#Theses

[jstor]

Okay, here's another good one for you: “Put a Finger Down, Fanfic Edition!”: Fanfiction Participants on TikTok and Anonymity Collapse, a thesis by Katie Behling (2022). Before you poo-poo the TikTok aspect, Katie's interesting argument is that the lack of anonymity in many of these videos demonstrates a shift in the self presentation of fanfiction participants and the level of confidence that slash participants have in their engagement with the community. The thesis is freely accessible to everyone, no login needed (though please do note that Katie copyrighted it).

[runs-4-pinkcupcakes]

Isla Holbox, Mexico. December 26, 2022 💋

📷 : runs-4-pinkcupcakes

[prapasara]

การเข้าสืบค้นมหาวิทยาลัยต่างๆ

ค้นงานวิจัย วิจัยแห่งชาติ (วช.)

http://dric.nrct.go.th/Index

ค้นงานวิจัย Chulalongkorn University

ค้นงานวิจัย มหาวิทยาลัยมหาสารคาม

https://library.msu.ac.th/

ค้นงานวิจัย มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์

ค้นงานวิจัย มหาวิทยาลัยศิลปากร

https://www.thapra.lib.su.ac.th/thesis/index.asp

ค้นงานวิจัย มหาวิทยาลัยธรรมศาสตร์

https://www.library.tu.ac.th/searchA/saz

ค้นงานวิจัย มหาวิทยาลัยศรีนครินทรวิโรฒ

http://library.swu.ac.th/#focus

ค้นงานวิจัย มหาวิทยาลัยสงขลานครินทร์

ค้นงานวิจัย มหาวิทยาลัยเชียงใหม่

ThaiLIS is Thailand Library ค้นได้ 24 มหาวิทยาลัย ดีมากๆ

วิจัยนักศึกษาวิทยาลัยนวัตกรรมการจัดการ มหาวิทยาลัยเทคโนโลยีราชมงคลรัตนโกสินทร์

https://www.rcim.in.th/?page_id=12202

สถาบันวิจัยระบบสาธารณสุข (สวรส.)

[newagesurvivalist]

The modern devotion: a meditation on fate

There is certainly a need for edification, but we can only find this in the pleasant repose of friendly science, that lies somewhere in the structure of our everyday undertakings. A man can dedicate his life to God or to freedom, but he will never encounter the endless in which he has placed his trust, because he is somehow stupified (he chooses at times, and cannot unchoose his superintendence). Of course, modern thinkers shall overthink the meanings of his choices. Wisdom, or something like it, shall infest the ruminations of the wise, even as they try to stick to the rules of their good Lord. In the end, our notions of wisdom are as irrelevant to simplicity as the practical wisdom we use to be aware of the changes in the world, or even when we read the newspaper: and in this wise, we will stick to categories. Death will take us to the depths at some point, and then we will be remorseful, but we can find some kind of unfetteredness in the contemplative life. In the last analysis, our shelteredness will suppress us in some sense; or, failing that, it will support us in our decrepitude.

The thing we see in government is that the entire world is somehow just a result of the ordinary things that we try to see. We must continue to study and improve our stead, but there is a lot of vagueness in this regard, so we stick to certain rules that we can follow, that we can live by, in a sense to avoid hypocrisy, but also to leave some room for wonder. This is a clear substantivity, that moves liberally in some inordinate relation, but the phantoms of liberality will always support us in the final structure that our desire still upholds, and some clever man will always send us debauchingly into the abyss, which has no more to do with our ordinariness than any sheer resolution; therefore, we are still stuck in the repetition of sheer inordinality, but we cannot respect the machinery.

A holy man will therefore be required. Certainly, the power of this singular monolithic force shall steer us in some maniacal direction, but the wise men of the old time will always keep us in a bad way, edifying us, but never holding us at the point of reclaiming the dead waters of hope and glory, because we are sincerely the moribund glorifiers of the holy order; still hiding in the entirety of existence, an individual will not see the control-center of these variable things, because he is not a simple man, but he will, at the same time, keep his tension ready to support the new world. A good politic against the feebleness of genesis.

