princeofdoom

So, here's my headcanon about “East Alternia/Beforus” and what happened to it. As I am white, take literally anything I say about culture with a lot of salt, especially where it regards similarities and differences between East Alternian culture and actual real life East and South East Asian cultures.  I’m going to be using East Alternia to refer to this cultural sphere on both Alternia and Beforus, unless I feel there is some important aspect of Beforus culture that I need to talk about.

Also this is taking some things from Homestuck, Paradox Space and Hiveswap canon that I found interesting or felt hinted at other things, but I’m not strictly sticking to canon because the narrative belongs to the fandom now and I’ll do as I like with the interesting bits. Mild content warning for fictional cultural genocide and discussion of alien reproduction. Both will be discussed but only in the amount of detail necessary.

So, East Alternia was and maybe still is (in the alpha timeline and at least at the time of Hiveswap in beta-verse) a cultural sphere on Alternia distinct from Alternia in general, or at least we can assume a “Western” Alternia. And culturally there are a lot of parallels (often based on stereotypes) drawn between East Alternia and East Asia on Earth.

Specifically, though, the strongest connections are between East Alternia and Japan.

We know that trolls on Alternia especially are imperialistic and I think with all the meddling that happened with their culture, this wouldn’t have been just HIC and Western Alternia, but other cultures that came up before HIC became Empress.

I think that East Alternia had at one point at the very least its own Mother Grub and its own Condy equivalent. And if anything there were probably a multitude of cultures in the area that were later subsumed into the empire of one Tyrian.

These other cultures may have had their own Tyrians (South East Asian, Chinese or Korean equivalents especially) or may have been completely landwelling and ruled by purplebloods. (Maybe an India equivalent was where some of the tenants of the purpleblood “clown cult” came from, similar to Hinduism or Buddhism, while other aspects came from Western, Roman-esque purplebloods).

But I posit this timeline: A multitude of Trollish cultures spring up throughout East Alternia, all with their own Mother Grubs, leaders and even varying ratios between the different castes. Then, many of these cultures either joined together out of mutual protection, or by going to war where the winning cultural group absorbed the other. Eventually a unified East Alternian Empire was left with cultural similarities to Earth Japan, but still having aspects of other cultures. This was all well before HIC became the Western Alternian Empress. East Alternia became its own cultural and ethnic group to the point that even in “modern” Alternia’s time after HIC unified all of Alternia under her rule, there are family lines that are still considered East Alternian.

It’s hinted at in canon that most of these trolls are lowbloods, and that makes a little bit of sense, coming from HIC and the other Western highbloods’ points of views. I think, as horrific as it would be, HIC had most or all of the original East Alternian Mother Grubs killed, and had all the trolls from across Alternia submit slurry to the Western Alternian Mother Grub(s) (this is also probably about when she instituted collection drones). Any Eastern Alternian Tyrians would have been culled, and many Eastern violetbloods as well, lessening the chance that an Eastern Alternian Tyrian line would show up again. The higher blooded a troll was, the more scrutiny they would be under for obedience, and disobedient trolls of all castes and cultural backgrounds were culled without submitting slurry.

So, the largest number of Eastern family lines that survived were rustbloods and a good number of midbloods. Maybe even cerulean/bluebloods made it through as well. I’d expect only a handful of purple and violet lines combined still exist that came from East Alternia if any, and if Tyrians weren’t rare already, a Tyrian that even came from partial East Alternian stock certainly would be.

I don’t think this was just done with East Alternia either, just that it was one of the more recent additions to the empire before Condy had control of pretty much everything. Most trolls that are East Alternian don’t know much about their culture except what can still be found in older manga/manwa and animation, and they just kind of extrapolate from there. Finding anything about a minority culture within East Alternia as opposed to just Troll!Japan is next to impossible, but there are some things.

Alternia as a whole became more homogeneous after HIC gained full control, but at the same time, because of the way that trolls reproduce, entirely new bloodlines of trolls came about at this point in history. While there are still traits that are common or more common in certain ethnic groups among trolls, because they basically combine all their genetics together, entirely new combinations of traits came about. Many Western Alternian trolls have some traits from other ethno-cultural spheres, and vice versus with trolls from bloodlines that are ostensibly from minority ethnic groups, like East Alternians or Gamblinauts - who were implied to be their own ethnic group as well, though I  don't remember where this was mentioned.

