Repiton and turning the uncanny vally upside-down: a rant pretending to be an analysis
Vast Error does a great job at making its main world, Repiton, feel truly broken. but more so than in grand shows of devastation or shambling quasi-undead, it shows in the daily lives of the characters. in the mundane. the familiar.
because here's the thing; it's too familiar. that's the genius of it all.
let's step back a bit; i don't think many non-homestucks read Vast Error. it might not be directly connected to it plot-wise, but it is on framework- and worldbuilding level (and technically also directly via the whole Midnight Crew/ Dead Shufflers intermission overlap). you're supposed to know how things are "supposed" to be.
which brings us to Alternia/Beforus. the place trolls came from in "canon". the place where expectations about what is normal formed. both versions of the world have massive differences, but the one thing they have in common is how absurdly a alive they are. Alternia was a death world, but anything but a dead world.
and what's often overlooked is that the drones and biotech and intertwined systems of automation and symbiosis on both versions of these worlds made them functionally post-scarcity! the enslaved alien races under the Alternian Empire were hatesinks, not labor force. all manual labour is automated and done by drones. drones they co-evolved with. i don't think it's far-fetched to claim trolls functionally *evolved* in a post-scarcity environment!
so what's at the core of troll society?
-unstable intraspecies dynamics that turn violent easily, and are often fatal, which makes some sense considering (see next point).
-a complex eusocial r-selected (<explains the ease of killing from an evolutionary perspective) reproductive strategy with 3 ""sexes""; drones, mother grubs, and trolls.
-technology, society, and ecology/biology form a continuum, much more so than it does for humans. computers are alive, hivestems grow.
and by the time you finish Homestuck, even if you never cared much about worldbuilding in such a way, you pick up on that. maybe not the details, but at least the aesthetic, the vibe of it. and despite how weird much of it is in comparison to the human baseline, your brain adapts.
because you know how people often say this story alters your brain structure? this is one of the ways how. when trolls are involved, it flips over the uncanny valley graph, subjectively speaking.
and the bottom of the valley becomes the peak, and that's where Alternia resides (forgive the horrble drawing, im doing this on my laptop's touchpad)
so where does that leave Repiton? on Repiton, there are no mother grubs or drones. on Repiton technology is dead, made of metal and plastic. on Repiton there's ads. there's shortages. Repiton is more familiar from a human perspective than Alternia or Beforus could ever be. and that's why it feels wrong. because the graph is still flipped.
it's way down in the valley that used to be a peak.
im not entirely sure how much sense i am making here but so be it.
