Is Webber capable of growing up?

[wefoij]

He's a spider boy fusion mutant thingy right? Maybe that permanently stunted his ability to grow. After all Spiders don't grow so why would he?

But then again, do spiders grow into Spider Queens? How does that work? Anyone understand Spider Queen biology?

Are the spider dens an organism instead of a nest built with webs? But Spider eggs are plural so no that's not it.

Will Webber grow into a Spider Queen Boy fusion?

He makes eggs out of spider glands. So are all spiders female? But only he is able to craft them. Is his spider half female? But one of Webber's quote refers to his spider half as a he. But it could be that Webber doesn't know the gender of his spider half.

Anyone know the answer to these questions?

[Cookie95]

He toggles between young and old more than Wanda does. Haven't you seen his white grandpa beard?

[wefoij]

Just now, Geo95 said:

He toggles between young and old more than Wanda does. Haven't you seen his white grandpa beard?

If he grows a beard, then that might signify that he's a full adult biologically. Because only full adults can grow beards so big. So that would mean that his current height is his max height because he grows a beard at his current height which means he is a full adult biologically.

I didn't notice that.

[-Variant]

3 minutes ago, wefoij said:

If he grows a beard, then that might signify that he's a full adult biologically. Because only full adults can grow beards so big. So that would mean that his current height is his max height because he grows a beard at his current height which means he is a full adult biologically.

I didn't notice that.

The beard is the spider half of him producing silk.
I don't imagine its a genuine biological beard. I just think its rather unfortunate placement as to where the spider's silk producer ended up.

[Cookie95]

2 minutes ago, -Variant said:

The beard is the spider half of him producing silk.
I don't imagine its a genuine biological beard. I just think its rather unfortunate placement as to where the spider's silk producer ended up.

Webber's face is spider butt confirmed

[wefoij]

1 minute ago, -Variant said:

The beard is the spider half of him producing silk.
I don't imagine its a genuine biological beard. I just think its rather unfortunate placement as to where the spider's silk producer ended up.

That's not it. Webs come out as a thread. Look at dangling spiders.

The fact that it takes a shape of a beard signifies he has a ton of openings that produce the silk. Which means his human half merged with his spider half and the aftermath is silk coming out of his face where a beard would on a human.

So its most definitely a beard.

Makes sense. The spider is a fully grown adult spider so after merging with the boy he's a full grown monster adult. Because boys don't grow beards yet this boy does so he's no longer a boy which means the fusion inherited the spider's biological age not the human's.

Unless spiders grow into spider queens. Do you know spider queen biology by any chance? Why do nests turn into queens?

[-Variant]

1 minute ago, Geo95 said:

Webber's face is spider butt confirmed

W-well... you're not... wrong.

[XKrulis]

18 minutes ago, Geo95 said:

Webber's face is spider butt confirmed

dude, ew, no

[TheMelonNinja]

Webber's beard has always been one of those "don't think about it too much" things for me, because there are several 'explanations' that get weirder than the last. 

[autumnsbeast]

Sometimes I think it's not a real beard, but more of a "spider spit" that falls from Webber's mouth and solidifies like a spider web.

[ShadowDuelist]

I think the queen itself is the nest and it grows legs and a face only after reaching tier 3, they move around only to spread their territory (specially if there are others nearby) and become a nest again. But it’s a living creature buried. Shattered spider show clearly the legs of the nest still moving.

The whole process of being a queen and moving around seems to be exhausting, so when they re-plant I’m unsure if they either die and plant an egg instead, or become an egg (for example some jellyfish can move back to earlier stages of their own growth) .
Queens can also poop eggs In the form of a nest, if there is none planted nearby.

This is now subjective but I like to think that spiders are probably just like “cells” of the queen itself, they come out as walking creatures, feed whatever they can, then when they come back they metabolically become part of the nest again. Like if they were digested in a way by the nest and share all the nutrients they got outside.

[HowlVoid]

9 hours ago, -Variant said:

W-well... you're not... wrong.

Mommy... where do baby spiders come from?

[Wardin25]

yes.

[Canis]

I believe that survivors in the Constant have their age paused, save for Wanda who exists outside of conventional time.(?) This explanation makes me the happiest since it explains why characters like Webber and Wendy don't show any signs of aging despite living for presumably thousands of days.

If this presumption is to be believed, then that means that constant-born entities would behave differently right? Well, why doesnt Wormwood grow? Why doesnt Wortox turn more and more gray? If survivors' bodies have their aging paused, why does Wilson grow hair? Why doesn't anyone else grow hair?

Game bad smh

[BezKa]

It's in the name. 

The Constant.

[wefoij]

16 minutes ago, Canis said:

I believe that survivors in the Constant have their age paused, save for Wanda who exists outside of conventional time.(?) This explanation makes me the happiest since it explains why characters like Webber and Wendy don't show any signs of aging despite living for presumably thousands of days.

