*hops in to say a Thing* I've only read the chapters pertaining to the original boat trolls rp (am actually rereading now, it's been a month or two) and I am confused as to how the heck castes work in this AU. There are hells more 'colors', if you will, than there are in the comic, and I was wondering how that is/works? Only thing I've come up with yet is something along the lines of "if two trolls of different castes fill a bucket, the grub comes out as a match to one of the parents, or is the same niche of color as one of them but perhaps a scant shade warmer or colder, depending on the other contributor.' Thoughts? Should this question be in another thread? The castes just interest the heck outta me.
I think Boat Trolls works under the assumption that there are gradients in the castes. It's entirely possible for two yellowbloods to not both have #a1a100 colored blood, for instance. They'll both be yellow, but different shades, closer to green or orange or whatever. Violetbloods are still on top and all that, it's just that there's not just one specific shade for every troll. I don't think that the grub thing is how it works. That's how it is for lusii, but finding a troll that's specifically descended from two trolls would be incredibly hard, considering the diabolical incestuous slurry and all.
hi! it's been born out by the $10k fantroll cameos as well as the hiveswap development art that there are gradients between the bloodcolors we see the twelve sgrub players represent. hiveswap will probably let us know how many social castes the trolls have divided themselves into, and their titles, which is what really interests me. it might be as few as three divisions— lowbloods, highbloods, and seadwellers— or as many as fifteen or fifty divisions, such as burgundy, russet, sienna, ochre, etc. among lowbloods it seems like there's certainly red-orange , yellow-orange, and yellow-green bloodcolors not represented by the twelve players, that would be distinct to humans (and hence applicable to fantrolls), minus limebloods, but then you'd have at least a few shades between olive and jade. between terezi's teal and vriska's cerulean is turquoise, and between jade and teal would be cyan and viridian, probably. i'm not great at differentiating blues in the cerulean-to-cobalt spectrum, though i think denim and navy would fit in there. blue-purple between cobalt and indigo, and a whole lot of purples between there and tyrian. anyway, bel is cobalt, i'd say a notch or two more towards cerulean than equius is, galley's a notch more green than sollux and arguus is a notch more orange. erskin is a wine-red precisely between eridan and feferi, and lainey is somewhere between jade and teal. pancho is skirting the jade line. lu might be standard gamzee-indigo? im not sure. i think a tad more violet. COLORS.
oh also we don't actually know if a troll's bloodcolor is even genetically determined by their two progenitors, or expressed through some other process during incubation or hatching or whatever. even on earth there are a ton of ways different creatures develop their size, gender, temperament, color, etc. bees become queens if they're fed royal jelly, alligator gender depends on how warm their eggs are, rats are more cautious if their mothers are stressed during gestation, fish do hells of weird shit. troll blood color could depend on anything from what the mothergrub was fed that day to how humid the caverns they hatched out in were.
See the whole 'incestuous slurry' thing sounds like either a load of bull (if having a red or black partner is what makes viable slurry then why would it fuck around with the slurry in the first place, yes there may be slurry but i imagine if partners are important at all then the hormones apparent in their bucket activate the genetic fluids, which would mean that those two genetics are THE genetics a grub gets, or it means it just makes the goop viable to become One with the Slurry and make little baby trolls) or propaganda (we need your jizz for future workers of the empire, now fuck dammit.) and it doesn't matter who one fills a bucket with at all. however this is a good point.
Whats actually wrong with erskin's leg in the space navy au? I mean, if thats not spoilerriffic to ask. In the main storyline, it was just that his leg was primed with the wrong blood, right? But surely sal would have caught halfassery like that?
Re: Navy AU: Erskin you complete walnut, you are missing a leg this is not the time to blackfight your kissmyass *crush! *ganked from @pixels
in the main storyline, erskin's actually returned to civilization, and so even with cloris's headfuckery he's on track to actually be healthy and normal by ascension. in this storyline he forgot where his hive was, so he never 'retired' after the thing with the shark. he got a new leg, but just kept wandering, losing reggie somewhere along the way, and eventually got stranded in the middle of a volcanic desert where he spent his last couple sweeps. the wear and tear of a wild life stressed out his prosthetic, stress and sickness and infection damaged his own tissues so the bioware knit further and further into his leg. he got a shitty hack job aboard the sunslammer in his first quarter-sweep to try and cut the rogue bioware out, encourage his flesh to grow back properly, and replace his leg with some new stuff that'd give him more mobility. it went wrong because, hey, shitty hackjob with some third-rate remaindered mediculler, who'd have thought! nerve damage, internal scarring, a set of bioware even more aggressively invasive in trying to bind to trauma-inflamed muscle. this is when he started needing a cane on and off. maybe a half-sweep or so after erskin got his courage up to demand another surgery, with a proper doctor, and got the sort of backhanded sabotage we saw with the killbots. the leg's bioware was primed for some median-average seadweller temp, not a near-tyrian. whoopsies! what an unfortunate oversight! he got chewed into hamburger up to his hip before the issue was discovered and corrected. he now needs a cane pretty regularly, and a fourwheel device in particularly bad circumstances, plus he's got overlooked shreds of three rogue bioware strains still fighting it out in there, resulting in a lot of dead meat of one kind or another. he'd be way dead if highbloods weren't cartoonishly sturdy, and as it is his condition is still steadily deteriorating. frequent, aggressive cutting and cleaning is just slowing it down. it'd go slower if he weren't stressing the area, sure, but he could lie around in a meadow all day and his shit would still be decaying. i enjoy that bel will understand roughly a third of the problem and then declare some condescending, oversimple solution without asking any further questions. or maybe he just does that where erskin's concerned, haha. they are such shits to one another. but anyway: one more botched surgery and the organs inside his pelvis are going to be impacted, rendering him impotent, incontinent, or both, and relegated to a chair or an arm-brace crutch. neither are great options, obviously! sal isn't accomplished enough to fix this level of mess— an equivalently fucked-up helmsman would just be put down. and erskin absolutely can't trust anyone else he might get shipped in. now with an admiral directly pissed off with him, he's not likely to wake up from surgery at all. if bel pushes him to get help from sigmah too quickly, things could get really ugly.
That sure is scary and upsetting! Wow, erskin. Suddenly the ashenfeels flip pale for your ragged ass.
yeah ok looking at it all together i'm like 'wow i sure do have an anime-tier h/c kink' but i wanted his leg to still be an issue and the rest just sorta seems like how his life would logically go? trolls are horrible, is the moral of the story. every story.
....i really think a bodyswap episode would be fun. erskin gets to dash around and bonk his antlers on every low branch, and bel gets to trip over himself and snap the grips off all the canes. he would be like 'at least you can't pull my hair now' and then erskin would pull on his fin.
