I'm HR Giger, and I approve of this thread.

>>66466
This reminded me of The Little Troll Prince (I'm not sure if that's intended or not).

>>66686
Hahaha holy shit this is so good.

Boner

Come on! I can't be the only one with this stuff!!

Troll nudibranchs! :3c

>>67336 Awww

>>67436
...hmm...

oh murr~

BTW, I'm only posting one or two of any given style of troll - if you like any of them, say so and I'll post any others that are similar.

C'mon guys, we need some more aliens in here. I can't be the only one who thinks they're cool!

Whoever posted that last one is awesome. The rest of you suck.

>>68860
>>67706
>>67705
>>67576
Stuff like this isn't speculative biology at all. It's just stylisation. Jesus christ, learn the difference.

>>68863
THIS is the good stuff. Do you know if there is an explanation of what this is illustrating?

>>68869
Big deal. They look weird, that's what matters.

What's up with those blood colored spots along their sides that I keep seeing in fanart? Vestigial grub arms?

> >>68863 THIS is the good stuff
Agreed, but there's so little of it, especially ones that look decent. So I'll take what I can get, so long as it look inhuman or the inhuman elements are well done. (>>67705's eyes and ears, >>68860's teeth & Condesce's nose and fins)

It's by remmidemmi on Tumblr, and no, there's no text with it. :/

>>68903 Yep, they're supposed to be either grub legs or grub leg scars, depending on the artist.

And seeing as I'm with like 4 exceptions) the only one posting stuff, I'm afraid you'll either have to take what I've got or provide some of your own material!

I'll see if I can find any more anatomical stuff to post, but I'm pretty sure that's one of very few.

Found some!

I'm really disappointed that drastically large/small trolls did not turn out to be a thing.

They could still be a thing; they might grow at a rate that's very different from humans' and just happen to be a similar size for a few sweeps, after all.

In any case, here are some abnormally sized trolls!

really disappointed in how not creepy grubs tend to be, i mean considering they are basically transparent caterpillars with the heads of human babies and all. it's just such a wasted opportunity

i don't really want 2 toot my own horn by posting things i drew but i just feel depressed seeing a xenobio thread with almost no actual xenobio in it so here u go

Yes, good.

I was hoping that someone would see the plight of not enough xeno and actually contribute! :D

And to heck with not tooting your own horn. If you, or anyone else, has an awesome idea, please do put it into words/pictures and share with the class; it's what this thread is here for, after all!!

I've only got so much stuff, after all.

bug feet > paw feet

>>69291
Come on, that's not even remotely alien looking.

>>69292
i imagine it was posted because it shows karkat with tapeta lucida
this isn't really an alien thread, though, it'd be more accurately called more-nonhuman-than-usual trolls

I'm posting the most alien-like trolls I have. Most of the extremely different ones have been posted already.

If you've got or can make some weirder trolls, I'm sure the thread could use them!

>>70174
who the hell is that guy in green supposed to be

>>70391
From the monogram on the scarf and the glasses, I guess it's supposed to be Dave.

And now for something completely different: cherubs

>>70935
>calliborn and calliope having completely different facial structures
nope.png

>>70935
>calliborn and calliope having completely different facial structures
nope.png

>>70961
it might have been drawn before we knew they were a 2-for-1 deal

>>70966
The time that we learned they shared a body was almost immediately after we learned cherubs were a thing, tho.

>>70547
This reminds me of Tuba Croc.

>>70970
i don't know man, this fandom is really quick with the art. i'm sure some people jumped to draw separate character designs for both of them before even reading the page her appearance reveal was on.

>>71400
I find art like this really interesting and all, but I can't help but think that if the trolls actually looked like that Karkat's whole story arc couldn't have happened. If their blood colour shows that obviously, there's no way he could have hidden his "mutant" blood for as long as he did

>>71400
Jack Spicer?

>>71418
Not to mention that scene in Mindfang's saucy diary where she'd have had to bleed the prisoner to find out what her caste was.

True. It's still cool, though.

