#virgin mother grub

[mintofhtagn]

TA: cant beliieve ii flew there from the traiin2top.

TA: but ii threw my fledgliing p2iioniic2 around liike nobody2 bu2iine22 back then, way two much power for a four 2weep old.

GA: You Lit Up The Sky Like Fireworks

GA: It Was Safer Than Walking Though I Am Sure

[cobblepillar]

[homestuck-fanauthor-coalition]

Hunter's Reminiscence

@arealpeople @madam-melon-meow

Houston has warm nights. The streetlights of the city thrum an orange glow onto the pockmarked asphalt. Gnat swarms float between the projections like schools of fish across rows of portholes, chased by the bats like sharks. Katydids shriek their songs into the air, and they float up past the rooftops, the highrises, the cell towers, condensating against the polluted sky and dripping back down through the whoosh of midnight traffic.

Chapters: 1/1

Rating: Teen and Up Audiences

Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Category: Gen

Fandom: Homestuck

Relationships: Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider & Dave Strider, Kanaya Maryam & Kanaya's Lusus, Kanaya Maryam & Dave Strider, Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider & Kanaya's Lusus

Characters: Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider, Virgin Mother Grub (Homestuck), Kanaya Maryam, Dave Strider

Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, First Meetings, Trans Male Character, Single Parents, Alternate Universe - Monster Hunters, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Humanstuck, Non-Abusive Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider

[our-fav-hs-char]

Who is our favourite?

[hs-transfusion]

> FEFERI PEIXES

HEMO: Jade (#078446) TROLLTAG: compassiveCullture [CC] SIGN: Virpis, Sign of the Nurturing STRIFE: ribbonkind MODUS: Rhyme LUNAR SWAY: Prospit MYTH. ROLE: Maid of Hope LAND: Land of Bells and Ribbons

CC: * You’re gonna be a total *STAR*, I just know it!!!

Of all the jadebloods in the BROODING CAVERNS, Feferi is by far one of the highest achievers when it comes to CARING FOR THE YOUNG. While she'd love basking in the HARSH ALTERNIAN SUN, she instead devotes herself to DOTING ON THE YOUNG, and otherwise holding what little position of AUTHORITY she can over the other jades in her cluster. Her RADIANT SMILE makes it very hard for other people to admit that she perhaps ENJOYS BOSSING PEOPLE AROUND a little too much.

Unbeknownst to others, when looking after grubs, she attempts to SECRETLY IMPLANT THE IDEA of a more COMPASSIONATE SOCIETY where culling doesn't refer to thinning the herd. In her downtime (of which she has very little), she also enjoys both DANCING AND SINGING, dreaming of either becoming an HONORARY EMPRESS, or, more reasonably, an INTERNET INFLUENCER.

Feferi's RHYME Fetch Modus requires her to produce a VALID RHYME for an item she wants to retrieve. The catch is, rhymes CANNOT BE RE-USED. They can, however, simply be made longer by appending UNRELATED WORDS to the start of them (i.e. to retrieve a PLACEMAT, she could rhyme RACERAT, and then BIGGER RACERAT, then GREEN RACERAT, th).

Feferi's lusus is classified as the MATER NATURAE; a virgin mother grub -- highly unusual for its species, it has ABDICATED FROM BROODING and has instead taken Feferi as its charge. This unspoken-of and almost SCANDALOUS happenstance has inspired Feferi's REBELLIOUS ASPIRATIONS.

The LAND OF BELLS AND RIBBONS is a bright, cheery planet, perfect for Feferi. Its crowning monument is a GIANT, RUSTED BELL that has been worn down from EONS OF MISUSE, just begging to be given a good clean and a LOUD RING. Perhaps that would awaken the sour ABRAXAS...

Feferi's ancestor is known as DIRECTOR IRONHEEL. She was essentially the JADEBLOOD PRINCIPAL, maintaining order over her CLUSTERMATES and ensuring a STRICT CURRICULUM for all future hatched trolls.

