#TW parasites

[bonefall]

Warrior Bites: Dietary Needs

[ID: A fish carcass, bird carcass, and mouse carcass on a stone slab.]

Are you wondering how much prey a Clan needs a day? What they should eat to stay healthy? Why food processing is useful at all? All the answers to these questions and more, contained within a general guide to dietary needs for your Warrior Cats!

As an obligate carnivore, a cat's entire diet revolves around processing meat. More specifically, the ideal diet should be 55% protein, 45% fats, about 1% to 3% carbs, with the remainder being various micro-nutrients. You can expect the average 10-pound warrior to need 350 calories per day, about 3.5 mice on average.

I've also included a section talking about obesity, which dives into how canon's depiction of it is both harmful fatphobia and wouldn't make sense from a cat perspective. It also discusses obesity in realistic cats; and how you're free to choose the realism on that aspect.

Below the cut;

Caloric Intake

Nutrition

Food Processing

On Obesity

Caloric Intake

The general rule for how much a cat needs to eat is that an active, non-neutered tom will need about 35 calories per pound of their own body weight, per day, just to remain the weight they are.

That means that the average warrior, assuming they are 10 pounds, will need 350 calories a day.

Kittens, pregnant and nursing cats, and large warriors will need to eat more than average. Neutered cats, elders, and clerics/medcats will eat less. There are calculators online for determining how much an individual will need, but you can estimate how much an entire Clan will need just by taking 350 and multiplying it by population!

Assuming the average population is about 30 cats, that's 10,500 calories to feed a Clan for a day! To put that in perspective, that many calories would feed 7 large humans. If you felt like fighting a group of angry cats to steal their day's worth of mice, I mean.

Generally speaking, land prey will have a caloric value around 5 calories per gram. Aquatic prey is significantly lower, around 4 calories per gram. Birds will be just below 6 calories per gram. To find out how many cats a piece of prey will feed, or how many pieces a cat will need that day, take the category and multiply by the prey's weight in grams.

So for example, the average house mouse is 20 grams and it is land prey, meaning its caloric value is around 100 calories! A warrior will need 3 and a half mice a day to stay healthy, and a Clan will need 105 mice daily to support 30 cats.

105 mice may seem like a lot, but remember that a wild rabbit is 1,800 grams on average which means 9,000 calories. 2 big pieces of prey will feed the whole Clan, with leftovers.

Those estimates include every part of the animal. Cats eat organs, small bones, and even skin. Skeletal muscle, or "fillets" in reference to fish, is so low in calories that it's typically somewhere between 1 kcal to 1.5 kcal per gram. That's what you're buying in the supermarket; but wild animals don't usually cut their food into choice strips.

(unless you're writing a clan that does food processing of course!)

QUICK FACTS

Average warrior will need 35 calories per pound of weight

10 pound warrior needs 350 calories a day

350 x 30 cats = 10,500 calories to feed a Clan for a single day

Birds provide the most calories per gram, land prey the middlemost, and aquatic prey the least.

Calculate calories in prey by taking the weight, converting to grams, and multiply by 4, 5, or 6 depending on broad category.

If you're having trouble feeding a Clan on small animals, look at bigger prey like rabbits and trout.

Muscle fillets are inferior to organ meats and have a much lower caloric value.

Nutrition

Not all food is the same. The more important thing to consider about any particular meal is NOT its calorie count, but its nutritional value. This is especially important to cats because protein is not stored as fat. If the body has no immediate use for it, it's flushed out.

Since cats should not eat more than 3% carbs, ALL of their fat stores will need to come from fat.

The ideal piece of meat would be at least 55% protein and 45% fat. Every individual species will have a different ratio, and more importantly, individual cuts will have a different ratio.

Skeletal muscle has a higher ratio of protein to fat. Organ meat, also sometimes called "offal," will have a more balanced ratio. That said, nearly all meat skews towards protein. PURE fat is very hard to find on the sorts of animals Clan cats hunt, and must be carefully divided, collected, or processed to make sure all warriors are getting proper nutrition.

