I know, and in fanfic it's no problem. My objection isn't to using it at all, it's to people talking about it as if it is canon in discussions of the canon.
Yeah, I feel that -- a lot of my meta stalls out in editing because I don't know if I wanna address the popular fanon in it or accept that I'm probably gonna get at least one person completely misunderstanding what I'm saying because they take that fanon as something "everyone believes".
Addressing the fanon's probably a good move, I'd say. People are gonna misunderstand whatever you say, often wilfully, because fandom is like that. Other people will get it and be interested.
Sghdjagdh @swirlingflight thanks for the witnessed I felt that in my bones. For Homestuck in particular I think the majority is perfectly aware that tentadick hermaphrodites aren't canon, but its not specified in canon either and that gives us room to play in the fuzzy middle ground. We can get regular human genitals in rainbow colors from just about any other sci-fi fandom. Or hell I can order one from multiple websites. Ime Homestuck fandom skews very queer especially in people with trans bodies, and casual Tumblr inquiries floating around a few years back yielded about the same answer: we like the flexibility of having a sexy proxy with a combo set up. It's much, much easier to work with than either a) one or both parties having the non-preferred set up or b) trying to write from experience with your own relationship to your body and then getting yelled at because that isn't perfectly representative of all trans experience with their relationships to their bodies.
A friend of mine discovered a fic where an AU author renamed a character in a language they didn't speak and accidentally created a teenage superhero with a sexually explicit codename.
I know about the tentathing and why it's popular, just got annoyed when people used it to argue that trolls in canon couldn't possibly have anatomically-based gender assignment. Whether it makes sense that they do is a different matter, but the fanon doesn't prove anything. Then again, trolls are about the least consistent species in fiction I've ever seen short of the sapient rollercoaster thing - "nook" is used to mean everything from anus to vagina to skull in canon while "nub" is used for every body part at random, what we do see of the trolls' biology appears to be made up from bits of random species as Hussie goes along, and I'm pretty sure "thermal hull" got used for both oven and fridge at different points - so I'm probably annoyed over nothing and should just stick to my fave versions. I guess one could describe them as an Impressionistic species, where the general overall feel is more important than the details?
I've solved one mystery here: the truth of the thermal hull. Spoiler: undertale screenshot (editing in a spoiler tag because the first image was larger than i realized)
Now I remember a thing from way back on Tumblr... I think it was "probablybadconlangideas" or something similarly named? Anyway, the concept was a language which has words for the extremes of a trait but not which extreme it was, so "the height-having man" could, depending on context, be the tall man or the short man.
I feel like a lot of languages already have that kind of thing going on for some value-assigning adjectives - like "sick" in English, "yabai" in Japanese, probably a lot of other ones I'm forgetting. The "could mean either 'very good' or 'very bad'" words. I'm pretty sure I've had the problem of not knowing which extreme people mean in English plenty of times already, at least :P
*insert that Tumblr post about how in Midwestern American English, the word "yeah" can mean like 12 different things depending on construction and tone*
Honestly having that kind of ambiguity for height extremes in specific would be really fun. You'd be able to tell based off context and you could do fun jokes with it. Like someone talking about their super height having dog and how cutesy wootsy he is and the person expects a tiny dog but when they visit and see the dog it is like a gargantuan titano hound. Like just slap that into a 4-koma format and you got instant comedy gold.
i saw the headcanon that karkat uses wildly inaccurate sometimes not-swearing mixed in with his actual swearing, and it's seeped into the other trolls' vocabularies too so when he calls someone a nookmuncher that's...about the equivalent of a human calling someone a nookmuncher stuff like that
That would make sense. I mean, Friendsim trolls use them too, but the Friendsim is already of dubious canonicity.
I remember seeing around somewhere the theory that the absurd terminology is a way (like substitution quirks) for getting around communication monitoring, so there's any amount of constantly evolving slang thrown around to make it that much harder for anyone imperial to detect actual sedition.
my fanfic gripe of the day is only meaning to write a relatively short military story and now being at 20 pages and counting and i dont know how to stop send help
The problem with that theory is that it relies on the oppressing body having limits, and not say, considering 'trying to evade monitoring' as itself sedition, which I don't think they'd have any problem with. (A 'Thermal hull' is a real-world terminology that refers to a shell that blocks heat. In one case it's being used to keep heat in, in the other to keep heat out, and it's somewhat odd to refer to these devices by the name of a thing they have, but it... kinda works)
Depends on how good the monitoring is. Then again, I'm not sure how random names for body parts would help cover up any meaningful attempt at sedition.
If they're constantly doing the synonyms and slang for everything, it'd be harder to detect when it's something specific, no?
Plus if it's a computer algorithm and not a person, as we've seen, figuring out the "rules" and getting around them isn't all that hard.
