#2069

You go downstairs and confront your custodian, which is another term for a frightening beast known as a LUSUS NATURAE. Your lusus has looked after you since you were very young in lieu of any biological parents, whom you have never known.

Oh! Well, that explains a lot.

In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to Gamzee calling his custodian the ‘old goat’. His custodian is literally a goat, the same way Karkat’s is a crab, and Terezi’s is meant to be a dragon. Weird signs like Gemini and Aquarius presumably get mythical creatures that fit the sign’s symbolism - or maybe Gemini gets two lususes. 

No young troll ever knows his or her blood parents, nor could such lineage ever be accurately traced. Adult trolls supply their genetic material to the FILIAL PAILS carried by imperial drones and offered to the monstrous MOTHER GRUB deep underground in the brooding caverns

Trolls have no relationship with anyone in their family tree, and no real concept of parenthood. This means that Karkat, who cloned everyone in the Veil, might be the only troll who ever met his biological parents. 

It also suggests that the Mother Grub isn’t the trolls’ biological mother, since if she was, it would be easy to trace a troll’s maternal lineage. Instead, she’s an intermediary - a biological equivalent of the Veil’s cloning tubes. 

She might be called the Mother Grub, but that term means something different on Alternia. Trolls might not even have bio-mothers - we know they have multiple parents, but we don’t know for sure that they have two. Even if they did, troll biology could allow a troll to have two biological fathers, two mothers, or a pair or trolls with sex chromosomes unknown to Earth.  

After they pupate, the young troll with his or her newfound limbs undergoes a series of dangerous trials. If they survive, they are chosen by a member of the diverse and terrifying subterranean monster population native to Alternia.

If they survive? Fucking hell. 

Trolls are starting to sound like sea turtles, laying large clutches of eggs with extremely high mortality rates. But turtles are animals, and can’t do anything about that. Alternia’s powers-that-be just don’t care. 

The vast majority of adult trolls are off-planet, serving some role in the forces of ongoing imperial conquest, besieging other star systems in the name of Alternian glory. The culture and civilization on the homeworld is maintained almost entirely by the young.

And it just keeps getting better! Alternia is a bona-fide space empire, a military civilization optimized for conquest. They’ve repurposed their home planet into a nursery, mass-producing generation after generation of soldiers.