#I’m straight up not having a good time

[an-ivy-covered-summer]

i— 😔😔😔

[overdramatic-tits]

[13phantom13angel13]

Hey y’all. I know I’m a bit late getting the sentence starters up and I apologize. I’m about to go into some personal details about myself that’ll explain it all so here we go.

I had two medical emergencies happen in my family within 24 hours of each other so I haven’t had time to write. In short, one of my children got hurt pretty badly (yes I have literal children) and literally the next day my grandmother was put in the hospital after being discovered unresponsive in her home. She was put into hospice this afternoon. She isn’t expected to live past the end of the week. My family is really going through it right now. I appreciate your patience while I go through this tough time with my family.

I love you guys and am grateful for you. Much love! ❤️

~Phantom

[paydencolours]

Situationships are the unpaid internships of the dating world. You don’t get anything that you’d expect and the only real ‘experience’ you usually get out of them is trauma

[teukiechicken]

2 nights in a row I had to wrangle all 4 cats into 1 bathroom and was told to take shelter because of tornado warnings. That was a work out because all but 1 HATES to be held and 1 hides under my bed all day and will not let you catch her. I’m covered in claw marks now but whatever. At least my cats are safe. I don’t care about me, I can get carried away by the tornado but my cats???? Don’t touch them Mother Nature or I will destroy you.

Also, still flooded and more flooding is happening now. Pray that my car is okay now that it’s parked on my LAWN and I didn’t ruin the engine moving it. My sisters car is possibly totaled due to a flooded engine. I hate it here.

[iboatedhere]

Hi! When are you going to drop the next chapter of secret service au ? No pressure at all I just really do love that fic and excited for the next chapter🩵💐

I feel like I have to finish chapter 4 before I post chapter 3 because I still have to write chapter 5 (even though it won’t be anywhere near the first 4 lengthwise) and I’m JUST coming down from a 3 day breakdown over it.

Thanks to @welcometololaland I have the part I was freaking out over mostly figured out but there are still future parts that are worrying me.

It’ll all get done but I don’t know when.

[wellhellotello]

Sometimes I just really want to stop existing.

[itendswithakiss]

They’re about to put the worst TA in my classroom. This guy doesn’t do his job and just stands in the doorway so he’s on camera the whole day. Doesn’t help track data, provide academic support, or help out in any way.

If I could quit, I would, but I can’t.

[rot-bag]

Ugh

[bxriles]

I’m sure that this is not a hot take and that a lot of people feel the same way but like…

The question “does it have spice?!🌶️🔥” makes me want to jump off a cliff. I’m out here looking for gothic book recommendations on Reddit, tumblr, and goodreads and WHY is this the first question so many people ask 😭

Look, I love erotica as much as the next person but come on. There have got to be other things that matter when recommending books or choosing to pick one up, my GOD.

[autumn0689]

My favorite manga panels in FMA is during when Mustang was blind and was looking so little and looking absolutely miserable. He looks so done in some panels and like he is one second away from having a breakdown in other panels.

[vendettapandav]

“Curly deserved better” “curly deserved so much more” “curly didn’t deserve what happened to him”

No no no no that’s the POINT. Curly is just as bad as Jimmy. He let so many of the giant red flags that tumbled out of Jimmy’s mouth slide. He was told multiple times about the abuse Jimmy was inflicting on Anya. He ignored Anya even when she pushed so far as to hide the gun on the ship bc she genuinely feared what Jimmy would do to her. Curly heard it all- saw it all- and he chose to do nothing. He had every opportunity to intervene before the crash but he didn’t. He chose not to. He blathered on and on about responsibility, about his willingness to do anything for his crew, but when they needed him most he did nothing. He just stood there and watched and let it happen.

And now he can’t do anything. He has lost the ability to make that choice. He physically can’t intervene now. His chance to change things and take responsibility has passed him by. Now, he has to just sit there and watch how the mask formed from all those red flags he so willfully ignored peels away and reveals the monster that was always there beside him. Now, he has to just sit there and watch as one by one, Jimmy manipulates and drives each and every one of the people that he swore up and down he would protect to the very edge, and kills them. Now, he just has to sit there and watch as Jimmy justifies each of his actions by blaming everyone else for the situation he put them in- the situation that Curly allowed him to put them in. He has to sit there and watch as Jimmy does everything in his power to create a palatable, sanitized narrative of what happened all so he can cover up what he was doing.

And Curly chose to stand there passively and allowed all of it until he physically didn’t have a choice anymore.

And in the end, Curly is the only one left to tell the story. The story of how it was all his responsibility, how he was supposed to do anything for his crew. And now, it’s all his fault because he couldn’t do just one thing. He has to live with that fact for the rest of his life. He has to live with the fact that his willful ignorance, his choice not to act, cost four people their lives. He will live with those physical and mental scars forever. But even worse, he has to live knowing that that’s the truth. And that in some cruel, twisted way, Jimmy was right.