This brings us to that fatal flaw of academic thinking: it cannot escape from engineering philosophies into social doctrines. Verily, wise men engage in speculation from the ground up, and they do not seek to continue down a particular senseless path only to cover ground that flies below one's feet anyway. Truly, he just wishes to send missionaries unto the road and restructure time in a way that shall allow us in some bicentennial way to refurbish meaningful communication to suit particular ends, and that will send men roaringly into riotous assemblies that have nothing to do with high-tech industry, but frankly, only with arcane-minded priests and hoary old generals. The true sage must in this wise always control his mightier frontline to set up a siege against the ignorant who cannot subject themselves to the higher Lord, who is still hard to make out in the darknesses of spiritual crisis, and this is verily a maintenance that will never be returned to the control center of computer science, which is just a result of endless work: nobody will ever see things for what they are, because we are just kleptomaniacs who have no better use for knowledge than the ordinary children of the Lord who build castles in the air and keep the essence of life obscured from the villainy of proper cheerfulness, and this result of endless labour is still the meaning of life (in the last analysis). Be that as it may, there is still some kind of mystical or mythical ordination happening in the value of the Lords work, where we still see contrivances happening in the build of visceral virtuality; here, the motions of the stars are reconvened in some higher reality, whereby distinctions between collateral choices are subsumed under the rubric of pestering revolution, makings us forget the ordinary work of the best men who still want the best for the world, and sending us, headlong, into the effigies of maniacal creativity, where there are no more controllings in the totality of space and time; and people will certainly see the moribund autarky happen in the categorical ways of the old style of thinking; people only had the European framework at the time, a framework contructed around the promise of God and the power of the mind, where will only find complacency and analysis, or simple breakdowns and formulas, and this is not brilliance, even though there might be an analytic truth.

The true problem really is scholarly science. People encounter complete crafts in the professionalism of normal work, but they cannot reveal the misery of the commonplace actuaries who build the structure of actual time. A kind of vendetta exists in the search for appropriate action, and people will always discover there might be some release in the violence of relentless creation; this is still a sign of the normal times, that will suppress us and derail us in the last analysis, but will never send us forward into magnificence and will not regain superiority in the entirety of the universe: why, everybody simple ruffles the feathers of the old fathers, who make sense of the revolutionary world, but holy kings will not break the mold of vampires who construct the meritocracy of the greatest kind of heroism that will suppress us in the final way forward: and everybody simply wishes to go on and forward in the misery of ordinariness, that will somehow complain to the God of war that there will be some kind of recluse from happiness: and this is truly what we see all the time. That there is no escape from structure.

So we see that villainy is just a sign of holy writ, that combines us, in some dark way, to election and this will never support us in the confines of liberality, and the kings will not do anything to save us. The poor men of the old world who do what they can to live forget about the happy world, and this is all nothingness: nobody cares about it, and it is silly. But a wise man may come to teach us the truth about ordinariness; why, he will derail the ordinary from the set ways of yore, and move us upwards. The king of the Jews will collect us in the final days of the master. And some deep thinker will perhaps make us see the light of the mind to see in the dark. Nevertheless, supportive entities of vision cannot sustain us; we struggle and suppress, and this has no connection to the virile contours of idiocy, but we may enjoy some part of it. Ultimately, there will be repose, but it will be situated in a terrific predicament; and that will certainly cut us down.

[lock-my-feelings-in-a-jar]

[soniahdavis]

Would you believe me if I told you these were two different essays by Sonia? Well, they are. The top is "The Psychic Phenomenon of Love" and the bottom is "Mothers and Daughters".

[lunarbows]

Y people are born damaged. it's literally in their dna to be completely devoid of empathy for anyone who isn't Y. no matter how "progressive" they may seem, they can always retreat back to Yness, and they know it. they will always be welcomed back into the fold no matter what they've done. they can never truly fail or become outcasts. their actions will always be excused (especially if they are a man). they don't need to concern themselves with consequences, accountability, or morality. they have no moral backbone anyway because they can always cast whatever morals they pretended to have aside whenever they feel like it.