If this presumption is to be believed, then that means that constant-born entities would behave differently right? Well, why doesnt Wormwood grow? Why doesnt Wortox turn more and more gray? If survivors' bodies have their aging paused, why does Wilson grow hair? Why doesn't anyone else grow hair?

Game bad smh

Wurt grows to a full merm. So everyone does age.

[Szczuku]

I believe that every survivor is affected by the same 'age-pause' that happens on the Nightmare Throne.

When Maxwell was freed he instantly turned into dust due to him spending 'an eternity' on the throne and all those years suddently catching up to him. And so I headcanon that if Wanda were to 'infect' other survivors with her unstable timestream they would instantly age and probably also turn into dust or at least decompose into bones for Warly to consume.

As for Constant-born survivors we can only assume that there's no reason to explain that in-game. After all there's probably many lore holes related to them.

Here's a good one for y'all: why doesn't Wurt drop fish morsel and frog legs upon death, disappear and then maybe possibly respawn from a random Merm House. 

[HowlVoid]

He will continue to develop and grow until he burst through his flesh cage. 

Its is written.

[minespatch]

16 hours ago, -Variant said:

W-well... you're not... wrong.

Also, be careful. LAdyD gave me a warning for talking about Pigman poop.

 

[ArubaroBeefalo]

8 hours ago, ShadowDuelist said:

Shattered spider show clearly the legs of the nest still moving.

im still waiting shattered spider queens...

[Mantispidae]

17 hours ago, wefoij said:

But then again, do spiders grow into Spider Queens? How does that work? Anyone understand Spider Queen biology?

Are the spider dens an organism instead of a nest built with webs? But Spider eggs are plural so no that's not it.

I'm gonna take a crack at that because speculative biology is my jam:

Constant spiders seem to follow eusociality, which consists of a single reproductive parent (Queen) and then non reproductive castes. We see the Queens actively produce new spiders, but also become a new nest- I would think the best explanation for that would be that the nests are likely both, with the original nest being an eggsac and one of those hatching into a new queen, which then grows out of the nest and moves to produce a new one. As for what happens to the adult queens who make the nest as they kinda just dissappear... the most realistic thing I can guess is Matriphagy, where the mother dies and the offspring eat her. Lots of spiders do that.

That said, if the spiders are eusocial, webber isn't fused with a queen, but with a small generic spider. Spiders also don't undergo metamorphosis like say, a butterfly would- adult spiders and spiderlings are nearly identical minus size and coloration. Caste systems however can produce wildly different characteristics within a single species (Hince queen bees being massive compared to their non-reproductive offspring) or it could be a case of sexual dimorphism if we assume its a male/female split.

And if we want to get REALLY technical- Spiders are two segmented animals (cephalothorax and abdomen) in real live while Constant spiders are single segmented. Traditionally all the organs and spinnerets are located on the abdomen, but on the constant the abdomen and cephalothorax are all one piece. So webber likely does produce silk from his head (resulting in the silk beard). However this also raises some questions about what happens to all the other spider organs, which is why we shouldn't try to figure out webber's biology. Otherwise webber has two different kinds of lungs and two different kinds of blood. A biological nightmare.

[wefoij]

2 hours ago, Mantispidae said:

I'm gonna take a crack at that because speculative biology is my jam:

Constant spiders seem to follow eusociality, which consists of a single reproductive parent (Queen) and then non reproductive castes. We see the Queens actively produce new spiders, but also become a new nest- I would think the best explanation for that would be that the nests are likely both, with the original nest being an eggsac and one of those hatching into a new queen, which then grows out of the nest and moves to produce a new one. As for what happens to the adult queens who make the nest as they kinda just dissappear... the most realistic thing I can guess is Matriphagy, where the mother dies and the offspring eat her. Lots of spiders do that.

That said, if the spiders are eusocial, webber isn't fused with a queen, but with a small generic spider. Spiders also don't undergo metamorphosis like say, a butterfly would- adult spiders and spiderlings are nearly identical minus size and coloration. Caste systems however can produce wildly different characteristics within a single species (Hince queen bees being massive compared to their non-reproductive offspring) or it could be a case of sexual dimorphism if we assume its a male/female split.

And if we want to get REALLY technical- Spiders are two segmented animals (cephalothorax and abdomen) in real live while Constant spiders are single segmented. Traditionally all the organs and spinnerets are located on the abdomen, but on the constant the abdomen and cephalothorax are all one piece. So webber likely does produce silk from his head (resulting in the silk beard). However this also raises some questions about what happens to all the other spider organs, which is why we shouldn't try to figure out webber's biology. Otherwise webber has two different kinds of lungs and two different kinds of blood. A biological nightmare.

Some eusocial species like some species of ants can have every worker turn into a queen. When one does though other workers detect it and they bite her and hold her still for a few days until her turning-into-a-queen process stops. I forgot the exact species name. Saw it in a documentary that covered a wide variety of ants, no chance for me to hunt it down.

According to the documentary these types of ants are less evolved and significantly worse in performance as the other species of ants whose workers don't have the ability to turn into queens.