[trenchgardens-ooc-ooc-ooc-ooc]

I was talking with a friend and considering troll boobs once more, and I think I found an angle that i just straight up love.

Eusocial insects have second, social stomachs which they use to give excess food to the homies a la kirby and his helpers in Super Star. What if troll breasts served a similar purpose!

Trolls have always had a wierd little thing where we dont know why theyd be sexually dymorphic sense we seem to know that, at least with our established communal canon and all that, theyre all functionally identical on an actual sex level. With humans our modern conception of gender grew out of social norms for our sexes, so what do we even call assigned gender at hatching when it comes to trolls? in humans the gender is assigned based on sex, or just whimsy if the kid iss intersex because fuck this stupid planet. So whats up with trolls, why do some have boobs. If its just a random difference thing, like how some people have cleft chins, then why would people care so much as to have similar misogynistic tendencies on planets like Beforus as we see with Latula? That seems to suggest its something more influential than just 'some people have bigger noses' style stuff.

From a biologists point of view, using modern albeit flawed terminology, the 'female' (read: bearer, or queen) of the troll species is the mother grub, and the trolls are 'male,' (read: donor, drone) ironically if Drones are part of the troll species which i personally love as part of my canon, they would be workers, using ant and bee (and probably termite) terminology, not drones.

This is interesting because drones(real world term) are typically produced through unfertilized eggs which is DEFINITELY not the case for trolls. Though, considering how rare mothergrub turnover seems to be a Rare emergency event, the Matriorb seems to be an unfertilized egg which produces a new mothergrub, and everything else about trolls themselves, id just chalk that up to them being aliens, nothing on our planet will be a perfect analog to them, its convergent evolution, not relationary evolution.

Trolls seem to have this set up in what the real world terminology would consider castes. the greater troll species would have these castes

Queen Mothergrub (comes to be after virgin mothergrub does... Something???? accepts her first bucket perhaps?)

Virgin Mothergrub (Hatched through Matriorb, unfertilized parthenogenesis)*

Drones (unfertilized, lain by Queen mothergrub)

Trolls (fertilized through pails)

His Tyranny (who fucking knows, royal jelly but for drones???)

Through this model the greater troll species would, genetically, be very stable. each generation of mothergrub allows for the only chance of natural selection and all that shit, but the Troll caste would be able to go through tons of generations per generation, like a second, smaller evolution inside your evolution. The only restraint on troll evolution would be remaining genetically compatable with the mother grub, [ assuming im even correct about that being sex, maybe the mother grub is a host for trolls who are parasites, but thats for a post on Wierder trolls. ]

I propose that troll gender is based off of morphs. adding a caste in there for Trolls (c) and Trolls (b). Like major ants or warrior termites, aproximately half of all trolls, though the ratio is skewed towards B due to some caste shenanigans, are C, and the rest are B. Cs are assigned male at... probably pupation, and Bs female.

I propose that troll breasts are a form of social nutrient sharing glands, somewhere between the milk crop of a pigeon, the mammaries of a mammal, and of course, the social stomachs of ants and bees (and maybe termites). I propose that they evolved as a way to share nutrients, and evolved out in Troll(C)s perhaps as a form of evolutionary specialization, think honey pot ants.

This would give a reason for why trolls have gender rolls corresponding with having breasts, it explains why they have misogyny— It Allows For Hormonal Transgender (Transmorph?) Therapies, it explains WHY THEY HAVE BOOBS AT ALL. ALL WHILE FITTING THE THEME.

Misogyny in trolls having the same theming as in humans make sense too, because concepts of nurturing coresponding with having a built in mechanism for nutrient sharing is. just what we have!!! It would give an evolutionary reason for why jades are seemingly either all type B, or just MOSTLY. And that part specifically, Jades being primarily type B trolls, would allow for the all the childhood related idiosyncrasies we humans have around breasts to translate to trolls too! It would explain what exactly the fuck trans trolls are doing, and it would give greater understanding to intersex (intermorph??) trolls!!!!!!