[jstor]

Another brilliant thesis for you

How do fanfic writers interpret elements of romance, sex, and sexuality in YA books and their screen adaptations? What are the implications of any alignments with or deviations from the source material?

On the good side, Alison Cummins finds that the fanfics were more likely to take on feminist perspectives of women’s agency and sex lives. On the not-so-good side, they still aligned with existing power structures by leaving whiteness and queerness unexamined.

[avetruth]

Yeliz Aydın. Horasan ve Irak Selçuklu devletleri-Abbasî hilafeti ilişkileri (429-590/1038-1194). Yüksek lisans tezi (2018) https://www.avetruthbooks.com/2023/10/yeliz-aydin-horasan-ve-irak-selcuklu-devletleri-abbasi-hilafeti-iliskileri-429-590-1038-1194-yuksek-lisans-tezi-2018.html

[professoredu]

What is ACADEMIC WRITING? (Part TWO).

I made this video due to some of the questions I receive and the struggles I see some of my clients go through because of having little to no clue about what academic writing entails. I am always glad to share my knowledge with them.

I offer assignment writing services for the listed types of Academic Writing in the video. HMU.

[prapasara]

ตัวอย่างงานวิจัยสาขาวิชารัฐประศาสนศาสตร์

การขยายตัวของการเรียนการสอนรัฐประศาสนศาสตร์ระดับบัณฑิตศึกษาของประเทศไทยในปัจจุบัน : ปัญหาและแนวทางในอนาคต

ปัจจัยที่ส่งผลต่อประสิทธิภาพการปฏิบัติงานของข้าราชการในสำนักงานที่ดินกรุงเทพมหานคร

นโยบายและการปฏิบัติในการปฏิรูปโครงสร้างระบบราชการ : กรณีศึกษากรมทางหลวง

ประสิทธิภาพในการป้องกันอาชญากรรมของเจ้าหน้าที่สายตรวจผ่านการใช้งานระบบตู้แดงรหัสคิวอาร์: กรณีศึกษา เขตพื้นที่สถานีตำรวจนครบาลห้วยขวาง

การรับรู้และตอบสนองต่อภาวะวิกฤตองค์กรของพนักงานระดับปฏิบัติการในกลุ่ม Generation X และ Millennials: กรณีศึกษา บริษัท การบินไทย จำกัด(มหาชน)

ปัจจัยที่ส่งผลต่อการมีส่วนร่วมกิจกรรมของนิสิตระดับปริญญาตรีคณะรัฐศาสตร์ จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย

การศึกษากร��บวนการเปลี่ยนแปลงขององค์การ กรณีศึกษา  การยกฐานะองค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลเป็นเทศบาลตำบลคอกกระบือ จังหวัดสมุทรสาคร 

ความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างคณะกรรมการบริหารกับผู้อำนวยการในการบริหารจัดการขององค์การมหาชนในประเทศไทย

การนำเทคโนโลยีสารสนเทศมาใช้ในการพัฒนาการให้บริการประชาชน:กรณีศึกษาระบบสารสนเทศที่ดินของกรมที่ดิน

นโยบายสาธารณะว่าด้วยการพัฒนาเมือง

CR    ::  Chulalongkorn University

[mountainshroom]

when your immortal bf is a bit feral

[kids-worldfun]

5 Basic Tips for Writing Your Assignment. Writing assignments is one of the most difficult tests in English language lessons. We have prepared tips for you on how to write an assignment for a high score. 

