_let 'em know, kid_

This is me when I read:

and this species has never eaten salad before. and we show them salad and they eat it and they’re like holy living fuck this is tasty. and suddenly they’re offering us huge houses with all kind of advanced technological shit and incredible medical care and all the amenities and everything, with the only condition that we keep making salad for them.

and like, salad isn’t even hard to make. grab some plants, dump em in a bowl. it doesn’t have to be fancy salad, they’ll fall all over themselves for the most mediocre salad in the world. we can make so much salad that we’re practically drowning in it, even if we eat some of the salad ourselves. and in exchange we’re protected from danger, we have great living conditions, it’s basically paradise compared to life on earth

The process is actually quite sophisticated, and requires the presence of a full-grown goth to trigger it. A pupal-stage proto-goth, at this point completely indistinguishable from any other small human child, only needs to encounter a mature specimen once - and while the initial imprinting that ensues will only take seconds, the incubation period often takes more than a decade, even several.

The first visible step of the transformation is triggered when the dormant goth suddenly gains awareness that they have free will and can do whatever they want with their appearance. While the progress may be gradual, or seem like the transformation happened all at once overnight, the initial seed was planted years ago. And now, in full bloom, a fully-fledged mature adult goth may finally be happy.