Author commentary: To make it a little extra obvious that the transformation is different for trolls, and likened to metamorphosis, god tier trolls get cool, new butterfly wings. Something about troll mythology probably includes imagery of butterfly-winged trolls as saviors, god figures, etc. There are even some indications it could be a rare mutation for certain special trolls (see: the Summoner). Humans don’t really have a parallel for this. In our myths, advanced humans generally keep looking like humans. When Superman got his superpowers he was still basically the same human-looking guy. When Neo became The One, dude was still just Neo, but he could suddenly kick guys hella hard. When Jesus resurrected he suddenly looked like…yep, it’s still just Jesus. We don’t seem to really intrinsically value physiological change in response to the mythological, god-like elevations of our heroic figures. A parallel example might be if, in response to such a change we achieved a closer biological communion with our evolutionary roots, like apes. If so, the Bible would say something like, when Jesus came back from the dead suddenly he was a lot hairier and much better at climbing trees. But nobody would think that was inspiring or cool, they’d just think it was kind of dumb. So we don’t roll like that. But there is definitely something elegant to the idea of an insect-like race growing a nice pair of butterfly wings as they ascend to a higher plane of existence, which not only taps into a certain biological latency of their species but also looks pretty sweet. It also means Vriska has realized her destiny (or really, Tavros’s fantasy) of becoming a cute fairy girl. Another lucky br8k!!!!!!!! For her, not for Tavros. If he hadn’t chickened out, he would have won her respect, and then cool fairy Vriska would have become his girlfriend as a reward.
