As someone who plays Dark Urge, I see injecting tadpoles into my character's brain as a way to fill the damaged parts of it to become whole again and activate its neurons. After all the tadpole is beneficial to our character in more ways that one, even giving us a look into other people's memories and expanding our horizons.
That's why I mentioned that I'm glad Larian did not go the "alien = bad" cliche and punish us, but instead left it to us as a personal roleplay choice whether to use it or not. As to me it's a form of symbiosis, a way to become the best of both worlds.
- The issue simply is that even when Larian tried misguiding the player into thinking about "punishment" and "alien = evil" thing in Early Access, it backfired badly because people were entirely avoiding that part of the story. Despite the clues clearly telling it's not negative at all, 99% of people were convinced that "Daisy" was just an evil tadpole trick or the Absolute herself.
- Even now it's having a similar effect when the failed attempts to extract it are punished, so you occasionally get a dude on Steam forums screaming his lungs out at Larian for not slapping them with a massive warning about consequences during procedures
It's just never going to work and I do not think there need to be any meaningful consequences for regular tadpoles, otherwise it's just going to be a repeat of history. Not to mention it would not at all align with the Guardian's lore & power because they are the reason why we get to use the tadpoles in the first place. They're here to enhance us and having any consequences to using it would undermine the Guardian as a character, along with the Prism.
The true consequence is the giga-tadpole.