I really like the Condesce eyes this artist gave Meenah

>>71436
>trying to have it both ways

man it's like those dragon wings deviantart kids draw that are half bat-like skin wing and half bird. it looks neat i GUESS but the animal can't fly with a meld of the two because they work differently. gills need water flowing across them in order to function, and that can't happen if there is a membrane between them blocking it. if you want external gills, you can't have facefins too. they can't breathe!! they are going to drown.

facefins in general kind of bug me because they are fucking useless. what purpose can they possibly serve, either now or further back in their evolutionary tree. i've seen some dudes try to rationalise it as helping to keep water flowing through neck gills, but that makes no sense because if they have neck gills they should be gulping water and pushing water through the gills via their pharynx. (neck gills are also kinda bad because of how human-like necks are structured vs the "necks" of fish who actually have that type of gill.)

the best ones are isozyme's thoracic gill/lung which is really cool, and zilon's frill things which are neither gill nor fin, just a nice-looking extension of the ear. the salamander gills are things i started--i'm fairly sure most instances of them can be traced back to me--but i'd have probably taken up zilon's idea if i'd gotten into the fandom later than she did because i like them a lot.

>>71437
the black sclera in that picture are cool though, it's true. no objections.

picture unrelated to eyes but still related to seadwellers. i just don't want to post without content

>>71437
thorax/torso gills are cool and work, until you run into the popular vestigial grub legs fanon

>>71448
i don't like that fanon at all, but it doesn't conflict with thoracic gills. if the "leg" is on the edge of the operculum (this isn't exactly the right word but idk if we have a better fitting one) then it might serve as a support structure which helps to open/close the gill and seal it shut while on land to prevent water loss and airborne pathogens from getting in.

the thing with these third leg pair ideas with the scars and the "vestigiality" is that that stuff doesn't really happen. either a structure that is no longer needed in the adult form develops/is incorporated into a new structure, or it atrophies and disappears. it's like how you don't have scar tissue between your fingers even though your fingers were all bound together by skin at one point during fetal development.

a caterpillar's prolegs are a relevant example here. the first three pairs of legs on a caterpillar are jointed and attached to thoracic segments, and will go on to become the legs you see on a butterfly. the other stumpy-looking legs are on the abdomen and disappear completely after pupation. there is no trace of them now that they have served their purpose, they are just gone. this would probably be the ultimate fate of a troll larva's extra pair of legs too, if we're going for biological accuracy.

You're overemphasizing biology over design.
It doesn't have to function as it is only a piece of fan art made to appeal to the eye. Biology outside of basic skeletal and muscular anatomy don't really come into play. It's about conveyance.

>>71453
it's a fucking biology thread, that were you expecting?

Nope's just a retard like that, ignore him

Nope's just a retard like that, ignore him

>>71449
But navels and nipples DO work like that.

I kinda like the fanon that the face-fins have electromagnetic sensors or whatever on them like on a hammerhead shark.

>>71458
Both nipples and navels serve a purpose. Males are capable of lactation under exposure to the right hormones, so they are actually fully functional, though male mammary glands aren't. As for navels, humans don't undergo any metamorphosis after the navel has served its purpose--placental feeding continues to be a factor in human survival until after birth, at which point the human has already entered its "adult" form, minus slight alterations caused at puberty that are nowhere near dramatic enough to be called metamorphosis.

>>71462
right. live birth and parental investment allows us to skip the larval form. egg-laying animals can also get around it by having larger eggs with tougher shells and more nutrients, which gives more time for the young to develop inside. larvae are basically free-living fetuses, and they are that way because there is not enough to sustain growth inside their eggs and a squishy egg with no guardian is a free meal for predators; they need to move and eat even though most of their body is still extremely underdeveloped. then they pupate when they have stored up enough energy to finally be "born" into the adult form, if they are arthropods, or in the case of other invertebrates, amphibians and fish they gradually stack on adult traits until they become adults. some animals also have a larval stage capable of moving so they can disperse themselves because they are sedentary as adults, but that kind isn't relevant to this discussion.