I'll be going more in-depth with dietary fat at some other time, as this guide is meant to just be an overview! Just know that some Clans will need to eat MORE food to stay healthy because of this.

Cats need more than the "macronutrients" to stay healthy. They can't JUST rely on the juiciest cuts of meat to keep their health intact, they also need several vitamins and minerals to support their body functions, and avoid getting a deficiency.

Here's some of the important micronutrients, where to get them, and what happens they don't get enough;

Vitamin A: Livers, mealworms, eggs This is one of the most important micronutrients in a cat's body, used for practically everything. Without this, their coats will grow dull, and their joints stiff, and they'll start to go night-blind. In a severe state, they'll start to lose the ability to heal skin lacerations and die. Pregnant cats and kittens need more of this than usual, but it IS also possible to get vitamin A poisoning from getting too concentrated of a dose.

Calcium: Bones, eggs With a calcium deficiency, the warrior will feel stiff and sore, and experience painful muscle spasms. Most cats will simply crunch the bones of small prey and never have to worry about this, but if your cats cook or scavenge, they have to be told to NEVER eat the bones of a roasted bird. Because bird bones are hollow and cooking makes them brittle, they can splinter and cause fatal internal bleeding.

Thiamine: Trout, boar meat, mealworms, eggs Called a Fish Seizure because raw carp and raw bream contains thiaminase, which will destroy thiamine in the body. Lack of thiamine will cause neurological issues, such as the aforementioned seizures, general confusion, memory loss, and muscle weakness. This can be counterracted by eating trout, which is so high in thiamine that there's a theory that carp evolved it specifically to eat salmonids better.

Potassium: Trout, boar meat, mealworms, eggs As cats get older, they begin needing a lot more potassium for their bodies. It's a very common micronutrient found in most meat, but elders should get the first bite of special snacks "out of respect" which helps keep their potassium level up. Without it, they become very weak.

i feel like that evil struthiomimus from land before time with how many times i typed eggs

QUICK FACTS

The ideal ratio of a cut of meat is 55% protein 45% fat

Organ meat > Muscle meat

Micronutrients are important

But micronutrients can also cause poisoning if, somehow, they're too concentrated (very hard to come across concentrated micronutrients without the science of chemistry tho. Like if a cat swallowed a vitamin gummy.)

Food Processing

"Food Processing" is when you do something to your food before you eat it. Just a little bit of care is going to go a LONG WAY when it comes to health of the warrior.

Cats that eat raw meat the way canon warriors do are almost guaranteed to get worms. Roundworms, hookworms, and tapeworms are all passed through the infected tissue of rodent prey, and in fish, roundworms, tapeworms, and flukes can pass through raw meat.

All parasites do something a little different, but most digestive worms aren't fatal unless the cat is sick or a kitten. However, nearly ALL of them screw around with digestion, making the cat need to eat more just to stay healthy, or causing stomach irritation. Some of them can even pass in milk, infecting a suckler's nursing kits.

The easiest way to reduce this kind of infection is simply to slice the prey open from mouth-to-butt, Tigerstar-style, and hook and lift out the GI tract before eating. There's nothing in that worth eating raw anyway. It can just be discarded, or cleaned out and used to case tiny sausages! But it's only a reduction; there's still a risk of catching worms from raw meat.

There's also always the possibility of getting salmonella poisoning.

Many believe that cats are immune to this, but that's not true! Carnivores just have a shorter GI tract than omnivores and herbivores, so salmonella spends less time in their gut and ergo has less chance of causing an infection. It still happens, ESPECIALLY when cats hunt songbirds.

Nothing can be done about salmonella in raw meat, besides eating it as quickly as possible. It's innate to the bodies of birds and reptiles, and usually found on raw eggs too.

Some animals are small enough to be dried and carried around as rations, such as minnows or grasshoppers. Others could be sliced up into strips, and marinated in spices like valerian or catmint for an extra boost of energy. It could also be worthwhile to cut the pelt off a particularly soft animal, like a mole, to dry and keep as bedding material.

