Troll Biology Discussion

the hiveswap rust and golds 8eing like that is most likely just due to poor characteriz8ion 8ecause i really dont 8elieve rust and golds are specifically powerful in psychic , aradia and sollux are just two little freaks with freaky powers /positive . i do think our horns are antennae though ! i never saw our species having ears cause we used our antennae to hear , another thing i like to headcanon is that our colors get a lot darker the further we grow , like the yellow-orange-red on our horns 8ecome darker more satur8ed colors , or our carapace darkens and grows tougher , i also always saw 8ones , nails , and eyes to 8e a red or orange color 8ased off the horns . like the colors for the nails and such is canonical 8ut i imagine them also darkening as we age .

I like to imagine that the reason why the warmer colors live shorter is because the healthcare they are given is so shitty that they die earlier compared to the cooler colors, who have better access to healthcare (due to being richer and more respected and whatnot).

Also drones are SO ignored in the comic. it's never explained where they came from before the Condense replaced them with robots after the Vast Glub -- which I imagine killed them too if she had to replace them. So I headcanon that if two trolls try to reproduce without the help of a mother grub, they get a haploid drone baby. and with the mother grub you get your standard troll. I think that would explain the similar sexual dimorphism traits trolls have like to humans, because why would Trolls look like that? unless if sexual dimorphism of troll is more of a vestigial trait. that would also be kind of interesting. That was my headcanon until i started wondering where tf drones came from rip. and that was my solution

Oh another headcanon is that Seatrolls have bad eyesight because their eyes evolved to see better underwater than in the surface, which is why they need glasses. My basis for this is only that Eridan and Meenah wear glasses, and Feferi never takes her goggles off once she's in the surface, so i think those are her glasses too lol. I headcanon Cronus doesnt wear glasses cus he thinks they are lame lol

weirdmageddons on tumblr has a really good post about how troll slurry is just blood mixed together + so I headcanon rainbow drinkers as being like that because mother grubs need to drink blood too

these are really interesting points of discussion! i always just accepted that the caste system was biological in nature and the population of a particular caste was relative to their lifespan. that is, shorter lifespan = more common blood caste and vice versa. i suppose it’s similar to how insect colonies work (with one insect being queen and the others being workers or something?) but with more levels to it instead.

i also believe i remember something about psychic powers being more prevalent in warmer castes, so based off of that i sorta just assumed that cooler castes tend to be physically stronger the higher you go. but iirc i don’t think that’s ever stated?

another random thing: i really wish the brooding caverns and trials were expanded more in homestuck proper. whenever they mention trials i‘m literally not sure what to even imagine other than wrigglers going through the depths of hell lmfao

i love hearing takes on this tbh, troll biology is really fun to discuss.

I think the tendency to think the hivebent trolls are outliers because they're clones or live alone or are mutants or whathaveyou is a tendency to miss the forest for the trees. Isn't a lot of that also true of the human characters? Some of those guys live pretty strange home lives, and none of them are TECHNICALLY human in the sense that they weren't born from other humans, but we still take it as our responsibility as the reader to think of them as if they are very real human beings with stories that represent real human problems and struggles. The fact that a lot of the trolls live quite remote never even struck me as unusual for their race given that we know every young troll decides where to build their home as soon as they emerge from the caverns, so they're just naturally gonna choose some strange locales. They are an internet race after all, so I imagined communicating online for them was more important than irl community. Nepeta may APPEAR to be a weird isolated catgirl, but she knows all about shipping and yiffing, so she's clearly not THAT cut off from society!! But all that is straying away from the biology topic haha.

