That Davekat piece I just reblogged reminded me of an idea I've been batting around. It's more of a headcanon than anything else, but it goes like this:
The Game parallels procreation and references evolution
procreation is an evolved process
Evolution is lazy, super practical, and kind of stupid: see migraines, pregnancy, and human chronic back pain
So what if The Game is also, in many respects, lazy, super practical, and kind of stupid
Many aspects of it can be explained through this idea -see the haphazard and occasionally nonsensical application of mythology that Dave comments on at one point- but the one that I've really thought about this the most regarding is translation.
I mean, it's entirely ok to just think of the trolls as speaking English(or Troll English maybe) and merely having a weird alphabet, but that’s also boring >:| I rather like, instead, the idea that The Game is simultaneously translating Trollish to English and vice versa all the time, or includes some translation “download” when it transfers Players into their Session.
Working from that idea, I like the further idea that The Game's approach to proper names of famous figures is imminently -stupidly- practical and lazy; rather than present such figures with their actual names and thus no immediate context for who they are, it translates them as the names of proximate figures from the hearer's own culture that they already know, and then just sticks the species name of the speaker in front of them. So Paulon Simion and Artgar Funkel -a refrance Dave might not immediately get- becomes Troll Simon and Garfunkel, a translation that easily places them in their approximate cultural context for him, while “Simon and Garfunkel” from Dave gets translated for Karkat as “Human Simion and Funkel”, both an affecting late-period Western Province Folk duo, and the tragic story of how a wonderful and productive moirallegiance devolved into a violent platonic hatred through years of pale/pitch vacillation over differing artistic and business visions :|
