#Half of heart

[stephpanda]

Half of heart

[descaperoom]

Setengah Hati

Gambar oleh ManariKharts di turbosquid.com

Kalau hanya baca judul dan melihat gambarnya saja, kalian mungkin mengira tulisan ini berkaitan dengan lagu cinta atau patah hati. Tapi, tulisan ini tidak ada kaitannya dengan itu. Kenyataannya, setengah hati bukan cuma urusan percintaan aja loh! Dalam kehidupan kita sehari-hari, pasti ada saja hal yang kita lakukan tapi kita tidak sepenuhnya ingin melakukan hal itu. Nah, itu juga bisa disebut setengah hati. Sebetulnya, melakukan sesuatu tidak sepenuh hati seringkali berdampak tidak baik untuk diri kita sendiri. Seperti ketika belajar, kalau tidak sepenuh hati pasti sulit mengerti dan buat pusing sampai uring-uringan sendiri. Atau ketika harus memasak tapi malas melakukannya, bisa saja rasa masakannya jadi tidak karuan.

Lantas, kenapa sih kita masih mau melakukan hal itu meski cuma setengah hati? Jawabannya mungkin beragam. Tapi biasanya alasan utamanya adalah tanggung jawab. Kalau sudah bicara soal tanggung jawab, kita seolah tidak punya pilihan lain. Apa yang sudah menjadi tanggung jawab kita, mau tidak mau pasti kita kerjakan. Paling paling, hasilnya tidak semaksimal jika kita melakukannya sepenuh hati.

"Sudah tahu hasilnya mungkin tidak maksimal karena dilakukan setengah hati, kok masih tetap dikerjakan?" Pertanyaan itu pasti melintas di pikiran kalian kan? Meskl sebagian dari kita mungkin beranggapan lebih baik tidak melakukannya sama sekali kalau cuma setengah hati. Tapi sebagian lainnya mungkin beranggapan lebih baik dilakukan setengah hati daripada tidak dilakukan sama sekali.

Perihal melakukan sesuatu dengan setengah hati, kita tidak bisa saling berargumen karena yang baik untuk diri sendiri belum tentu baik untuk orang lain. Maka perlu diingat bahwa kita sendirilah yang harus menyadari, apakah yang kita lakukan akan berdampak baik pada kita atau tidak sehingga nantinya bisa menentukan sendiri akan melakukannya sepenuh hati atau tidak.

[gothamitee]

What will you be tonight? That’s the question

[goldensunset]

people who go through the main tags of big and tumultuous fandoms looking for new fresh good posts to reblog are essential to any circle. they’re like true hunter gatherers leaving the safety of settlement and braving the unknown wilderness to find food for the flock. they risk their lives every day and will come back with a few scratches at best and severe psychological damage at worst

[rynli]

officer now is not the time to obsess about your sexuality

[shadowtraveled]

"mithrun is the only real monsterfucker in dungeon meshi" is objectively the funniest bit you can get out of his everything, but in all seriousness i think his attraction to his love interest is deliberately overstated—and that makes sense, because romantic jealousy is a classic and digestible motive, which is explicitly what kabru was aiming for in condensing mithrun's backstory, and also because until chapter 94, mithrun wasn't willing to admit to the true nature of his desires.

but because romantic envy is both classic and digestible, it probably isn’t a unique enough or complicated enough desire to tempt a demon’s appetite. mithrun’s wish, as far as we can figure from kabru’s reduced retelling, was to have a life in which he had never become one of the canaries, and that carries like 3857 implications and desires within it. that’s delicious. his love interest acts as sort of a red herring to his motivation for making it, though. (side note: i'm saying "love interest" here because, keeping in mind that i barely speak japanese on a good day anymore, "想い人" is something i'd usually take as just kind of an old-fashioned and romantic way to refer to a lover, but in context i wonder if both the connotation of yearning and the vagueness are intentional, and i think this phrasing gets those aspects of it more effectively. anyway.)

mithrun considered his love interest to be untrustworthy. there was a minute where i thought that comment might be about a similar-looking elf (yugin, one of his squad members), but comparing the two…

the "sketchy" arrow is definitely referring to the elf we know as his love interest—the bangs go toward her right, she only has the one forehead ornament, and, most notably, her ears aren't notched.

every time she’s given a full-body depiction in his dungeon, she’s drawn as a chimera, with the body of a snake from the waist down. (side note: the “what if a dungeon has chimeras before reaching level 4?”/“then the dungeon lord is unstable” exchange just being mithrun grilling his past self alive is so funny. he’s so. but anyway) there are a couple things about this.

first, the snake part of the chimera appears to be modeled after some species of coral snake mimic

which, in the biology-for-fun manga, i… doubt is a coincidence, especially with the added context of the “untrustworthy” comment. the dungeon’s conjured illusion of mithrun’s love interest was a harmless copycat of a venomous original. for whatever reason, he felt this person was a threat and made up a "safe" version of her to be in a relationship with, and while it’s definitely possible to be attracted to or even love someone you find to be toxic and/or intimidating, when you take that into consideration alongside the configuration of her body, you get some interesting implications.

which brings us to our second point: if we assume that mithrun was not in fact fucking a snake, then sexual attraction, at least, was so far removed from his idea of a relationship with this person that he did not even bother to keep her dungeon copy human enough to maintain the illusion of the option of a sexual relationship. this is somewhat echoed in the depictions of their interactions, which also imply a frankly unexpected romantic distance. she kisses his cheek and he doesn't seem to react; she's at the edge of a narrow bed with only one set of pillows, on top of his blankets while he's underneath them.

