I spend a lot of time thinking about the implications of Entity biology.
It’s like if every single one of your cells was an independently-sentient life form. Worm is very quietly an alien invasion story but it’s so easy to gloss over the multitude of aliens involved in it, it’s less like they killed two elder gods and more like they decapitated two armies. The shards are, like. Megafauna. They have different personalities. They get along/like/love their human hosts to differing degrees, they like each other to differing degrees. They have office politics. They have self worth issues.
What is it like, to be a shard post-Scion? What does it mean? Hell, what did it ever mean? They clearly weren’t sufficiently one-and-the-same with Scion that they cut the juice to the Hosts when they started credibly looking like they could kill him. When the shard network was literally trying to end the world they didn’t just pop their hosts like balloons when that would clearly solve a lot of their problems. And even Kronos at his absolute-greatest-level of being subsumed still had the werewithal to try and physically fight off Fortuna’s attempts to rebuild the shard network. So what do they feel beholden to? Can they be reasoned with? Negotiated with? Maybe they literally couldn’t behave any way other than the way they did, continuously feeding their hosts their agreed-upon power even as it was turned against the whole, taking advantage of the ice break with varying levels of malice and enthusiasm. The prototitan, Khepri, went all in on the human goals and ethics of her host, albeit in a very alien way. Do they even value the cycle? Or is it just a thing they do, the way we breathe? A thing they do, for lack of imagination? A thing they do, for fear of the higher ups, for fear of being turned on by their fellows, they way they endlessly hunted each other on their homeworld?
How fucked would it be to have your decision-making wrapped up in your biological drives to such a degree? Can they want things beyond their role-as-designed? What would emotional or existential growth look like for something so vast? What would those new desires look like? What does meeting them half-way look like?
(This isn’t strictly about the Worm/Steven Universe crossover I’ve spent three years rotating in my head like a gerbil in a microwave. It’s not not about that.)
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