This raises a lot of interesting questions about the notions of... well breastfeeding in troll society. I imagine it would be something mildly taboo, as most of alternian and beforan culture is heavily western and we fuckers are so fucking wierd about peoples bodily autonomy. But it could also be like a Homies thing. I imagine it would be kind of viewed as mildly animalistic or base, probably never said like that, but thats the quiet part im saying out loud.

If you guys have thoughts on eusocial troll breasts and their agabs (agaps?) being based on morphs let me know, i think this is my new canon for all my trolls.

[mcacomulada]

What you are about to read is probably a bit weird, it's my attempt at making sense of the biological cycle of trolls.

Troll Biology for Wigglers

Trolls are a triploid species, with a triploid biological cycle. The mother grub (3n) releases eggs (n), if these are fertilised by combined troll slurry (they are absorbent, in the primitive times trolls probably had to jizz over them instead of using buckets), they hatch into trolls (2n). If they are not fertilised, however, a virgin mother grub (n) is born (along with all other kinds of lusii). 

A matriorb is made when a virgin mother grub eats a fertilised egg (2n) intact. At this point, the egg dissolves in the innards of the virgin mother grub and goes through a metamorphosis, into a matriorb (with the adding of the virgin mother grub’s gamete).

Queer theorisks also point out that the quadrant system which permits various concupiscent partners was probably a result of troll reproduction being based off of the mixing of a large quantity of a lot of trolls’ genetic material. This necessity to share that much genetic material and with so many people probably provided the necessity to have multiple partners.

The history of troll biology is incredibly obscure, as before meeting humanity, trolls didn’t see any value in preserving that kind of information or learning much about the past at all.

The Blood Colors: Chromochromosomes

The trolls and lusii, unlike humanity, don’t have sex chromosomes. Instead, they have chromochromosomes (on top of the 27 pairs of others).

Each troll has two chromochromosomes, one of them defines characteristics like blood saturation, horn shape and size, number of molts, height, etc. There is only one variety of this chromosome, appointed chromosome V.

The second one has twelve different varieties, all according to blood hue, psionics, and other hue specific attributes, it also potentially modifies characteristics like horn size or general height reached. These twelve chromosomes recieve the subsequent names: Α (alpha), Δ (delta), Λ (lambda), Π (pi), Ι (iota), Υ (upsilon), Τ (tau), Ν (nu), Κ (kappa), Σ (sigma), Μ (mu), Χ (chi). [Order from warmest to coolest on the hemospectrum].

Kankri and Karkat’s mutation is caused by a trisomy in the chromochromosomes, wherein they have both the Χ and A chromosomes. This would be extremely controversial to discover, seeing as that basically turns the hemospectrum from a line into a circle, and makes the hierarchy seem even more pointless than it was.

Although not portrayed in the graph, both the mother grub and trolls release two types of gametes: those that have chromosome V (gV) and those that have a chromochromosome (gC). If there is one there isn't the other.

Lusii are born only from the gC, trolls occur when a gC egg and a gV gamete meet or vice versa. The mother grub is the result of a fertilized egg (VC) combined with a virgin mother grub's gamete (gC).

[meraki-sunset]

so uh how valid do you think the lusae of the twelve trolls were as parental figures [spidermom is a straight up zero, but given what karkat was, the way crabdad acted towards him was pretty valid]

1- Ram lusus: they died before the game so there's no info. Probably a good guardian seeing how happy and friendly aradia was. 9/10

2- Tinkerbull: Lovely guardian towards tavros, but unable to aid him due to his size. if i only rated how good they were he would have a 10, but for how helpfull he actually was he gets a 8/10

3- Bicyclops: is chained on the roof of Sollux's apartment complex and feed mind honey to not be stupid, doesn't sound like a very capable guardian if sollux has to take care of them, but doesn't seem like he was mean at all, 7/10

4- Crabdad: Grumpy but that matched Karkat's personality, good at hiding his child's mutation and keeping him alive. 9/10

