Yeah. The thing that always got to me about the pop culture usage of zombi is that I briefly had a Special Interest in Voudoun and had an Erzulie altar for several years. Zombification seems to be induced by ritually/culturally-enhanced tetrodotoxin poisoning, per Davis' books. Those people aren't dead, although I have gathered that successful recovery is very rare and probably quite arduous. But I have way too many friends who write zombie stuff and one of them has done well with it commercially under her pen name (because she doesn't want the 12 year olds who read her urban fantasy to read her zombie books)--and the stuff they write is good, so I'm just like...meh, at least don't forget the E on the end so we know you know that's not a real zombi. What can you do. Sigh.
It was traditionally claimed that they were dead, but in real life they're not. In fiction they can be, but the original Voudoun type of zombies certainly don't run around in hordes eating brains. I think what went on with regards to the loanword version is that someone came up with the idea of walking corpses that kill people and wanted a word for it, and found a word which means something recognisably similar. Happens with language all the time.
Oh yeah, loanwords are hilarious. In Japanese, somehow, "morning biking" became a term for breakfast buffet, because smorgasbord is Danish, and "viking" and "biking" are pronounced the same way in Japanese. Imagine thinking you're going to go ride bikes with someone and showing up dressed like that to a fancy buffet brunch! I'd die.
I'm withholding judgment on whether he was malicious or oblivious till we actually meet him, but I'm definitely thinking that Spoiler: underage, noncon & spoilers Dammek talked Xefros into doing sex things with him on the premise that as rebels it was their duty to break "meaningless" taboos regarding the enforced relationship system, i.e. 'rails with pails. It wasn't meaningless to Xefros.
Sometimes Zero has dreams about very forcefully feeding on Fiethsing. This confuses her greatly along with distressing her immensely. She soon forgets about these dreams and the distress they cause her though, as the why behind this is a murky thing that slips away constantly. She did remember it enough to get Fiethsing to promise to kill her if she ever seemed to have lost herself because Zero is moody and worst case scenarios are her forte. That is both one of the few promises Fiethsing attempted to keep and one of the many she failed to. Because Fiethsing never keeps her promises, for good or ill. For the canonical context of the last bit concerning Fiethsing failing to kill Zero, at one point Zero is corrupted into being the Magus of Null by the Cthulhus. During this whole debacle Fiethsing promises that, at the very least, she'll kill Zero. Needless to say she fails in this promise utterly.
Spoiler: Hiveswap Friendsim Okay, Diemen's behaviour in his bad end storyline is really worryingly sexual for a kid that young-looking. I might be wrong in reading him as under age ten, since I also thought Sans was a child till I played Undertale, but since he's so tiny and chubby and cute it's hard to see him as older. Hypersexuality is often a response to sexual trauma, and considering he's homeless and surviving by "tricking people into giving me Meat Products", am I the only one whose mind went to a really dark place?
Lowblood and highblood beauty standards on Alternia are different. Highbloods are expected to be well-muscled and graceful. The Alternian media does everything it can to encourage lowbloods to get fat, because a) that way they don't show up the highbloods in beauty, b) it's another way to shame and control them because with a lowblood lifestyle of awful food and constantly fighting or running away it's REALLY hard to keep weight on, and c) that way they taste better.
Jadebloods give off a specific pheromone which cues the grubs "this big thing is a caretaker". Other trolls don't produce it, and if one happens to end up among grubs without an accompanying jadeblood, they're likely to be swarmed and eaten alive in hundreds of little tiny bites.
I had a similar idea. Gl'bgolyb only eats lusii. What if what she's absorbing is the care they have for their charges-so that she can care about her Heiresses?
...if she didn't care about the heiress to begin with why would she want to eat things that made her feel absurdly protective to them?
Could just be that an early troll (possibly guided by Doc Scratch) started feeding her lusii to tame her, and once she'd eaten enough of them she started wanting to adopt baby trolls. Nobody said this always had to be Gl'bgolyb's decision from the start.
Because of the caste difference, if Xefros objects to Dammek taking more than half of the flavor disc, Dammek is legally permitted to eat him instead.
Beforus had a much lower death rate than Alternia and also a much lower birth rate, because they bothered to take care of the born kids rather than just replacing them. Consequently, unlike the two Earths which are pretty much the same, there are billions of Alternian trolls who never had a Beforan counterpart. (This probably includes all of the Troll Call but I still wanna explore the idea of Beforan selves for them.)
