this is probably an incendiary bomb of a thing to say but it's deeply funny to me that fantrolls are like the one OC type i'm aware of that are just fundamentally unable to escape the property they came from. Like people make fan OCs of like every fictional species that has ever been depicted - this site has a whole cadre of yinglets running around and I'm pretty sure I never see the word 'val salia' mentioned in relation to them - but I've never in my life seen anyone manage to make a troll OC that wasn't inextricably caught in the intricate web of absurd rules that homestuck has established. No one tries to transplant them elsewhere. Why would you. Absent context they're just weird grey guys with horns
on the other side of this, it's incredibly disorienting when one of these things DOES fully break the bounds of its source material, and you aren't like 100% plugged the fuck in to every detail of furry culture lol
like, I've been in furry-dominated internet communities for decades; I'm pretty familiar with this stuff and even I spent like half an hour googling shit to try and find an answer for "what the actual fuck is a sergal, no like for real, what the hell is happening here"
the answer is of course "It's a fictional alien species from a long-running webcomic, but like the comic itself isn't actually a furry thing it's just a really detailed sci-fi epic with a lot of really elaborate speculative ecology, and a bunch of furries made OCs from it because the creatures were cool, and then so many did it for so long that it stopped being a reference to the webcomic and just entered the canon of Kinds Of Animals You Can Be If You Want, and now there's fucktons of sergals but like 90% of them aren't even fans of the actual webcomic they just really wanted to be a dog and a shark at the same time"
and then social media stopped existing so now the only people still online are Me and also Infinite Furries so everybody thinks this is all completely intuitive common knowledge that people just innately understand
