One funny thing about Worm is that you can get basically to the end of the book before realizing that there’s a titular Worm, that the incredibly vague title is actually referring to a specific guy in the cast. It’s very likely you’ll have stopped thinking about this by the time it comes up, because the title’s broad thematic link to Taylor’s situation becomes obvious even before Cherish describes her with the extended worm metaphor. If you really wanted to I guess you could also interpret the title as, like, a rot-of-society thing, worms eating away at the foundation, or an infiltration thing, Taylor worming her way into various groups and situations, putting herself in a position where she has the leverage to make people do what she wants. A Multifaceted title, to be sure. But there is, also, there is very much a Worm. There is a literal Worm, and this Worm is behind everything bad that happened, which of course sounds like a shitpost in the vein of the “morbin’ all over everything” jokes. You thought your society would collapse due to the preponderance of heavily-traumatized Nihilists gaining city-leveling superpowers, but it was I, The Worm.
“Take that, you worm!”
i mean it’s not like the worm was unrelated to the plague of heavily traumatised people with city-levelling powers and the associated risk of societal collapse
“at the end of Worm, when they fight the worm” sounds like a joke but isn’t
