Meanwhile IMO toxoplasma - like, literal toxoplasma, the symbiotic cat disease - is delightful and terrifying evidence that we're living in some kind of fantasy setting. Like, crazy cat ladies? Real biological thing, not just a quaint cultural trope! Those ancient superstitions about cats being divine, demonic, otherworldly, evil spirits, etc? I think cats are cute and I don't blame them as individuals obviously but those ancients really were onto something about them! One of our two most beloved pet species isn't actually a domesticated animal, it's a highly-adapted brood parasite that stumbled upon a strategy of acting like a domesticated animal, and maximizing "cute" in an era before "cute" was even legible, "meowing" as a superstimulus versions of human infant cries. They're obligate carnivores, but also sadists who will overhunt as much as they possibly can as a form of play - and a significant fraction of human insanity (particularly bipolar, schizophrenia, that end of things) is a result of a brain-targeting disease they all carry, which has infected about a third of humans. The disease is frankly like a less dramatic version of cordyceps - it originally adapted to target brains so that it could confuse mice into getting eaten by cats, and this proved such a boon for cats that at this point you could practically think of the toxoplasma species as an extension of the cat species. It clearly has some (subtler) effect on humans, too, and I wouldn't be surprised if it helped cats with the brood parasite routine, if it's imposing some kind of "like cats now" symptom that manifests in a brain the size of a mouse as "lose all survival instincts and run up to a cat" while manifesting in a human brain as "be more inclined to adopt a cat as a pet". Anyway it's straight-up midichlorians shit and I love it. Cats have magic microbes and they're a curse on humanity, all of the joking "dogs are good and cats are evil" mythology from my childhood's pop culture was so much righter than it knew