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possamble · 5 months ago

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Like take for example how she treats healing Laios leg!! We *never* see someone who was healed have lasting symptoms from a heal. It *itches* terribly — Laios looks like he will scratch it raw. The itching implies an incomplete heal — you only itch that bad when something is being regrown or scabbing like when you get tattoos. There’s something that needs to finish healing. This scene always stood out to me— because Falin notices and *heals* it. And that brought up a ton of questions for me (We see her cast magic, was it to soothe the itching? A phantom pain? Why was it itching in the first place? Didn’t Marcille finish the job? Why was he having after effects we never see someone have any before?) and i’m breaking my brain over it because is this an sign of Marcille’s engagement with healing in general? Perfunctory—a means to an end? Morals? I feel like there is something there for us because that scene wasn’t necessary to the plot so why did Ryoko Kui add this interaction? I think how Marcille engages with healing was telling us a lot more than I previously realized because she was in a medical researcher position before coming into the dungeon however when we see how this was practically applied by her was really interesting!! She’s so divorced from feeling empathy for the pain of healing and i think that’s some sort of self-preservation instinct. Idk i just feel like her engagement with healing is so fucking fascinating when juxtaposed with her beliefs on death pls share thots if any

I think what gets hidden in the details about Marcille’s healing is that no, she’s not a talented cleric and healer in the way that Falin is. But Fantasy settings tend to relegate healing towards “holy” and “good” magic that never causes harm—

and Marcille is what you’d get if you put a doctor and a surgeon with a modern, more realistic approach towards medicine in a genre that doesn’t usually allow for that.

Like, you’ll see surgeons or doctors secretly being incredibly efficient serial killers in TV thrillers everywhere—but a fantasy series with a cleric or healer that’s secretly great at killing is a bit more rare to find(though not nonexistent, admittedly). Healing magic tends to be painted as either a religious discipline that’s not accessible to those who don’t have a tie to a deity or some ineffable force in the universe, or a matter of accessing some natural “life force” that exists in all living beings.

Dungeon Meshi, of course, loves bending fantasy conventions in the most incredible ways, so that’s not how it works here. The series allows itself to contend with the fact that healing a human body requires extensive and painstakingly detailed knowledge of that body.

The reason that Falin might appear to be a much more talented healer than Marcille is because Kui dresses her up in all the archetypal traits of a Caring Cleric, and that immediately clicks with readers expecting fantasy conventions in ways that Marcille's expertise doesn't.

This isn’t to discredit Falin, obviously. She is a talented healer, as attested to by Marcille herself:

But the interesting thing is that she does it all on instinct, so it’s not an exact knowledge. Furthermore, she uses the gnomish system of healing, which is implied to rely more on the judgment and knowledge of natural spirits (and therefore takes less mana). So it’s not hard to imagine that she would have less exact knowledge of how the human body operates than Marcille does as a medical researcher.

And that in and of itself raises questions: In a world where magic can immediately re-attach a limb, why would medical research be necessary? But Dungeon Meshi makes it clear that healing magic isn’t perfect, nor “holy” magic—it’s simply magic, like any other, carefully tailored to operate within the confines of what a human body needs in order to keep living. It’s not able to cure everything, and it especially seems to have gaps in terms of being able to treat illnesses that aren’t immediately solvable injuries.

And that all ties into Marcille's attitude towards it: It's a scientific and magical discipline like any other that requires careful study. There's nothing inherently good or bad about it—it was made by people, for people, and what matters is how you use it.

So, Marcille was at the academy, studying the ways that illness happens in a body, and carefully writing new magic to counteract or at least mitigate it.

(How I interpreted this was that she was likely part of research teams dealing with complicated things like autoimmune diseases, cancer, and other things where the body isn’t technically injured by a foreign element, but erroneously harming itself due to internal reasons.)

For me, this kind of explains her approach to pain in healing:

Honestly, what this immediately reminded me of was that a friend of mine had to have surgery on their throat when they were younger, and part of the procedure was waking them up without anaesthesia right after the surgery to make sure that they could still feel everything. They told me it was the worst pain they’d ever felt in their entire life—but from a medical perspective, it was necessary to make sure that none of the critical nerves in the neck had been affected.

