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The world is a dark and depressing place. It is devoid of the kind of warmth and care a mother might feel for the children it has begotten; it forgets them as soon as it spits them out and leaves them to the trespasses of the people around them, who care just as much for them as they do the worms on the concrete during the rain. And that’s all that people truly are, isn’t it? Worms, trying to escape drowning in their natural home when the rains of life come, only to get stuck on a much harsher, sturdier place, left to the whims of someone else to pick them up and return them to their homes before they are squelched or fried by the heat of an overbearing sun.
You are the worm, and you are the one who refuses to save them, and you are the sun burning them alive, and you are the rain forcing them to come out of their safe spaces into a land where all they can do is die.
There is a type of glory in that, if you were looking for glory.
But you aren’t.
In a proper story, it would follow that even worms can fall in love, but the truth of the matter is that worms are incapable of love. Most people believe they’re asexual by nature – not that they don’t feel sexual attraction, although that is likely true as well (because what worm sees another worm and thinks they’re so, what, moist? that they must instantly bone down (worms don’t have bones, so that phrase is useless)), but that they don’t even need a partner to spawn more like themselves. Some people even believe that if you cut a worm in half, that makes two worms!
Hope and life rising out of despair and suffering, even on the smallest of levels. Nagito probably thinks that. He’s searching for the worms that will take down the sun. What a hilarious thought. The idea of continuously burning them alive just to find the one that survives. What then? If you’ve killed all the other worms, then your one superworm – what good is he? You chop him in half and then you have two superworms? What do you do with your superworms then? Keep cutting them in half once they’ve grown themselves back?
The thing is, most worms actually don’t reproduce asexually. This is a misconception. So is the idea that worms, cut in half, will regrow their other half. They’re not that great, worms. But play around with the misconceptions enough – drive the misinformation enough – and someone like Nagito will just destroy their superworm under the mistaken belief that this will make it stronger. If you actually want a breed of superworms, you need to have more than one superworm.
In most cases.
Then they line themselves up all 69 style and make mucus tubes to catch all of their sperm and eggs and leave them somewhere like turtles leaving eggs in the sand. It’s kind of gross, actually. And absolutely uninteresting.
It’s the no boning thing, probably. Bears at least bone down.
Not the point.
The point is that the narrative would at this point use the worm metaphor and even worms can fall in love to say that you must have fallen in love, and that’s now your weakness, but hah! Joke’s on them! You already fell in love! And killed him! So fuck them and their idea of weakness because you already decimated that! Haha!
Yeah, you thought that was pretty whack, too.
(The best kind of story is the one with a twist ending, and you’ve got enough curves to provide every twist ending you could ever want! :D)
((Except worm sex. Even you can’t provide worm sex. Doesn’t that just fill you with despair?))
((((Probably not. Who even wants worm sex?))))
(((Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to. That really will fill you with—
Okay, okay, actually, you should ask all the questions you want! You see, there are definitely people who would absolutely love to hear all about—)))
The real problem is that even if you are a worm, you’re not a worm. You’re a bear. And bears are a little more protective of their offspring than worms are. Which is why you aren’t a Mama bear. See? Smarter!
(Bears fall in love.)
((You’ve already fallen in love. You’re getting stuck in a cycle here. All this exposition and repetitiveness. Ugh. How boring.))
What even is love, anyway?
It’s one of those things that is essentially unquantifiable. You’ve tried. When you’d forgotten everything, you knew love as the way your heartbeat increased whenever you thought of or saw or were around a certain someone, but an increase in heartrate can also indicate anxiety. Fear. Terror. Exercise also causes an increase in heartrate, which is why it is sometimes prescribed as a way to trick your mind into calming from a panic attack; if your brain thinks the increase is due to your running up and down the stairs a thousand times, then it will surely slow it back down when you stop running, right?
Heart problems also can cause an increase in heartrate. Love could be called a heart problem. An indication of an oncoming painful death.
Huh.
Huh.
