splickedylit:

You know what keeps occurring to me though, not really as a reasonable canon interpretation but just because.

If the Condesce was alive SO FREAKING LONG–like, SO long.  Way too long, longer than should ever be possible–then like

 what if her species has evolved without her?  What if the young would-be empresses come to fight her for the throne, expecting somebody like them, like the adults they’ve met who laughed when they demanded respect?  And the empress comes out of the dark with a face like an ancient animal and a mouth that goes too wide and too full of teeth and pitch-black keratin plates so thick clothes are a formality.  Just black chitin and then these great, vivid slashes along her sides where her gills are, and gold everywhere, she can just carve lines in her plates and fill them in with gold.  And her teeth are too long and so is her tongue with its gold studs, and her eyes are from an age when there weren’t seadweller hives in the oceans of Alternia.  Just darkness all the way down to the Emissary who raised her. 

They’ve evolved so tame down on the homeworld, cute little silver-skinned minnows.  Tame hair that straggles out down their soft, bare necks, tame claws that are barely claws, tame little delicate horns that would crack the minute they slammed together to fight head to head like she used to when she took the throne.  Tame bodies that aren’t made to dive onto all fours and long-lashed eyes that barely see, let alone in the abyssal dark.  They’ve gotten smaller–not by much but she’s gotten bigger and bigger and bigger–and they’re faster because of it, fast tough little disposable killing machines with hands made to do the work she sets them too, but compared to her they’re young, and because they’re young they’re slow, and so small and so, so weak.  

She could gut them with one thumbnail, and her reach is so much longer than they ever trained for and sometimes it’s nice to indulge in animal instincts (hers are so much closer to the surface than theirs) so she reaches out and she does.

At least they developed glitter and big plastic sunglasses.  Not a total waste.

that would be rad but condesce is more or less the child of modern day trolls due to ectobiology. so what it would be closer to is condesce being a modern troll in a world of unevolved trolls