It's always seemed quite logical to me, since long before Hiveswap, that the lowerbloods would be powerful psychics, because Alternia runs on an identifiable kind of video game logic. An RPG has its barbarians who are too stupid to use magic, and it has its magicians who are so physically frail they collapse if you place a finger on them - and a whole spectrum of diverse character classes between them! That's what the hemospectrum is to me. Similarly, since I was a kid I've chalked the lifespan thing down to highbloods having stronger bodies (re: the above post - while it's never directly stated highbloods are stronger, the fact that Feferi exhibits Equius-like strength always seemed like a very explicit hint at this) while lowbloods have stronger minds; highbloods may be able to live longer on the physical plane, but psychics demonstrate that their power allows their souls to linger after death (without the help of a much more powerful psychic monster like a horrorterror, I mean), so it's a trade off. I also like to think of it as kind of linking into Homestuck's gnostic themes; while highbloods' longevity means they can rule the physical world, lowbloods' higher level of consciousness means they're better tuned into the spiritual world behind the curtain, so to speak.

To the Kanaya thing - it seemed pretty well-implied to me by the end of the comic that all her weird daywalker stuff was normal jadeblood stuff, which we were just led to THINK was unique to her because jadebloods are THAT RARE. Of course, Hiveswap massively ramped up the normalcy of jadebloods by insisting each caste be equally represented (which also makes the "obscure cult" thing make much less sense), but I feel safe saying that Hiveswap fucked with a lot of the things that Just Made Sense to me about the jade caste.

To the Equius thing - well no, he's not a mammal, but he's not really an insect either? Trolls aren't related to any earth family of animals; they're a species from a totally different dimension and planet who happen to superficially have a lot of our earth insectoid traits - but also a lot of our earth mammalian traits. They're big animals, they gotta regulate their own heat somehow, so why not sweat?

To the Vriska thing - okay, yeah, she is just a freak. but her being a super special author's pet is hardly a new discovery haha

yeah!!! i have the same hc about lower castes having more psychic powers while upper castes have more strength!

generally agree with the sentiment that hiveswap made things more confusing in that regard though? why do so many ceruleans have eye mutations like vriska??? shes the special spider!!!!

anyways my personal hc for troll psychic powers is that they cost life force/energy to use so trolls who use psychic powers more frequently die faster. therefore godtier aradia is OP because she has no limit on her psychic abilities.

@a1m3v the drones ar e THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE. Logically if they are like bee drones they should be serving the mothergrub/queen so then why are they controlled by the Condesce? If the mothergrub is like a queen bee, then how does the condesce have any power over the drones? Like, if there's multiple queens for bees they split into different hives because otherwise the queens fight each other all the time. also irritating because a "drone" can also just be a word for robot. maybe the real drones were the robots we made along the way or whatever

@jakemorph I think it's just particularly interesting with the trolls being isolated because while we can pretty easily tell when something is abnormal for the human characters' living situation, it's much harder to know for the troll characters unless the comic says so.

Especially with the brooding caverns, I think it's implied that Tavros never went to the brooding caverns because he does not remember the trials while Vriska does. Karkat 100% was never in the caverns because he would have been culled if he was, I highly doubt Terezi was because then how was she chosen by an egg lusus?

Also slight correction: only primates can sweat. other large animals either rest or die when they overheat. the fact that trolls start out as grubs and then pupate makes me think they would have a lobster style carapace. actually i want to know more about troll pupation! how the heck does that work????

I don't think a story should strictly have to tell us what is and isn't normal for trolls, though, when it can show us. It's a pretty fundamental pillar of good storytelling; when we're being introduced to a new world, we should be able to take it on good faith that the things we're being shown are being shown to us for a reason. It's the same logic that tells us most trolls have black hair and red horns because the 12 we've seen all look like that, even though 12 is such a mathematically small slice of the population! (I also like to think of it as Dave's Conjoined Twin logic - even if the story never tells us EXPLICITLY that Dave won't have a second face on his stomach if he ever lifts up his shirt, we can be pretty confident that's the case because we trust the story to tell us the things that are relevant and avoid telling us things that aren't relevant.)