All of the above examples of food processing are possible without fire, but if your cats DO have fire, they will have a DRASTIC increase to the quality of their health.

Such as;

Cooking will almost completely eliminate those foodborne parasites. Their eggs don't survive extreme heat.

No more salmonella poisoning! GONE! Cooking is the only way to eliminate this!

It can increase caloric absorption from anywhere between 20% to 50%. Our example warrior who needed 3.5 mice a day could suddenly need one less mouse; and even a meager 20% drop in how much the entire Clan needs saves 2,400 calories a day. 24 whole mice!

I HAVE TO STRESS HOW BIG THAT IS. You save anywhere from 2/10 to 5/10 successful kills.

Thiaminase is destroyed by cooking, making bream and carp healthier and reducing "fish seizures."

It allows for fats to be processed and stored as tallow, lard, and oil, so it can be added to other dishes to make them both healthier and tastier.

Most food preservation requires fire in some way; by heating, jellying, boiling, etc. The only other two ways to reliably store food is by having access to a ton of salt, which is hard for most non-coastal clans to acquire, or vinegar, which is so acidic it's a notorious cat-repellent.

While cooking can also destroy some micronutrients, its benefits FAR outweigh any potential "strengths" of raw food. Destroying micronutrients is also not always a bad thing; as TOO MANY micronutrients can cause poisoning. Fire-using Clans will be more likely to "seek" micronutrients than non-fire Clans as a result, though they probably won't recognize the science behind a hankering!

QUICK FACTS

Worms. Basically unavoidable if your cat's eating like a canon warrior.

Some parasites can spread through milk.

Slicing and lifting out the GI tract can significantly reduce the chance of catching worms.

Salmonella can only be eliminated with cooking

Cooking will drastically increase the quality of a Clan's health, if your cats are advanced enough to figure out fire.

Warriors need to hunt a LOT less prey, and can store that prey, if they have fire.

Fire-using Clans will intentionally try to put more types of food in their diets and get 'cravings.'

On Obesity

Warrior Cats is not a realistic series. The boundary that any particular writer draws between humans and warrior cats is completely arbitrary. The series itself follows no sense of realistic genetics, regularly shows the cats using herbs that would poison them, and gives the characters human-centric morals like monogamy and paternal involvement.

So when it comes to being fatness in your project, please keep that in mind. You do not need too follow realistic cat weight distribution, if that's not what your project about. That said, let me tell you about humans vs cats in this department!

Humans have a massive diversity of weight distribution, with varied genetic predispositions to gaining and losing weight. The shame, bullying, and medical discrimination that comes with fatphobia is a LOT more harmful than being fat itself, and the causes of the "obesity crisis" are ridiculously more complicated than "ppl r snorking 2 much food".

Realistic cats aren't the same way.

When REAL cats are fat, that's VERY bad. It's a sign they are being fed the wrong things by humans, or live somewhere that they are able to eat what they shouldn't. They just don't have that same diversity in fat distribution that humans do. Because of how adipose tissue secretes certain hormones, feline obesity is like a chronic inflammatory disease which can cause arthritis, bladder stones, hepatic lipidosis, and more.

But with that in mind, fatness should be perceived very differently even in the most realistic settings. In comparison to humans;

It is harder for a wild cat to put on weight. Most of what they're eating is raw protein, actively trying to fill the 45% of daily fat intake they need to stay healthy. Protein isn't stored as fat, it's immediately discarded by the body if there is no use for it. A cat would need to be taking an INSANE amount of prey to start becoming dangerously overweight. Housecats are often fed human food, which has carbohydrates. Low-quality cat food will also use carbs as filler. High carb food is VERY bad for them, since they're only supposed to have 3% carbs at most. This is one of the reasons why it's easy for pet cats to become overweight.

Realistic cats don't look start looking overweight until they are significantly obese. Most of their fat is stored around their ribs and internally, unlike humans with our thick hips and round bellies, and they are covered in a naturally sagging pelt of fur. It's not as obvious with them. Visually, weight will be noticed best from a bird's eye perspective, unlike humans where it's apparent at every angle.

