so i know it’s common to headcanon the trolls as naturally having intersex type bodies, or even anatomy close to perisex people after taking hormones? ive been thinking of a way to tie that into the tongue and cheek conception of “alternia” as an “alternate place” to the conservative suburban dream represented by homestuck‘s earth. i literally think it should be canon that ALL trolls are transgender, physically, socially and otherwise. but bro what? if 100% of the population was transgender then it wouldn’t be “trans” anymore would it. except on this bizarre planet, yes it is. every troll is assigned the opposite of their true gender at birth, and it’s the cultural norm for them to be pressured by custodians to embody their assigned gender with the full knowledge that it doesnt fit them (there are guardians who go outside the norm like sollux’s ally dad). this fits alternias culture of pointlessly torturing children. also trolls should naturally produce HRT. all of this adds up to transitioning is almost like a coming of age thing every troll goes through AHJFJHADBJABJ of course homestuck never stops at systemic solutions working for everyone, that’s why i think even outside of this most trolls should have intersex characteristics that the rules of this bizarro transgender society dont account for.
let me explain some examples
VRISKA - canonically a girl, therefore transfem. assigned male at birth, transitions to female, has a penis, body naturally produces estrogen
KARKAT - canonically a boy, therefore transmasc. assigned female at birth, transitions to male, has a vagina, body naturally produces testosterone
Does This Mean Eridan Detransitioned?
one thing that makes this cool to me is that the hormone/body situation means all trolls will have bodies that naturally look like trans peoples on hrt. cuz low-key guys i seen the way you draw the trolls and yeah ANMFANJFJWHFNJA TRANS BODIES ARE WELL REPRESENTED IN HOMESTUCK FANART ILL SAY THAT SNKFJSHFSNKFNJWFJNW there’s room to show the varying stages of HRT on peoples bodies and even the surgeries depending on the character?
another thing that just makes this straight up hilarious to me is that despite 100% of the troll population being trans, transphobia still dominates the popular culture on alternatia, and kind of maintains transness as a deviant, minority identity when it’s literally statistically the norm ANMFNJAFJHWBJFAJHC i feel the nonsensicality fits alternia as a satire of earth. like if trans ppl are normal why would they treat them that way? well, why does earth?
i think with there being 12 trolls there is so much potential to establish this system and then break it with a myriad of intersex characters. if i wanted to use homestuck to tell stories about transness/gender diversity i might do this. Ohhh but what do I know…
now im just thinking of the funniest situation where gamzes somehow gets away with being the only cis person on alternia in this system dude dont ask me how <WJNFHWDJKWHFIEJKFSJKWFHJAJFALJALKFJLWFLKEAIHFAJKCJKWLKFAFLAJFKWHCKEWJLFACOJAHICASHCKSAJKFAICOJACJKAS
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It's like Homestuck but during Antebellum slavery.
you losing your shit at multiple points in this is really funny
peak theory though i agree wholeheartedly. especially cis gamzee. clowns find a way
the epilogues are the best part of homestuck
i need it on the record that this is Freaking Epic so i am also making an Official Comment on this post
SMILE LAUGH PLAY !!
Unhinged, nonsensical and potentially offensive.
10/10, I agree wholeheartedly.
-- The Butch
Yup. That's going right into my belief system, thank you kindly.
unironically this is a thing that does happen irl for some animals and pretty much all plants. obvious example is the clownfish. the scientific term for this is in these species (mostly ocean animals from what I can tell) is sequential hermaphroditism and its really interesting to me because i like to study the creatures! There's tons of different types too, sometimes like OP said it is just a matter of sex changing with age and sometimes it has to do with external factors such as climate, resources available, competition for mates, ect.
just like irl I also think troll attitudes about transness on alternia stem more from misogyny; and unlike irl, the influence of doc scratch. troll gender should be 8x more confusing and convoluted than human gender, which is already pretty confusing. Kind of like how the quadrants suck ass and confuse everyone including most of the trolls but altenian society enforces them anyways or the drones kill you, they would probably have like. gender quadrants. or something. all i know is that its really transgender.
I thought this was already the case.
clowns kissing
I like this theory only because I've always thought Karkat was trans but did not know how to word my thoughts or explain my reasoning. I just, like, feel it in my gut. like I just know, yk?
My conceptualization of troll gender is that they have extremely minor dimorphism that is vaguely reproduction related, and they've built a binary gender system and cisnormativity around that, which i think is a similar 'gender reductio ad absurdium" thing
Spades Slick is a butch lesbian 2k25
this rocks
vriska failed to account for that fact that tinkerbull isn't the best example of an overbearing lusus, she has been trying to crack an egg that was cooked into an omelette fresh out of the caverns
you could really flesh out equius' goofy super-strength with an interesting backstory about his testosterone suddenly kicking in
and oh man this set-up could be really wild for Kanaya huh, sharing the trans woman desire for motherhood that Candy Jade touches on
Thinking about this some more and there's also so much potential with the strict separation between children left on Alternia and then adults elsewhere after ascending. No one gets to talk to actual adults and realize it's just normal. All they get is trickled down propaganda... I also really love your point of Alternia as an inversion of conservative suburban ideal into a new conservative evil. It also warps nuclear family structures so wonderfully - children basically getting raised by the family dog LMAO.
There's also so much sexual violence that's built into the system, with drone enforcement of entire population being forced to reproduce at beginning of "adulthood" just so most of them can die in a cave and then also kill each other for fun. Basically requiring absurd and arbitrary sexual performance as a measure of fitness. Especially since anytime any details about Troll Sex does get brought up its some crazy shit that sounds terrible, or the vomiting (dysphoria..........). The quadrants all being ways to basically pathologize any type of general complex emotion one could feel for another (enforced poly society...). It's all just about forcing and enforcing stupid bullshit that everyone hates. Except Gamzee. The evil clown being the 'normative' figure of society is so fucking funny.
