#wild speculation

The pilgrims handling babies but also babies of their species

Wujing doesn't really count but I think he would be surprised if he met kiddos who are fish demons in a "why do I think they are cute"

Bajie will deny it but baby pigs are DELIGHTFUL to him, they tippy tap even if they are demon piglets so it's like extra cute

Ao lie PANICS at baby dragons same with Tripitaka, these two have never had to interact with a toddler

Wukong is the chillest about baby monkeys, like mom crying because the kid won't stop screaming and wukong just pops him on his shoulder and makes the kiddo burp and calm down to the joy of the mother

(dunno I am sleepy and thinking of pilgrims)

Honestly this begs some VERY interesting questions about "how much do you identify with the species whose body type you are in?" and dysmorphia and baked-in instincts and allll sorts of other fascinating topics re: the nature of yaoguai and especially yaoguai like Bajie and Wujing who started out as something different. And does it also apply to shapeshifting? Like, if Wukong is shapeshifted into a bird does he instinctively find baby birds cuter than he would otherwise??

I have no answers but many questions.

Okay, and some speculation. :D F'rinstance, since (most) fish notably do not have the instinct to care for their young, I think Wujing would be exempt from automatically finding the babies cute, but he might be able to, e.g., decide that that fish demon is ugly by fish demon standards whereas this one here is very appealing and quite the catch. (hehehe). (...sorry). And this would be a challenge for him to articulate; he never learned that specific colors and a particularly spiny set of fins are Good, he just vibes that.

Bajie is thrown into some confusion over how freaking cute he thinks piglets are, especially since I HC him as having the most dysmorphia, but is sort of reassured when Tripitaka also goes into raptures about the lil' round bellies and the tippy-tap toes. Piglets are just cute. Okay. HEY, then how come no one finds me cute, huh? Only answer: the ladies DO find me charming but are too modest to say so.

(All the other pilgrims: "No. Wrong takeaway entirely.")

I think you are 100% right that both Ao Lie and Tripitaka panic upon being presented with babies. Tripitaka for the obvious reasons: he has no idea what to do, it's so fragile, what if he drops it, what if it cries and everyone thinks he did something wrong, what is that smell. Ao Lie's got a different reason to be wary: he knows baby dragons are ferociously protected by their parents and so if there is a dragon baby here, Mama is not far away and will probably eviscerate you for standing too close.

Wukong of course is great with monkey babies and is hugely in demand as a babysitter on Mt Huaguo. He unfortunately makes the mistake of assuming he'll ALSO be great with human babies. They look pretty similar, they laugh when he pulls faces at them, anyway he is brilliant and will figure it out.

The specific society-or-hivemind of flies we've met is called the Lucilian Chorus, in a setting where magic is done almost entirely through song. Can the corpseflies perform yearningsong? What do corpseflies yearn for? Are any of the swarm dead and resumed? Would resuming a single fly even be meaningful, or would it be akin to resurrecting a clipped toenail?

And what makes this Chorus Lucilian? In the real world this would indicate some relation to the Roman poet/satirist/cavalryman Lucilius, but his works are so fragmentary that it's hard to say what this could mean if it's a reference - it could even be unrelated to the man and his work, and rather an attempt to anchor our idea of what a pest knight is like in the Roman equites instead of in the more popular medieval knight archetype. But of course presumably Lucilius never existed on the Big Man, so, what would the name "Lucilian Chorus" imply from an in-universe perspective? Was there a person named Lucilius - presumably from ~two thousand years ago in pseudo-Rome - who had some formative impact upon the Chorus that bears his name?

Also - pest knights, the willing hosts and intermediaries for corpsefly swarms, are portrayed as an old-fashioned order, apparently long-preceding the Conquest of the Dead. They're treated as an oddity and a joke, but their long existence implies an equally-long history of relations between humans and sapient corpseflies. What on the Man has that been like? Did humans ever attempt to establish rule over corpseflies, or vice versa? Have they gone to war?

Might they in the future?

Because of course, Cyshane is now ruled by the resumed dead, and its technology runs on corpse labor. Dead flesh used in technology must be significantly slower to rot than meat is in real life, and unpalatable to corpseflies, elsewise it would rot away much too quickly. Caul was sentenced to 17 years of postmortem labor, implying it's reasonable to expect a dimbox to last 17 years - and if corpseflies could nest in them, they would not last that long. So if anyone should have reason to hate and work against the necromantic turn of society it should be the corpseflies.

Aaron is terrified it's caused by knocking him out and/or carbon monoxide!

Robert is convinced it's just a migraine!

Robert lying about how bad the blindness is so that Aaron stops worrying, putting himself in more danger at the farm!

With the information gained from the Loudwire interview we now expect the new concert movie sometime in 2027. So . . . what do we think will be happening December 2026, when Frater meets Papa?

Even more specifically they’re said to grow in the Garden of Dreaming/Forgetting where people go to purge their bad memories (there’s a short story about Ahri attempting to do this).

So now I’m in love with the idea that Jinx is going to Ionia to try to find this garden to cleanse herself of all her traumatic memories.