#I also write Makaras who are incredibly skinny and lanky and Peixes that are as prev mentioned the size of a truck

[splickedylit]

I reread domestic diplomacy for the umpteenth time and it’s just! So! Good! I love love love how from Dave’s perspective Gamzee is an absolutely fuckoff enormous clown monster who apparently stalked straight out of a horror movie and into Dave’s life as part of his alien boyfriend’s traditional alien polycule. I’m cracking up just contemplating it, it’s such a good dynamic! Especially with all the xenolinguistics and communication difficulty! 😂

I love how your Makaras are typically written as being on the absolute upper end of the troll height range, which it looks like is out beyond nearly all human outliers. It sort of sounds like the troll height distribution of your stories has a broader range in general than human heights? Or would you say that the average troll is taller than the average human, and the spread is comparable?

Hee, thank you very much! I think Dave definitely was feeling like a pretty cool dude who was totally chill about his boyfriend's weird alien stuff, but Karkat's a pretty entry-level alien as far as aliens go, lol. Turns out they also come in "7+ foot fish-goat-bug alien in clown paint" flavor.

RE: heights, I would say...hm. The average troll height is a little taller than the average human height, although the mode--sorry to break out math concepts haha--is about the same! Most trolls you meet are about normal human-sized. But I've had a long-time headcanon that trolls just continue to grow as long as they're alive, so very long-lived highbloods create dramatic outliers that bias the overall average upward! Average troll is over 6 feet is actually statistical error: Big Motherfucker Peixes, who has been growing for thousands of years and is the size of a truck, is an outlier adn should not have been counted haha

I will also say, on top of that, I think of my Tall Makaras as not even "the upper end of the range", but as outlying the range completely! Like, that at 15-20 sweeps, Gamzee is at the height that would be expected from a highblood several hundred sweeps his senior. And the GHB, at multiple hundreds of sweeps old, is bigger than literally anybody, and pretty much only matched by the Condesce, who's ridiculously old and has been growing the whole time like a lobster haha.

I find it very fun if all twelve of the main trolls we get in canon have like. Some form of mutation, or something outside of the norm about them--some of those are canon (Equius's strength, Nitram wings, Karkat's blood, Kanaya the rainbow drinker), and some of them are me having fun! And, y'know, making the Makaras big enough that even other trolls who are used to big highbloods see them and go (°ロ°)