Putting on the fat that CAN be acquired is ridiculously important 3.5 raw, whole mice a day, per cat, are needed to fill their basic dietary requirements. There are going to be days or months especially during winter where they might be below that number, and that stored fat is going to be lifesaving. Bulking up is actually a big deal!

So not only is how canon treats overweight characters full of malice, it's full of lazy malice. It makes no sense from a realistic standpoint for wild cats to develop an association between fatness and greed or laziness. It's important, hard work for them to acquire it!

Though the Clans are notoriously xenophobic and kittypets are more likely to be overweight, it still doesn't make sense from a realistic cat perspective to be fatphobic in the same way as canon. It's more likely they'd see fat housecats as having "unearned" weight given to them by humans, like they're cheating, or they might be disdainful of how much junk food they eat, or pitiable because it's a sign of a bad twoleg... or just "sour grapes" variety jealousy ☕.

Bottom line is that there's a LOT you can do here which is better than canon's vicious bullying. The writers just lifted British cultural disdain for fat people and put it into the books. They simply did not think it through.

So please do what they didn't, and just put a little extra thought into how your project is going to view fatness! Consider if fatphobia is even a theme you need in your text.

As stated, you do not even have to write weight in your cats as being realistic in this way! I encourage you to pick and choose what's most fun and fitting for your own work. I personally give my characters a more human weight distribution, simply because I want to spite canon and be more body-positive. I am a fat people and you can take Bumble's big chunky bod from my cold, dead hands.

You can choose to make your work however you'd like, and now with this guide, you can have an easy reference for what your cats should eat! Thank you, StarClan, for this prey <3

[peach-flavored-cyanide]

"Where are you, brother?"

art under cut (tw for body horror/parasites)

[addlepater]

lowkey think c!wilbur would actually enjoy being a parasite under Q's skin. in the literal sense. I think the guy would daydream about being re-incarnated as a flesh-burrowing parasite just so he could be closer to Q. I think he would genuinely get off on the idea of being reincarnated as a tapeworm in his gut.

[unabletomakedecisions]

Fun Facts about Parasitic Worms

Did you know that there are parasitic worms that get into your blood or lymph vessels and stay there? Imagine looking down at the veins in your hand and noticing that one of them is moving. It's shifting and squirming. Oh god, there's something inside there. Get it out, get it out! But you can't. There's no way to do it without cutting open your vessels, and you really don't want to do that. So you need to wait. Wait until the antiparasitic works, and pray that it does.

There are also worms that pierce through your skin and make their way to your lungs and when you cough them up, see the writing mass of worms crawling all over your hands, they use it as a way to go back down the other way & get into your digestive system to breed. You may very well have had these worms at some point too, they're apparently pretty common.

-- Fun facts from a vet student

[torchickentacos]

Im here for your opinions on roundworms and parasites.

THANK YOU! Your enabling is always appreciated (and I think I have a pokemon ask from you that I lost in my drafts like six months ago????? I'll go find that later!) Here are some of my parasite opinions. Under the read-more because, re: last post's tags, this is not what most of you guys signed up for 😭

My main opinion- worms are, by far, the most interesting type of parasite, even amongst other endoparasites. Exoparasites are largely boring. Sorry to any tick or leech enthusiasts out there. Amoebas (and other protozoan parasites) are just okay. They were more interesting in season 2 of House MD than they are in real life, imo.

Guinea worms (draculculiasis) are maybe the most disgusting type of endoparasite, but thankfully they're incredibly rare. I'll keep it not-revolting but the removal process is disgusting, and not much gets to me but that does. When I was in vetmed classes back in like 2018-2020, I was the person who wanted front-row seats to literally everything, and despite that, guinea worms make me viscerally uncomfortable... but very fascinated. Heartworms are pretty high up there, too, and roundworms do get an honorary mention.

