#keenly aware also that I've never seen a weird alien culture that I didn't want to rub my face around in

[splickedylit]

Sorry for the double post, I just realized I have come across r selection species. 😅 But now I'm curious, why are the trolls in your essay an r selected instead of a k selected? Are their lives really short or is it just to do with their breeding? Also, is this a fan essay or are you the one who made this world?

@patch-zirwes I honestly have no idea how you ended up on a six year old blog post about lingerie for weird alien relationships--one that tbh I didn't even remember writing and had to go look up when you sent your first ask, lol. But uhhhh okay, let's see.

First of all, trolls and moirallegiance aren't original, they're from a webcomic called Homestuck. I just find them fascinating and have been known to put a lot of thought into xenosociological worldbuilding.

Trolls are aliens and their species as we meet them is very violent and aggressive and focused on weeding out weakness. I referred to them as an r-selection species because of their breeding structure in-comic, and the way their society approaches the worth of individual life.

to broadly summarize; trolls all contribute genetic material, which is taken to a creature called their Mother Grub, who combines it through unspecified biological means and then produces grubs that grow up to become trolls

Through various exposition we also learn a) trolls are a warlike society with an expanding interplanetary empire, suggesting there are LOTS of them even though b) trolls tend to treat each other with fairly callous disregard (very "if you're weak enough to die, you deserved it" vibe)

therefore: it seems their species' strategy to thrive and spread is probably to produce many, many offspring at low energy cost, and if the weakest ones die then oh well, there are thousands of others on the way.

((Further complicating this is the fact that trolls also exist on a spectrum of blood colors, from rust-red to royal fuchsia, and it's implied that a) colder/"higher" colors are increasingly rare, and b) higher bloods are exponentially longer-lived. Individuals are pretty much all treated as disposable to some extent, but the extreme societal imbalance of power definitely makes some trolls more disposable than others, societally-speaking.))

Anyway I am not an expert on this stuff and I desperately need to go to sleep but there's all that.