Maybe it depends on the bug. At the same time as that happens, certain types of bugs are apparently also a delicacy; Xef's cookbook mentions grubcakes as a highblood food, and apparently he's expected to learn to cook throttlemoth gizzards which could kill him. Add in the reference to "horrifying parasites" as standard in cluckbeast eggs and forget gross, I'm wondering if all their food is actively trying to murder them. Do Beforans eat bugs too? Was it ever said? It would make sense if they did; as you said, easy protein to feed an apparently carnivorous species which is so numerous. Xefros' line about not asking what's in grubloaf is adding in my mind to the popular fanon that it's made of troll babies in the grub-like stage. I think they were only ever referred to as "wigglers" in canon, but still...
i definitely think that troll cuisine is significantly more dangerous than ours, but humans also eat fugu and raw or incorrectly handled food can contain all kinds of parasites, and i wouldn’t describe our food as actively trying to kill us iiiii honestly can’t remember what beforans eat, i’ll go take a look fake edit: porrim references grubsauce when asking if kankri has something on his face/stained his sweater, and cronus references grubsauce again (“no grub sauce on your hands”) when talking to meenah nope, grubs are the larval stage, iirc wiggler refers to young trolls in general. but i’m biased in favor of that headcanon, so ymmv and all that. they specifically refer to beefgrub as some kind of livestock animal, but they never say that’s the only reason something might be called grub[x]
Difference with fugu is it kills the person who eats it. I think it's very Alternian to have something that kills the lowblood who prepares it and is probably fine to eat after it's cooked.
it’s super alternian, but people also prepare lionfish, which is safe to eat but very dangerous to prepare because of the spines the major difference is that instead of preparing and eating it themselves, they’re making lowbloods prep it, which i wouldn’t describe as the food itself actively trying to kill them like, a dead lionfish isn’t actively trying to kill me if i poke myself on it, it’s not actively doing anything
Remind me to share my mother's lionfish story. Is there a thread for humorous anecdotes about people your family members knew? At least with lionfish you can breathe and wear gloves when prepping them. Apparently Xefros is expected to just not breathe in while cooking throttlemoth; I wouldn't put it past Alternia to specifically have rules against lowbloods having access to gas masks.
I don't really think it's Alternia's MO to want lowbloods dead. If it did, there are many more direct and simpler ways to do so, e.g. not providing them the means to build a dwelling, or not allowing them to have weapons (any lowblood found with one is killed by drones, fr'ex).
yeah. it's probably just that they tend to give lowbloods the more 'dangerous' jobs, because.....they're lowbloods, they're more common in grub clutches, and so if they AREN'T careful and die on the job that was survivable but dangerous, well, they weren't going to be a benefit to the empire anyway.
I don't think they're actively trying to exterminate lowbloods, I just think the highbloods think killing them is funny and there are always more. Further proof the Extended Zodiac is a very truncated version so your fantrolls' sigils are all still canon; if there were only twenty-four signs for each colour, the limebloods are all dead, and he's obviously not a seadweller, it would be flagrantly obvious that Karkat's sign isn't a standard one and they'd have found him out.
Might just be a personal preference or even a food intolerance. If you based your idea of how humans feel about food on conversations between me and a bunch of my friends, you'd get the idea that humans hate wheat and it's poisonous to most of us.
Agreed, although there is the Watsonian explanation of the limeblood signs having been folded in to be assigned to edge-case goldbloods or olivebloods. But there's definitely no way that the Extended Zodiac is really intended to cover all of the possibilities for every single colour; it's meant as a cool toy to play with and confirm that there aren't just the twelve signs we knew about already, that's about it.
I know the humans and trolls understand each other perfectly well, but I had a wonderful mental image of Bro Strider using Alternian as an opportunity to fuck with people again and speaking it in the manner of Donovan Deegan's Orcish.
thinking about alternian exile and: all those trolls-all that biomass and the important-for-life-elements within-leaving the planet every sweep or so. are there regular imports of equivalent amounts of fertilizer to alternia, or has the soil quality been slowly getting worse over the sweeps? the latter option may actually help explain the dangerous animals etc: australia also has poor soil that has been slowly decreasing in quality for a very long time (although in australia's case it's because the whole country has like 0 vulcanism so that soil has been there since the time of the early dinosaurs without replenishment) and it's...australia. it has a venomous tree that sheds its hair-fine venom injection spikes everywhere so you can't even safely go near it.
like, australia's wildlife seems to have gotten locked in a cycle of 'poor soil? kill all the competitors! competitors are dangerous? evolve to be more dangerous!'
Ha! I actually have fantrolls that are from Tro'straya (one of them has a "pouchtiger" lusus even) and the other fantrolls they pal around with (who belong to other people) think they are excessively friendly and open. They eventually all sat down and had a talk about it and came to the conclusion that living in Tro'straya makes you less antisocial, because the ecosystem is even more out to get you than on regular Alternia, but the fact that Tro'straya is well supplied with incredibly dangerous wildlife even for Alternia, and wide open spaces with areas where dreams are even more overwhelming than usual, means that even cold-blooded assholes get dead and are eaten by wildlife mysteriously disappear when everyone else decides they have had enough of that idiot. Lungaana, aka Silima Vesant, loves telling other trolls about spider bites you won't survive unless someone else administers the antivenom in minutes, because you're already too scrambled to do it yourself when you notice.
he so would. It's like apple juice, except with more chemicals! @cassikat did you know about this? omg!
