Sketchbook scanning time: PoF edition! feat. the page where I hashed out Yozuna's Whole Deal, Halores, and the page with the prompt "Fashion" which I immediately filled with various clown outfits lmao.

Still waiting for a good chance to use y'all, Silly Big Clown Pants With Thong And Underboob, Fat Fabulous Candystripe Dandy, Croptop Clown Monk, and Tits Out Masquerade. I love you. mwah

Your character designs are always so dang cool!!! Are the captain positions on other ships in the holy fleet challenged for like the position of GHB in a duel to the death, or are they appointed? (Some combination thereof?) The Orisoner looks so friendly, but I bet he’s brained somebody with that whimsical staff! I love that in the group shot Kurloz’s frame is almost a 2x scaled up version of Sister Waspclaw - his Gigantic Lankiness is just so fun. (Also LMAO at Kurloz being too prudish to claim his right to show tits! Honestly any time he mentions modesty standards being different a couple centuries ago it cracks me right up 😂)

Aw, thank you! :D Waspclaw is real small for a highblood, especially a relatively old and powerful one--smaller than pretty much all her pupated students, and a few of the pre-pupation ones! So next to Kurloz "Big Motherfucker" Makara, she's absolutely tiny. But does still manage to have more boobs than he does. Tragic.

RE: succession, it varies! It's pretty much always going to include some amount of combat--some of the variety where the loser is allowed to slink away and lick their wounds, and some where they definitely don't. Let's see. On a scale from most to least "Challenge To The Death"...

Definitely the Behemoth. It follows the same rules as the Grand Highblood challenge--if two trolls who want to be in charge walk into what passes for a captain's court on the Freakshow, only one is going to come out. Yozuna's not fast, and most trolls who ARE fast aren't nearly strong enough to make a dent in it even if they hit it--but the fact that Kurloz is big enough to really hit it hard and also came up specializing in speed and evasion is probably a real big part of the reason it hasn't made any attempt to challenge him for the throne, honestly.

Waspclaw. She's very lax with gutsy newbies getting fresh with each other and their superiors, thus the Joker's reputation for letting people get away with stuff, but stepping to her directly is SUPER dangerous. Make your gamble if you know you can get away with it!! But always know you aren't going to get away with it with her. :o) Plus, much like the Uderaks and Untoxxic, she works in poisons and venoms, and also she's heavily min-maxed into speed, so by the time you realize your challenge fight has officially been accepted, she's gone "well, they made their choice!" and you've been stung with something fatal.

The Abattoir. He isn't fucking around, although she also strikes me as very businesslike about it, and not inclined to be vindictive about the act of the challenge itself. I think the format is a little less "immediate fight to the death" and a little more "courtly duel" in keeping with both of his knightly sort of vibes. The exception being if you manage to draw blood on either of him, in which case shit flips very much into death-match mode. Also like. Hard-mode. You do have to challenge for both ships at once, and you will be fighting both of her. So like, considering authority over Elixir and Stardust features a lot of interfacing with the nonbelievers and doing Finance and shit, not a lot of people are jumping at THAT daunting prospect lol.

The Judgment. She wants to hear your argument for why the fuck you think you have what it takes to perform the physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually-taxing work of disciplining the wayward sinner-criminals of the church, and she's not getting any younger, here! If she feels like she's won her argument and the battle and you're inclined to back down in shame, she's not going to continue to press the point, but she will definitely openly think less of you for making a stupid and badly thought out attempt on her authority. She's as close as the church fleet gets to having a legislacerator taskforce, and she's just as stern and hard-assed as the Cruelest Bar, but also a large part of the Penitent's function is for flagellation and rehabilitation (???) of potentially-redeemable highbloods who've fucked up in ways that the church considers forgivable enough to give them a shot. She's down to clown (fatal) but also she's not an executioner necessarily.

