Troll Classification - Tumblr Posts

TIL: Homestuck’s Trolls aren’t insects.

Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body: head, thorax and abdomen, three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes and one pair of antennae.

Trolls canonically don’t have exoskeletons (The Handmaid gets electrocuted and reveals their skeletons. This is also how we know their horns aren’t bone.) Trolls don’t have the three-part body of an insect. Grubs may have it in canon but it’s honestly a bit unclear, it may just look like they do. Trolls (and probably grubs) have jointed legs but so do humans so that’s a bit of a stretch to claim that trolls are insects because of this point alone. Trolls and grubs both can’t have compound eyes because both are shown with pupils in canon (except I guess possibly some gold bloods as they don’t have pupils). Lastly, Trolls don’t have antennae unless we want to claim their horns are actually antennae since they aren’t bone.

Mammals have mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding  their young, a neocortex, fur or hair, and three middle ear bones.

Female trolls have breasts, however it’s unclear if they produce milk or not. Hussie’s comments on that were super vague and he basically said “Maybe they do maybe they don’t.” So as far as canon goes it’s unclear. Trolls do however almost definitely have a neocortex as it’s a part of developed brains. They absolutely have hair and so long as they have outward ears (pointed ears, fin ears, human ears, doesn’t matter) they have three middle ear bones.

Comparing the two to canon, it’s clear trolls are way more likely to be mammals than insects, but they may also be something else entirely. If you like your insect troll head-canons though, don’t let me stop you, I just thought this was cool information.