5- Pounce de Leon: According to Nepeta "pawssibly the cutest and purrhaps the bestest kitty you have ever s33n!" and they saved nepeta when her hive was destroyed and took her to the cave that later became her home, good on all aspects 10/10

6- Virgin mother grub: Born to be the best loving mother and died for not only her child but all the future children of the new world, 100/10

7- Dragon lusus: EGG. 6/10 (okay she taught terezi how to smell color but still egg)

8- Spider mom: Fuck you -100/10

9- Arthur: A gentleman and a trooper ready to raise lovingly the strongest little worm in the planet. 10/10

10- Goat lusus: Neglecfull. 0/10

11- Seahorse dad: His kid is a brat but he is suportive and heps him in his job as orphaner. 8/10

12- Gl'bgolyb: Protects Feferi from being culled by the condesce, which no one else can do, and doesn't seem to cause any harm, exept of course, when she killed the entire troll race. 8/10

[alterfall]

making sure i understand correctly- do troll ancestors remain the same as they were in canon? does vriska maryam look up to the dolorosa or some altered version of her? is kanaya serket trying to live up to/ignore the shadow cast on her by marquis mindfang or something else? and the question that brought me here- the headmistress is stiill damara megido- are there effects backwards from gamzee being her descendant?

This is correct. Just like the humans, only the Beta Trolls have been 'swapped', meanwhile the Alpha Trolls have been warped due to being the descendants of pre-Scratch versions of said swapped trolls.

A while ago, Hydro drew this companion piece to an older infographic, which I'll attach for visual aid.

(note that we didn't swap the scratch around or anything, the Beta Trolls are just on the left because they're introduced first :P)

Trolls like Vriska, who are very interested in their Ancestors in canon, retain that trait in ALTERFALL, hence why she has this whole vampire aesthetic going on and is very proud of her connection to the Virgin Mother Grub. Meanwhile, Equius, someone who buys massively into the Hemospectrum, suffers from self-loathing and a 'cog in the machine' mentality rather than highblood supremacy. I'd definitely recommend giving the old character posts a fresh look with this in mind, as it can reveal a lot of the reasons why we chose certain directions with the characters!

-SF

[dingodad]

ive been hating so i will say one thing i really got a kick out of from friendsim was the reference to jadebloods not being allowed to fuck. this was daraya's date i think? i don't remember i'm never going to play those games again. but the idea that jadebloods are forbidden from reproducing is such a great example of the kind of emergent worldbuilding, obvious once you think about it, that homestuck employs to such good effect. not only does it a) hint at the well-known Alternian policy of eugenics and reproductive control, possibly indicating that the empire is in the active process of (trying to) breed dangerous rainbow drinkers out of the gene pool and b) obviously echo the association between the jadebloods and the virgin mary, but it also c) has clear parallels with the real-life history of nunneries - where women were often sent in the hopes of preventing promiscuity, a practice which frequently led to lesbian sexual encounters instead! - and d) implies that, if jadebloods keep being born in spite of their ancestors being prevented from fucking, they may be some kind of necessary component of the system, like drones, which the mother grub can produce asexually. like it truly writes itself. that's exactly how you should extrapolate from what's already in the text

[randomhomestucktournaments]

Homestuck character most likely to read Homestuck Round 1-3

[cobblepillar]

[xeno-bio-sociology]

Would it even be possible for a Mother Grub-like creature to exist on a humanoid species scale without magic, considering the vast caloric intake it would need just to exist even without constant egg-laying? Speaking of, how fast do you think it could produce eggs? I'm trying to figure out numbers for the troll population and that's my starting point.

Woof, hmmm....

It's interesting because I have wondered some of these things myself before, wanting a place like Alternia or any other giant-animals & dragons world to be plausible, but I don't have the background to get into the actual science of it. But let's see how far I can get and then hope that someone else can fill in the gaps.

Okay, so the three major constraints we'd be working with here are: structural integrity vs gravity and square-cubed law, air intake and blood circulation vs square-cube law, and calorie intake vs food chains and square-cube law.

