#emc2 unda

[chrisrin]

dave strider with his lil bro doing his best. (based on unda’s e=mc^2 fic) 

[unda-dsk]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

I realise that I forgot to post this here! I updated emc2!

[chrisrin]

unda fics when they give me the excuse to draw the exact same characters with the exact same designs for the hundreth time:

[unda-dsk]

hi! i was thinking about your worldbuilding and i really love how u do soulmarks, but there was something i was curious about. when did soulmarks begin appearing on people, evolutionarily? did neanderthals have soulmarks? australopithicines? were there ever ancient humans who were soulmates with other homo species, before they all went extinct? or was it just h. psychovirales- and if so, when? h. sapiens evolved about 300k years ago, but didn't become "behaviorally modern" until about 150k years ago. did the appearance of soulmarks coincide with similar events in ur world?

sorry if this is weirdly specific or just irrelevant, i am a bio major who is rereading mc escher and got curious :-)

If memory serves I believe that I wrote it as the ancestors of both species were present at the same time and in the canon timeline we got regular homo sapiens and in mce you have psychovirales in the present instead. Though they'd have been very close and intermingled as species (in the same way that we have neanderthal dna).

You could argue evolutionarily that perhaps psychovirales traits were too costly or not as effective in the main timeline and fell out of the gene pool. Alternately, the behaviour of their species were just less successful in the main timeline, likely due to how they act. The psychovirales humans are *strong* and great pack creatures but they've got downsides with that, like your soulmate dying being so devastating. The canon human kids are unsettled a fair few times by the psychovirales humans, after all!

Given that soulmarks work with other species as disparate as trolls it'd make sense for psychovirales soulmarks to show up on their other hominid cousin species, but I'm not gonna say that they're actually just one of those species themselves.

In the canon timeline I think psychovirales would have had to have faded out as a population before modern humans were around, otherwise they'd have shown up in oral records.

As for when psychovirales evolved the marks i think that'd be really interesting because it'd be so hard to tell when it started from an archeological record. But, given that you're already dealing with the magic-y nature of it, there'd definitely be a benefit to the confirmation part of the mark at least. That'd be really easily carried on genetically given that it's finding your *soulmate*, and from there selecting for easier to understand marks is pretty straightforward.

Anyway, i love worldbuilding so much. it's just about my favourite thing.

[chrisrin]

speculating on why karkat gave dave a red-hand print as a soulmark in the unda server.

[chrisrin]

soulmark.

[unda-dsk]

Although I'm still working on getting the next emc2 chapter up (still not doing great brain-wise and trying to take it easy) I'm utterly burdened by not having published more of the fic yet. Not because of a need to be productive or have a schedule, no.

I have several relationships between characters coming up that I am utterly OBSESSED by, and the only people I can talk to about it are my betas. I am foaming at the mouth for these weirdos to meet and interact.

I gotta put out more emc2 faster so I can YELL AT EVERYONE ABOUT IT.

[unda-dsk]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

The next update is live! These kids sure are in some situations, huh?