Not really an opinion but I need to know what kind of worm RFK JR has. I have been so darkly fascinated by this for months on end. It's PROBABLY neurocysticercosis, but what if it's something more interesting???? I have never wanted to see the full medical work-up of a politician more badly. I periodically check to see if there's any updates in the brainworm department. ALSO, it didn't actually eat his brain. I'm not a parasitologist but I'm like 95% sure that any worms that would have a presence in the brain would not actively feed on any organic tissue in that sense. It's probably a cyst caused by a calcified tapeworm larvae that damaged surrounding brain tissue. There was probably no actual ingestion of brain tissue despite claims and headlines. BUT IF THERE WAS, I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT. But nobody has a concrete answer.

If we want to talk about non-human parasites, then horsehair worms are a fun starting point! They infect insects and cause the insect to seek out water and drown themselves, and then the worm escapes in the water as part of the worm's life cycle. If you've got a strong stomach, go look it up on youtube. It's vile but SO interesting. The Green-banded broodsac is also a lovely little freak. It invades snail's eye stalks and pulses bright, strange colors to attract birds. The bird eats the snail (and the worm) and the worm uses the bird's droppings to scatter its eggs. It's some real freak of nature type shit and I love it.

Also not really an opinion, but I learned very quickly as a child that telling the other kids fun worm facts is not a great way to make friends, but on tumblr it works just fine!

[paradoxbeta]

WHO IS EOC? i am very curious now!!!

>:) okay SO

tumblr picture formatting is utter garbage and i dont want these to take up too much space so im cramming these drawings into one row (or not if this crapsite breaks on me, because it seems to be REALLY fighting me on this, so if it ends up not making a nice little picture row know that i tried my best). but this is effigy of composure!

he has a couple problems, but the big one is that his superstructure has a terrible parasite situation. the parasites are flat, thin, and able to make it into grooves and pipes the inspectors cant reach. flushing out doesnt do much to dislodge them and they breed faster than they can be killed, so theyve happily made their homes in this sheltered, food-rich haven (to the obvious distress and horror of the host iterator). originally the concept for these parasites were much closer to centipedes and had the placeholder name "synapcipedes," but ive since started leaning more towards an obvious tapeworm motif for them because its gross and i enjoy it morbidly. it also has some pretty cursed implications if you think about it for too long which i have decided are funny/really disgusting/so stupid that they have to stay. i still flipflop between considering them centipedes vs tapeworms though and i dont think thatll ever be rigidly defined. the ambiguity is nice to toy with

on the top 10 list of "things that are not fun" having turbo worms has to be somewhere up there, so eoc has it *rough,* and kind of sort of eventually barrels off into the deep end because of it. his futile attempts to clean his own structure are frustrating enough, and the constant feeling of bugs crawling all over the inside of his body (which only gets progressively worse with time) does no favors either. however, the real big reason why he mentally declines is just because there's a ton of centi-worm things eating like fire through his neurons and other what-have-yous that iterators need to think and function. i think if he only got hit with one of these 3 things then he might have been able to hang onto his sanity, but with the triple combo he doesn't really stand a chance of doing much except stalling his functional death. which is good on him because if i was an iterator and my overseers told me i had a structure infestation, my mental health would have just preemptively swan dived off a bridge before anything even happened

anyhow, exponential parasite population growth meant exponential increase in all this other fun stuff, which means the time from the beginning of the infection to the time eoc is considered officially gone is startlingly short (for iterators, at least). it still took quite the while because losing your marbles is a loonnnng process, but still, yikes. its unfortunate because eoc was a real jokester pre-everything, and a cool guy to talk to. he was one of those people who could come up witty comments for anything like hed been ripped from the script of a sitcom. oh yeah, also, should have mentioned this earlier, but he ends up accidentally amassing a scavenger cult mid-insanity which goes hilariously bad because he's barely aware it's happening. nothing really works out for this poor iterator.

tldr: eoc gets parasites, they erode his brain, he goes nuts about it, (accidentally amasses a cult,) dies

[wc-confessions]

All the kits that died without a specifically named cause died of worms in my hc. I know for a fact that these cats don’t have the proper medicine for treating them like a vet would, and worms are actually fatal to kittens without proper treatment. Hell these cats don’t have any treatments for parasites, like how have none of the cats in cannon died from parasites?

