They're surprisingly common

Important note: The Blighttown leeches aren't slugs. Thanks of course to Lance, for letting me use the hollow slugs footage. Alongside all the slugs, there are also quite a few slug-adjacent creatures, especially snails, which would add to the ranks if you counted all of them as well. It seems like not every Phantasm is a slug either, with some looking more like sea butterflies or other strange aquatic creatures, but slugs apparently tend to be found wherever the Great Ones have tread.

I can picture Miyazaki holding a slug saying "I just think they're neat".

Man I do love my slug likes, Elden Slug, Slugborne, Dark Slugs, and Demon Slugs.

The furtive slug, so easily forgotten

Really interesting thing about those slugs in Elden Ring where their eyestalks are replaced by parasitic worms; That also happens in real life! The parasite is called Leucochloridium, and their preferred hosts are in the mollusk family, such as slugs and snails, which they use to get eaten by birds to reproduce! There is a bunch of different types of them and they vary in color a lot. The most well known coloring is a bright green with a red tip, and you can see one of these guy in the opening of Chainsawman!

Holy moly that unused DS3 slug is insane!

Another entry to the Souls bingo, next to: - curse - disgraced kings - giants being oppressed - barefoot priestesses - morphing into dragons which causes horrible consequences - status quo relying on death of a group of demiurgic entities - "it's not a glitch but a misunderstood mechanic" - bells - gargoyles - ancient civilizations going extinct - magical feminine boys - king's right hand being a crazy magician-scientist - timeline and space falling apart - dogs - funny NPC with horrible future - hardest boss being a warrior woman who wants to be alone - easy boss with sad backstory - best boss being a DLC addition - drinking from magical flasks - moonlight sword

I can't believe Zullie made a whole video just for me.

An inspiration could be that Japan used to suffer from slug based parasites back in the days. But sometimes in the -20 -30 they had a big campaign to get rid of them by diking out wetlands. This in combination with anti-parasite medicines like Ivermectin managed to pretty much clear the island of these parasites and the disease they caused. But they are still remembered in media and how disgusting they were.

Confirmed salt shaker weapon for shadow of the erdtree DLC

Bloodborne's use of slugs and squids as an indicator of cosmic awareness is interesting. Almost as if "ascending" to a higher plane of existence like in one ending, also induces a "reset" on your evolutionary path.

I wonder if, at least in regards to Bloodborne, it has any relation to a particular old theory from the 1850s that mollusks were telepathic, forming a permanent mental connection through fluids excreted when mating. Seems to line up well with Bloodborne's own themes. As a side note, that same theory also inspired the transponder snails from One Piece.

0:30 you could also possibly count the Overgrown Mealworms in AC6.

Those luminescent slugs in Demon's Souls exist solely to trip you up so that a floating orb of C4 can detonate on top of you.

Armored Core 6 has the big Coral Mealworms too, which feel like they fit in to this trend nicely

That "Mound of Hollows" slug model looks extremely similar, if not outright identical, to the Corpse Bucket enemies in Yahar'gul from Bloodborne.

This episode is for RKG and the rest of my fellow slugs.

2:34 This actually seems to quite closely resemble the 'Cramped Casket' enemy found in Yahar'Gul in Bloodborne

The slugs and snails of Bloodborne are perhaps the most inventive use, I think, in how they pertain to an even more unusual symbol—the One Third of the Umbilical Cord. Oddly, the "umbilical cord" resembles an eye-laden cochlea, or the inner ear. "Cochlea" is a Greek word meaning "snail's shell;" the center of a snail's whorled shell is called the umbilicus. Sound plays an unusual role in Bloodborne's cosmology, particularly in the Research Hall, where "the cerebral patients imbibed water and listened for the howl of the sea." The most successful of these patients is St. Adeline, who marvels upon the "sticky sounds" indicating the presence of her guide. Later, she begins to see their voice as it "bends and bleeds," ultimately culminating in the Caryll rune, Milkweed, which transforms the Hunter into a nursery for phantasm slugs. (And of course, Caryll runes are themselves visual transcriptions of the Great Ones' "inhuman voices.") Shoutout also to V.II Snail being perhaps another reference to the inner ear, lol. As we know from the story trailer, Coral is administered into augmented humans' brains via the ear canal. Like the sticky whispers, Coral contains the voices of formless consciousnesses, who may serve as guides to those with whom they come into Contact. V.II Snail is himself an augmented human, the result of several generations of lethal experiments...

4:12 Whole squad vibin'