ask alternate-universe karezi

I was going to draw cuddles and then it turned violent I’m sorry

for the petstuck au ahaha

Yeah sure I can explain it! Me and Peregrine never really explicitly discussed that much about the overall setting, but I can give you a general idea.

Our AU is kinda-sorta based on “the” petstuck AU, as defined by Unwanted Free Ugly Troll and Loophole, but obviously there are a lot of differences, too, and I have never actually finished reading either of those works, oops. But basically, even though trolls are an intelligent species, they’re treated as animals by humans. I imagined that many trolls are kept as pets, others are forced into trollfighting rings like the one Karkat and Terezi were in at the beginning of the story, others live in secret communities in cities, and others live free from humans in the wild.

Karkat was born into a household where he would have been kept as a pet by wealthy humans. Being a mutant runt, he was instead tossed into the streets. He spent some time living among “urban feral” trolls before being kidnapped into the trollfighting ring. 

I wrote a very short story that never saw the light of tumblr about another troll, whose owners didn’t want to take care of pups, so they tried to drown her at birth.

Terezi was born in captivity, and most of her life story is described in the fic I wrote. 

Despite the way trolls are treated by humans, they are in fact intelligent; for example Karkat still likes romcoms. 

As for Jade and Dave I’ll just quote Per:

Jade is a vet specialist that works at the animal control center as opposed to a regular vet’s office, so she gets all the cruelty cases and deals with difficult animals, instead of just regular pet owners asking for check-ups and things, and she works in collaboration with the police quite a bit. Dave works part-time as her assistant but also as a DJ on weekends because reasons.

I think there are people in the business of taking care of trolls who, like Jade and Dave, want to see the condition of trolls as a whole improve, but Karezi Petstuck AU is much less ‘political’ than UFUT or Loophole and more focused on the trolls themselves, so that isn’t a big focus of ours. 

That’s more or less everything we’ve decided about the social context, I think. As for the biology, a lot of it ended up being based on cat biology, but other mammalian biology is in there too. Here are some things I can tell you about trolls:

mammals

naturally nocturnal (although the trolls we’re writing about have adapted to humans’ diurnal schedule)

in the wild they are tree-climbers and they possess great climbing abilities (much to Jade and Dave’s dismay when the kits are born)

natural diet includes rodents, insects, and fruits

have the capacity for echolocation (this is how Terezi sees)

clean themselves like cats and dislike getting wet

they purr, hiss, and growl

they reach sexual maturity around the age of 3 years. Karkat and Terezi are about 5 years old when they have kids.

females go into heat, and when they give birth it’s usually to litters of 2-4 pups

(we call the babies ‘pups’ and ‘kits’ and ‘babies’, it’s not like we’ve decided on one terminology)

they have a variety of blood colors, but the caste system is not as strong because troll culture is not the dominant culture

size is somewhat correlated to blood color, with the higher hues being larger

their horns and irises are in their blood color