#my thesis statement for HoM was 'what if i gave gamzee a loving home and then took it away'

[technicalchaotic]

I LOVE LOVE LOOOOOVE HOPE OF MORNING!!!!!!!! AND ALL THE GAMKAR FICS U WORKED ON !!! ( sorry for screaming i just got excited asodighag ) id happily listen to anything u have to say about them !!!!!!!

You have no idea how happy it makes me that a fic I started writing like six fucking years ago still has people that care about it.

Let's talk about clown kids.

> Clown church specifically relating to Gamzee's childhood in Hope of Morning

So I subscribe to the fanon that purple blood lusii are universally or near universally useless. The Mirthful church in HoM is, at its core, the solution to that.

The church in the HoM modern day has multiple branches, but for this post we're looking at the Lusus clade.

The Lusus clade is made up of all the adult and subadult trolls tasked with finding and raising the purple kids on alternia. It's a position of high honor in the church, and its members mark themselves out with lime-bleached hair.

SO. The lusus clade. Higher in rank than the laughsassin elite, coming in just below the high priests, and generally a troll might transition from dedicate lusus to high priest multiple times over a career.

[DAMNIT I hit post on my drafts too soon. Stand by]

At the beginning of the dark season, when the nights are getting longer but the storms haven't set in yet, dedicates set out in pairs to search the surrounding area for the season's wrigglers. The focus is on kids in the two-three sweep range, but kids slip through the cracks (Gamzee was around 5 sweeps) or get picked up super young if they need to be (Kalton hadn't pupated yet). Generally if they haven't been found or gone looking for a church to join on their own, purple kids don't make it much past about 4.

Now, Gamzee was a ways outside the normal radius, well into seadweller territory. He only really got picked up by Sister Infernal because she is insane and stays out longer and goes out farther on her own than most pairs do. Luckily for him goatdad had eaten most of the local large fauna and the few intruding seadwellers long before Gamzee existed. He was still starved, undersized, frail, and sopor-addicted when Infernal found him and brought him back to the church.

Detox is honestly pretty routine for kids coming into the church. Gamzee was an advanced case, but he was also the first recorded descendant of the Grand Highblood, so nepotism worked in his favor there. Eventually he joined the subjugglator ranks on a track to command, with the understanding that eventually (in a few hundred sweeps or so) he would take over the church. Gamzee in HoM is actually pretty smart and relatively well-educated. It's just 7 sweeps of rigorous training didn't cure him of being a terminal airhead.

So Gamzee grew up from an abandoned feral dog into beloved favorite child into a young and capable warrior prince who was extremely well liked by his peers. His capture and presumed death honestly turned the tide of the conflict between the church and the empress in a number of different ways. Losing Gamzee was a massive blow to morale, and destabilized the church's leadership in really dangerous ways that ultimately ended at the beginning of HoM