I personally find it difficult to gaf about Beforus but I wonder then if that would then be an explicitly trans-positive society? And then with the Scratch, with Doc Scratch's interference as a patriarchal overlord, grooming the development of Alternia to deliberately make it transphobic... make every troll dysphoric.... make their pet/parent misgender them..... truly the most prolific pedophile in history.
re: cuberow
that thing about animals changing sex did partly inspire this, cuz i recently watched isabella roselinis series “green porno“ that explains a bunch of that stuff. i highly recommend that to everyone
> READ GODHEAD at SPICYYETI.COM
It's like Homestuck but during Antebellum slavery.
ON BOARD WITH THIS. I've written about transfeminine symbolism elsewhere so I wanna focus on a potential piece of transmasculine symbolism I picked up on. TL;DR It's boobs (and their negation). In much the same way that transfemininity can be implied through veiled allusions to dicks (eg Vriska's eye-patch being borrowed from the pirate One-Eyed Willie) or castration, I think transmasculinity can be implied through veiled allusions to breasts or mastectomy. My thought process, by character:
MALLEK. Remember Mallek? Handsome cerulean hacker from Friendsim. Everybody lost their minds when he took his shirt off at the end of the good route because 1. handsome and 2. he had nipple piercings, reigniting unresolved debates about why the fuck trolls even have breasts. The speculative weight of this reveal was quietly seeded earlier in the story when we saw a box of cereal in Mallek's apartment ("Fury Pops", a play on Corn Pops), invoking the question of milk. Made me wonder if the name Mallek was itself a play on milk (also ofc Rami Malek, who then played a hacker on Mr. Robot) ... and made me wonder about his horn piercings. The horse dicks on Horuss and Zebruh ensured that many people read the vague erogenous-zone coding of troll horns as phallic, but Mallek suggests they might be papillary.
EQUIUS. Again, the art on his wall of people being crushed by giant horse penises might lead you to think that the udder on his mustachioed centaur is cock-coded, but if you ignore the pornography and the disjoint between Aurthor's horse/human parts, we're being pretty straightforwardly presented with a milk-producing man. That which dangles below, the "centaur's testicles", are breasts. And if we accept Mallek's suggestion that horns can be papillary, Equius's broken horn fits his archery theme: the Amazons (mythic tribe of all female warriors) in some tellings cut off one breast as a means of improving their archery.
CRONUS. Both of the Amporas have a seahorse lusus and with him the suggestion of male pregnancy; Cronus redoubles this with a name that invokes a god who, in another sense, likewise had babies in his belly; and Cronus being humankin, outright describing his dysmorphia in terms of being born in the wrong body, also gestures at a desire to cut off his horns, which per the above would generate the "dual scars" of a mastectomy.
KARKAT. There is so much I could say about Karkat but lemme start with a manifestation reading of TROLL THIS WORTHLESS HUMAN. To rip some words off my blog, I’m inclined to view Karkat as like, the vengeful ghost of Nanna, in this instance? His anger towards John started with his killing of Nanna during the preceding flash, he ends with “FUCK YOU AND THE JOKE BOOK YOU RODE IN ON” (which killed Nanna), and there are odd parallels posed between Karkat’s “hate” and like, breast milk. “IT IS A HATE THAT TO FATHOM MUST BE PUT INTO SONG. // SHRIEKED BY THE TEN THOUSAND ROWDY SHOUT SPHINCTERS PEPPERING THE GRUESOME UNDERBELLY OF THE MOST TRUCULENT GOD THE FURTHEST RING CAN MUSTER,” Karkat says. “Sphincters peppering the underbelly” is a grotesque picture of an udder, with hate squirting from the teat. Hussie actually painted Horrorterrors as mothers in a news post that same year, describing a squid-orphan who will “never know the taste of its dead mother’s heinous teatbrine” – Karkat echoes this angle, it seems to me. So when Karkat poses his “pure and hot” hatred as a holy gift to John I’m sort of imagining Karkat aggressively trying to put his tit in John’s mouth.
The milk angle explains the phrase “WHY WOULD I GIVE A PUNGENT WHIPPING LUMPSQUIRT WHAT YOUR NAME IS.” – Karkat is conjuring a teat (lump) whose milk (squirt) has soured (pungent) into (whipping) cream. That this replaced the standard phrasing “give a shit” I think recolors Karkat’s next major gross-out, “YOU ARE SUCH AN IGNORAMUS I COULD SHIT MILES OF RAGE SNAKE TO CHOKE YOU TO DEATH.” It sounds kind of like aggressive mothering again, like Karkat is threatening to silence Egbert’s cheeky throat with white hot “hate” straight from the blubbery faucet. Pacify that boy! Pap pap papillary.
ANYWAYS this all obviously isn't exhaustive (eg there are other viable body readings of "dualscar") but it's an angle I'm pursuing at the moment. Very interested in the Isabella Roselini vid, I will check that out
I personally headcanon the majority of the homestuck cast as isogender. They weren't born (they were cloned in a lab) so they can't be "assigned" anything at birth, and thus they are neither cis nor trans.
Ehhh I don't think slime genesis excludes people from gender assignment any more than a C-section would. I could see it argued that Dirk and Roxy were never cis in the traditional sense since the genders they try to embody were self-assigned through knowledge of cultural norms that nobody around them ever had the power to enforce, but all the other humans had parents at some point to kickstart their socialization.