I did mention that had some specific thoughts about Beforus and here it is:

Because instead of HIC, Feferi was running Beforus, the take over wasn't as violent. Likely, East Beforus was allowed to "keep" at least some Mother Grubs, but I imagine that over time, reproduction was centralized nonetheless. East Beforans had more connection to their traditional cultures than East Alternians, including Damara still speaking with a "strong accent"/her traditional language, which is similar to Japanese in the same way Western Beforan/Alternian is similar to English.

I haven't been on here much, not much to say. I won Nano but I need to work on planning out the second half of the story, which might be another 50k by itself. Also having some money troubles but when doesn't my family, and who doesn't that wasn't born wealthy?

Aside from that, tho, I would like to get into rping on here but I still don't know how or if people really... do that here. Is there a group or groups for that on here? Should I start one? I'm not generally very good with running things by myself but if someone else wanted to help make an rp group, I'd be up for it.

Going well, I'm ahead on my words, have plenty of ideas for where to go, and since I don't have a specific ending in mind I can't say anything is causing problems for "The Plot". I still haven't had two of any of the three main characters interact on screen yet but it's close.

Just thinking out loud here, but I think the reasons I'm ok with some things in fiction that I'm not ok with irl (like red flags as long as things don't tip into actual abuse or the like) is this: irl, you cannot know for certain what someone's intentions are, even if they tell you. They may not know themselves, they might be outright lying. So it's best to take red flags in ANY kind of relationship seriously and keep away from people who act certain ways, whether or not their intentions and the other ways they act on those intentions are good.

But in fiction, if the author allows, we can know the exact intentions of any character for another. We know that there's some mitigating reason for one character acting a way that could be an issue irl without that knowledge. Just like in some cases, it serves the purpose of the story to know that character who seems kind and sweet is actually manipulative and awful.

But this only really helps when people understand there is a difference between fiction and reality.

So, while I've been trying to get ready for National Novel Writing Month, or Nanowrimo, and getting into Food Fantasy, I've completely disrupted my schedule and now I have a minor cold or something. I'm mostly fine just feeling run down.

I still definitely want to do Nanowrimo, but to otherwise keep a healthy schedule that means I'll probably be pretty much off social media in November and maybe the rest of October for that matter. We'll see. If anyone wants commissions, I'll be checking email tho, so please contact me at vampyresmiles@gmail.com if you have commission questions

From a goretober prompt made by lemons_art on instagram, day one: Plants

( tw for plant gore, and plant transformation. )

There had been reports of some beast prowling about the harbor at night. Many thought it was a large, feral dog. But of the few eyewitnesses left alive, they all swore it was some kind of huge mountain cat. How a wildcat so large could get into the city, and why, wasn’t yet known.

Extra patrols were sent out to look for the creature after sunset, since whatever it was, it never struck while it was light out. Near the end of the hour of the boar, there was a yell, and many of the citizen patrols and a few samurai went to investigate.

They found one of the younger citizen patrols near the docks, the one who had yelled. He was shaking, staring at some crates and claimed he had seen a monster just as it hid among them.

One of the lower ranked samurai turned to the one heading the search to see if they should search the crates, and stifled his own shout. The lead samurai lay dead, head at an odd angle and deep tooth marks through his neck.

It was the hour of the rat.

Takumi skittered across the courtyard of the samurai's mansion on paws darker than the moonless night. Whatever party was being held here was winding down and the master of the estate would likely retire to his chambers soon.

Takumi could wait a little longer to be sure his target would be mostly alone. No need to mingle innocent blood with that of the guilty.

It was the hour of the ox, at least halfway through by Takumi's count, when the samurai's second son, who carried the same scent as his father, came to the master's chamber to sleep. The humans' habit of sending off their lords and said lords' heirs and wives to the capital had slipped Takumi's mind. But he had come to enact his grudge and found a fitting target in any case.

The young samurai was not fully asleep when Takumi's fangs found his neck, ending him swiftly and quietly. Takumi had drunk his fill of the tainted blood, jumped to the roof to clean himself and left before anyone found what had happened.