Annotated 20-17
Oh, hey, it’s that guy.
Not much to say about this one. Harky, as you recall, took a green bolt of Graiya’s power directly to the face. It might’ve been slightly mitigated by some part of Syr’Nj fighting for control, but even so, a fight of god versus mortal generally doesn’t end well unless you’re Diomedes. Avatar of Tectonicus or not, troll or not, Harky is just barely holding on here.
Interesting biological theory from reader Ahdok: Trolls regenerate from the heart. Destroying the heart with fire kills them. All disconnected pieces die slowly. Repeatedly hitting the body will halt regeneration temporarilly and cause damage, but the regen rate increases exponentially over time. Eventually the regen rate becomes explosively fast and the whole troll will effectifely burst out of the heart.
One week a year is troll mating season. Trolls are asexual, but during this week a large piece of troll can form a new heart. During mating week, trolls become increasingly violent, attacking everything they can find including each other. The high rate of limb loss makes new trolls.
Additionally, some particularly smart trolls figured out how to graft their limbs onto humans. These limbs also regenerate when injured, but the act of regeneration slowly infects the host with more troll, expanding from the graft. This allows trolls to reproduce at any point of the year, and the wary adventurer fears an ambush by troll surgeons looking for people to mug and attach limbs to.
Curious. If trolls are asexual, why are they gendered? And are they like bananas, all essentially identical genetically? This creates a whole new set of questions!
Maybe I didn’t put that quite right. I should have said, if they reproduce asexually, why are they gendered? My apologies for the way I expressed it there.
A. Gender is not the same as sex. Maybe trolls don’t have sexual differentiation, but do have gendered differentiation?
B. What if back in the evolutionary history of trolls, they did not have regen capabilities and used sexual reproduction, and that differentiation has remained?
C. Isn’t Ahdok just another commentator? This isn’t necessarily cannon in this world. T, is this cannon?
D. If Trolls are a playable “race”, Hurricane would probably let players choose “male” or “female” for their character, as humans do have sex differentiation and most have opinions on which they want their online representatives to be. Of course, this argument breaks down a bit if Arkerra was a world that existed before HR, and depends on how much control he has over the construction of said world.
In regards to A. While technically true, all displays of Gender have originated in, or been based around sexual differentiation (at least for humans). Those being the most obvious identifiers for categorization. So if there are no sexual identifiers, because they are asexual there must be some identifier to determine who fits into what gender role. I wonder what that would be for the trolls. It could be a self identifying system, but frankly they do not seem quite egalitarian enough for that, so there has to be some thing people can look at and say “You most obviously fit into category _____.”
B and/or C seem like the most plausible answers. If all things are the same, as in there was never any physical make up differences, I can’t see gender really coming up in their development, or at least not in the manner it is usually displayed.
But, have the trolls faced colonization? Because if so, that could be another reason, it could be a cultural holdover from when a race that did have sexual dimorphism and also had gendered roles based on that, conquered them. It would be really interesting if sexual characteristics were transitory, so say breasts only develop when there are young to feed, so sometimes a troll has them, but other times they don’t (physical change could be based on a number of factors, like population, food scarcity, pheromone exchange, or other environmental factors). This kind of fluidity might cause a culture with more rigid gender norms to implement a sort of gender/caste system on the trolls, so that the conquerors can more easily keep track, organize, and control their subjects. Though I suppose this still relies on them giving birth to live young, over the whole “limbs growing hearts” thing. Though maybe not, I mean there are those secondary sexual characteristics that are useful for infant development. I guess we’d have to know more about Troll young. (I think the concept of sexual characteristics being fluid really fits the trolls, if any species was suited to it, the one that has regenerative abilities seems like the likeliest candidate.)
Jim: as an asexual aromantic person, I can tell you with confidence that social asexuality (not the biological term) is entirely about a lack of attraction. It is not abstinence or celibacy, or mitosis.
Who is Ahdok?
Ahdok was one of our frequent commenters in the old days, and this was a comment on the original page.
So to borrow the joke from Scott Kurtz:
Harky is a sexual troll?
This would be a reply to TxGator, except it also needs to be a reply to Jim. This would be a reply to Jim, except it also needs to be a reply to TxGator.
Ahdok is a commenter on the original (non-annotated) version of this strip. They also spelled out that they were talking about in their D&D campaign there. T quoted three paragraphs of their comment because he found it amusing, not because it’s Guilded Age canon.
That fan theory went places.
I like it. :D