(un?)fortunately, I have not! thank you so much for reading and saying this!

Ah! I hope you enjoy, man! Thank you so much!! I am, more or less, always at speculative explorations of grief, haha.

Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. (“It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.”)

I mean, you’re taking the work itself and the language choices seriously and challenging their meaning, kind of a dream for any writer to have that level of attention paid to their words!

Pseudo in the sense of “deceptively having the appearance or form of something but not being genuinely that thing”

For my taste this covers things like aesthetic and mechanistic similarities but I do not at all begrudge you for wanting a higher fidelity metaphor/description here.

This makes a lot of sense and is very interesting!

“Distant but inspiring” is probably the synthesis of our disagreement here, haha!

The phrase pseudo-science may very well disagree! As would this 2015 paper that makes this very analogy themselves! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25514435/

(Note: I am surprisingly conflict averse for someone whose primary love language is debate, so just saying out loud: enjoying this back and forth!)

As do i <3! Always appreciate insight, especially from a slime guy!! the "pseudo" in "pseudo-neuro-mycorrhizal" phrase is meant to apply to both words. and, yes, they do not rot! They do, however, consume the bacteria that grows in/around rotting things, which is why the story says they "love rot"!