For those who don't know, the square-cube law is the principle that the mass/volume/weight of an object grows faster (x3) than its surface area (x2) or the measurement of its height/length/depth in one direction (x1). An ant, being much smaller than a human, needs proportionally less muscle to fight back against gravity. Its exoskeleton doesn't need to be made of a super-tough material to withstand most of the impacts it receives or to easily contain all the bodily tissues. It needs less oxygen and what oxygen it has can reach all its tissues even without a special tube system to pump it all over the place, and it can survive on a very small amount of calories. If you simply embiggened the ant to a human size it would collapse and be unable to breathe.

So let's take this one at a time: structural integrity Our mother grub needs to be made of much stronger material than an ant is. There is precedence for this, found in other animal kingdoms. Elephants manage to move around despite their size, as did the dinosaurs before them, with huge dense bones and similarly meaty muscles. And both the scaly-footed gastropod and some rodents integrate metals into their bodies to toughen their shells and teeth respectively.

This is an alien from a different planet and evolutionary tree after all, we do not have to stick to the traits we can observe in the insect kingdom on our own planet here. Calling trolls and mothergrubs insects or insectoid is simply a shorthand for convenience and we can decide that they've convergently evolved these adaptations or whatever else we might invent to allow them to work as we wish, we just have to make the actual function make scientific sense. So, the mother grub's exoskeleton is metal-infused, and she might have a secondary internal skeleton to hold her up as well, as a solid core to hand things on is more structurally sound and mobile than a can around it. Or perhaps a more honeycomb-like approach, with supports scattered throughout; like a building with rooms. Maybe it evolved in a kind of opposite way to how a turtle did, where it had an internal skeleton that then grew into a shell. Or perhaps it is a new structure that we do not have an equivalent for in our insects. Either way, that's the exoskeleton out of the way.

As for muscles, while I think it's possible for them to have evolved them to the point that they can have the typical thin limbs of an insect, since we can see that mechanical devices can operate under such contraints, I think it's likely that that the limbs in general and the weightbearing and locomoting legs especially are significantly chunkier than we would see on an ant.

I will say however, that it is entirely possible that the mother grub in particular is not especially expected to move around by herself, and typically relies on drones and jadebloods to do much of anything. Pretty sure that’s how termites do. Perhaps Kanaya's virgin mother grub is also smaller than she is depicted; though the opposite could be true and most mother grubs do not regularly attain such sizes and either the lusus fluke or her being unmated contribute to her being as large as she is. We simply do not see any other mother grubs, though the implication that the skull on Terezi's scale is from one would suggest that the inverse is true and mother grubs can be enormous indeed. Either way, she probably doesn’t fly unless she’s much lighter than she looks and maybe filled with helium. Perhaps the wings are decorative? Or maybe they function as part of a heat-dissipation system or even for oxygen exchange themselves?

In any case, onto the next issue: air and blood circulation

As you probably already know, insects have a much different respiratory system to vertebrates. Instead of a central hole or three to breathe from and a sac to breathe into, where it dissolves into the blood and then a bunch of tubes all around the body to take the blood to the tissues, they tend to have what are called "spiracles," a bunch of little holes in their skin big enough for the air to enter and a tube to take the air to the tissues directly. The problem with this on a large scale is 1: less surface area:volume means you have less space for spiracles, 2: more volume:size means it's harder to get the oxygen to all the tissues you've got packed in there. Letting the oxygen essentially just passively absorb just isn't very efficient.

In past eons some invertebrates have gotten around this to get much larger than they are today by the simple expedient of there being significantly more oxygen in the air than there is these days. We can also get a heck of a lot more leeway by updating our mother grubs to have a heart and blood and veins and such. Something more complex than the simple book lung that spiders and such have. For reference, while the largest terrestrial invertebrate that ever lived was a 110lb millipede we think that the blue whale is pretty much the largest an animal can get with a mammalian circulatory system before the heart just can't pump the blood through the body fast enough, and it comes in at 199 tons (two-hearted whale when).

