Everybody loves the goofy glowing worm guy coming in Elden Ring's DLC, but we're also terrified something bad will happen to him

There were many notable new characters in Shadow of the Erdtree's first trailer: future controller-snapping megaboss Messmer, zombie Lion Dance guy, gross bisected and impaled old dude, and, of course, the Wicker Man. The true people's champion, however, seems to have been squirreled away in supplemental promo screenshots⁠—I'm talking about the little worm guy.

Blue and ethereal, it seems to occupy the same zone of the Realm of Shadow as the duel between a samurai and a dervish shown part way through the trailer. At the end of its wrinkly body is a small, surprised face like a wizened Shy Guy, with two diminutive arms sprouting out of its trunk, wildly out of proportion to the rest of its body.

Glow Boi. from r/Eldenring

The long and short of it is that the worm is extremely cute and weird, inspiring adoration from all and sundry. It doesn't show up on the Shadow of the Erdtree trailer, official website, or Steam page, but rather was shared in a bundle of promo images that went out to some outlets and influencers like VaatiVidya.

I have already found Twitter and the Elden Ring subreddit festooned with expressions of love and support for the mysterious worm. Demon's Souls modder and dataminer Thens echoed that question hanging between every modern couple: "Would u still love me if I was a worm?" Given the worm in question, I can't imagine any doubt.

Auroraunity_ on Twitter and artjoey on Reddit have already produced fan art of the worm, while Alltheheroes on Reddit posits a lore explanation for the worm's resemblance to the real life Mexican Mole Lizard⁠—it ties into item descriptions for the Crucible Knights' gear and spells, if you were wondering. Others, like sawblll52 and Femboy_Ghost on Reddit or werupz on Twitter were content to express their admiration and curiosity regarding the noble beast.

All of this joy and excitement has an undercurrent of melancholy though: what kinds of horrible things could happen to the beautiful worm, given the notoriously tragic storytelling favored by FromSoftware? Is the worm a mere field enemy to be avoided or killed? Does it have a gut-wrenching quest arc like the similarly adorable Boc the Seamster in the base game, as proposed by OwlScowling on Reddit? Will we team up with the worm and become comrades, only to see it fall to our enemies or have its hand forced against us like V.IV Rusty in Armored Core 6, a sort of "Steel Haze Worm" scenario?

Would you fight Spirit Noodle? from r/Eldenring

RiyaB1999 on Reddit paints these possibilities as the lone potential disappointment risked by SOTE, while others, like maczn, insist that a creature this cute could not be hostile. A few, however, have chosen to embrace the path of pain: Rojom and hunterslugdaddy have each provided an artistic take on a more hostile worm, the former as a boss fight, the latter as having a really jacked body hidden underground like those Digglet memes that get passed around every now and then.

We just won't know for sure until June 21. Until then, I can only see the speculation engine for worm guy continuing to overheat and strip its own gears, churning out new art and theories based on the true star of the DLC.