[Notecja]

5 hours ago, Mantispidae said:

I'm gonna take a crack at that because speculative biology is my jam:

Constant spiders seem to follow eusociality, which consists of a single reproductive parent (Queen) and then non reproductive castes. We see the Queens actively produce new spiders, but also become a new nest- I would think the best explanation for that would be that the nests are likely both, with the original nest being an eggsac and one of those hatching into a new queen, which then grows out of the nest and moves to produce a new one. As for what happens to the adult queens who make the nest as they kinda just dissappear... the most realistic thing I can guess is Matriphagy, where the mother dies and the offspring eat her. Lots of spiders do that.

That said, if the spiders are eusocial, webber isn't fused with a queen, but with a small generic spider. Spiders also don't undergo metamorphosis like say, a butterfly would- adult spiders and spiderlings are nearly identical minus size and coloration. Caste systems however can produce wildly different characteristics within a single species (Hince queen bees being massive compared to their non-reproductive offspring) or it could be a case of sexual dimorphism if we assume its a male/female split.

And if we want to get REALLY technical- Spiders are two segmented animals (cephalothorax and abdomen) in real live while Constant spiders are single segmented. Traditionally all the organs and spinnerets are located on the abdomen, but on the constant the abdomen and cephalothorax are all one piece. So webber likely does produce silk from his head (resulting in the silk beard). However this also raises some questions about what happens to all the other spider organs, which is why we shouldn't try to figure out webber's biology. Otherwise webber has two different kinds of lungs and two different kinds of blood. A biological nightmare.

To this I can add that spiders normaly have quite slow metabolism (a tarantula I have can live up to 15 years), as they don't move much and their body temperature is room temperature... Is Webber hot or cold blooded? He doesn't look like slower metabolism... As spiders molt to grow, is Webber going to molt too? How many molt he could survive? In some species last male spider molt ends with some parts stuck and errr it's a horrible death... (I didn't sleep much last night so I have even more horrible thoughts...).

[ArubaroBeefalo]

constant spiders are like bees, but instead of doing holes in walls or wax dens they do silk dens, the queen can create haploid copies of herself.

My guess is that the den tier 1 egg contain eggs that hatch every night, new spiders that protects and improve the nest until one egg that contains a queen hatchs, this queen will be growing and for that she needs space (tier 2 and tier 3 dens being bigger) when is ready she goes out of the nest and create a new one with all the haploid eggs she has been producing, some of them queens, in the old nest will remain some queen egg. When the queen is old and has produce enough eggs she becomes a new den (basically she dies and let her body inside the egg to feed the new spiders

 

so each den is a sack of eggs with workers and warrior spiders, the workers helps develop the queen and the warriors do their thin

[CameoAppearance]

I think in order for Webber to be alive the human and spider components have to have fused together in such a way that everything works, however improbable that is. Maybe there was some continued metamorphosis after the spider swallowed the human, but another possibility is that Webber did eventually die from biological incompatibility after he entered the Constant and got rearranged into a more internally functional monstrosity when a survivor found his skull in singleplayer Reign of Giants and he got brought back to life. Either way, he's fine now!

I bet most of his organs are in between human and spider, rather than fully one or the other or one of each; he does apparently have two tongues according to the Lobster Bisque quote though, so I guess at least some of them are duplicated. His eyes are probably mostly human on the inside since he can't see in the dark, and he must have some amount of spiderness in his digestive system because eating monster meat doesn't bother him. He can probably molt his exoskeleton as many times as he needs for his human parts to finish growing. It's possible that he'll end up unusually short because of the strain, but maybe that won't be a problem after all and he'll grow to the size of an ordinary man or larger.

However, for this to matter he would have to escape the Constant, because the only children who get to grow up in it are the ones who were born there.* I go back and forth on whether I headcanon that player characters from Earth (besides Wanda, whose age is borked in the opposite way) have their age completely paused or if they do age but they reset to a 'save point' when they respawn, but either way Wendy, Webber and Walter are going to be stuck in childhood for a while yet.

I do think all spiders in the Constant are female in a strictly physical sense and the different types of spider are different castes like bees or ants, but I don't think this makes a big difference to Webber calling his spider half a he. The human half probably wouldn't notice unless someone pointed it out and just assumed the spider's a boy (I mean, he also nicknamed the Eye of Terror "Mr. Eyeball"), and the spider half doesn't understand why the words matter because spiders don't have their own language or any other genders to compare it to. I'm not sure whether there's any chance of him turning into a spider queen hybrid; the spider wasn't a queen beforehand, but maybe worker spiders can develop queen traits or fully turn into queens under certain circumstances, like those ants. It would explain why he can produce spider eggs, whether in the form of doing a spider biology thing to the severed glands that makes them develop into egg sacs or just... having the spider half lay some eggs.

*I admittedly don't have an in-universe explanation for why Wurt and Wilba don't get visibly older if you play them for several hundred days without dying or anything; all I can do is shrug and blame it on the game not having art or programming to implement regular, non-Wanda-related age progression.