So pump up the oxygen level (not too high or there's fire explosionsm especially under the alternial sun), and maybe decrease the gravity on the planet and things can grow pretty big. Maybe you could even switch out oxygen and carbon as the main elements we're looking at here and get a boost that way too. I’m not big on chemistry or how things work, so maybe oxygen and carbon are the only things that’ll work here, but for instance the atmosphere on earth is 78% nitrogen and only 21% oxygen and humans don’t even do anything with the nitrogen, so even assuming that humans have to breathe the same air as exists on alternia (not a safe bet, as each species would have some wiggle room in terms of air composition and all humans were godtiered and capable of surviving in the vacuum of space [or at least the medium] by the time they were face-to-face with the trolls, and Earth C is both dubiously canon and potentially contains species that are not quite the same as those on either earth or alternia) you’ve got plenty of space to fill with some alternate gas in there.

So we’ve got a metal-plated, well-muscled mother grub who maybe doesn’t move around so much and has anatamy containing lungs, pumped blood, and veins. Maybe she’s got spiracles still and they work like our own airways or maybe she’s got a big honker of a nose like humans do, but either way we’re cooking with fire here. We’ve made the planet lighter and changed the O2 content and maybe we’re working with a silico-hydrate base for all our flesh-building purposes and thicken up the air so it’s soupy and bouyant. Heck, maybe we shrink everything we see over on alternia and the trolls themselves a bit, and they’re only depicted as of equal size as humans for story reasons or maybe everything gets resized to a default setting once it enters the medium for convenience’s sake. Whatever, it’s not important cause now comes the problem that I keep running into headlong each time I try to tackle an alternia-like ecosphere. The food web.

Cause, see, the mother grub by her self and trolls as a whole, they’re not a problem. (Well, not until they start taking all those nutrients to space)

The problem is this: Lookit how many giant predators and hyper-predators there are. Lookit this dragon. That is canonically a newborn. She can fly and breathe fire. Lookit this horrorterror. She canonically eats a ton of land and surface dwelling meats and isn’t just subsisting off of chemical vents or something.

All that mass, the energy to go flying off into the sky with extra to (literally) burn? That’s gotta come from somewhere. And on the one hand, we have maybe a partial answer: the sun. Specifically, that it is implied to be extremely hot and strong and maybe close. Not explicit, since Trolls could be unusual in their being nocturnal and even looking at our sun for long will blind a person, but the implications are there and we can run with them to a big, hot, super energy source ripe for the taking. The problem with that is that energy typically doesn’t flow down the food chain very far. We like to think of the food web as being a self-sustaining perpetual motion machine, but that’s just not true. So much energy is lost at each step, often as heat. And then that heat dissipates into the atmosphere and then escapes out into the greater universe. Think about it; how many seeds does a bird have to eat to grow to its adult size, and then to sustain it every day? Then how many birds does a cat have to eat to do the same? And how many cats does a fisher eat, and how many of those does a puma need in its life? It’s a lot. It’s exponential at each step, since a creature must spend so much energy just maintining its daily life and can’t put it all on body growth. And then all of that big long chain has to be sustained on vast quantities of plant matter, who generate their own bodies from the sun. There is of course a secondary chain that “starts” with detrivores like fungus and flies, but is by necessity focused on a much smaller amount of resources than the main chain.

So we’re limited by the following:

- how much energy the sun makes

- the % of that energy that makes it to alternia

- the amount that bounces off alternia or its atmosphere before it can be harvested

- the % of that energy that photosynthesizers can harvest

- the % they can store

- the % they need to live and propegate until they are eaten

- how much the herbivore needs to grow and live and eat and reproduce

- the efficiency with which the herbivore stores the energy gain

- how much the creature that eats the herbivore needs to use

- how much ITS fat can store.

- and so on

We can mess with any and potentially all of the steps in the chain to increase potential length of it and allow more and more massive and widespread superpredators at the end of it. We’ve already started that by increasing the potency of the sun, but each change will have repercussions. For instance, if energy is so widely available then why bother to evolve anything more complicated than photosynthesis itself? I once heard an author say that one needs to have two levels of answers to worldbuild convincingly – to solve the first problem and then to solve the follow-up question. That after that people will be satisfied. Something about fighting nuns. Where did the nun learn to fight? In the sewers. Why was she in the sewers? To fight the crocodiles.