The truth doesn’t really get rid of that awful taste in your mouth though, does it?

[ravenpureforever]

So guess who finally watched JJK

[chairofchaos]

them: is this the hill you want to die on?

me: no, but it’s where I’ll leave your corpse

[euthymiya]

This whole day I have just been yelled at by patients on the phone for long periods of time one after the other I’m at my limit truly

[fumifooms]

You’re the resident chilchuck expert, so I was wondering about it there’s any canon evidence that he did smoke or drink alcohol when the kids were younger. I always thought it was something he picked up due to the strain of long jobs, when the kids were already older, but you seem to think differently and I was wondering if there was anything in canon that made you think that way!

Now that you mention it I guess it’s true there’s no evidence he did. Smoking we literally only know he does at all because of one post-canon panel where he has a pipe, so no, maybe this stick-looking thing in the panel below too though, I’m not familiar with medieval blunts eh. We’ve only gotten one panel of him and his daughters interacting when he was younger so that’s not too insightful on that end, and every time we see him young and freckled it’s in a job context so again not really where we’d expect him to be drinking. The earliest proof (/heavy implication since we don’t see inside his cup I guess) is 3 years before canon when Laios hired him, where he’s at a bar, classily placed in front of all the bottles ✨

Yes alcohol is almost certainly a way through which he copes especially with stress, so if we go with the theory he started around when work got stressful, well… Chilchuck started working as a dungeon diver ~10 years ago so when he was ~19, making Mei, Fler and Puck ~6 and ~4 respectively, so from that draw the ‘stressful enough to start drinking’ line wherever. We don’t know what he did before that with any certainty, and it could be he did odd jobs, lived off mostly mutual aid and community work, or just focused on only raising the girls. Half-foots tend to be poor and I see a lot of that in Chilchuck specifically so I don’t think he could have afforded to not have some paying work though.

Alright, so then why do I think he did drink when the girls were younger?

I give a more complete rundown of the info we do have on his alcoholism & his family with panels and references + all the speculation I make from it here. But the most targeted and objective answer I can give is:

Of course there’s just very very little we know of Chilchuck’s life with his family, and I think that’s by design too. I think the details being up in the air is to allow more nuance of the topic, like, will trying to reconcile go well, is their relationship salvageable? We don’t know, because we don’t know. So the message of giving hope a chance even if it’s a long shot, that things could truly go either way, is more relevant, impactful and meta in that way. How long was he usually away for work travels into dungeons here and there? How did he act with them? All we can really do is "it’s likely that", it’s a game of which way we think it’s more implied. There’s no right and wrong answer, it’s all Marcille-like larping the events out.

My main reason for thinking he did is that his father died from overdrinking and Chilchuck is very aware of that. He mentions his death casually in the extra about their stance in alcohol and in his Adventurer’s Bible profile, etc. He acts towards the alcohol presumably the same way his father did: with abandon, uncaring for the health effects, probably happily too considering Chil says "dying doing something you love is a good way to go". Very nonchalant. So you see what I’m saying here right, wether he started early or late, his view of alcoholism is very influenced by what he saw of his father growing up, it’s something he’s always been aware of and saw in a mostly positive light, something that was inherited you could say. It’s something that was normalized to him from a young age. Regardless or where it goes from there I do think this part is pretty inarguable. If he views it positively and we know that in the present alcohol is his favorite food that he loveees, why would he have held out on it? Personally that all makes me think he started drinking very young, especially since I don’t think they limited alcohol to age as much as modern standards (and I mean, teen drinking is obviously still a thing). And here you could argue, maybe his father only started being more alcoholic later when Chilchuck moved out, or something! And to that there’s nothing I can say except I think that’s a strained theory, and that Chil might even have largely cut contact with his family after moving out (since he and siblings are listed as almost strangers and he doesn’t seem to have much emotional attachment to his parents, but also we know he rents out his place to "a relative"), but it’s true we have no evidence. "I’ve picked up the same unhealthy substance abuse as my father haha! No big deal right haha" repeated several times to me just reeks of intergenerational trauma, & the alcoholism gene as they call it. Like effortless sliding into drinking as if it’s second nature, it’s natural after all, it’s normal after all, it just makes sense, it makes you feel good and that’s what matters.