As far as the brooding caverns go, I don't know that I would take Vriska and Tavros' recollections at 100% face value... I mean, Tavros is being asked to recall a traumatic event that would have supposedly happened when he was literally a baby - I'm not surprised he doesn't remember if it happened or not! Meanwhile Vriska has a very vested interest in claiming to have experienced something, if it makes her seem like a more idealised, battle-hardened troll. So I could easily believe that all the trolls either did or did not enter the caverns. Though I dispute your reasoning for Karkat: didn't his ancestors breed a lusus just for him, specifically so that he would have something to protect him in the caverns - and he wouldn't have to be adopted and taken away from normal society like the Signless was?

I hope I don't seem like I'm picking on you by also talking about the drone thing HAHA I'm just very interested in talking about this topic (and I wanna bump the thread back up to see more people's responses!): it's not like the drones in a real life beehive are, like, under the queen bee's mind control, right? They have the same amount of autonomy as any other bee in the swarm. So I don't find it particularly strange that troll drones serve the same entity every other troll ultimately serves (though in the end they DO serve essentially the same purpose as a drone in a real insect colony, since their primary function [at least as far as the comic is concerned] is delivering genetic material to the mother grub). Really the more interesting aspect of this line of questioning to me is just how conscious the drones really are... do they actually just have one-track bug brains compared to the more humanoid members of their race, or are they fully functioning people who happen to be forced into servitude by the same machine implants that give them their rocket boots and missile wrists? ("drone" works so well specifically because it's a double entendre that refers to both a robotic weapon and a type of insect, btw!) I like to think it's a little somewhere in the middle, where they trade off some of their brainpower for their massive hulking bodies, but there's also absolutely a glimmer of humanity stamped out early on by a rigorous training and conditioning program, reinforced throughout their lives by cybernetic upgrades.

Anyway, as fascinated as I am by the drones in particular I'll be productive and add something new of my own LOL: there's a line in Hiveswap Act 1 about how eating eggs with bad parasites in them would disrupt the good parasites inside a troll's guts, and spinning off from that I like to think that most of the inside of a troll is parasites. just like how lots of the human body is composed of technically foreign microorganisms, but scaled way up: if you cut open a troll's body you'd find that a lot of their organs are actually worms and insects working together to keep the body running. I also imagine that if you cut open a piece of troll (bio)technology, it would look quite similar!!

re:jakemorph

no worries!! I just like talking about things and I'm glad to hear different opinions :D

I do think homestuck does a good job of keeping the trolls interesting with the information that it tells us! I am thinking about troll biology kind of like speculative pokemon biology. I don't expect it to make sense, but it's fun to think about!

Yes I keep forgetting how much of troll tech is based on using living components! I wonder if drones are conscious, if they existed on beforus? I tend to think of Alternia as a parallel to the Alpha kid's earth while imagining Beforus would be more like the beta kid's earth. Though to what extent I'm not sure. iirc latula mentions having a dragon lusus that taught her how to smell with her eyes or something, which i also find fascinating because lussi seem to all be the same species. A theory I heard somewhere that I like is that trolls are parasites that can mind control lussi to an extent/have different blood colors specifically to trick a lusus of the same blood color into caring for them, kind of like a cuckoo bird.

as a1m3v says they were only replaced by full robots on Earth when the Condesce lost access to the mother grub, so that implies they really are 'troll drones' in a biological sense and probably did exist on Beforus. very interesting to wonder what role they played there though! maybe it was limited to just the genetic material gathering stuff without any of the eugenics enforcement stuff.

I never felt it was indicated lusii were all the same species, so I'd be curious to hear your reasoning for that?

I certainly think that the matching blood colours and scents is a clever trick trolls use to trick lusii into picking them up, though the relationship doesn't seem quite as parasitic as we see in cuckoos: the troll takes the lusus up out

*up out of the caverns with them, and shows them a much better life looking after them like a pet! really I always thought the lusii got the much better end of the deal, given how terrible parents lusii are haha, though they're probably quite effective guard dogs I suppose

Oh something to add that is less troll biology than troll ectobiology: I have a theory about why Karkat had 24 tubes

Unlike humans who need 1 relationship to reproduce, trolls have 2- 1 kismesis and 1 matespritship.

