...vriska doesn't wear boy clothes, it's not like boys have a monopoly on pants and neutral colors and jackets and girls are required to have bright colors and skirts. the gender of vriska's clothes is either 'whatever vriska decides to be' or 'they're clothes they don't have gender.'
Also the same could be said about Nepeta and Terezi and their wardrobe choices. Spoiler I’m not sure where I stand on the whole “do NB trolls get culled” thing, so I’m gonna just ignore it.
eridan is also pretty consistently drawn with darker/thicker lips than other boy trolls, so he may well wear lipstick
My view on the "stop playing games for girls" comment was always that girls (and women) on Alternia are coded as being more aggressive and more dangerous. I headcanoned that female trolls were the equivalent of soldier ants and male trolls were worker ants or drones, prior to the species getting to the point where they didn't need to congregate around the mothergrub quite as much. So it wasn't necessarily that Karkat was mocking Tavros for being into something coded for the 'wrong' gender, it was Karkat going "hey, jackass, stop playing extreme sports, you can't keep up with the people you're trying to hang with". Also, Karkat believed (possibly without merit) that if he could prove he was useful enough to the army, he'd be given a pass on being culled for his mutation, and Tavros' worry for being culled was "am I going to pass the physical". I suspect that trolls generally don't have a gender binary, although certain castes may be expected to present in specific ways (Feferi and Kanaya might have gotten pushback if they insisted on male pronouns, for example), but 'gender' is defined as "what pronouns do you, personally, prefer using in reference to yourself". Gender doesn't affect how well you can fight, so even though Lord English and Doc Scratch would definitely have been trying to push Alternian society in the direction of "girls are Weak and Bad", I don't know that it would have been terribly successful in the face of the Empress and every other female troll being terrifyingly dangerous.
I really wouldn't say girl trolls are coded as more aggressive; all trolls are expected to be aggressive. Eridan kills whales for a living and plans genocide as a hobby, Equius builds robots solely to break them, Tavros gets socially punished for not being aggressive, Karkat puts all his hopes for survival on being an effective soldier, Gamzee's in a murder cult which is according to Porrim mostly made up of men... Meanwhile, Vriska has her doomsday devices and Terezi her hangings and Aradia FLARPs, but Kanaya only uses her chainsaw for topiary and defense against zombies until the game, Nepeta hunts but is not aggressive to other trolls at all, and Feferi is the opposite of aggressive. Eridan doesn't look like he's wearing lipstick to me, and if he was, everything else about his vanity is played as a joke until he gets to the actual killing point. And I'm fairly sure Karkat's hope about his blood being overlooked was supposed to be in vain, otherwise he wouldn't be the only candyblood he'd ever heard of - there would surely be others in the ranks who had been spared. Even if it's a rare mutation, troll society is billions and billions of years old and there are supposed to be a ludicrous number of trolls in the Empire, Signless and Karkat can't be the only ones. Maybe we should move this?
I don't know, everyone's probably right about the gender thing but I'm still inclined to think that ANYTHING about Alternia that looks positive is a trap. The whole society was literally designed to be as horrible as possible for as many of its inhabitants as possible, both in and out of universe. Maybe it's my ace side talking but if I was allo-gay I would rather live in human society where people are shitty but it's possible to carve out happiness on your own terms than in a place where nobody cares who you fuck but you have no choice but to hook up with the exact right amount of partners in the exact right way and reproduce regularly or die. Guaranteed employment sounds cool, but not in industries determined by your blood colour and only for the proportionally tiny number of people who survive that long. And we've commented about the free housing, but that's a) to prep them for SGrub and b) bread and circuses. It's to give them something to lose if they rebel. I feel like a society like that probably wouldn't be good by human standards about this one thing, and that if they are there ought to be some kind of horrible twist to it like the "love who you like but you MUST find at least some random by the deadline or die" thing.
I mean, I don’t think it would go against anything previously shown in homestuck and it would be fine narratively if trolls could just...be nonbinary If every single thing in Alternia had some kind of horrible twist, it would get pretty tedious
I'm just not inclined to trust anything about the Alternian regime, and maybe that would be tedious but having them be progressive and nice on only this one thing seems weird to me. It's making me think of the "uwu Night Vale is a perfect LGBT haven I wish I lived there" fanon thing a few years back. Though I'm guessing the rebellion would in general be okay with it either way so it probably isn't gonna come up much. Also LE or at least Doc Scratch didn't want to make girls weak; they wanted to enslave them and use their power for their own purposes. The Handmaid sure as hell wasn't forced to be weak, and they wanted the player girls to be powerful enough to do what they needed to do in SGrub. As for my "boy clothes" line that was inappropriate, sorry, and I was probably projecting. I think of my own clothes as "girl clothes" and "boy clothes", which... should I take that to XX/XY? Is that a weird way to put it?
I mean I’m not sure I’d call ‘yeah okay be whatever gender you want who cares what’s important is that you be a GOOD SOLDIER’ nice and progressive
It's more progressive than Cadet Bone Spurs trying to ban all transgender people from the armed forces.
Still making me think Night Vale, and I still was under the impression Alternia is intentionally designed to make at least its low-blooded inhabitants as miserable as possible and they'd take any way to do that. Okay, back to a topic we all agree on; Cirava looks super awesome but that eyepatch or whatever it is does not look either comfortable or likely to stay on.
the thing about alternia as a dystopia is that i took it as being Just Good Enough and keeping the inhabitants Just Busy Enough that instead of having a third rebellion, they'd accept that this is the way things are supposed to be and carry on as normal. after all, if trizza wasn't as awful as she is, dammek likely never would have rebelled, since he's not even thinking about trying to rebel against the empress. alternia's designed to convince lowbloods that this is the natural state of the world, and that they are biologically destined to serve highbloods. as i took it, it's a ruthless machine, not a torture chamber, and the death and murder is for removing those who don't fit into the cogs.
Evil for the sake of evil isnt functionally sustsinable, and the alternian empire is already plenty impractical, it would likely not be an empire if that was the case.
To be honest, I'm wondering why trolls even HAVE a gender binary. It's implied there are anatomical differences but it makes literally no difference to their lives in general, so why they ever bothered starting to divide between "boys" and "girls" at all isn't clear when logically it would make about as much sense as having entirely separate societal roles for, I don't know, "tall people" and "short people". It can't be all down to LE because Beforus does it too.
....yeah and imo our allowance of people doing what they want instead of forcing One Specific Job on them, which for a fair number of trolls is probably conscription to the army, is more progressive than Alternia. except not really, because our world and country aren't built around a necessity for that. and Alternia isn't built around cis straight as the default. comparing our situation to theirs and calling theirs 'progressive' when the truth is mostly just that it's never mattered all that much for them as long as you do what you're supposed to and contribute your genetic material is kind of....not really workable because our society and theirs are completely different, both in terms of actual build of society and in terms of "how other is queerness".
my headcanon beyond the obvious “because a human wrote it” is that troll gender is almost inescapably entwined with caste, and that boy and girl are just approximate translations for a rough, nebulous split saying “jadebloods are girls” would in a lot of ways be like saying “all jadebloods are jadebloods” with my headcanon, and teals have a more even gender split because there are more ways to be a teal, they’re not shunted as strictly into roles, and for me boy/girl translates rougly into some social concept rather than a biological one i’m sure it contradicts canon in some ways, because i’m fairly certain canon is just that they’re grey humans with horns and fangs and eye lasers, but i like the idea of trolls that don’t follow a human binary, so it’s what i use