.

[whumpster-dumpster]

hii hope youre doing well! could you do some sci fi whump prompts please? ^^

Sure thing! Since sci-fi has a wide range, the prompts are kind of all over the board:

Spaceship crash

Alien viruses or toxins

Otherwordly parasites

Laser or radiation burns

Prejudice between alien races

Alien interrogation/experimentation

Lost/separated on an unknown planet

Hunted down for collection as a "rare species"

Futuristic biomechanical implants malfunctioning

Telepathic whumper intruding in whumpee's mind

Space sickness (similar symptoms to motion sickness)

Punishment/imprisonment for breaking alien cultural rules

Painkillers/other medicines don't work for whumpee's species

Food poisoning; alien rations unsuitable for whumpee's species

Universal translator breaking; whumpee and other characters struggle to communicate

Alien caretaker(s) trying to treat whumpee's injuries and worsening them instead because they're unfamiliar with their biology

Spaceship systems malfunctioning: losing oxygen, losing heat, increased pressure of gravity, trapped mid-teleporation, etc.

[lichenaday]

I know this blog is lichen focused, but I also consider it a science blog and a space where I can talk about my experiences in science and academia. My most recent field work involved catching, handling, and ringing birds at a bird observatory, and I wanted to talk a little about the harsh realities of working with wild animals that I feel like don't get represented enough. I think it's important to paint a fair and realistic picture of what the world of animal research looks like, as it often gets misrepresented in media.

Wild animals do not like being handled. You have probably heard some story or seen some movie that makes it seem like you are somehow gonna connect to the animals you are working with and reassure them that you mean them no harm. No no, you are a big scary predator and they have no idea what is happening, and they scream, bite, and fight like hell to get away from you. This runs the gambit from kinda funny to mildly annoying to actually making it hard for you to work to making you feel bad for putting these animals through this stress. There will be no special magical wild animal friendships, trust me.

Animals are DIRTY. Like I know you know that on some level, but you don't really know it until you are up close and personal with them. In the case of the birds I work with, this usually means shit. Lots and lots of shit. On them, or you, on every surface and article of clothing you have. And you may think "in the grand scheme of poops, bird poops aren't so bad." But let me tell you: in sheer quantity and viscosity, bird shit beats them all.

PARASITES. Now we are not anti-parasite on this blog in general, they have their place in the ecosystem just like everything else. But personally, I don't really enjoy having to see them or experience them up close and personal. I'm talking ticks, fleas, mites, intestinal worms, louse flies, etc. Just . . . no thanks.

Animals get injured, and having to see these injuries up close and knowing there isn't anything I can do about it is hard. Be they old wounds, new, or the very rare wound that can occur during the catching and handling process, it can really get you down looking at an animal that you can't help.

Animals are unpredictable. Like, most of this field is about *trying* to predict their behavior, but animals are true disciples of Murphy's Law, and I swear they get off on frustrating scientists and their well laid plans and hypotheses. For me, this meant that the birds I was working with just didn't show up in the predicted numbers. This was frustrating to me on a how-the-fuck-is-my-project-gonna-work-out-now? level, but also on a worried-for-the-health-of-the-birds-and-the-planet level. If you enjoy work that is predictable and dependable, wildlife biology isn't for you.

I wat to be clear that I LOVE what I do, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. The work I and other wildlife biologists do is incredibly important and I am not saying this to cast a disparaging light on the field. But so many wildlife biologists I have interacted with are not like, bleeding heart, sensitive babies like me, and didn't adequately prepare for the mental and emotional toll of working with wildlife. I think the field selects for folks who are able to compartmentalize their love and empathy for animals, and I don't like that. I think we need people like me in the field, but I think they should be prepared for the reality of it, that's all. Or maybe I just need to vent lol.