whenever something present in a larva is no longer needed as an adult it atrophies and is reabsorbed into the body and used to construct things that aren't useless. it's extremely inefficient to keep a structure that does nothing on as a "scar" in the adult form, especially when it is something like a whole fucking limb. if it stays, there is a reason it stays. for example, the gills of the axolotl and mudpuppy are fully functional holdovers from larval forms because they are fully aquatic salamanders. i don't care if people keep the extra pair of limbs but for god's sake don't say they do nothing.

re: nipples, the reason why male mammals have nipples even though they will never be used for rearing young is because they develop simultaneously with the rest of the skin, which occurs before sex differentiation of the fetus. some animals are designated male or female from the very beginning (leading to stuff like this butterfly), but we aren't. the mammary glands and nipples are the same in males and females all the way up to puberty too, and there isn't any selection pressure for men to lose nipples when they start developing secondary sex characteristics, if that is even possible for us, which i don't think it is. it's not the same as larval structures either because they don't actually have any use until the animal is an adult.

Woo, discussion! This thread is awesome now!

>>71472
I don't see why it'd be so outrageous to have trolls with grubleg scars. Scars form when one's body decides it's less wasteful to half-ass it than to rebuild the area entirely, and it's not out of the question this is the case here.

>>71503
all i'm saying is that something like this would have a purpose, which is potentially a lot cooler than it being a useless ass accessory. i do not understand why you are fighting me over it.

and no, that is not what a scar is. at all. scars are the end result of wound repair and happen because the cells deposit collagen in a different way than normal healthy tissue. it happens this way because lesions needs to be contracted and sealed shut fast. in most cases scars fade over time as the collagen net gets reworked, but it will never be the same. scarring is a completely different process than metamorphosis and shit like that (there is a reason why i've been putting the word between quote marks this entire time); metamorphosis does not cause lesions which are subsequently repaired with fibrous tissue, so you will never find scars as part of normal development of an animal. barring things like navels ofc, but see >>71462 for why they're irrelevant. if u are going to talk about this stuff please at least do a cursory glance on wikipedia or google or something. i mean come on.

>>71504
I'm not fighting you, just throwing it out there. Though in my justification for that particular headcanon I am assuming grublegs would be lost upon metamorphosis rather than absorbed back into the body.

And I know what a scars are; I don't see how that doesn't fit within my simplification.

>>71505
so they atrophy and fall off before pupation or what? that would probably leave some sort of mark on the larva, but it would also disappear after metamorphosis. and yo losing two limbs is a big fucking deal when you need all the energy you can get to survive pupation. they're not empty, there is meat inside there. muscle and fat and living layers of epithelial tissue. if you're thinking it'd be similar to ecdysis, that's not what ecdysis is? insects don't shed their skin, they only shed the chitinous cuticle that goes over top of the skin which does not contain any cells. for something like that to happen to the legs, digestion of the cuticle would begin as it would in insects but the leg would regress into the body, leaving a hollow tube that eventually drops off. this would leave a softer, round depression where the limb used to be, but no fibrosis whatsoever, and the animal gets to keep all the nutrients stored in the limb.

doing this before pupation means there is slightly less time it has to spend immobile i guess, and there are two weaker areas on either side that can be broken more easily by the emerging juvenile, but i think the costs kind of outweigh the benefits there. predators can take advantage of those weak spots, the pupa can make its own weak spots when it's ready to emerge by digesting the inside of the shell, and the time difference would be sort of minimal. legs could also be used to anchor the pupa to its substrate while the legs slowly regress.

i'm also not sure why people always want only the middle pair of legs to "scar" or be used while the other two pairs go on to become limbs in the adult form. the other two don't look any different from the middle pair, and none of them look anything like a humanish arm or leg at all.

also no, you don't know what a scar is because the way you described them was completely wrong??

>>71507
I think you might be under the impression I implied scarring has something to do with methamorphosis??

>>71509
maybe what you said was just bad wording but i don't really care either way and i don't want to derail this thread.

why don't you try explaining how a scar acquired as a larva as part of normal development is still present in the adult form as a scar. why losing the second pair of limbs before pupation is adaptive and how would it occur. why having it fall off and leave an open lesion which scars over would have developed instead of reabsorption of the limb or incorporation into another structure. why is it possible, why is it cool. i haven't thought about its justification much because i think it's a boring theory with a lot of problems and i've never seen anyone try to explain or defend it. please do. alternate explanations are nice to have and i can't say i'm not biased against it because i am, so someone who likes it or is at least more neutral to it might be a nice counterpoint.

