You know, I've been thinking about a thing brought up on the kinkmeme years ago. The trolls all go on about conquering aliens, but do we have any confirmation these aliens even exist? All the other species encountered in canon come from other universes or within the game, not from in the trolls' universe. None of them seem surprised to actually see an alien on Alternia, but they're kids and have spent their lives being told they will meet aliens eventually, and their media is likely full of them; those could be lied about in the same way their media has awful caricatures of lowbloods and portrays jadeblood life as much nicer than it really is (in Polypa's Friendsim route). Is the Condesce just telling them there are aliens and spreading them out over an empty galaxy?
Well, if nothing else, we know that cherubs exist in at least two universes (endgame one and the one with the canon fantrolls) That aside, I personally always interpreted it as the Troll Empire being so expansive and aggressive that aliens themselves aren't really anything special, since they encounter and destroy them with some degree of frequency. That'd explain why most Trolls we've seen are either vaguely interested or completely dismissive of aliens, not aggressive or surprised. Like, half the main 12 trolls in the meteor lab were like "Literally who gives a shit about these dumb aliens", and most of the Friendsim ones seem to just kind of shrug. To them, this is kind of just like bumping into a raccoon on the side of the road or something.
Yeah, but the trolls didn't conquer cherubs, and I don't think they even could; plus, I always had the headcanon that cherubs were either created by the game or originally created it or both because of time shenanigans and thus weren't originally from any of the universes we see at all. And if there are other aliens, it seems kind of weird that we never see even a troll kid's drawing of one or something. Even if they haven't seen one it does get hammered into them very strongly that aliens exist and that they're nothing to worry about because trolls are so powerful and can defeat anything, so they'd think there's no reason to be surprised by aliens being there, but when has imperial propaganda told the truth about anything else before?
We’ve also only seen like, thirty-something troll kids out of a species with an intergalactic empire. We don’t really have enough examples to generalize the opinion of the average office building, much less how an intergalactic species as a whole views aliens. For all we know aliens might be ao unremarkable that being “into” aliens to the point of drawing or writing abour them is considered as socially weird as being a furry or a brony in real life. Like “Ew Jyrdin Vallas is obsessed with aliens, I saw him scribbling one in his book the other day, lets go beat him up” style.
Also, given that Cherubs are both common enough to be a founding myth in troll society (Meenah mentions the giant cherub-green snake skeletons are found pretty frequently and have a big part in pre-and-post-scratch troll mythology iirc) and apparently only have territories of a few lightyears, it'd be odd if an ostensibly intergalactic imperialist empire with ftl travel didn't occasionally bumble into a benevolent cherub's protectorate/malevolent cherub's domain and have to fight them.
@garden i think now is a good time as any to release some background content for that thing i made for you during holly poly Some character notes I wrote down that colored the way the whole thing played out Spoiler Here's the individual components for this particular soundtrack pic Spoiler: Day n Nite (Eyestrain) Spoiler: Karkat Spoiler: Terezi Spoiler: Sollux Spoiler: Dave Early draft for 'Stolen' Spoiler Early draft for 'Let's fall in love' Spoiler
Yeah, but it seems weird that they never even mention any other aliens they might have heard of, and as I said the cherubs are closely linked with Paradox Space and may not be a naturally occurring species. One would think they might say "oh, these humans are a bit like the aliens I heard they found on planet X except they don't glow in the dark" or "would you like a slice of alien from planet Y?" or something. Since it's confirmed the empire uses troll slave labour and implied that they're cannibals, it would seem weird if they didn't inflict the same treatment on aliens if they found any; is the use of aliens reserved for off-planet adults only?
I mean, the best I can say is maybe, a lot of this stuff can be pretty plausibly explained away. In regards to the cherubs, sure, but we are literally shown them existing in the same universe as troll worlds and told that they’re a part of troll mythology. The fact that they might be a product of SGRUB doesnt change that, insofar as the time period the story tales place in is concerned, they exist and also have some degree of contact with the trolls. In regards to other aliens, it could just be standard troll military procedure to exterminate any species they encounter, so the average troll doesn’t really know anything about the aliens they encounter. Even if they don’t do that, it wouldn’t necessarily follow that every troll on Alternia has a working knowledge of the aliens that the Empire encounters. There are humans on Earth who don’t know basic facts about their own country, and we don’t have an entire intergalactic empires worth of information.
