@plumb1tes
This is my Athena Troll! Hope you like her ^u^
YES with the 80′s businesswoman vibe! Love her!
FIRST: Alternia or Beforus or some type of AU?
Ok, this is a WIP AU where twelve trolls (based off of Greek Gods) play sgrub, and their planet is pretty similar to Alternia in terms of enforcing the hemospectrum and the like. This troll is based off of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war (the tactical side of it)
Name (preferably include how you came up with it and why): Athine Pallas (Athine from the goddes’s name, Athena. Pallas is from the extra title that some address Athena, as some call her Athena Pallas.)
Hmmmm I worry that this name tips its hand a little too readily? Athena’s got a lot of epithets besides “Pallas,” many of which serve an actual function of her role as a goddess. Based on your description, I think the best ones to use for her are Atrytone, “The Unweariying,” and Promachos, “She Who Fights in Front.”
So maybe…Atryon Pachos? Also keeps her initials the same.
Age: 7 sweeps (almost 8)
Strife Specibus: shieldKind (Can be throwable, and its quite high-tech, like Captain America’s. It has retractable razors on the rim of the shield, and circles back after thrown like a boomerang.)
God I love this! As CD pointed out, Athena from borderlands has a rad shield that might be fun to use as a visual anchor!
Fetch Modus: Not really great with these, but puzzlemodus seems to fit her, as she likes solving problems.
I kinda like giving her Jade’s Pictionary Modus since Athena is a also a goddess of handicrafts.
Blood color: Teal
Symbol and meaning: It’s an astrology sign of Minerva, Athena’s roman counterpart.
Love it! It already fits tealblood sign language pretty well! I may add a line and open up the upper loop a little but I think it’s good to go!
Trolltag: adroitExarch
You’ll see below that I’ve offered suggestions to modify her ancestor’s title, but I still like this trolltag since it sets up a desire to rise above her station.
Quirk: She doesn’t use any other punctuation other than a period. It’s to show her monotone voice. (If you have any suggestions I’m glad to hear some!)
Nah, I think this works! Troll quirks don’t have to be super complicated. If you wanna add a fun one, maybe she extends her “oo” sounds into “ooo” when she’s over-excited, sort of like an owl hoot!
ex: “Whooo the fuck do yooou think yooou are?”
Special Abilities (if any):
Lusus: An owl, which is sacred to Athena. She was a mentor to Athine, and raised her without much fighting, as Athine was a pretty composed grub. However as Athine gets older, she spends less time with Owlmom, and doesn’t really listen to her advice as much due to believing she’s smart enough to not need it, becoming absorbed into studying due to wanting to be a general, like her ancestor. Owlmom loved Athine, and felt pretty sad about being ignored. She grew a bit mischievious, and would frequently cause trouble to get Athine to pay attention to her.
Personality: The first thing to describe Athine: logical to a fault. She is a pretty unemotional person, and responds to questions with the most logical answer she can think of. Athine is an ambitious person, and a go-getter. She doesn’t want to settle with being a legislacerator, even though she assumes she’d be a pretty good one. She has her sight on being the general of the emperor’s army. With her perception and intelligence, she gained a decently sized ego, though it’s much more subtle than others in her session (*cough cough* the Aphrodite troll *cough*).
I wanna MEET the Aphrodite troll!
Athine is also a pretty irritable person, but most of her frustration is directed at her lusus’s mischief, and tries not to lose her cool in front of her group if she can help it. She is a pretty professional person, and almost always reacts to situations with an apathetic demeanor. This doesn’t mean she’s emotionless, but she prefers to not have her feelings cloud her judgement on others.
God yeah she’s a Dersite.
Athine is confident in herself as a leader, and is good at ordering others to work in order to achieve a goal. She’s definitely not a personable troll, nor is she very friendly, but is able to quickly make decisions in the heat of the moment. She is very no nonsense, and has no sense of humor most of the time. While she thinks herself as a good leader, if a friend were to be harmed by her own judgement or decisions unintentionally, she would be quite remorseful and critical of herself for a long time.
Interests: She loves to play chess, and has played it since she was a grub. Athine is also pretty studious, and likes to gain knowledge that will benefit her or her group, though she doesn’t really like trivial knowledge, or information that isn’t useful to her.
