Ho Yay - Felix and Jake. Felix practically idolizes Jake, setting up friendship schedules and sleepovers, and sending him longing, little-more-than-platonic glances. Also, they crossdress as cute girls. And Felix? Well, he's VERY convincing.
Felix takes his disguises seriously, but that aside, Informed Ability about Felix is that aside from the previous Troop member, he had no friends at all, and that also explains why he wanted to trust Gus when Gus extended the hand of friendship.
Also between Felix and Gavin in "Welcome to the Jungle", between Jake and Lance in "Tentacle Face", and temporarily between Felix and Gus in "My Gus is Back".
Hayley and Cadence also have their share of it.
Narm - The vampsters (vampires crossed with hamsters). Case closed. Their evil lair even has a giant wheel for them to run in.
Oh, this show's chock full of it. One shining example is seen in the episode where Jake's little sister gets a Dragon as a pet. Long & short, she must say goodbye in the end. It's handled in a way that's supposed to be truly heartwarming...yet comes across as cheesy as an old 1990's flick.
Shelley Longpre is a disturbed young psychopath who enjoys torturing and murdering insects and other animals, including his mother's kitten. Taking advantage of the tapeworm infestation to enact his sick desires, Shelley tortures the infected Kent before killing him and gaslights Ephraim into mutilating himself in the belief he is infected, before burning him alive and attempting to kill the remaining members of the troop.
Dr. Clive Edgerton is a sociopathic geneticist who originally created the tapeworms as a potential weight loss aide, but secretly modified a strain of them into weapons of biological warfare for military weaponry agencies. He is completely unfazed and unmoved when studying the effects of the tapeworms on test animals that leave his coworker horrified and sobbing, tricks Tom Padgett into becoming Patient Zero and shows an utter lack remorse for the horrors that occurred as a result of his creations. He expounds on how humanity's capacity for love is its ultimate weakness, since (by his estimations) the desire to help infected loved ones will ensure that the tapeworms will keep being passed on to more people.
Harsher in Hindsight: A certain comedy routine has a man infested by a tapeworm, and he acts like a mother who backed out of an abortion at the last second. Shelley's Sanity Slippage has him behave much the same way towards his tapeworm colony.
Lets start with the books main antagonist, The Tapeworms. Genetically engineered bio weapons that can infest a host through just about any contact, and after infestation will split into two types, Devourers, which feed excessively on anything they can get their mandibles around, and Conquerers, which make their way up your spinal column and dig into your brain so that you’ll feel constantly hungry even as you waste away into nothing but skin and bones, after which they’ll burst out of your body and strangle you to death.
Shelley in general is this, being a sadistic creep who is sexually aroused by causing harm to other things, but probably the worst part about him is that no one actually suspects him of this until he decides to target people. He just kind of slips into everyone’s peripherals while occasionally stirring the pot for his own amusement. Then we get his reaction to getting infected, where he seems to go from rightly mortified at his impending death to entertaining a delusion that he can raise them as a father. It’s all depicted in as skin crawling a fashion as possible, especially when Newt and Max find him in the cave.
Ephraim's Sanity Slippage over the course of the story is a truly miserable sight to behold. After beating an infected Kent badly enough to cut open his own knuckles, Shelley plants the idea that he may have become infected himself into his mind, which leads him to become more standoffish and aggressive towards the others, escalating into a physical altercation that leaves Ephraim alone with Shelley giving him instructions on how to dig into his own flesh with a pocket knife to try and dig out the nonexistent worms, which results in him passing out from all the cuts he’s dug into himself. When he gets carried back to the cabin by Newt and Max, Shelley starts digging into his wounds before telling him that he needs to “burn them out.” The worst part is that Ephraim is thanking Shelley as he’s dousing himself in gasoline. It is a strong contender for the most disturbing scene in the whole book.
All of the violence against animals is depicted in laborious, nauseating detail, with the worst offender being the scene with the sea turtle.
The Woobie: All of the troop except for Shelley qualify. They’re stuck on an island with the possibility of starvation, dehydration, and interpersonal violence swimming openly around in the air, all while being well aware that those are the nicer options all while watching the navy sit there and do fuck all to help them. The gruesome, painful deaths many of them suffer are also completely bereft of any dignity, so they can’t even say they died well.
