corvidcipher asked you: I assume Troll Biology:...

9th February 2012

corvidcipher asked you: I assume Troll Biology: The Complete Experience won’t include Carapace Biology: The Complete Sideshow Experience, but do you have any thoughts on our chitinous friends? Particularly, I’m curious about support and musculature—true exoskeleton, or exoskeleton with spider-like secondary endoskeleton, or endoskeleton with armor plates? Extensor muscles, or a hydraulic system? Anything else you want to talk about would be super neat too. :V

I don’t think it’s much of a surprise that there’s more of a focus on science in troll bio conversations but carapaces are all about cool designs instead of inner workings. With carapaces you can’t talk about ancestral forms and selection pressures and environmental interactions because their present forms are just… how they are, how they always have been. Since they are essentially black and white stick figures everyone is free to go to town on what they would look like realistically and they don’t need to pay any mind to WHY they look that way because there is no answer. Which is totally cool!! This freedom’s produced a lot of neat as fuck designs.

There’s an element of anthropocentrism in Homestuck that I think is actually kind of neat instead of horrid like most things that include anthropocentrism. Both the carapaces and the players always seem to have a humanoid body plan with the same kind of abilities, which means even though the carapace bodies don’t change from session to session and the players do, they are always person-looking enough that the players can interact with them no problem. Evolution is true for life on the planets sessions spring from, which is why the players look different every time, but there is a sort of “goal” to develop a type of human-like organism that can play the game effectively and allow the universe to reproduce. The presence of a humanoid species with advanced technology is a sign of the end times, in other words. I like it because it doesn’t really put them on a pedestal—they’re chosen not because of inherent betterness, but because they jive the best with the carapaces.

There is a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem—do the carapaces look that way because of the players or do the players look that way because of the carapaces—but logically I think it’s the latter! Because carapaces are central to the game and they are static. I think it’s possible daughter universes have humanoid players in part because their predecessors are kind of naturally biased towards making an idealised world similar to their own, but if that was all that mattered there would probably end up being a gradual shift in body form over generations of universes to a point where the carapaces would not resemble the players at all. Which would break a lot of mechanics! So the carapace is kind of like a walking blueprint for all player species across all sessions—instead of them being patterned off of and catering to us, we are built in THEIR image.

Maybe the original universe that spawned all the others had a player race that looked exactly like them, and that’s why they are the template instead of something with like six legs and eyestalks all along its back.

To answer the actual question—a carapace is just the top part of a shell. People are most familiar with the term when it’s referring to insect carapaces so that’s probably why virtually all carapace people are drawn as insectoid with epidermal chitin plates everywhere on their bodies, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t have, say, a bony shell on their back with osteoderm scales, more reptile than insect.

Whatever the carapace is made out of though, or where the plates are, carapacians are too big to not have an internal skeleton. There is a very restrictive size limit on animals with exoskeletons, and the only reason why arthropods can get away with not having an internal support structure is because they are so small. Marine arthropods can buck it because water itself acts as a support system, and they would not be crushed under their own weight when they molted, but even then the largest marine arthropod ever recorded (giant sea scorpion) only grew to about 8-9 feet if I’m not mistaken, while the largest terrestrial is the coconut crab, which is about the size of a big house cat. Bipedalism would also put too much pressure on their legs—large terrestrial athropods are all very squat in order to spread their weight out, and the only thing that would remedy this is to have very thick plates on the legs which would impede movement and make them even heavier.

So the best fit answer is endoskeleton with armor plates of some sort. The carapace, whatever it is made out of, would probably restrict movement of the chest even if it is not completely fused to the vertebrae like a turtle’s is, so overall their back is less flexible than ours. The plates don’t necessarily cover their entire body either. Their faces might be smooth skin, for instance.

All that being said, my favourite interpretations of carapace people are when they have joints like ball jointed dolls or limbs resembling chess pieces. A lot of the realistic looking faces people try out don’t work for me and I have yet to find one I would accept as my own headcanon, but there are cool ones. The only thing I hate seeing is noses, really, carapaces are not meant for protruding noses.

look at me mom no readmores

Tagged: biology carapace people corvidcipher homestuck let me tell you a story