the kiss is particularly interesting because it seems to contrast the text. kabru's narration tells us this was everything mithrun could have asked for, but mithrun is there looking unreadable to pensive, likely because this is right before the panel that makes it clear things in the dungeon are beginning to go wrong.

walking through this backwards for a minute, we have the physical barrier of his bedding and the spatial separation inherent in a bed made for one person, the emotional barrier of his mounting anxiety getting in the way of his ability to enjoy the affection he sought, and... the snake, which historically carries the connotation of temptation, yes, but also mistrust, barring physical intimacy. okay. ok. if a dungeon reflects the mentality of its lord, all of this might suggest that mithrun was not able to have any real desire for a relationship with this person. his unwillingness to be vulnerable or let another person in was insurmountable. but in that case, why was she such a focal point that she remained to the end, after his dungeon had stopped creating iterations of his friends to come and visit him? why would he get so upset over her meeting with his brother that he became lord of a dungeon about it?

well. mithrun's brother was also interested in her, probably genuinely. and mithrun had to win.

you have an older brother who your parents completely ignore, probably in part because he is chronically ill/disabled and almost definitely in part because he received a ton of recessive traits that resulted in rumors that he was an illegitimate child. you are aware, most likely because those same parents fucking told you, that you actually are an illegitimate child. but they keep you around because you had the good fortune of looking just like your mother. what can that possibly teach you but that you, like your brother, are disposable?

it's utterly unsurprising that mithrun, under these circumstances, developed a pathological need to be better than everyone around him. people don't keep you otherwise. i'd argue this is also why he says he looked down on everyone he knew while milsiril claims his dungeon reeked of feelings of inferiority—he sought out people's worst traits and prioritized them in his mind to protect his already extremely fragile sense of self-worth, and all the while he tried to be as likable and high-performing as he possibly could be. his parents disposed of him anyway, but even then he tried to keep up the performance. he was kind to everyone. he never once lost to a dungeon.

when he saw his "love interest" meeting up with his brother, what he saw was himself being replaced by a person his parents had always treated as worthless, and if that was what they thought of the child they'd kept, what value could anyone possibly see in the bastard they'd given away to die? mithrun and kabru tell the story like he wanted to win this unnamed elf's heart, but it was never about being with her. it was about cementing his worth, proving that he didn't deserve to be thrown away.

and so it's particularly cruel that his demon discarded him, too. but maybe it's also particularly gentle that, in the end, there was someone who refused to even consider giving up on him.

kui laid it out in three panels better than i could hope to.

yeah. it's love. you wanted to be loved, even when the only way you were able to understand it was through the desire to be wanted, and you wanted that so badly that the idea of being consumed felt like the promise of finally mattering to someone.

[ashoss]

my beautiful wife kori and her guy

[princetenkoo]

Everything Was Grey (2024)

[mournfulroses]

Hala Alyan, from The Moon That Turns You Back: Poems; "Half-Life in Exile,

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

I absolutely rushed to draw this as soon as I saw this post by the lovely @rosekasa

[hinamie]

shhhh

[clouvu]

Nothing in the world belongs to me But my love, mine, all mine

[prideprejudce]

I am truly hoping that daeron is the spitting image of alicent. not only will it make complete sense for him to be shipped away from kings landing after his birth because his very appearance goes against otto's usurping propaganda that alicent's kids are "true targaryens" while rhaenyra's are "half breed strong boys" but alicent having to look in the face of the only normal child in the family surrounded by monsters for brothers and an already half gone sister and seeing his face of disgust and fright and it's her face. it's her face staring right back at her

[v-poreons]

Join us and die! Join us and die! Join us and die!

She demanded I draw her it was a physical need LOL

Progress gif + flat colors under the cut 😳

[starry-bi-sky]

on a completely separate note; shizun luo binghe with a disciple shen yuan who fell into the abyss??? *thinks about LBH canonically stealing SQQ's corpse for 5 years* he'd hallucinate i think. like, like visual and audial hallucinations.

Keeps thinking he's seeing SQQ in the corner of his eyes, or wandering between the trees, amongst a group of disciples. Thinks he hears him calling for him, but its just the wind or another disciple.

Gets Xiu Ya reforged but patently fucking refuses to make a sword mound. Because his disciple Is Not Dead :))) There was No Body. He's Not Dead. And If You keep Insisting That He Is, He's Gonna Skewer You :). He's holding onto Xiu Ya so he can return his most favored disciple's sword when he returns. It's on his hip right next to Zheng Yang where it's supposed to be.

Also this motherfucker?? does not sleep btw. He has the image of SQQ, wide eyed and hysterical and standing at the mouth of the abyss burned into his fucking eyelids. Can't use the dreamscape to escape it either because he keeps trying to save him and either he does and it's an incredibly cruel trick to wake up to, or he doesn't and he gets his heart broken in several different pieces again.

There is no convincing this man that Shen Qingqiu is dead. Absolutely nothing at all. He is buried so deep in denial that moles would be jealous of how deep he is. He keeps making tea for two in the bamboo house only to remember that it's just him. SQQ's fans are hiding everywhere, little reminders of his presence. He goes to wake up SQQ on the mornings he sleeps in-- only to find the room empty.

[pocket-dragon]

Oh to be a tiefling fresh out of Avernus, surrounded by gorgeous, older, elf-ish women.