Athine likes to play FLARP with the Ares troll of their session, being a pretty formidable duo (him being the one that does most of the actual fighting, and her giving him orders. This is symbolic of the fact that Ares and Athena are two sides of war; Ares is the brutal fighting, and Athena is the tactical planning.)
Honestly if I could add something? Include weaving. She’s the goddess of warfare and of handicrafts, and her weaving competition with Arachne is one of the more famous myths with which she’s associated. Also much like tactical warfare, weaving requires immense pre-planning and rapid adjustment if you mess up.
Ansestor: The Exarch. A supreme general that squashed rebellions, leaded fleets of soldiers to victory, and the Emperor’s right hand woman. Her story was a pretty well-known one, and it is from her ancestor that Athine aspired to become as brilliant as her, and wanted to become a general instead of a legislacerator. Athine greatly respects and admired her ancestor, and wishes to be just like her.
Man I like the concept but troll rules as far as we know still state that ancestor titles be eight letters long. If we go a rank above Exarch, we get Patriarch, which actually matches the correct number? Whether you wanna change it to Matriarch or not is up to you, but I like Patriarch since it lines up with Athena wanting to be on the level of her male contemporaries. As CD points out, a common feminist criticism is that Athena favors men in her stories but also like…men wrote those myths, so…
But the point stands. I especially feel like this fits her because you’d expect army generals to be purplebloods or violetbloods, both of which are apparently male-dominated castes.
Title: Thief of Mind (I think this suits her pretty well, but if you believe you found another one that suits her, I’m all ears.)
I…honestly think she might be a Space player? Tactical warfare and handicraft have a lot to do with manipulating space, and while I admit that I’m the one who included weaving, Space definitely has an association with fashion (Just look at Kanaya and Jade, the most fashionable characters in Homestuck).
Given her desire to be this flawless leader, I think Heir of Space is a fitting title? Especially since the inverse, Mage of Time, also lines up with the character you gave her.
Land: Any suggestions?
Yes! Land of Spiders and Frogs. Given the Arachne myth, I can’t imagine she’s a fan of ‘em. Also lets you design a very witchy-looking planet, which is fun since Athena is also worshiped as an aspect of the Goddess in Wicca. Go wild! Put some crystals on it! And Hoo BOY is frog breeding the perfect task for her! It’s literally all about pre-visualization and intense strategy.
Dream Planet: Derse
Yep yep. With her new classpect, that would make her Liga, sign of the Dogged. I think it suits her real well, and incorporating it into her original sign is as easy as adding just a couple lines. Let’s go to the redesign!
My redesign was pretty heavy handed, partly because of how well-designed she is in the first place. Sometimes it’s like, I could just textually give you one suggestion or go absolutely crazy with it.
So CD and I have a running theory that tealbloods are all designed after college kids of some kind. But the lady on the left doesn’t look like she goes to my college! She looks like she’s mock-interviewing me and keeps scribbling way too many notes after each of my answers and never changes expression.
She’s 7 sweeps old. She should look like a teenager. So I wanted to design the girl that might eventually grow up to be the woman on the left. And who becomes an 80′s powersuited war general? A 70s college feminist, potentially. I based the design on the right on Gloria Steinem, who was really weirdly upfront about working for the CIA because it was “liberal, nonviolent, and honorable” lol. Let’s go top to bottom!
Hair - Original is heavily edited from Sollux’s hair, of all people (I admit to being very weak when it comes to spriting hair with limited volume), while the new version is from a naphal sprite sheet. Gloria Steinem had iconically highlighted hair and I wanted to nod to that.
Eyes - whenever we talk about a “wise owl” we usually see a cartoon owl with a graduation cap, a set of comically large glasses, and a pointer. I wanted to give her glasses to make her look more owlish while keeping the downcast condescending look from the original.
Lips(/Heels) - I wanted to add a little bit of college-y rebellion to her aesthetic and felt the best way to do that was to play on the trope of “lipstick as red as the blood of her enemies.” Instead, she’s sporting a seadweller-purple lip and a matching kitten heel, to make it clear she’s gonna chew ‘em up and stomp on ‘em.
Shirt - I was listening to Death By Glamour on loop when I sprited the left side to get in the mood for those shoulders. On the right I simplified a lot. Gloria Steinem usually wore plain shirts with high-waisted pants, which was easy enough to edit from your original.
Symbol - made it a little bigger and added two internal horizontal lines to reference Liga
So that’s my very indulgent review of your troll! I hope you like some of the suggestions I made!
-TR