Sometimes in medicine, pain is necessary because it’s not some uncomplicated and bad thing—it’s a response of your nervous system, and sometimes the only indicator that your body is still working the way it should. And I think this is the mindset that Marcille has, which is why she seems so blase about it—she doesn’t think that she’s actually hurting people, it’s just a necessary part of the healing process.

And in some ways, she just sees it as a realistic downside of the fact that you have to recover quickly in dungeon situations:

Normal recovery would take months. Healing magic shortens that to a few seconds. The pain is a result/tradeoff of forcing something that would naturally take a long time into such a short timespan. This all makes sense and is Right and Correct and Normal in Marcille's mind. It's not that she lacks empathy and doesn't care enough about not harming her patients: she doesn't think that it's "harm" at all.

Not a shred of guilt in that face before causing extreme pain. Contrast this to her constant fussing over Izutsumi on the smallest things—it's hard to believe she wouldn't even be a little apologetic if she actually believed this would be hurtful in a way that matters.

I think this is overall, less indicative of any lack of empathy so much as her incredibly stubborn and sometimes ridiculous way of compartmentalizing things to her own internal rules. I’d even argue that this mindset is preferable in surface situations, where people have the luxury of time. Dungeon healing hurts because it has to be fast and instantaneous—but if you're just treating a broken bone that can be put in a cast with slower healing magic to help, wouldn't you prefer that over an instant heal with the chance to cause brain damage, no matter how minuscule the chance is? Shouldn’t your long-term health matter more than short-term recovery and some pain?

To touch on Laios’s leg injury—we actually do see this kind of reaction to healing magic later on in the manga. When Marcille is teaching Laios how to heal, she ends up bowling him over because her cut gets super itchy:

but then she reacts positively and tells him that it's supposed to happen, before trusting him enough to try it on Senshi.

So while yes, it was an “incomplete” heal, I don’t think it was particularly telling about her approach to healing. And honestly, judging by the fact that it only distracted him when he was relaxed enough to be cleaning his armour before bed, it looks like she connected all the major muscles and nerves enough not to cause pain or risk re-injury by moving, but just left superficial stuff for Laios’s body to naturally heal.

Her mindset makes sense in context: She also had to heal Chilchuck and Senshi, while conserving enough energy to immediately start digging for Falin’s body and potentially do a very taxing resurrection spell as soon as possible.

After that, Falin healed the rest of Laios’s leg injury in a situation where it wasn’t needed, but there were no other high stakes to discourage it. Also, she can’t bear to see others in pain. ambrosiagourmet already did an incredible analysis of how this empathy doesn't really signify perfect altruism so much as Falin's deep discomfort with having to witness pain, so I won't go into that too much—but the important part is, Falin isn't inherently a more caring healer than Marcille. They are both making decisions for the patient based on their own approaches to healing—it's just that Falin's approach is preferable for dungeoneering overall.

(In Marcille's defense, it seems that dungeons are an incredibly specific environment that falls way outside the realm of what's actually taught to mages in most schools. Being a combat-oriented mage actually seems pretty frowned upon.)

So, in a lot of ways, Marcille is both realistic about dungeon healing (mana conservation by not doing full heals when not necessary, thinking about pain as the condensation of the time it would have taken to naturally heal, etc.) and very unrealistic about it. What she doesn’t realize is that the pain matters: In a dungeon, people have to be up and ready to continue right away, over and over. If it hurts every time, that makes them very averse to being healed, stressed out about getting injured, and affects their performance as dungeoneers.

All that to say… I personally believe that Marcille is very passionate about healing people. Not healing magic necessarily, but medicine as a whole. It’s not just a means to an end—it’s her main area of study only second to her research into ancient magic. And sure, she might have gotten into it because of her fear of death—but what I think people don’t give enough credit to is that her motivations changed from when she was a child.

