@cubecrow -

aaaaarrrghh HOW did I miss the "deeply sketchy and abusive guy manipulating things from the moon" imagery?

Some thoughts on nymphs and their animal/alien references:

I remember reading that the chestburster scene in "Alien" was the writers deliberately playing on the idea of "male pregnancy as body horror". Fortunately for my stomach, I doubt nymphs are parasitoids - the name evokes the young of non-holometabolous insects such as dragonflies, crickets or mayflies, which don't have maggot-like larvae. Instead, they're like fully-formed insects with no wings or genitals, which they gain when they shed their skins for the last time. ("The grand metamorphisis awaits....") Many insect nypmhs are active underwater predators.

Although.... Hymenoptera (the wasps, bees, ants and sawflies) are holometabolous insects that keep evolving the same two unusual lifestyles over and over again. Some of them are hyper-social beings with a breeding Queen: a Sisterhood of sterile Workers; and a brief flowering of horny, disposable male Drones. Others get really, really into the parasitoid thing, like the ichneumon wasps that inspired "Alien". There are hyperparasitoids that lay their eggs inside the eggs of other wasps that are already inside very unfortunate caterpillars and now I'm just nerding about insects, sorry, I got distracted. Some suggestive echoes of AA's little speech there, though.

The jaw thing in "Alien" is based on eels, which are freaky damn fish. Eel shoots out of a hole to grab you, then pharangeal jaws shoot out of the eel to grab you even faster. Dragonflies (and dragonfly nymphs) can do a similar trick: they basically have a prehensile upper lip that can shoot out and grab things. I read a science fiction novel once where somebody got their head yoinked off by a humanoid dragonfly descendant - the image kind of stuck with me.

Cephalopods: oops, more disturbing parenthood imagery there. Despite their formidable brains, squid, octopus and cuttlefish are short-lived. They mate once, then it's game over. The males skulk off to die in a hole somewhere; the females stop eating and guard the eggs whilst slowly starving to death. Maybe the entire Catacomplex is full of starving mother nymphs. There's a cheery thought.