So: We amp up the sun. Why bother evolving herbivory? The sun is too hot and withstanding it is costly and resource-intense. Not everything can be a plant because not everything has the sun-blocking resources, and there is a niche for nocturnal herbivores who don’t have to invest in sun protection. Why carnivory? The sun-block also makes the plants tough and hard to eat and digest; eating meat is relatively quick and easy.

The same thing can be done at other steps. Maybe we make animal life on alternia more efficient: they can do all work of living without creating much waste-heat, and their versions of digestion and fat pack in more calories denser.

But again, the nitty gritty science is not my area of expertise, and these are the questions that can keep me awake at night. What kind of solutions could make the food chain more efficient? What kind of pressures would encourage long food chains, large fat stores, and giant hyper-predators? How can we engineer an environment that will predispose this planet to logically evolving dragons?

[abbastuck]

PORRIM MARYAM

Porrim Maryam, Maid of Space, 6 sweeps (13), She/Her, Broomkind, guidedAlong

Porrim is a good girl. Porrim is the goodest of good girls. Always on her best behavior and looking out for others. It's a very rare occurrence for a virgin Mother Grub to become a custodian, almost unprecedented. But what's more unlikely is for the grub to refuse the lusus and stay within the brooding caverns willingly. That just makes her the poster child of dedication to her birthright.

Night in and night out, she spends her time tending to grubs and the mother grub herself. Her life is one of routine and dedication, one she is happy to follow. She's lived among jadebloods her whole life and has never met someone her age that isn't another pure maiden just like her- in person, anyways.

The caverns allow for an hour of husktop time per jadeblood. She's found herself an online friend group, strange and unlike anyone she's ever met before. She's even gotten herself a matesprit, one she has sworn herself to. One day, he'll be old enough to come into the caverns, sweep her off her feet, and they'll never have to look back again as they sail away into the twilight. But Cronus isn't old enough just yet, so she's more than happy to wait for him.

She spends a lot of her time online fretting about her strange friends, primarily Kankri and Latula. Not only does she know Kankri is a mutant (though Cronus tries to tell her she simply imagined it and saw things wrong), but she knows how unhealthily he lives and keeps pushing for him to change. On the other end, Latula doesn't seem to care about her status as a woman at all and is crass and vulgar. Clearly, Porrim has to show her how to be a proper lady by example.

((she types how she speaks- very softly, so her voice doesn’t echo off the cave walls and upset the grubs. she also ♍︎akes an effort to e♍︎pathize her role in the caverns, a pure ♍︎aiden dedicated to raising the next generation.))

[homestuckexamination]

i got a couple of Maryam-related questions. With the implication that Dolorosa was already a rainbow drinker even before being enslaved, what exactly did Dualscar and Mindfang fed to her to at least enough to survive- animal blood? And for Kanaya's lusus, since it's grounds for culling if a charge's custodian dies, what about cases like moth mom's where she died early due to a special biological case?

We actually don't really know IF Rainbowdrinkers need blood to 'survive', but if they do, both Dualscar and the Dolorosa are highbloods who would have 0 scruples or qualms about using lower bloods as resources to keep a Rainbowdrinking Jadeblood around. Hell, with Dualscar being an Orphaner, I wager Lusii are actually more valuable and premium than some Rusty or Two.

Alternia doesn't make exceptions for special circumstances. Alternia is a fucked up tyrannical world. Kanaya just lives off the grid. Hell, the very fact she had a Virgin Mother Grub Lusus at ALL was probably grounds for culling to begin with. That's a valuable Imperial Resource.

[rogue-of-heart-classpecting]

Hellooooo you seem like someone who understands things well, I’m stuck between thief of time and sylph of space for classpecting myself and I was wondering if you could explain those a bit?? No worries if not!! 💖💖

Sure!