BUT from my interpretation then we have a whole other layer: Alcohol is of course not all bad always. I think he’s always liked alcohol and drank it on occasion and it brought him joy etc etc, but I think here the implication in the question is, how much effect did his drinking have on the family relations and how early? And that isn’t so much about when him drinking started but when the alcoholism started. Addiction is defined by a habitual need, that has negative effects from filling that need (physical, psychological, social, etc) and negative effects from withdrawal. If Chilchuck drinks to cope and he can’t not cope without it, that’s addiction, if it affects his relationships, if it’s a need he has, it’s addiction. Addiction can be very insidious or look very casual, and how much people around the person are affected by it is case by case. Cheerful drunks can be sooo annoying and uncomfortable though let me tell you. Drunks are drunks. And this sounds harsh, but even if people around them don’t mind drunks it’ll still have some effects here and there, living with one can be such a challenge, ily drunks good luck with everything much like Chilchuck you deserve good things 🫡　

Ok so with the dad thing and the "ok well maybe he’s always drunk casually but it grew worse with time around when he started working as a dungeon diver" precision made, the other bit of info we have that can inform this is that Chilchuck is on a harsh diet and that alcohol is a hunger suppressant. We know Chilchuck "used to be fine not eating for two days", that literally on screen to quench his hunger so it doesn’t keep him awake he goes to drink water, drinking is his instinct to hunger. Again alcohol is a hunger suppressant and if you want info on that the internet has a lot of research and anecdotes about it. He diets to be light enough to not trigger traps, so it’s something he’d have started after dungeon diving most likely. Between the stress and the diet, yes it’s extremely likely he started going harder on alcohol after he started working in dungeons. There’s arguments on wether two days without eating is less bad for half-foots than humans, but apart from smaller portions there’s nothing that indicates half-foots should get less than 3 meals a day. They need less food but that’s because their bodies are smaller: the need is proportional to the body, not smaller than others’ races, the % of need is similar even if the kg amount of food isn’t. There’s also a popular headcanon with support basis that half-foots run hot and have a faster heartrate and whatnot, and that points towards a faster metabolism rather than a slower one: a bigger need for eating rather than a smaller one. He has the same bmi, 18, as Mickbell, but perhaps because Chil is much taller he’s less intensely visibly underweight with ribs showing than Mick during the bath extra, it’s most apparent when he becomes tallman.

Alcohol is something so important and omnipresent in his character that I have trouble believing it’s something that was part of only a small fraction of his life. It’s his immediate go-to, his no-brainer solution to a good time, I’ve sort of always assumed especially after looking at his family that it’s something he discovered decently young. Like he just acts like someone who’s always had alcohol to fall back on and started young idk. Alcohol is one of his 5 keywords. Alcoholism is very ingrained into his world view and life, his "it doesn’t matter" stance his ‘work hard play hard’ mentality his idea that the world is harsh so you get relief where you can, so it just makes sense to me that it’s always been in his life, if not actively then at least looming.

So yes, in summary, my take: Alcohol was always something he wholly enjoyed to an unwise level, but it could have been considered casual until he started working into dungeons and his need for it on a regular basis intensified. Alcohol has always had positive association to him as far as we see, so when it started being a problem he didn’t see it as such. To quote him, "I drink anytime I get the opportunity to". Why always? Approval of father’s alcoholism. Why alcoholism at all? Diet + stress & coping mechanism & emotional stunting + relationship issues, and she decided she had enough after they went out for drinks.

Conclusion

Chilchuck having drunk from a young age makes sense to me and it’s the strongest narrative angle I see on the table, but that’s objectively a me opinion, yes! There’s no evidence, moreso there’s canon basis and supporting info, but it’s all very left up to interpretation. I’ve made my own interpretations of things from the scraps we see, like everyone else making Chilwife and daughters content. Wether you have a stance on the topic or prefer to leave it vague in your takes, it’ll be a matter of what you think makes most sense, or what you’d rather believe I suppose (which is literally fine)

There’s a lot of subjectivity in even just setting up causal links like you probably noticed during this and I was careful with my word choices, because we’re just extrapolating from what we see and unless Kui states it explicitly from a reliable mouth all we can do is have informed opinions on most things. This particular interpretation is influenced by other details I’ve come to form about my interpretation of Chilchuck too, the more psychological and emotional sides of him and the timeline and how his marriage even happened, unplanned pregnancy imo. Like I hope you see what I mean, this wasn’t supposed to be a speculation post just a quick simple answer but there’s sort of just no other and concise but complete way with the subjectivity nuance to put "maybe it could be yes because of this but maybe it could be no because of this" haha

Edit: Wait the phrasing on this… Interesting. "In recent years"— This does imply that if not just his alcohol consumption increasing then the diversity and quality of it did, so either he indeed did start drinking more (not necessarily meaning he didn’t drink before) assumedly because of his wife leaving, or he started drinking other/more different kinds of alcohol maybe due to the union he formed + his experience gave him greater salary than he had previously (and no wife and family to provide money for), a mix of both perhaps.