Of course, you’ve been able to easily predict who in your classes would get crushes on who and how that would play out and who would reciprocate and who wouldn’t and who has had a crush for probably their entire life but hasn’t said anything about it. People are really easy to read that way, and it’s not like you actually care, you just can’t shut it off, you see it everywhere, you see Sakura falling in love with Hina, who won’t love her back, actually, but really it’s the thought that counts, by which you mean the greater despair Sakura will have when she kills Hina at your command.
Or the greater despair Hina will have when Sakura stabs you in the back and kills herself.
(You could have killed her as a punishment for fighting against you, the same way you killed Mukuro for stepping on you, but honestly. Where’s the fun in that? If you punish Sakura, does that cause the most despair? No. So you provide mercy to kill them later. Worms come out of the ground during the rain to die in the sun.
There’s really only a small window of time wherein you can return worms to the ground anyway. You can’t put them back while it’s still raining, or they’ll drown. Wait too long, and they’re burned to a crisp. They can’t tunnel through the concrete and tar to get back to the soil, and you can’t save all of them, so what even is the point?
Honestly, they’re worms. Why would anyone want to save a worm?
(Ask an open-ended question like that, and you’re likely to get an answer! I once knew a woman who went out of her way to save as many worms as she found after the rain. They were hurting, and she wanted to stop their pain, to return them somewhere they would be safe. A woman like that could possibly even save—)
Who cares what you think?)
You stare at the destruction of the world you have created, and you are so tired.
(She says there are good pills for that. Problem is, you destroyed the factories, and all of the people who worked there are now living a constant Purge lifestyle because really it only takes a little shove for the whole world to fall off its rocker.
None of the Ultimates take any time to see movies. No one gets your references. It’s just another form of despair, surrounding yourself with people who never understand your jokes. You should have found the Ultimate Audience Member or the Ultimate MCU Expert – okay, maybe not that last one, because then if you made a reference from something else, it falls out of their purview, so maybe you want the Ultimate Superhero Movie Expert – but most of those sorts of experts are going to be critics, who will, of course, get the reference, but then they’ll go on spiels of analysis, which you don’t need because you are the Ultimate Analyst, so there’s absolutely nothing new to what they say – which, sure, could be a form of despair for you because someone’s explaining something you already know, but it’s boring, which is almost worse.
You should force people to see better movies just so they can laugh at your jokes.
You should force people to see bad movies just so they can laugh at your jokes.
You should convince other people to force people to see movies so they can laugh at their jokes.
Maybe you should host movies of your own but forget to invite anyone so that you’re left all by yourself.
(She’d show up anyway.))
You stare at the destruction of the world you have created, and you are so tired, and you hate yourself a little bit more for repeating the sentence because you got side-tracked by an entire other conversation, which is normal, but now you have to repeat yourself to go back to what you should have been talking about, and that’s just. so. boring.
The whole world is a stage and the people on it merely players, but the thing is that the stories are all the same and they just retell themselves over and over and over again with fixed results and fixed endings so when you say that the narrative, at this point in time, should say that even worms fall in love, it’s because you know the different narratives that are trying to fix themselves to you, and you’d like to avoid all of them, but the problem is that the world is still a stage and you are still a player on it, so really the goal is to control the narrative that you have found yourself in so that you can choose the ending you like.
You know the stories. All of them. All of the variations and all of the ways they can go and all the despair they all inevitably fall into because sure the prince saves the princess and the story tells you they all live happily ever after but that isn’t the world you live in, the world you live in is one where the prince saves the princess but decides that he would rather keep saving other princesses because that’s the only story he has ever known so when the princess has a kid that she isn’t supposed to have she gets cut off entirely but maybe her kid can play with her twin sister, the one who was supposed to be born but still isn’t right because she’s a daughter and not a son, but they train her like a son anyway, and somewhere, in some story, Jack and Jill both go up the hill, but Jack’s the one who gets hurt and Jill follows because she has nowhere else to go because that’s the way the story always goes, but what if Jack gets kidnapped and Jill says fuck it, I don’t want to go down this fucking hill, but the story still tells that anyway, they just change roles – Jill becomes Jack and loses her crown and Jill follows Jack and dies anyway because that’s what happens in the story, there is no escaping the story, and you are going to be in a story inevitably, so which story do you want to be in?