You see it here, when she’s laying her dream outright to the Winged Lion:

She might be kinda racist herself, hypocritical, and short-sighted (mostly out of ignorance, I’d argue), but at heart, she hates that people hurt each other. She hates that long-lived races look down on everyone else just because of lifespan. She has—arguably very correctly—identified the disparity in lifespans as one of the main causes of interracial strife, and she wants to get rid of it so that everyone can fully understand and relate to each other as equals.

And in some ways, it’s not even that insane of a dream.

Knowing that people used to live as long as she’ll have to, and something changed in the eons since, is it really that weird for her to want to change it back somehow?

But all that aside—the most important part of this to me is that… originally, she wasn’t actually that hung up on completely equalizing lifespans. She got into medicine because she wanted to, at the very least, close the gap as much as she could in her very long life.

She was realistic about it at first. She thought that, by studying ancient magic’s ability to pull from the infinite, she could harness that infinite energy in tandem with medical knowledge to give more life to the short-lived races.

But as she says it herself, it changed when she realized that she doesn’t have time to gradually unravel it on her own.

So, yes. She got desperate. She got crazy. In light of all she did as dungeon lord, it’s easy to assume that she never cared much about healing as a profession, and is just a self-obsessed little girl caged by her trauma and trying to change the entire world to make sure she doesn’t have to be hurt.

And… she is all that. She's my blorbo supreme but I'll be the first to insist that she is very much a complete hot mess. But my point is that these were very extreme circumstances, and Ryoko Kui has given us all the understated evidence we need to know that she’s actually a very passionate doctor otherwise. This is the girl who freaks out if she’s not useful to other people and not allowed to help:

Did actually get excited about making safe dungeons for helpful purposes beyond just learning more about ancient magic to fulfill her dream:

And in tandem with her own personal trauma—not in opposition to it or to obscure it—cared about making life more peaceful and equal for everyone in the world. Not to mention, she had to have done some insane work to be acknowledged as the most talented researcher at the academy and be allowed onto teams that were researching new healing magics.

TL:DR, I think she has a lot of empathy for people and passion for helping them, it’s just expressed in a way you wouldn’t expect in a fantasy because Ryoko Kui doesn’t fuck around with her storytelling and genre subversion. She might not be a good archetypal healer, but she's an extremely knowledgeable doctor with a point-blank and intense attitude towards healing and medical treatment (see: her strictness about physical touch when teaching Laios about healing).

For me, all evidence points towards her going back to what she was doing before the story on top of her duties as Court Mage, kind of becoming a sort of Surgeon General for Melini as the head of health and safety for the country and whatnot.

PS. I will admit that there's explicit evidence she's not good at healing here:

But this was also like... chapter 3. Written years ago. I personally feel that everything Kui has said about Marcille's background since is enough evidence that it was just a one-off joke before she had an airtight idea about who Marcille was and would be, but I'll concede that it's mostly conjecture.

But again, as I said, I believe that while she might not be the best at the heal spell that's used in Dungeons, she's passionate about being a medical researcher and the field of medicine as a whole.

#asks #marcille donato #marcilleposting #dungeon meshi manga spoilers #dungeon meshi meta #i guess #this is kinda long under the cut im sorry #also i guess. keep in mind that im very biased towards healers in games and a marcille apologist so #that may have colored the way i view things #i just... yes marcille is great at explosions but that's because she's kind of an insane all-rounder.#like sure she may not know how to do everything but she *understands* every school of magic #she straight up mentally overwrote cithis's illusion on the spot bc she knew how it was cast #i wish people leaned into her having primarily been a medical researcher more!!#sure falin's great at healing on the spot but #marcille is who you want as the head of a hospital when you've there for a chronic condition that needs long term treatment #yknow???#her trauma forms so much of who she is yes #but she's also still more than just her trauma and being outside of the dungeon would bring that to the surface again

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unluckycryptid · 3 months ago

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Rise of Red Power Rangers AU

i'm known for being a huge power rangers fan around my friends/coworkers so ofc i'm doing a power rangers au for any fandom i'm apart of.

