#Musings (Hope)

[anxiety-banana]

hello i would like everyone to know that sometimes you can sob your eyes out and have an existential crisis one moment and then suddenly you're booking your driver's test and applying for jobs and crocheting a blanket and maybe life isn't so bad anymore!! maybe you can feel awful and fix your life anyway!! maybe you're allowed to be a wreck and still be good enough!! i am a full on adult and have avoided getting my license for years but now i'm finally doing it because i've grown around the fear!!!! the world didn't crash and burn when i was fifteen!! i did this for myself and i'm going to be okay!!

[buggachat]

something so fucked up about Chat Noir’s whole deal is that he is in a lot of ways Adrien playing a character. Like Adrien picked up his miraculous and was told he’d be a superhero so he was like “ok, time to act like a superhero!” and he lets himself have fun w it and play up the role and let loose and kind of just allow himself to be silly and goofy and have fun and for once in his life not care about performing Perfection™.

But. But none of the other characters KNOW THAT. So everyone just sees Chat Noir and is like “look at this guy’s ego. He’s so full of himself. Surely it’d be fair to knock him down a few pegs” without being aware of how few pegs he actually HAS. He’s like the “insecure character who overcompensates in ego” trope except he’s really not doing it unironically, he’s just having a fun LARP pretending to have self worth in his off-hours but nobody else is on the same page about it being a game and he refuses to tell them. He just dramatically pouts about it and lets them laugh and pretends like he’s not internalizing it and it is almost 3 am and my brain forced me to write this instead of sleeping I’m gonna take a melatonin

[contactlessdrivethru]

there is something unique and deeply special about monkey d luffy as a protagonist. he’s overwhelmingly ADORED by the fandom. he’s consistently the most or at least top 3 most popular characters in the whole series. peoples takes about him are gushingly positive. and that’s… really uncommon.

a LOT of fandoms i’ve witnessed or been in have a tendency to favor characters other than the main character. especially in anime. the main characters are often written as a blank slate for readers/watchers to project onto, but that makes them not as interesting and so they don’t get the fan attention.

but luffy is so far from that. and he’s ALWAYS been this way. we love him so much. he’s the heart of the story and the heart of the fandom in every single way. and i think that speaks to how well-written he is as a character. he’s fun and charming and complex and interesting and he makes us laugh and cry and cheer and hope and love. he’s able to inspire so much joy in people, both in his world but also in this one. and i think that’s really special. i feel so grateful to have found this story that means so much to me, and i’m so grateful that luffy exists.

[heybaetae]

HAPPY 29TH BIRTHDAY, PARK JIMIN! (in•s•p) October 13th, 1995

[tofixtheshadows]

Id love to hear ur interpretation and analysis on falin! She’s one of my favorite characters and and I was wondering what ur thoughts on her are

Man, I struggle to think of anything I could say about Falin that others have not already said. But she's one of my favorite things about Dungeon Meshi too.

So much of the story revolves around Falin, and she's not even there. Tumblr loves to talk about haunting the narrative, but Falin might be one of the best examples of it ever put to page. She's dead. She's alive. She's dead. She's alive. She's alive but she's missing, she's alive but she isn't herself. She's dead but she might wake. She's dead but she's frozen in ice. She's alive but she's sleepwalking. They chase her ghost and they chase her body all through the story.

I think what Kui does with her is fascinating. Not just as character with a personality we can analyze, but as an object in a narrative- that's why I say she's one of my favorite things about the story, because I also mean it in a mechanical sense. As a writer, Kui's really good at misdirection- that is, setting you up to believe or expect something about a character or a plot, and then turning that on its head. It's most apparent with Kabru, but it works really well with Falin too.

Because the precious little sister is a very well known character archetype, right? So is the gentle healer. The heart of the party. The white mage girl. The damsel in distress. The martyr.

And this isn't a Laura Palmer situation, where we find out that beneath her wholesome surface there's something dark and troubled. No, Falin truly is a kind and gentle person. That isn't where the misdirection leads (and that, too, I think, is another misdirection- it's not "Plot twist, she isn't as nice as you thought!", which would almost be too easy).

The misdirection here is more about structure than about character (but also, yeah- a little about character).