[the-goya-jerker]

so this might be a bit out there but if you're willing to answer what are your thoughts on the blowfly girl story

TW: Maggots, lots of maggot, and rotting things. This is deeply unsanitary and sexual, and if you have a weak stomach, any issues with maggots or parasites, or issues with contamination, turn back now. The linked site has a bunch of maggots as the cover image.

The actual story also contains scat and piss kink.

I'm even putting this under a read more since I recognize this is not quite like my usual content.

In short:

When I googled this what I found was Blowfly Girl's Maggot Story.

This story is what I would classify as, perhaps, grotesque erotica. It is written, whether truthfully or not, by someone who is aware that it is "gross", they are slightly repulsed by it, and in that repulsion they find some sort of sexual gratification.

I'm truly amazed I've never come across this before.

We could talk all day about whether this story is true or not, or about the safety of doing things like this, but I'll leave that to you to work out yourself.

In this story a girl shoves rotting meat covered in maggots into her pussy while in a dumpster.

There's a really strange dichotomy occurring where Blowfly Girl is deeply repulsed by what she is doing, but she is also deeply aroused. I do feel some kinship to her. Sometimes, for me, repulsion or terror and arousal are very closely married ideas. I think, really, sometimes our strong emotions can warp into arousal. It's similar, in principle, to when you're so upset that you just start laughing.

A few quotes from this are deeply evocative to me though and I'd like to highlight them here.

- "Holding myself up against the side of the dumpster, I threw up. Ever vomited while you were horny? It's weird." - "I felt so filthy, so disgusting, like I'd turned myself into some low, depraved sort of beast. And that made me so incredibly hot" - "that I'd stuffed the most intimate part of myself with these things that were too disgusting to even touch without gloves. And that I was totally getting off on it." -"Other girls have babies but I give birth to decay and filth"

I will admit. As I read it grew on me a little. I really do see where she's coming from.

There's a point where she's seemingly in an altered state, feverish and sick and delirious, and completely consumed by the rot inside of her and the arousal.

I do think, objectively, this story is erotic. It did make some awful excitement twist in my chest. Her desperation to have them inside of her, the degradation she feels while also feeling a deep fondness for her maggots. There is something appealing about loving the parasite inside of you.

However, I do have some issues with things that get too close to gross-out content. This threads the line so hard, I'm genuinely torn.

I'll give it a 5/10 because the mixed feelings I have on it are a little confusing.

Either way, I hope Blowfly Girl is living her best life, I hope she's being safe and I hope she's still living her truth out there.

[bonefall]

how?? do the clans harvest mouse bile?? does mouse bile actually work against fleas??

IT. DOES. NOT.

It's actually a harmful adaptation of a bad home "remedy" for removing ticks. It's the "Nail Polish Remover Trick" you might be familiar with, where you're told to dab ticks with something acrid to make them drop off.

PLEASE do not do this. I have family who caught the red meat allergen AND lyme disease from lone star ticks. This method is more likely to infect you as the stressed-out arachnid vomits blood back into you. Please please please do not do this.

The best way to remove a tick is by getting tweezers and pulling it up by the HEAD. Pulling the body is likely to leave its gross mouth in you. If you have no tweezers, get as far down with your nails as you can. Pull the head out.

But no, you wouldn't even be able to collect that much mouse bile, and mouse bile isn't even as unpleasant to ticks as nail polish remover is. It's completely bogus from top to bottom.

(This is a really common misconception, btw. The nail polish remover thing.)

[which-item-poll]

[hatsampixie]

Sorry Pomni..

Never thought I'd be drawing Gummy Worm parasites.. but here we are. (And this is coming from someone who has a MAJOR phobia of 'em.. seriously, I get panic attacks.)

Hopefully this is the first and last time I draw parasites. I apologize to anyone who got jumpscared by this.

[regretevator-confessions]

gnarpy has tapeworms

.

[bionicboxes]

more Enderman thoughts. I just think they’re neat! 

[sparkycinnamon]

the fungus 🧡

(again this is probably not the canon ending for this au just a possible thing that could happen to her)