Alright Rise of Red Power Rangers AU

Red -> Red ranger (obviously)

Chloe -> Blue ranger (again, this is obvious)

Ella -> Green ranger

Bridget -> Pink ranger (obvious)

(Chris) Charming -> Yellow ranger

Special Ranger: Silver ranger -> Chad?

Notes:

Let's go with a Knights of the Round Table theme except we can call it Knights of Auradon

This is gonna be SPD inspired origin (but I'm borrowing other elements from other series)

Chloe expected to be lead ranger (even though her whole color palette is blue) bc she'd be a legacy ranger from her parents being the previous power rangers.

Queen Cinderella and King Charming are separate from Ella and Charming. Cinderella -> Cindy (former blue ranger) and King Charming -> Reginald Charming (former red ranger)

Red and Bridget are from the enemy camp of the Queen of Hearts and get the chance to escape with the help of the Sorcerer's Cookbook that they stole from the Queen of Hearts. However, during their escape, the Cookbook gets damaged, scattering all of its pages all throughout Auradon.

Chloe, Charming, and Ella have all been rangers in training and are finally allowed to see if they are worthy of their morphers.

Their morphers are Swords-in-a-Stone (kind of like Lost Galaxy), but they don't know their colors until they morph.

Luckily, all 3 are deemed worthy of their swords and are immediately sent into the field to capture intruders from Wonderland which are Red and Bridget.

When they morph for the first time, Chloe is shocked she's blue ranger but they still manage to apprehend Red and Bridget and bring them back to base.

Base is at Cinderellasburg estate in Auradon

Chloe's parents (and Charming's aunt/uncle) are the mentors of the group.

Cindy goes to talk to Red and Bridget about the Queen of Hearts, revealing they used to share a past and tries to convince them to help Auradon since they put up quite a fight with the rangers in training.

Bridget immediately takes her up on the offer, becoming the Pink ranger.

Red initially declines the offer since the Queen of Hearts is her mom and she doesn't want anything to do with her, much less fight her.

Meanwhile, Chloe goes to her dad, asking why he thinks she didn't get red ranger. King Reginald tells her that he suspects that her views on the world are too black and white and that she doesn't always see the full picture before rushing into the field with her sword.

Chloe, Ella, Charming, and Bridget are sent out in the field when the Queen sends out a monster from wonderland accompanied by tons of card soldiers and the Ace the Royal Guard.

Back at base, Red is walking around the grounds of the Cinderellasburg estate and comes across some of the background tech team composed of Faye and Zellie who somehow convince her that joining the team is what Red wants in order to prevent other people from getting hurt by her mother.

Red joins the team mid-fight when it seems like they're losing to both the monster and Ace. It is revealed that Ace and Red were really close friends in Wonderland but Ace saw Red's running away as a betrayal. Red morphs into the red ranger and reveals that all the duels the two had in the past, she let him win for his own pride.

After injuring Ace and destroying the Monster of the Week, the team celebrates, but Chloe still holds a grudge against Red being team leader.

It doesn't help when Red is in charge of training drills and puts the team through hell. She ends up getting a lesson in leadership and does all the drills herself later on.

Uliana, Hook, and Morgie are either part of the comedic relief where they're always up to something and always end up needing rescuing OR they're part of the Queen of Hearts Royal Council and become some of the villains for the rangers to defeat closer to the finale.

The main motivation for the Queen of Hearts to attack Auradon and the rangers is to get back scattered remains of the Sorcerer's Cookbook.

Chad has a guest role and serves as the temporary Silver ranger

When not in use, the team uses some magical bracelets to summon their sword morphers which are stored on the magical stone.

Their morph call would be like Mystic Force where they point their swords to the sky and say something like "For the Honor of the Kingdom!" (she-ra inspired, sue me)

Throughout their run, Red and Chloe constantly butt heads with Red going for more unconventional means while Chloe wants to follow the rules. Most of the time, they end up having to compromise. Also, they're roommates

While Bridget and Ella are also opposite personalities, they end up hitting it off fairly well.

