im a little stupid where did the warhammer is threespines thing come from 🥹
glad you asked! while this hasn't been outright confirmed in the comic or even outside it, we have plenty of foreshadowing and allusions to theorize about, the first being the shape of warhammer's body:
quite similar to a spine when you put them side by side, right? of course, this doesn't mean anything on its own; parasites practically never resemble the objects they infe-
oh. right.
ID_FRAGMENTA is almost identical to how morrigan's sentinels appear, aside from the obvious parasitic mutations. hell, even the plume of smoke they're coming from in that panel is shaped like fruit falling from a tree, mirroring morrigan's object! plus, if morrigan is unique enough to create an easter egg parasite, wouldn't the same apply to the other lawless kings as well?
next up, we've got this page from ebb and flow:
the alt. text makes it more clear that the focus on ID_THREESPINES here is intentional: "Painkiller says, Right. Wonder what someone that huge is up to right now. Painkiller closes the door, where three spines is visible off in the distance." i don't think it's a coincidence that a conversation about a lawless king ends with a very prominent and deliberate shot of ID_THREESPINES.
an even earlier piece of evidence comes from metamorphose, aka literally the very first episode we see ID_THREESPINES. like, seriously, this happens only two pages after we first see it:
and before you think this is a coincidence, i want to make it extremely clear that this is 100% intentional and we know this because chester himself said so in a commentary video:
(transcript: "[...] and then we have this “do you have any kings”, they’re playing Go Fish, which I thought would be a funny, cute detail. And I was like, “what card should Citrus ask if Spool even has?” And I thought “oh, duh.” Right? In the context of, like… Threespines and stuff, uh, I’m not gonna say anything more than that, but, I mean, I feel like it’s obvious, especially with everything we’ve foreshadowed. We tried to make it obvious, but I don’t think people wanna be a hundred percent sure, if you know what I’m talking about.")
why would chester make citrus say something about a king card in the context of ID_THREESPINES unless ID_THREESPINES is a lawless king that's been assimilated?
chester has also made this comment in regards to warhammer's disappearance:
(source)
which at least confirms we'll learn how this happened