>>71511
People like that headcanon because it gives some connection between the grub form and humanoid form of trolls. Since grubs are relatively featureless remnant of grublegs is pretty much the only thing that can carry over.

>>71513
that's the most disappointing thing i've read all year.

i thought you had actual ideas.

>>71514
then come up with some better ideas instead of complaining about other people's

>>71516
what the fuck do you think i have been DOING

did you read ANYTHING i said? anything at all?

stop talking

>>71522
someone's in a mood today

Are there some more of these insect-troll images? I think I like the idea of that, but it looks like a lot of them are a bit too heavy on the carapace for my liking.

As far as I know that's the only one that particular artist's done. I'll see what else I can find.

>>71718
I'm fairly sure this has nothing to do with Homestuck.

It's Petstuck, I think??

>>71817
>mother grub isn't an oversized plump insect
get the fuck out

the mother grub and the drones are not the same fucking species

>>71821
I always liked the idea that the drones were bioengineered artificial ogranisms created specifically for the purpose of hauling buckets of spunk; not sure if there's anything in canon that contradicts that.

>>71826
if anything i think canon supports it.

i think it's also fairly obvious trolls are parasites of the mother grub. they are not the same species, and it is not a mutualism. they're just not virulent parasites; they've probably had a long evolutionary history with the mother grub and other lusus species. it's not adaptive to kill a host you need to reproduce in a case like this. mother grubs seem to be relatively rare, and they are huge, so it's better to use one many times.

>>71832
There's this rather good fanfic that develops upon that theory:
http://archiveofourown.org/works/612342?collection_id=Ladystuck_Exchange2012&view_adult=true

>>71832
Yep, this has always been my headcanon. Trolls parasitize mother grubs, not the way wasp larvae do (where they literally eat the host from the inside out, killing it), but the way parasitic worms do (where they steal some nutrients from the host and then pass out of the digestive tract).

Probably part of a Jadeblood's job is to make sure that Mommygrub has enough food to sustain both herself and her internal horde of hungry troll eggs.

http://whosdoing.tumblr.com/post/37894634972

i deleted a picture but please feel free to repost it again under a nsfw thingamajig! (yes i know there were no details drawn on but iys still kinda questionable for work safe browsing. just give it the tag)

>>71898
Hey. I thought you forgot about us.

>>71916
>6 nipples
>2 boobs
uh...

>>71917
supernumerary nipples are a real thing some people have. haviing mammary glands to accompany them is much rarer. that's not the usual placement of rogue nipples though, and cats actually usually have 8 of them, not 6.

the fact that there IS 6 though might suggest that they are in fact not nipples at all, but a creative version of those grub leg "scars" people like to put on adult trolls.

>>72065
i don't know why this showed up again when i drew and posted this earlier in the same thread, but ok >>71437

it's nice to know somebody thought it was good enough to save

>>72066
Sorry about that. My bad. I usually rely on the board's duplicate detector to ensure I don't repost.

>>72066
Sorry about that. My bad. I usually rely on the board's duplicate detector to ensure I don't repost.

>>72217
That is awesome.

>>72240
Oh dear.

>>72246
I don't know what this is.

But I don't like it.

>>72247
who could take issue with toddler rose snuggling with grub kanaya?

>>72248
I take issue with the fact that Rose is naked.

>>72249
Or just not wearing a shirt? Like she and all the other babies are when ectobiologically created?

>>72259
Meenah literally has two left hands...

>>72260
So she does. Huh.

Technically not aliens but

Whoops, double post.

>>72299
>>72300
Not so sure about the tail, or what makes it NSFW, but I really like this look for the trolls.

>>72304
I think it's the slits on the crotch that makes a nsfw warning appropriate? I mean, the nude Nepeta picture earlier got taken down when it was posted as sfw, and the only differences there are the gender and the presence of nipples.

