NOTHING LEFT TO DO BUT DANCE

there’s been a lot of terezis wearing fur on my dash lately, particularly bloodswaps

and i’ve been wondering to myself

did i start this

Tagged: derpbentbloodbenttereziarthomestuck

ahahahahaha i don’t even know why this is so funny to me

god im just imagining them both as horrible goth teens and dualscar wrote that travesty to impress her but it didnt work because she hates everything

maybe he wrote the same thing in the a2 timeline and it became known as the first true novel, and thus the basis for troll literature

my immortal is a universal constant

Tagged: condescedualscarhomestuckreply postbad harry potter fanfictionthose were the days

deat)( 2 prepz

Tagged: homestuckcondescethis is a few days latehomestuck update

http://www.livestream.com/luzerna !!

i’m starting in 15-30 minutes probably, come say hello! will work on panels and not this, unless people would rather me work on this, it’s just a wip to get your ATTENTION

it’s later than i said it would be because i don’t want to stream at the same time as somebody else :(c

Tagged: bloodbentderpbenthomestucknepetatereziartwip

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: biologycarapace peoplecorvidcipherhomestucklet me tell you a story

i don’t think they would puff up like that when threatened but it would be cute.

i don’t know what they are grievously offended about because i just like drawing these sorts of faces but my guess is that it’s probably something awful and it probably involves equius

Tagged: arteridanfeferihomestucki think you need to leavve

well i think calmasis is probably actually a troll, the reverse of kanaya imagining rose as a troll (now rose is imagining a troll as human)

and i think the most likely possible identity of uU is one of the A1 trolls, barring a completely new character being introduced in the story’s twilight hours

and there are fairly obvious links between calmasis and uU

so the question is

which one of the ancestors had that haircut as a kid

Tagged: calmasishomestuckremember when everyone thought uu was the suffererand then the condesce20$ on handmaidAncestors

Anonymous asked you: I really like the part of your Rogue design that you’ve already drawn. Any chance we’ll see the rest sometime in the future

two gods with one stone (karkat is the rogue of void)

There’s some stuff on the formspring about Aradia already. Though, I’ve decided since answering one of those that the voodoo thing is just a religious ritual for most. The ability to reach into someone’s dreams and mess with them is not psionics that you see in lower castes, it’s something that you can do as a god with domain over primal emotions, and by extension, madness. If you choose to use them that way. What the Grand Highblood could do as a Hero of Rage was seen as a product of enlightenment of sorts, like the Summoner’s wings, which caught the attention of the Empress and she promoted him to the position (they became close friends over time). The whole modern night terror thing is entirely his fault; I’m not sure which but either he’s still alive, getting crunk with the Condesce and doing it consciously, or during the Summoner’s revolution he basically nuked the planet before he died and everyone on Alternia is still feeling the effects a thousand years later. Maybe that’s the reason why the adults all but abandoned it. Either way, run of the mill subjuggulators and other indigobloods not associated with the order can’t do that. Aradia might eventually be able to depending on how she realises herself in the game.

She does practice the religious and military doctrines associated with it, and that sets a lot of people on edge, just as it should, because she’s good at what she does. But her actual interests lie more in the realm of mostly harmless roleplaying games and telling stories and interrupting people <:

feel free to just cut this right out if you reblog, the description is longer than i intended

Tagged: aradiaartbloodbentderpbentgod tierhomestuckkarkatlet me tell you a storyscuttlebuggy