to be fair i think they’d both be each others’ faves
dave strider would 100% start reading animorphs for the lulz irony points but then IMMEDIATELY get invested in and genuinely emotional about it. jade would be the only one to have read it also and she’s like “it was good!! cassie was my fav but there were too many aliens and not enough furries” and dave would be like “fuck off jade the aliens are the BEST PART marcos life is so hard god my namesake is such a fuckin dick” he’d try to explain the series to john in like eighteen rambling paragraphs and john would just be like wow sounds lame dude.
karkat would read it because dave rec’d it and he’d cry like every single book, even the funny ones. he’d make a shipping chart and it’s absolutely this one tumblr user catsandcataclysms made and sent me lol
i always thought it would be interesting to have a story where the aliens are using a universal translator so all the humans had their names translated from old english or greek or whatever. if you did this with homestuck fic, it could be especially interesting if the trolls got their names through an automatic six-letter name generator, so they didn’t mean anything but ‘this guy in particular’, while the humans were: God Is Gracious (john), Usually Greenish Metamorphic Silicate Rock (jade), Romantic Flower (rose), Beloved, Cherished (dave), Bright Dawn (roxy), Long Stabbing Knife (dirk), God Is Gracious, the Girl Version (jane), and then it turns out that jake could be a hebrew name or an english diminutive of john or a regional pronunciation of jack and therefore his name translates out to everything from Supplanter, to Joke, to Male Person, to God Is Gracious Number Three.
like can you imagine karkat being like, ‘OKAY, I HAVE TO ASK. WHY THE FUCK DO YOU GUYS HAVE SUCH PHENOMENALLY STUPID NAMES’ and Usually Greenish Metamorphic Silicate Rock is like, ‘hey, fuck you too, buddy!’ and the pornographically titled Beloved, Cherished is like ‘okay like you’re really one to talk, Feline Composed From Or Associated With a Small Self-Propelled Vehicle,’ and karkat realizes once more he has created the worst of all possible species of alien and has to go and lie down and hate himself
Translator has always been my headcanon for why highblood trolls seem to use “normal” words for objects (refrigerator) while lowbloods use long descriptions of objects (thermal hull). I like to think that the lowbloods are using some sort of slang that doesn’t translate. Maybe like Cockney rhyming slang.
haha, my headcanon for that bit of troll culture was pretty much the opposite. i think lowbloods are obligated to speak simply and clearly to be most widely and easily understood, so the common usage of alternian is to make compound words out of regular words plus various prefixes, suffixes, and maybe infixes. like german, though english does a bunch of this too, though english usually drags in latin and greek to do so.
meanwhile, alternian nobility has no such obligation to speak intelligibly, because it’s their underlings’ job to figure them out. they can use as many archaic nouns as they want, plus puns and weird grammar, and then feel superior when they watch everyone else scramble to keep up.
access to education is basically a privilege among humans, so regional dialect, slang, and nonstandard grammar are markers of low class. hence, the condesce sounds silly to us— uneducated; frivolous— but would sound much more serious to trolls —assertive; imperious— because of our different standards of formality.
People don’t speak standard or non-standard dialects because they’re supposed to, it’s just that dialects spoken by upper-class people wind up as the standard because of privilege. The only reason non-standard dialects are harder to understand is because while most people are exposed to the standard dialect, the upper classes don’t bother to learn the non-standard ones, because why would they? It’d probably be impossible for a dialect spoken only by disprivileged people to become the standard.
On the other hand, if sea dwellers and land dwellers were originally separate groups with separate languages, the sea dweller language might have come to be a prestige language, like French and Latin did in Europe. In that case, those highblood terms might actually be from sea dweller roots, as opposed to the lowblood terms that are from land dweller roots, with the land dweller language being more agglutinative.
great addition/correction, thanks! and i definitely like the idea of a seadweller prestige language.
important notes:
the most high-ranking troll we ever see blatantly uses aave (i would write this off as something she picked up on Earth but Meenah did, too). aave is a dialect, with a lot more specialized shit than a few simple words like “fridge”. aave being a prestige language would make sense because we only see tyrians who are very into being empresses use it
i find the decapitation meme really interesting, cus it feels like it was gonna happen for sure based on the fandoms sense of humour, but the way it works is based on how it happened in-comic
like a similar joke was gonna happen either way because even tho its a long comic where a lot of characters die repeatedly, dirk managed to get decapitated TWICE, but i feel the joke wouldve gone differently depending on whether both incidents were on purpose, both accidents, or one was on purpose and the other an accident
since both incidents were dirks idea, it became the joke that dirk comes up with being decapitated whenever hes faced with a problem (which is hyperbolic to comic effect, considering in the canon both occasions were life or death situations, but i love the hs fandoms hyperbole)
but i think that if both had been accidents, the fandom wouldve still come up with a similar meme, namely that this is just something that can randomly happen to dirk whenever. similarly hyperbolic comics would emerge of, like, him an dave playing frisbee and the frisbee accidentally decapitating him; him and the others are sitting around eating breakfast and his head falls off in his cereal. that kinda stuff
and if the first instance was on purpose but the other one turns out to be daves idea i imagine it wouldve been at least one comic of dirk complaining “wow you cut your head off ONE TIME and suddenly its A THING”; or if the first was an accident and the second was on purpose there would be at least one comic along the lines of dirk musing mid-battle “yknow actually, that decapitation worked out pretty well, maybe it will this time” (tho tbh i dont think these ones wouldve caught on as much because of the lack of room for hyperbole and possible applications for the joke)
but yh, this is just something i was musing about in the shower yesterday. i just think that this meme kinda perfectly captures a large part of the fandoms sense of humour in a few ways
i just think its amazing that we’re now imagining MEME AUS
i want the epilogue to be john egbert writing a game review for sburb on amazon
“4/5 stars. very immersive! met a lot of new people while playing. lots of content. the only reason i am not giving it the full five stars is because my dad died during the course of the game, along with the whole human race.”
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