:D Ah. Well law is not the most trans friendly field, and he had Kristoph Gavin, a habitual emotional abuser and very-likely-psychopath as a mentor for several years. The fandom tends to run with this in the direction of sexual abuse, which is not entirely unexpected (they seem to do that with every villain, and in some ways it's kinda cathartic to read so many recovery stories as a rape survivor) but throw in a trans headcanon and it's that much more heavy. It becomes less of an escape for me.
I go ":::///" at the majority of depictions of sexuallyabusive!Kristoph because I don't think it gels well with how Apollo seems to behave toward and think about him in the first case, and even throwing that aspect out the window, I'm still completely horrified by the idea of how he'd treat trans!Apollo. Holy cow, that's a fascinatingly awful image.
Well, I think it's somewhat reasonable if you start with "this is okay" Apollo but that makes him a hell of a lot more fucked up... Yes this.
(@paintcat and anyone else who might be wondering: Spoiler: tw: Kristoph Kristoph Gavin is basically the reigning all-time champion of the Japanifornia All-Comers Passive-Aggression Derby. @keltena's description was "brightly, cheerily venomous." e.g. as your mentor in the first case, this is his way of encouraging Apollo to do his best: He ruined someone's life for incredibly petty reasons and spent the next seven years pretending to be his friend (his motive for that isn't given because AA4 has some massive writing problems, but "to gloat" is basically how it comes across). He's murdered at least two people and tried for a third. This is how he talks when backed into a corner: Handing him access to the keyboard worth of emotional buttons to press that "knowing your young, inexperienced employee in a not-trans-friendly profession is trans" would provide is the kind of thing that could put Apollo in therapy for decades. )
Oh no sorry talking about them is fine, the comment that was up before wasn't about that, it was about a very depressing AA fic I've read that had no (explicitly) trans characters. So.
alright SO as ive said in a different thread that im too lazy to track down, ive got a headcanon that trolls don't assign gender to body types because it doesn't make sense in-universe if you think about it. (trolls are monosex so you wouldn't be able to assign gender until they hit puberty and we know that young trolls have gender). so any gender has an equal chance of ending up w/ tiddies or not. so what they DO have in the way of gender assignment is caste/lusus-based, because we know that lusii are specially bred for each caste and it would be very easy to tilt the gender ratios in one direction or another. anyways where was i going with this. RIGHT trans boy kankri and thought-she-was-a-trans-boy-but-nah-just-furiously-rejecting-gender-roles-in-any-way-possible porrim. there's some scuffling when she realizes that she is not, in fact, a trans boy, and tries to apply that same logic to kankri who IS a trans boy and doesn't appreciate it. two weeks of bad discourse later they come out of the experience slightly more knowledgeable about each others' experiences. slightly.
I am 100% not hating on your headcanon but... I'm confused. Do you mean monosex in terms of bits? Because secondary sex characteristics (boobs & beards & all that) are still considered sex characteristics. I could see the singular genitals as a thing that developed in conjunction with a bi-normative society but I don't think that makes sex not a thing. Sorry, I know it's a really popular headcanon but every time I see it I just :/ cause I don't get it.
i mean it as in i havent done any kind of science in about two years and dont know basic biology but i THINK the fact that their reproduction is insect-based and involves a 'queen' means theyre monosex. do not quote me on that because i know exactly Jack Fuckin Shit
Nah, troll reproduction doesn't work like insect reproduction. It's its own bizarre thing. Bee/ant reproduction does often involve two sexes, with queens mating with male drones. I think you've got it mixed up with how all workers in hive species are female? But the workers mostly don't reproduce.
i meant it as in 'mother grubs and trolls are the same species with mother grubs being one sex and trolls being the other' but if trolls dont work that way then whoops (i have a bad time distinguishing from 'very logical headcanon' and Actually Canon sometimes.)
Trolls are Frigging Weird and I think gender being cultural rather than biological would make sense. But they're not weird in a way that parallels any particular Earth critter, so there's a lot of leeway. (They could even technically have a BUNCH of sexes, considering reproduction involves throwing genetic material from everyone together anyway.)
The biggest canonical fuckery in terms of troll biology is females having boobs. That makes them a lot more mammalian, leaning very heavily towards human, than any other kind of animal in terms of reproductive biology. Seriously, no other species has tits and no one really knows why we have tits in the first place. They're inconvenient and weird, even just speaking biologically. I saw that theory going around about the mother grub and the trolls being separate sexes a while back and it still makes me ??? because there are definitely sex characteristics present among trolls. I think it actually makes a lot more sense for the trolls and the grubs to be symbiotes, even symbiotes that were genetically engineered to take the burden of reproduction off of troll biology... actually I just thought of the genetic engineering bit, that makes a lot of sense. Paging @Lizardlicks because I'm pretty sure they've talked some about this?
My troll headcanon has four sexes. Two of which provide genetic material (the two genders of trolls as we know them). One of which collects the material. And the final of which uses the material to birth more trolls. I dislike genetic engineering theories just because I just don't like it conceptually and I'd rather have my weird four sex species. The trolls for me as just a lovely breeding ground of many types of reproductive shit with animals I know about being smashed into one creature. So we have queens like with bees, tentacle cocks and darts like snails and slugs, multiple genetic material providing "sexes" like certain species of bird or lizard and whatever else I deem fashionable and sexy at the time.
Trolls need to court other trolls with pebbles. Sexy pebbles. Sometimes sexy pebbles are defined as "the severed heads of your foes". Like penguins but with more tentacle cock and genital trauma.
