Thank you always @keltka for such an incredible swap! (and also for that incredible gift) Plugging in my second gift and treat that I got cause theyre real good! Also relinking that Polyswap Poll! Big Plug Of My Own because I went so hard this year and Im very proud of my work Both are lyricstucks, songs by Mothers and Mother Mother Respectively!!! Ocean Sounds a DirkEriCro lyricstuck set to Hold Your Own Hand Spoiler: a select page eta blood and wounds Oasis a WV/AR/PM lyricstuck set to Infinitesimal (nsfw) Spoiler: a select page (sfw)
Presents Authors went live! We've got 22 works out, and more people have mentioned having works planned! https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Polyswap_Presents_2018
Pamela Dean's "Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary" features a poem which feels very much like a description of quadrants to me:
Probably. Couldn’t find it. I did skim back in this thread to see if anyone was discussing Friendsim here before I posted, and saw a few mentions, so I thought it was OK. Do you want me to move it?
Was there any particular reason given why Vriska couldn't have just fed animals to her lusus? Did it biologically require trolls to survive? Because she could easily have just controlled or even asked other kids to help her hunt.
Fairly sure she could have controlled or asked other trolls to help her herd animals towards the valley. Early humans hunted that way, herding wild cattle off cliffs. And she can canonically control brownblood communers into telling animals to do what she wants the animals to do. Maybe she didn't think of that? And I guess if she was controlling the trolls she brought over, none of them would be in a fit state to think of it either...
theoretically it's possible Vriska's lusus DOES need trolls to survive and can't subsist on other lusii, it's never explained. but it's also possible that because Vriska's lusus seemingly needed to be fed kind of a lot, Vriska took the easiest route possible, which for her, thanks to her powers, would be mind controlling trolls to just...go to her mom and be eaten. while she CAN psychically control brownbloods to get lusii to do what she wants, that seems to be more difficult and a longer way of doing things than just directly controlling them herself, and I imagine hunting or herding could seem more taxing and time-consuming to her than just controlling a single troll into going to her lusus. I think it's also worth noting that Vriska seems to dislike having to spend time feeding her lusus, and whether that's because she just doesn't enjoy the job or because she already finds the thing time-consuming and doesn't want it to take even longer, that probably plays into her not going in for/trying to come up with long-term solutions or thinking about it longer than a single feeding takes and instead just....going feeding to feeding, which means that the easiest thing for her to do is the mind control.
I'm pretty sure some blues must have tried it, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Alternia specifically bred blueblood lusii to require troll meat. It's horrible in so many other ways... And it's not like the spider could do much to her if she just stopped feeding it and didn't go into the valley for however long it takes for the spider to die, but didn't she say she'd be culled if she didn't feed it? Is that standard practice for trolls who lose their lusii? Skylla says losing one's lusus is "just a part of life" and doesn't seem afraid of culling, so maybe it's just if they intentionally kill the lusus? How would the law enforcement even find out? Do they monitor them that closely?
I could honestly see it being a specific practice for 'if you specifically kill your lusus', as opposed to what happened to Skylla being that her lusus was literally stolen from her through no real fault of her own. ...it might also be a thing where they come down harder on the highbloods there--if a lowblood loses their lusus, well, lowbloods aren't expected to be responsible for much anyway, and there are enough of them that if one dies from losing a lusus, who really cares? on the other hand, a lot of higher blooded trolls are expected to take on various responsibilities for the empire--it could be that killing or losing your lusus when you're so high up the hemospectrum is somewhat regarded as the troll not being capable of the responsibilities the empire needs them to perform, so they get culled to kind of....nip any future laziness or failure in the bud. it might be sort of like a 'if a cerulean can't keep up with feeding their lusus, then how can we trust them with any REAL jobs' thing?
Yeah, that would make sense. How smart are the lusii? I know they can't speak but are they considered close to a troll level? Alternia does seem to punish killing at your own caste or above, so killing a lusus of one's own caste... probably not a big deal in that way but it's a thought.