SBURB seems to do one sentient species per session. If there are multiple sentient species per universe who gets to be the species that initializes the new one? Or is there redundancy? Does every sentient species get a form of S***B and it’s a race to whoever beats the game first? Only one session survives, right?
Whichever one was retroactively predestined to have SBURB players in it by virtue of being born through ectobiology, presumably. Other people in other species could potentially play the game, but just like the numerous humans who died by being hit by meteors, they’d fail to enter the mediun because they’re not one of the retroactively predetermined players.
I don’t think that there’s anything technically stopping them from entering the medium, but their session would be barren
Iirc SBURB knows what players will make it or not though, as it listed Jade as “offline” even before she had actually installed the game.
There's other guides being written by other people who didn't make it. I just kind of assumed that if there were other sapient races then even they did start their own instances of the game then they'd just end up dying like those kids whose guides Rose was so frustrated by that she started her own. Like maybe they did or maybe they didn't, either way they technically could but the timeline's already sorted out so it doesn't matter either way.
Yeah, I think the whole “retroactive predestination” thing has a big part to do with it. Only certain people could ever actually enter the medium and become players (coincidental entries like the Guardians and Fedorafreak notwithstanding) because they’re the ones who did actually make it into the medium and then went on to ectobiologically ensure their own existence, unlike every other being in the universe. Basically, SBURB makes a stable time loop where certain players are predestined to become players due to the fact that, later on in the timeline, they will enter the medium and ectobiologically create themselves.
It'd make sense to me if it were, honestly. Easiest way to make sure you don't get weird diseases running rampant on the homeworld is to make sure that you don't send alien biological material back there, after all. Which means that the most a troll kid would normally see, pre-Ascension, is photos or video of an alien. Even the Heiress isn't going to be snacking on aliens if there's a strict ban on shipping in biohazards.
That's very true, yes. Still wondering why we haven't seen any pictures of an alien on the homeworld, there ought to be at least a mention of them somewhere... I know the Doylist explanation is Hussie didn't put any effort into it because it's not really relevant, but it's an interesting Watsonian thought. Honestly, I like it just because it makes the empire even more fucked up, and the Condesce a sadder villain figure. As for other species playing Sgames, I don't see why there wouldn't be multiple species with successful players, if there were multiple species in a universe. Reproduction runs on redundancy, wouldn't it be better for all concerned if multiple different planets could potentially spawn universes?
So troll kids for the most part are perfectly aware of what an alien is as a sort of factual statement ("there are aliens in space") about the same way a human kid who's never been to the zoo and doesn't live on any of the continents where they do can still tell you about elephants.
But they aren't really telling us anything about aliens. They're not surprised to run into one, but they've never mentioned what any aliens look like or do; if I was a kid who had never seen an elephant but had heard of African elephants, and then ran into an Indian elephant, I'd comment on the differences. Or even, to drop the metaphor, just say "wow, I've heard of lots of different aliens and none of them looked like this!"
also if we're going off the assumption that troll kids know aliens exist but haven't seen them and it is akin to a human kid knowing elephants exist but growing up somewhere they'd never seen one and never having been to a zoo, I gotta say that my conception of elephants as a kid like that was "they are gray, and big, and have trunks", and nothing else I would not be equipped to remark on the differences between two types of elephants even if I ran headlong into one particular type and this is also a world where the aliens likely do not exist on it, and you are also making the assumption that most trolls we have met would even care about the aliens prior to seeing them (I never went looking for elephant pictures even though I'd never seen one, I didn't care) and that all trolls have access to that information as well. given the restrictive caste-based nature of Alternia, it is, imho, entirely possible that lowbloods aren't given info on aliens at all because it seems they're rarely given info that doesn't pertain to the job they'll be taking on someday. jadebloods might be considered to not even need information on anything that isn't the Mother Grub and related topics. and most of the trolls we have met thus far, even while being unsurprised by the concept of aliens and you being one, have seemed at least mildly disgusted by you/your appearance--it is possible trolls are conditioned to find aliens gross, in which case it would be odd for them to keep pictures around. the closest analogy I can find for that concept is if humans widely kept pictures of like, tiny parasites on their walls, even though most humans at least dislike parasites and some are outright disgusted by them. why would that be a thing you would expect?