[d0d0-b0i]

excuse me while i go throw up

[lunarbows]

grateful for everything i've learned about myself - and the world - over the past week.

people in hollywood (PIH) are not people. similar to the way that people with NPD are not people. in both groups, their insecurities, selfishness, and obsession with being seen and admired are the driving forces behind their behavior. both groups will abandon all logic, morality, empathy, and even personal safety to achieve their goals. this is especially true if they are confident that their behavior will be excused or even celebrated (see: literally any white celebrity, or most famous men of any race). also, in both groups, it's extremely important to seem accessible, relatable, and kind, even though they are none of these things. unsurprisingly, many PIH also have NPD.

the main exception to the comparisons lies in the fact that people with NPD don't have a choice to be the way that they are. though they should still be held accountable for their actions, they do not have free will and they will always be victims of their own disorder. PIH, however, make a choice to enter the industry and give up their mortal souls in exchange for fame, money, and power (their "personal" reasons for entering the industry are irrelevant). PIH can also choose to walk away, though of course most of them either cannot (in too much debt, death, etc) or will not (they can't stomach the reality of losing their relevance, they're greedy, etc).

another exception is the fact that PIH tend to be more conniving and good at hiding their misdeeds, because the price of getting caught will most likely be much greater than it would be for a non-PIH. however, it's important to note that PIH are not necessarily smarter than the average person - in fact, most of them are extremely unintelligent in every way (emotionally, academically, socially, etc). it's their money, influence, and power over others that gives them a huge advantage over someone with NPD who is a non-PIH.

it should be noted that the age at which a person becomes a PIH is immaterial. though there is plenty of evidence to suggest that every child star is a victim - because children cannot consent to becoming PIH - if a young PIH becomes an adult, they are not exempt from accountability, or from removing any ignorance that they may have about fellow NPHs. In fact, given their money/power/influence/privilege, one could argue that they should work harder than anyone else to put an end to child labor in hollywood.

PIH also have similarities to cops - choosing a profession for prestige and power despite the potentially grave consequences is one similarity. another is that both groups have a subgroup known as "the good ones" (TGO). these are people who actually have morals and have a genuine desire to change the world for the better. in all instances, however, TGO either die or quit. this is because both professions are rotten at their core, run by hopelessly immoral people, and cannot be changed from within. all of this clashes with the lives of those who are genuinely conscientious.

a person who latches onto PIH and builds their life around them, colloquially known as a "stan", can also be called a "golden cow worshipper" (GCW).

every single GCW has at least one mental health issue, and their behavior is motivated by several factors:

1) life under capitalism, the patriarchy, systemic bigotry, and a several other things leaves little room for things that actually make life worth living - community building, spirituality, prioritizing mental and physical health care, etc. PIH content provides a distraction from the trauma and drudgery of everyday life.

2) PIH are the perfect entities to project upon. most PIH are blank slates with no real personality or intelligence who are just coasting through life on conventional attractiveness and other privileges. highly curated (and highly-paid) teams of professionals are responsible for constructing the public personas that PIH use to engage fans and to keep them interested. it is also the teams' responsibility to quash anything that might expose the bile underneath these carefully constructed personas. with enough content and photos at their disposal, GCWs can construct highly detailed fantasies surrounding PIH that have little to do with who the PIH actually are in real life.

3) GCWs usually lack morals of their own, so they often look to PIH for moral guidance. whether their favorite PIH actually have morals is irrelevant. the illusion of moral acumen is enough. (actors in particular are naturally good at feigning moral fiber, as well as any other emotions they may need to convey in order to manipulate others and control the narrative surrounding them.) in the event that the illusion of morality is broken, GWCs usually continue to cling to the PIH regardless, and will even go so far as to deny irrefutable evidence of wrongdoing in order to maintain their parasocial relationships with the PIH. the expensive teams are, of course, also responsible for illusion maintenance.

4) PIH look and act like human beings. humans are naturally drawn to other humans who they find appealing in one way or another. PIH, their teams, and hollywood as a whole work tirelessly to exploit this natural inclination. it is very likely that PIH and their teams understand psychology better than anyone. it is easy for monsters to manipulate people if you can successfully mimic human traits and emotions.

bottom line: it's not normal to want to be admired by millions of people, so much so that you are willing to enter an industry that is built upon immorality. hollywood will never be progressive in any true sense of the word. and it can never be reformed from within. it is a factory that is only meant to make money, to protect abusers, and to crush anyone who can't withstand the weight of its evil. the people who can withstand it have embraced the evil. they have decided that their souls were worth trading for money, power, and fake love from people who will never truly know who they are.

no one can feign ignorance about the industry at this point. there is too much information available for a an adult to remain ignorant, willingly walk into that shit, and still be considered a morally upstanding person.

