my train of thought but the border between two concepts of the trolls is blurry and frustrating. “trolls are silly and creative fantasy creatures who do not need to follow the laws of physics or biology or genetics or any sciences at all if it provides jokes or drama” is very different from “trolls are a deep culture with fully thought out and meaningful reasons for things to be the way they are that have historical or anthropological basis and is scientifically or sociologically sound”. It feels a lot like Hiveswap and its related media want the trolls to be the latter, but has to work within the restrictions of the original approach Homestuck took, which was “funny and silly fantasy alien goofiness.”

These tensions have yet to be rectified in any official capacity.

[ThePungeonMaster]

Actually, there may be a scientific explanation as to what could cause differing blood colors:
The thing that causes human blood to be red is the iron the hemoglobin bonds to, as the bonded iron reflects a red light. However in other animals, namely certain cephalopods and crustaceans, instead of using hemoglobin to transport oxygen throughout the body, hemocyanin is used. This hemocyanin bonds to copper instead of iron, and causes the blood in those animals to be blue. So we can extrapolate that if the hemospectrum were at all possible, all differences between the trolls are caused by the reactant their hemolymph uses. Granted, it could be just as likely that instead of the color and traits of the trolls being caused by the reactants in the blood, the anatomy of the trolls instead causes their blood to take on a certain pigment through chemical reactions inside their body and chemical reactions with the environment.
Regardless, I think the whole thing falls into shit we're not supposed to think about. The entire reason troll world building is broken is because we're trying to build off of shit Hussie thought would be funny 8 years ago and reframe it under a serious context. Sometimes it works, often it doesn't.

[Dream Muttman]

Different lifespans in the same species is a real thing, especially among insects with castes. Ant queens live for several years, while workers live weeks to months at most, and males only live for a few days.

[JakeMorph]

yeah b3n you've completely lost me. I get that you're saying lowbloods living shorter lives naturally is a poor analogy to real-life classism and that you think highbloods only live longer because they have access to better resources, but I think its actually pretty intuitive that the condesce extended her helmsman's lifespan with powers rather than just generosity considering scratch refers to her using "her touch" to extend his lifespan

[TH4NK YOU B3N]

Different lifespans in the same species is a real thing, especially among insects with castes. Ant queens live for several years, while workers live weeks to months at most, and males only live for a few days.

1. I am not an ant and Andrew Hussie is not an ant. There is no ant sociology because ants aren't sentient.
2. You're talking about differences based on their role in the reproductive system. Going by that, there are three sexes: Trolls, Mother Grubs, and Imperial Drones. Trolls are otherwise interchangeable for this purpose.
3. Trolls are a technologically advanced spacefaring race. The Condesce used technology to give herself psychic powers that are otherwise restricted to lower castes. There is no reason that such technology couldn't be used to level that playing field. Tavros had to use a (particularly shitty) wheelchair for all of SGRUB even though Equius knows how to make cyborg prosthetics. There's no good reason for that. In the United States, at least, insulin is prohibitively expensive. There's no good reason for that either.
4. The scientific racism angle has to have a level of plausibility because otherwise discrimination would look as arbitrary as it actually is. We have to look at it and decide "This is still stupid."

[calamityCons]

Regardless, I think the whole thing falls into shit we're not supposed to think about. The entire reason troll world building is broken is because we're trying to build off of shit Hussie thought would be funny 8 years ago and reframe it under a serious context. Sometimes it works, often it doesn't.

You. You understand me. Thank god. I thought I was losing my mind yesterday.

This is why I still hold that it would be better to just make Hiveswap a reboot or something, because that way we don’t have to start on the shallow surface level worldbuilding from the previous decade and can instead pick and choose the coolest or most interesting parts to extrapolate from. So much about Alternia just disintegrates without the ultimate answer of “the ingenious and brilliantly evil Doc Scratch did all of it to summon his dumb and shitty boss”

[TH4NK YOU B3N]

That does sound like a nice prospect, but I think reframing funny things under a serious context is a fun exercise.

the condesce extended her helmsman's lifespan with powers

Ah, yes. The SBURB powers. SBURB, the planet-conquering game developed by a grown Meenah that utilizes advanced Alternian technology. The advanced Alternian technology that is unequally distributed because of the caste system. Okay.

Why do you think I find it to be a poor analogy when I'm praising how clever Doc Scratch is to trick me that way?