Therefore, each troll must be entered into the ectobiology machine twice, corresponding to 24 tubes for 12 trolls instead of the kids’ 4 for 4.

I also think this explains something about the 2 generations of trolls- their similarity. It’s stated Karkat and Kankri look genetically identical. Few of the ancestor trolls on Alternia really look overwhelmingly different from their descendants. Furthermore, they all have the same aspect as each other, unlike humans, and they all share symbols, unlike humans. I think all of those trolls were ectobiologized in the copy stage, and that because of the session glitch there was no generation of trolls actually ectobiologized.

Alternatively, Hussie just accidentally put too many tubes in there :P, but I think my theory has interesting nature vs nurture implications vis a vis classes, aspects, and the alpha and beta trolls in general. A theory I’ve had for a while is that Tavros was also going to grow wings at “pupaty” like Rufioh did, but never got to because he didn’t live past 13. The theory enables a lot of cool ideas like that.

Also @jakemorph I think you’re absolutely right about trolls mimicking Lusii, but I think it has to be deeper than that because they also often share abilities with them, and literally blood. I think if slurry is blood they could just be feeding lusii to the mother grub to produce troll copies that can mimic them.

However, it’s also odd that Glbgolyb and Feferi have pink blood when horrorterrors have purple - maybe the lusii themselves are also mimics???

It’s also worth mentioning that the trolls are a spacefaring civilization and that the Condesce appears to have some level of genetic engineering technology. I feel this explains the different blood colors’ inception in conjunction with the mimic theory if you imagine the different lusii are from extraplanetary biospheres, while the genetic engineering suggests any parts of troll or lusus biology could be engineered rather than evolved or inherited.

I don't see any shared abilities in the lusii... the only lusii that even HAVE "abilities" (unless we're talking about some Friendsim thing I don't know about) are Gl'bgolyb and the dragon, both of whom are psychic (+ dragon eye beams) - but neither of their trolls are. Maybe we can extrapolate that bicyclopes have concussive beams like Sollux does based on their eyes, but if that were true it's still an outlier case.

I really don't feel that there has to be any "deeper" explanation as to the trolls and lusii sharing blood colours. T

(yet another early send 😔😔 fraf staff please get on that edit button. for me.. It doesn't even have to be for anyone else just let me do it)

We're talking about an alien planet where all the animals have a rainbow of blood; it would be weirder if the trolls there DIDN'T follow suit and also have a rainbow of blood. It's about as strange as dogs having eyebrows just because humans also have them.

I agree that trolls probably are scouring the genomes of alien worlds in order to engineer better and stronger lusii (one of my fantrolls has this as a job!), but I don't agree that this is a sensible explanation for the existence of lusii to begin with... it's hard to imagine that trolls first started venturing off into space and establishing their galactic empire before they even had a hemospectrum!! And you have to remember whatever explanation you have for blood colours and lusii on Alternia has to still work for Beforus, which still had a hemospectrum and still had the exact same lusii but had a totally different history with no Condesce at all. I really think the troll-lusus relationship is an ancient tradition of monster domestication that's so integral to troll life that it's been incorporated into their modern empire-building society.

THEORY TIME!!!!!!!!

adult trolls are supposed to have wings.

I dunno but it's weird to me that none of the other godtier species change drastically after ascending, and there is precedence for trolls having wings (The Summoner, Rufioh). Vriska's ascension definetley plays into her being a magical blue fairy, but I think that would be like if a human suddenly gained angel wings after ascending? Jade did become part dog but that is because of kernelsprite/dreamself shenanigans and we already know that neither Vriska or Aradia prototyped their dreamselves. So wings coming out of nowhere doesn't make a whole lot of sense even for SGRUB mechanics.

The only adult trolls we see are from alternia, which Doc Scratch has ruined. It is also mentioned that adult Cherubs are supposed to have wings, but Gamzee, another fragment of Lord English raises callie and caliborn to make sure that they do not get the wings they are supposed to.

also IRL most insects have wings when they are an adult.