What I mean is, with these archetypes firmly in mind, along with a whole other host of fantasy genre expectations, I think anyone who goes into Dungeon Meshi un-spoiled probably expects Falin's rescue to be an endgame event; at least on a subconscious level, where you're not really thinking about it but in the back of your head you're already stretching out the story to place Falin firmly in the distance. Fire breathing dragon at the bottom of the dungeon is perfect final boss material, right? Slay the dragon. Rescue the princess.

And Falin is the perfect prize in the traditional old school fantasy that the concept of the titular dungeon is a send-up to. Blonde (white), soft-spoken, sweet-natured, beloved by everyone. An angelic figure.

Maybe that's why Ryoko Kui gave her white wings.

It is sort of jarring when chapter 23 rolls around and it's already time to fight the red dragon. And it takes a few chapters, but they succeed. And then Falin's impossible resurrection succeeds. But by then you guess that this is not going to be the story you expected it to be.

I want to point out that Falin spends a lot of time getting, well, babied, post-resurrection. Marcille washes her in the bath, despite Falin stating that she's capable of washing herself. Marcille schools her about her mana use despite Falin demonstrating that she is not hurting for mana, and brushes aside Falin's explanations. Both Marcille and Laios refuse to actually tell her what happened. Laios scruffs up her hair like she's a little kid and scolds her for something she can't remember doing. Marcille explicitly calls her a little kid when Falin tries to talk about how much she's grown.

Of course I'm not saying that Laios was wrong to act like a big brother, or that Marcille shouldn't be worried about taking care of her shell-shocked friend in the bath. But the framing of it clearly shows a Falin who is struggling to be heard.

If you'd like to address the big gay elephant in the room while we're here, I want to state for the record that- whether you read her as gay or not -I think Marcille is completely oblivious during this. Because Falin is her little friend from school. Her best friend, yes, but also the young tallman student she, in her infinite elven wisdom, had to mentor and look after. Marcille has not yet accepted that Falin is an adult now, nor has she accepted that she, herself, is only barely past teenagerhood developmentally and is not nearly as mature as she believes. Of course she'd scrub Falin in the bath and fuss over her.

Falin, meanwhile, seems more than aware of her own adult body and the inappropriate way Marcille is treating it.

The mana-sharing scene is, I think, Falin trying to get a little of her own back. How do you like it, Marcille?

And she tries again in bed.

Maybe she's wondering if their relationship will change now that they're grown ups. If Marcille prefers her as a little girl, or at least as a woman who lets herself be guided like one; if Marcille will react badly if Falin keeps trying to assert herself. She also might be subtly trying to signal to Marcille that bed sharing, like bathing, carries a different weight to it when you do it as adults rather than as children.

With all this in mind, the decision to turn Falin from the precious prize they rescued into to the vicious dragon they have to slay, hits a lot harder.

Falin with a powerful, monstrous, destructive body. Falin, who couldn't even stand to cause people pain from using healing spells, slaughtering half a dozen people in brutal ways. And that's not her, she's being mind-controlled, but as an object in the story she has completely flipped. From damsel to threat.

And I love that she carries a little bit of that with her when she's resurrected again.

Because she's no longer the girl who's going to let herself be stifled by her brother's and her best friend's co-dependency, no matter how much she loves them. She's different now: stronger, eyes open, forging her own path instead of following in their wake. Falin is still going to come back to them again, but this time it won't be because they chased her. It'll be because they let her go.

[gentlebliss]

Hello, my name is Mochizuki Hajime, and I'm saving up money to move away from my abusive home. I'm a mixed (Japanese and Brazilian) LGBT adult male. In my home situation, I am a victim of several forms of incest, am sexually and mentally abused, and violence is often used against me. A lot of aspects of my life is restricted by my family, as I'm not allowed to have friends, privacy or leave the house (among other things).

You may donate to me via $app—which is the only way I can safely accept money currently—or you can pay for a drawing or some HTML work. I made these popular themes (1, 2) and multiple website layouts (1, 2) as well as Windchime on Neocities. Examples of my art can be found here, and my coding/website work can be found here.

$app: $gentlebliss You may DM me/send an ask if you are interested in receiving any of my work in return for money. Some photos of my work is under cut. Thank you and have a nice day!

[inafieldofdaisies]

[blood-starved-beast]

love how the only naked tiddy jiggle fanservice we get in Dunmeshi is when Falin is a large quadrupedal chimera monster. Ryoko Kui is not beating the Monsterfucker allegations and will continue to not beat the Monsterfucker allegations.