I Thought the keyword here was, (and I quote the OP) "speculative biology". You know, the stuff you'd see out of a medical reference.

>>72378
If you have any, or have any ideas that you would be willing to share, that would be great!

>>72378
There aren't a lot of artists in this fandom who actually know any biology and produce speculative biology work with any frequency. There are also a lot of people who hate discussion of plausible bio because they take it as a personal attack on their headcanons.

I still stalk this thread for the real stuff but I've pretty much given up any hope whatsoever that it will be anything more than just off-model trolls with plated skin & tails.

>>72382
>>72383

Granted I'm no artist, But the first thing that came to mind when I saw this thread was the fluid the trolls sleep in. The fluid must have some properties similar to perfluorocarbon (wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing) (youtube.com/#/watch?v=9MdlyM7w8PM).

I don't know, how would that work for sopor slime? It's portrayed as pretty viscous, and gelatin-like.

>>72385

Here's a better link to the video.

http://youtu.be/9MdlyM7w8PM?t=32s

I'd love to see some more interesting stuff here, but off model trolls is pretty much all I've got, I'm afraid.

>>72514
It was at this point that I realized fan trolls have reached that special level of inane, blind self-indulgence held previously only by furries. You know the kind I mean.

Is anyone actually enjoying this thread? I'm mostly seeing complaints.

I was originally hoping that people would contribute stuff that I hadn't seen yet, or that it would spark some cool discussions and new art/theories.
But for the most part that doesn't seem to be happening.

>>72519
Well that's probably because Hussie has stated multiple times that trolls are just grey skinned humans with horns. Makes all this "speculative biology" seem a little silly.

>>72521

Silly? Sure.
But then by the same token so is ANY fanwork.
As fans, we take this thing that we love and we expand it, explore it, change and improve it.
We look at what might happen in the future, and what the past might have been like to give us what we see in canon. We wonder what would happen if characters A and B met, or if C and D got together.
If we change the outcome of this fight, how would that affect later events? What if we saw this scene from a different point of view? What if the setting was different? The species swapped? A different time period? How would these characters fit into a different genre? Could we add a new moral? What if we dumped them into a blender with this other work of fiction? What would happen then?
Those questions are the essence of the fandom. They're how we create, and why we gather together to share the fruits of our labours.
If we simply took the canon as gospel, let it stand without questioning or shaping it in any way, there would be no fandom. There would simply be a creation and an audience, sitting in silence and not interacting at all.
The theories, art, stories. All the furvor and joy and innovation of fandom. It doesn't come from accepting canon as immovable stone. It comes from asking "what if?".

So yeah, Hussie said they're just grey people with horns. Are you just gonna sit there and take that or do you think you could come up with something cool?

>>72521
You're half there. I don't think it's good to completely disregard what's objectively true (i.e. they're not fucking insects, if you want to draw [potentially] insectoid people go draw Prospitans/Dersites instead) but they have aspects that are definitely not human too, so it isn't like there is no territory to explore. There's also room to experiment with appearance because, you know, the characters are represented by almost detailless sprites and we don't know for sure what their torsos look like underneath the clothes. People are just super shallow about designing stuff.

>>72385
Perfluorocarbon is cool, but there's an issue of how to clear it out of the lungs once it's been inhaled. I think in real life you need a tube down your throat to suck it out (I know the mouse in the video just needs to be hung upside down to cough it all out, but it was submerged for less than a minute in fluid far less viscous than anything that can be called "slime," and rats have a significantly smaller lung capacity than humans/human-sized things). I think it would be easy to flush slime from the lungs if they were structured like >>72413 but then every troll would have to have this and not just the seadwellers, which raises question about what makes them different from landdwellers. Maybe nothing, except that seadwellers are much more tolerant of high salt concentrations (maybe the gill/fin things on their faces are actually salt glands); landdwellers are still amphibious, but can only deal with fresh/brackish water.

Re: slime though, I've always held the belief that they don't breathe the slime in at all. Their trachea snaps shut to prevent accidental inhalation, they go into torpor to reduce oxygen consumption, and whatever is in the slime is absorbed through their skin like a frog or bat wing.