THIEF OF TIME

Now the thief… I have been reading the homestuck book 4 with andrews notes in it and vriska’s entire life since day 1 was spent in pursuit of attention. And she’ll get it from anyone she can. A thief of time would be trying to steal as much leisure time for their own purposes as possible from anyone around them. “Can you do my chore for me? Thanks!” “Cover me?” Or they would be stealing with time. And stealing can really mean anything. Sending someone on a goose chase to ransack their house, or monopolizing someone’s time to get information out of them. Just whatever the thief needs at the moment. Later in the game, they would be able to suck years off of others’ lives. And keep those years for themselves. They might be able to freeze people in place and speed themselves up by stealing the person’s normal passage of time and adding it to their own. Thinking up powers is fun because if you can think it and justify it it is yours. A lot of players got their powers by just wondering if they could do it, whether that’s in the parameters of their classpect, and trying it out. And then they can just do that and continue using it forever. This part is particular to the individual. I don’t know what you would want out of time or your powers, but you could think of a way of stealing something that would get you to that goal. The thief is manipulative maybe on a sliding scale, like meenah to vriska. Meenah encourages or prods others into doing her bidding. Vriska manipul8s people by controlling their fucking brain and makes them jump off cliffs or kill their girlfriends etc. This class is well suited to leadership in a boss-like way. Dictatorially (literally, in case of meenah). They are also girlboss. You know what I mean? They’re like… I don’t want to say sassy bc meenah is such a racist depiction already… but you know, they’re charismatic and con man-esque. They’re persuasive. And good orators.

SYLPH OF SPACE

We have a represented classpect here! Let’s take a look at kanaya and then we can talk about universal traits and possible differences. As you know, I share my classpect with nepeta, and I do have a core connection with her behavior and outlook, but I am. Very different from her. But she does help demonstrate what the classpect Can look like. Sylphs are generally backstage of the show. Ignore aranea. She spent like 1000 years being a side character before flipping out. Kanaya usually pulls the strings on more “important” characters, those who act more. She is constantly called meddlesome. However she isn’t really an orchestrator of anything the way a puppet master might be. She’s more like everyone’s conscience. “Are you sure you should be doing this?” “It’s okay to turn back.” That sort of thing. As she progresses through the story she starts taking more and more action. Out of nowhere she comes back from the dead to be the plot point that kills eridan. She gets more serious about her relationship with rose. She eventually makes rose stop drinking when before she could be considered an enabler (not encouraging bad behavior, but allowing it or not stopping it). Sylphs are calm controlled people who encourage growth and healing of their aspect or through their aspect. Now about space. Kanaya designs her own clothes and fashion, but she has a much stronger connection to the idea of a virgin mother. I kind of hate the christ metaphors in homestuck, not because I am Christian, but because I hate Christianity. But she literally has a virgin mother grub as her mother. And her chastity modus… and porrim her ancestor raised the signless like a mother. And he’s. The Jesus guy. Anyway kanaya needs to get the matriorb so she can hatch a new mother grub so trolls can keep being born. And jade bloods are supposed to tend to the mother grub in this parental sort of role with the baby grubs. Like an oldest sister. Kanaya also has this intense desire to auspitice other people to keep them from killing each other, also like an oldest sister. She has this extremely caretaker role in everything she does. And she ends up breeding the frog. Space players don’t necessarily have to be parental or feminine; jade wasn’t really like that, nor calliope. Those are some examples of other space things. Jade actual space and calliope storytelling and creativity. If you are laid back and accepting and likely a passive player (oh god, this is a big concept so ask in the notes if you don’t understand.) and you care about the journey more than the destination, that is what a space player is like.

It sounds like you have the right theme idea with the aspect since you picked out a dichotomy! The important part is asking yourself how you interact with that aspect and which one is more important to you or dictates your life more. Is your life spent in pursuit of “time” or are you someone who cultivates “space”? Are you nurturing or abrasive? Are you goal-oriented or meditative? And most importantly which one do you just straight up like more.