Like it would be one thing if it turned out the summoner was not real and did not actually have wings but the existence of Rufioh confirms that it is possible for trolls to have wings? As he states he had them even before the game started. I have more thoughts about this but mostly i just think Terezi should get dragon wings because itd be cool and awesome.

I wonder if trolls are descended from a species that did have wings? In that case, Rufioh was a mutant who'd regained that lost part of proto-troll development, and god tier forms could be drawing on the same latent genes. So much about trolls evokes hymenoptera: the group including ants, bees and wasps. They've evolved wingless in some or most of the population on multiple different occasions.

On which note: I can't quite get my head around the Queen Grubs. Are they actually trolls? Or are they a different species that is symbiotic with trolls? In the later case, how do queen grubs reproduce, and are they the same species as drones?

Which has implications for another question: about, er, pailing. We know it doesn't matter if the couple who fill the pail is MF, MM or FF - the results are still useful. Is that a)'cos no fertilisation takes place until all the pails are mixed up together by the mother grub?

b)Or are there in fact 3 possible combinations of gametes that can produce a fertilised "egg"?

c) Or.... if the mother grub is indeed a troll, do both male and female gametes merge with a third sex of gamete provided by her?

d) or is troll gender completely unrelated to sexual reproduction?

Dang! I forgot about this thread. and I see some people have discussed my comments too so Dont mind me, long reply time! rip

@jakemorph || I certainly think that the matching blood colours and scents is a clever trick trolls use to trick lusii into picking them up||

Ooooo I like that theory! It's just like how wild animals use mimicry to their advantage, I love that :D

@Bandersnatch Since trolls are based on bugs, like ants, and queen ants are still ants, that means Mother Grubs are still trolls. In my interpretation at least. It's like extreme sexual dimorphism.

Also I think singular trolls are like, half of haploid (ploid? lol), and the mother grub provides the other half of the DNA set. Which is why Mother Grubs are so important to the propagation of their species.

I'm not really sure about biological sex for trolls. I have stated in this thread before that I have two headcanons, one where it's a vestigial trait. Maybe Mother Grubs and Trolls are like Neanderthals and Homosapiens? Human evolution diverged but were still close enough to breed with each other. And similarly, proto-trolls and proto-mother grubs started doing their thing and re-evolved together again, leaving troll bio-sex as a vestigial trait. I hope that made sense ripp

Or you can throw drones into the mix. I know female bees who lay eggs make male bees, which mate with the queen who makes female bees. Drones could be filling a similar role to them, with having a singular pair of trolls without a queen grub to make an infertile offspring? Since Drones are willing to be involved with the troll mating process, it makes sense for me for drones to come from the same species. Maybe since they can't reproduce themselves, they feel obligated to help everyone else?

Unless if its more like a symbiotic relationship, like how lusii adopt trolls.

@cubecrow || @a1m3v the drones ar e THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE. Logically if they are like bee drones they should be serving the mothergrub/queen so then why are they controlled by the Condesce? ||

Yes I have wondered the same thing. I wish to know what Drones are like. Why would drones work for trolls? do the trolls offer any sort of benefit back? or do they subjugate this random species along with them? Possibly, There have been mentions of space wars that adult trolls get conscripted to. But if we're going with the troll drone theory, I came to this conclusion as I was typing this:

Drones serve the trolls is the same reason for why every troll serves the Condense: Gl'bgolyb.

Its implied that the drones died along with all the trolls. It's why the Condense had to replace them with robots. I think Gl'bgolyb's cries could have killed them too.

I talked a little too much about drones rip (maybe i should make a drone speculation thread. for a time I got really passionate abt speculating on drones rip)

wait i may be wrong about worker bees laying eggs im stupid ignore that BUT MY POINT STILL STANDS IM STILL INTELLIGENT (im embarrased genuinely WHEN WILL THE EDIT POST FEATURE COME)