>>72523

Why are insect-like features unthinkable for trolls? There's a lot more reasons (grubs, pupation, mother grubs, drones, hives, butterfly wings, etc) for insectoid trolls than for insectoid carapacians, which tend to be coded more as lab-grown doll-like chess people than as insects.

>>72527
mother grubs and drones are not the same species as trolls; they don't actually live in hives, they just live in a normal house they call a hive; several things that are not insects go through larval stages and metamorphosis, including some of our fellow vertebrates. normal trolls don't get butterfly wings, only the characters playing the game could, so it seems to me like it is more of a symbol of ascension to godhood (like sprouting bird/"angel" wings are for us) than a biological thing. why don't the humans have wings? probably because they looked lame. i think halos probably could have looked cool though, i'm kind of sad that isn't a real thing now.

it's pretty clear that trolls have smooth skin, not plated. some things are insect-like, but there are plenty of other animals they are also like (i.e. mammal and amphibian). purely insectoid is also just kind of a lazy shorthand for alien when it comes down to alien design a lot of the time so i kind of have automatic contempt for it wherever it pops up unless the appearance can be adequately explained away. synthesis of several types of organisms makes for a much cooler + more solid design.

also, carapace people have canonical dermal plates. whether or not they have a complete exoskeleton or not is unknown ("carapace" is only a dorsal shell, it doesn't even mean that there is also a hard plate on the stomach) but if you want to draw plated insectoid-looking things, the carapace people are waiting.

>>72530
Rufioh and The Summoner both had wings before going God-Tier--the Summoner never went God-Tier at all, and I don't think Rufioh did, either. This suggests that the genes are there for wings, they're just dormant. Like the genes for tails in humans.

Many things in troll culture refer to them being insectoid though. Hives, quest cocoons, even Pupa Pan.

There's also this:
"The eggs hatch into young larval trolls which wriggle about to locate a cozy stalactite from
which to spin their cocoons. After they pupate, the young troll with his or her newfound limbs undergoes a series of dangerous trials."

Case closed.

>>72531
i secede that i guess. i was pretty sure the summoner/rufioh had them because he went god tier, in the same way that the condece/meenah's thief of life powers held over in the scratched universe. if he said he had them before the game ok. i confess i didn't read the pre-scratch troll shit over very well because i hate them, so i could have easily missed that bit of information. but it's still true that most trolls do not get them, and that insect-themed words used to describe things aren't the correct terminology. i can call my house a hive and my bed a cocoon too, but that doesn't stop them from being a house and bed, and it doesn't make me a bipedal arthropod.

>>72533
i'm really glad you read prior posts in a discussion before adding your own two cents which were already covered. i mean you would have looked pretty stupid otherwise.

>>72535
If you're going to be anal about details, you need to be consistent in your level of unclenchingness. Assuming and glossing over some things while being overly focused on other points as to lose their overall significance entirely makes one look pretty stupid as well.

>>72536
For sure. I certainly don't see any clear evidence for smooth vs plated skin, other than the lack of lines on the sprites. Which isn't a very good argument since they're highly stylized.

And I totally agree about the synthesis of different groups being cooler than just one single source. ... Which is why I think adding insect traits to the generally all-human-all-the-time look of the trolls is an improvement. Add some amphibian and reptile traits in there too and I'll be even more enthused.

So, no one's really interested in this thread?

>>72539
>s-see see! It's still got her horns, so that's totally Feferi!

>>72544
Meenah, I think. Short hair & rat-tails.

>>72545
I'm very confused as to who these are supposed to be. The blood colours, horns and what I'm assuming is Kanaya's clap on, clap off ability don't match up at all.

prob fantrolls.

>>72542
I wouldn't say that. I'm interested.
It's just that I've said all that I had to say on the matter.

>>72542
>>72552
Pretty much. It's a slow board dude.

>>72551
I think I speak for everyone here when I say no one gives a fuck about fantrolls

>>72554
We had like two threads full of them.
Junk's occupied the banner for quite some time.
So no, I guess you don't speak for everyone.

>>72554
>>72561
Oh, she's actually still there, just not in the threads.
Wow.

>>67884
what

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