Charming is getting into some hijinks and Bridget senses the tension between him and Ella (who often scolds him) and is often trying to do matchmaking between the two or causing ruckus in the kitchen.

Ella and Chloe have a more sisterly bond, with Chloe often going to Ella about her arguments with Red.

Red and Bridget are cousins and Bridget often gets Red's side of the argument that Chloe probably told Ella about so when Ella and Bridget get back to their shared room, they're just rolling their eyes at the two other rangers.

Chloe gets along with Bridget due to their bubbly personalities, while Ella and Red get along from their shared motherly trauma (Ella lived with her stepmother before becoming a ranger).

Chloe and Charming are the best swordspersons on the team, often dueling each other with their matches ended up tied.

Charming teaches Red how to skateboard.

Bridget and Charming are often trying to get Ella to relax and join them in some silly little activity.

Red learns motherly love from Cindy

Anyway, Red and Chloe eventually learn to work together and learn a lot about each other. That's when the romance begins >:)

Finale: The gang is invited to Castlecoming at Auradon's Grand Castle.

Red and Chloe go together and they're about to confess their feelings when the Queen of Hearts makes an appearance for the first time. With the shock, she kidnaps Cindy releases her army of cards on Auradon and the Cinderellasburg estate.

Red consoles Chloe who is already thinking the worst, and she is backed up by the other members of the team who promise to get Cindy back whatever it takes.

Against King Reginald's orders, the rangers go off and enter Wonderland.

Chad stays back to help fend off the card soldiers with the other Knights of Cinderellasburg.

Red and Bridget have to lead the team through the treacherous terrain of Wonderland but they make it and manage to sneak into the castle.

They split up: Ella, Bridget, and Charming go off to rescue Cindy. Meanwhile, Chloe and Red go to confront the Queen of Hearts.

Red tries to compromise with her mom, saying that there's gotta be another way, but she ends up initiating the first attack.

Chloe and Red end up fighting the Queen of Hearts and they're doing really well until the Queen of Hearts manages to temporarily get the upper hand. She goes to strike down Red, but Chloe steps in front of her and takes the blow.

Red rises up and takes Chloe's sword, and along with her own sword, finally goes full out against her mom.

She gets to defeat her mom and knocks her out but discovers that the army of the Queen is still not defeated and is being fueled by the Sorcerer's Cookbook which has a strong protective spell around it that even the Queen of Hearts can't stop.

The other rangers come back with Cindy and Cindy tells them there is one last option, which is to combine all of their swords into one sword. However, there's a catch: the sword can only be wielded by one person and there's a chance of them getting destroyed by its power, plus destroying the cookbook would unleash even more energy, essentially giving the wielder of the sword a death sentence.

Red steps up, saying that she'll do it, and rebukes Cindy's offer to do it since Red promised Chloe she would get her mother back. Reluctantly, they all merge their swords (Cindy is able to wield Chloe's sword since she's still unconscious and since Cindy was the former blue ranger) and Red wields the Five Sword. She manages to strike the protective shield of the cookbook and stabs the Cookbook and is holding on as a great power is about to take her out.

At the last minute, the Queen of Hearts wakes up from being unconscious and sees that Red is about to die from both wielding the sword and destroying the cookbook. She steps up, takes the sword from Red and shoves her back to the other rangers.

Finally, with a bright light, the Cookbook is destroyed, along with the Queen of Hearts to Red's dismay.

Chloe is still out and Red doesn't know what to do until Cindy suggests a True Love's Kiss.

It works and when Chloe finally comes to, she asks what happens and Red says that her mom is gone, but they won. Chloe only puts a hand on the other girl's cheek, consoling her but relieved that they won.

Time Skip: Without the Queen of Hearts, Red has claim to Wonderland's throne. She and Chloe are now a couple, currently running Wonderland. The rest of the team gets relocated to Wonderland as they have a new mission: help Red and Chloe rebuild Wonderland and join it with the United States of Auradon.

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