[attleboy]

fanart for @raggedytiger's human ragapom designs because they are ADORABLE and very much on the mind... :D

also this bit from a thing didn't make the cut but i saw ur latest art and i'm proud of getting "pomni doesn't know how to smile" right (i drew these like a couple days back... i prophesy)

also a bit of commentary on the 1st one bc the brain is buzzing... i imagine meeting while in a video game then moving to real life would make little “human” details like freckles or wrinkles or scars very mesmerizing... it'd be pretty grounding cause a game isn't likely to render little details like that, yknow? it's a special reminder you're here and real and they'd probably appreciate that :)

[lil-cherubim]

Princesa 👑💐✨️

Twas for Tallulah's Bday! Or just Tallulah being the most wholesome and heart melting egg girl there is

[wienners]

"dude its not that embarassing to rewatch some creepypasta stuff you liked as a teenager" the character i imprinted on like a baby duck at 16 was a demon from new jersey that acts like the humanization of every offspring song and canonically listens to scissor sisters. His favorite color is purple and his favorite pokemon is gengar. He leaves people notes with emojis on them. He acts like a beetlejuice scare actor at halloween horror nights. His catchphrase is "feeling sassy?" Hes (allegedly) worked with every war criminal throughout history and been every serial killer. even the gay ones. he ate a baby. his animal motif is a rabbit. hes kind of based off donnie darko. he almost exclusively wears merchandise of the Quentin Tarantino movie Death Proof. he talks to his cats in a baby voice. he wears a white fedora that makes every video he wears it in feel dated by like 7 years. hes 5'3. he hacked a girls tumblr blog. he added a laugh track over a video of him killing people. he named a chainsaw rex. he torments people by playing frank sinatra at them. his name comes from an animal collective song. theres a canon blog entry where he makes the speakers blare rob zombie before he enters a room, then holds a guy at gunpoint to describe what he did to to him while "making sure to leave in all the cool parts". Hes like ten tumblr sexymen traits rolled into one. His actor has gone on record saying heath ledgers joker inspired his acting choices. Sometimes his voice gets distorted and it makes him sound like bill ciphers first year on HRT. Hes basically like my artistic muse. For some fucking reason i associate the song cake by the ocean with him. I firmly believe that if everymanhybrid didn't require a masters degree in creepypasta autism to comprehend, he would've caused more teenage stabbings than the slenderman incident and more kin war tumblr scenarios than nagito komaeda.

[puffywiz]

Is this anything

[metamorphesque]

"The Return of the King", J.R.R. Tolkien

[timethehobo]

When you look after the dead, the dead will look after you.

[beepboopappreciation]

I always see people talk about how cool becoming a cyborg would be, replacing parts of our flesh with metal and pistons and cool gadgets.

Why don't we talk more about the horror that is the opposite of that?

A computer who grafts lab-grown skin in patches onto their own form to feel. To experience a gentle and cool breeze passing by, or the oppressive sweat-inducing heat that their systems produce.

A robot with an organic eye to help them see as their creators once did. Imperfect, sure. But it seems to have quite an uneasy effect on organics, and doesn't that make it more than worth it?

A machine with blood coursing through its systems, flowing through the central chambers, in and out of its beating heart. Perhaps if the heart holds up, it could add lungs to help circulation.

A being that resembles a man at a distance, but upon closer inspection it is clear that he is instead a cacophony of skin, mismatched body parts and features, with just a few robotic limbs and mechanical parts visible. It smiles at you, the wide grin revealing that none of its teeth match.

He lurches toward you, hair from at least three different scalps falling carefree in front of its shoulders. You take a step back.

Where is the line drawn between cyborg and robot with human parts? Do you know? Does it know? Does anyone know?

It gets closer. You continue to retreat. Your back brushes against a wall.

You don't know where that line is, you've decided, but you're positive this individual has crossed it.

Having cornered you, it reaches its mechanical hand out, fingernails grafted on the metal tips. You blink, locked completely still from fear for just a few moments. It angles his hand in invitation. He wants you to take it. You hesitantly accept.

Under the metal you can feel . . . something, flowing, pulsing just beneath the surface wanting to escape. It's warm.

"Wh.. what do you want?" You manage to sputter out.

The being shakes your hand, his smile returning. "A friend," it replies.

[tinystepsforward]

i see matt posted again