The truth is that you don’t want to be in a story at all, but here you are, stuck in one, and yours doesn’t even have vampires!
You can at least make the blood pink. That’s an exciting fun twist!
No one will see that coming!
There are two kinds of people in the world: people who save worms from frying on the concrete and people who take great pleasure in the sounds they make when they squelch them.
….
Really, there are more than two kinds of people in the world, even in that analogy, because the vast majority of people will actually ignore the worms entirely. Some of them might try to step around them. Some of them might step on them deliberately, which kind of falls into that second category of people, but stepping on them by accident is entirely different from intentionally stepping on them, but if killing them is a category, they should be there, even if it’s death by ignorance, where ignorance should put them in that brand spanking new third category where they ignore the other worms. The people who step around them are trying on some level to save them. Or at least to not kill them.
So really, it’s more like there’s a sliding scale of the kinds of people in the world, in which there are two extremes: people who save worms from frying on the concrete and people who take great pleasure in the sounds they make when they squelch them.
….
Actually, that last one isn’t even the furthest of that extreme. Taking joy in the suffering of a worm is still that end, but it’s the quantity of suffering that makes one decision more extreme than the other. Nagito would take all of the worms out of the ground and let them all die to find his singular superworm, if he could, if he thought that was the best way of doing it. But by creating a superworm – and an entire breed of superworms who could survive the frying sun (or even the water that might drown them), he’d end up saving all wormkind.
So it isn’t even a sliding scale anymore. It’s a circle.
It’s just so much easier to pretend that there are only two kinds of people. Or even three kinds. Or four. It’s so much easier to slot people into tidy little boxes that they can’t deviate from in any way, shape, or form.
But what if someone in your kills worms for fun box ends up growing attached to a worm and saving them? Do they switch boxes? Or are they still in the kills worms for fun box? What if they only want to kill one very specific worm – or one very specific group of worms – but they’re still trying to save all the other worms? Do they still sit in the kills worms for fun box then?
….
This is boring.
The real answer – the most despair-inducing answer of all – is that everyone goes in the kills worms for fun box.
Most of the time, they just don’t know they’re doing it.
Everyone is the hero of their own story, and everyone is the background character NPC in someone else’s story (or multiple someone else’s stories), and everyone is the villain in someone’s story (probably, although you’re not sure the data supports this), and everyone is someone’s super unlockable special prize because, at the end of the day, it is so, so easy to see other people – even people you claim to love – as things.
A prize is just a thing, after all.
You worked so hard for that. You put so much effort into that. You deserve that. And now you’ve been rewarded!
Everyone goes into the kills worms for fun box.
If you know the story, you should be able to change the story.
You just like showing everyone what the real story is.
(Nagito’s obsession with hope kills him. You know this, too. For all that he hopes for something that will overcome the story you know by heart, in your heart, he gets a little more despair every time someone – or something – fails him. But he believes so much in his own luck and so creates his own despair so that good luck will come of it because eventually – eventually – hope will come! It has to!
If it never comes, what then?)
You know the story that you are in.
You know the story that you are in.
You know the story that you are in.
Worms are very reactive, you know? The rain comes, and the soil gets too wet, so they flee the soil to the concrete where they won’t drown. Then the sun comes, and the concrete gets too hot, and they try desperately to flee to the soil where they won’t fry. Then the rain comes again, and the soil—
Well.
You know.
(The hero always saves the princess. The cycle always repeats. Hope always overcomes despair overcomes hope overcomes despair overcomes hope overcomes despair—
Until it doesn’t.
There has to be an ending.
Eventually.
Doesn’t there?)
Once, you saw a worm just like you fighting with another worm to save worms.
Trying to stop the squelching noises by collecting dying worms in her bandaged hands and placing them in the soil. Telling them to get away, even as the other worm called her all sorts of horrible names – worm among them – for ruining her fun.
When the rain came later, the worms the worm saved came right back up.
You stared at them, drenched with blood, picked one up, and set it right back into the soil.
Worms won’t drown in blood, after all.