Brother Libation. I drew inspiration from Il Dottore from the commedia del'arte, Bacchus, and the whole concept of drunken fist characters as an archetype, so if he's challenged he's got like... a 33% chance of just offering some kind of whimsical puzzle challenge that nobody ever manages to solve to his satisfaction, a 33% chance of just verbally convincing them to chill the fuck out by being a Cool Hang, and a 33% chance of bonking them heartily to the brink of death with his big spiky gourd.

The Orisoner wins for least deathmatchy. You can try to challenge, but you'll just get invited to come chill and vibe and just like. Really get into why you think your leadership will be hilarious and honoring to the messiahs, and what you think about art, and why you feel like you need captaincy to make the changes you want to see in the church and empire. If anybody attempts to escalate to violence, they'll mostly be met with a vaguely disappointed, surprisingly benevolent no-weapon-open-palms kind of rebuff, and if things continue to get more aggressive from there, the big spiky walloping staff will come out and be employed with startling effectiveness and skill lmao. But! If there were ever going to be highbloods inclined to take debate of best leadership policy over violence, it's the ones who decide they want to be theologians professionally. (Debate of best religious interpretation is a whole other ballgame, and gets aggressive here more than any other ship on the fleet lol). Orisoner in general though, would be one of the safer trolls you could be around as like, a human or a lowblood, if you had to pick a ship.

Something about troll reproduction is that everyone alive in the empire had to have gotten some fuck at some point. And that makes me look at The Behemoth and wonder if the other participant has to be alive by the end of the ordeal because Wow Look At It. I'm so morbidly curious about the type of troll that it would decide was good enough and if they walked away with something broken or not.

y'all the fact that as I got this ask I was lying here in bed musing to myself about how. There is a universe where the scene of Gamzee meeting the Behemoth that I'm writing ends up with them fucking nasty in some kind of very spur of the moment hookup largely unrelated to quadrants haha. Because Gamzee's down to clown with people who are way too big and not used to being gentle. And actually the fact that he's going to get real bruised at best and injured at worst is a perk. I don't,,, think the scene will go that direction, but it's a diverting thought lmao. Anyway, perfect timing anon thank you.

....I do wonder. If you're enough of a deadly motherfucker that you can and would rather kill a drone than bother with finding some kind of Beauty And The Beast romance situation. Would the drones smell/see/sense a troll covered in the blood and death/distress hormones of a drone and go "well, this one passes muster" and keep moving. Could you look at this situation and just go "well obviously I'll kill my way out with brute force." What then.

Now all I can think about is some 'I get mad stupid when I'm horny' clown making their way to the captain's ring on The Freakshow, not to challenge for captain but to challenge for the right to fuck hard and nasty

Its track record for fatality in fucking is presumably lower than the one for fighting, but. Not nearly as much lower as one would prefer, haha.

Do you tend to pronounce Behemoth with the emphasis on the first syllable or the second syllable? I realized that I usually put the emphasis on the second syllable, but I often stutter over it as I try to consider both pronunciation options. For Yizuna I’m thinking of Rocky from Lackadaisy screeching out “THE BEHEMOTH AND THE TOPHAT CLOWN, SEE THEM RAIN THEIR FIRE DOWN” and that line was delivered with emphasis in the second syllable 😂😂

That's such an apropos quote and context lmao. I've always pronounced it like,,, "beh-HEE-muth"! A quick google search is backing me up on that, although I know some people pronounce it differently.

Fun fact, just since I noticed you accidentally spelled its name Yizuna instead of Yozuna, and I wanted to talk about it real quick:

"Gianna" is just basically a plausibly name-sounding derivative of "Gigantic"--I also intentionally used an "a" ending because in English that reads as feminine and although its presentation is pretty masc, Behemoth's not a man! So I liked the idea of a name that would make an english reader pause, even if it was only for a second, and make note not to default to he/him.

"Yozuna" is derived from "Yokozuna", which is the highest rank of sumo wrestler. BIG BEEF.