(*******)

all of the things i just wrote about are things that i understood as a child, but got further and further away from as i became maligned by mental health issues and the patriarchy. now i'm making my way back around.

the great circle.

i will never be fooled again.

[loriache]

Kabru, impossible mutual understanding & unknowable objects

Despite his concerted and constant efforts to understand other people, it’s established in a few extras that Kabru believes that true mutual understanding between certain different races is impossible. Specifically, between long-lived and short-lived races, and between humans and demi-humans. Partially, we can trace this conviction back to specific hang-ups caused by his life; the trauma of the Utaya disaster, prejudices he carries from his childhood, and his experience of racism among the elves. In this “little” essay, I’m gonna discuss how I think those experiences formed this belief, how it comes out in his actions, and how some of his actions seem to contradict it. The question of whether it’s possible to reach mutual understanding with other living beings despite our differences is one of the core themes of the manga, and I’ll also touch on how this aspect of Kabru’s character links to that.

Seeking understanding

Kabru is a character who devotes a huge amount of time and effort to understanding people, and he is very good at it. In his internal monologue, we can tell how advanced and complex his skills of analysis are. He is able to read a huge amount of information just from looking at people's faces and body language.

People are, to him, what monsters are to Laios. This is something that's been expanded on at length in other, excellent meta. It's the fact that they're foils; it's the fact that Kabru is also very easy to read as autistic, with a special interest which is the opposite and parallel of Laios'. It's something that came out of trauma and alienation, as Laios' special interest in monsters also began as a coping mechanism.

The complicated origin of this "love" for monsters and for people comes through, I think, in the fact that one of the places we see both characters use their fixation is in being very, very good at killing the thing that they love. This also ties into the idea that loving something isn't even remotely mutually exclusive with using it to sustain your own survival; using it for your own purposes; hurting it or killing it. Love can be, and often is, violent, possessive and consumptive. This understanding is part of what makes Kui's depiction of interpersonal relationships so compelling to me.

While Laios fixated on monsters and animals to seek a place of escape, in both his imagination and his self-image, from the humans who he couldn't understand and who couldn't understand him, Kabru seems to have fixated on understanding people in order to navigate the complex, socially marginal places that he has been forced into throughout his life. As an illegitimate child raised by a single mother with an appearance that marked him out as different to the point his father's family wanted to kill him, and a tallman child raised among elves who didn't treat him as fully human and wanted him to perform gratefulness for that treatment – treatment that, after he met Rin at age 9, he certainly always understood could be a lot worse – his ability to work out what people wanted from him, whether they were friendly or hostile or had ulterior motives, wasn’t just an interest. It will have been an essential skill.  

Milsiril, I think, was a flawed parent who tried to do her best by Kabru and did a lot of harm to him despite her best intentions. She may have treated him much better than an average elf would have, but like Otta and Marcille's mother, there are other elves with different outlooks on short-lived races. How would they judge her treatment of him? We don’t have any insight on what it could be, but to be honest, the person’s whose opinion of her I’d be most interested in knowing is Rin’s.

But even if she'd been perfect, living as an trans-racial adoptee in a deeply hierarchical nation with a queen who is a 'staunch traditionalist' who wouldn't even acknowledge the existence of a half-elf like Marcille (according to Cithis) is an experience that would deeply impact anyone.

Elves & Impossible mutual understanding

While Kabru was living with Milsiril - in other words, while living in the Northern Central Continent - he came to believe that "there was no way to achieve mutual understanding with the long-lived races."

This is evident in his political project: he wants short-lived races to have ownership over the dungeon's secrets. Despite his dislike of the Lord of the Island, he's a useful bulwark to stop the elves taking over. Despite his doubts about Laios, Laios needs to be the one to defeat the dungeon, because if he doesn't the elves will take over.

Kabru still carries a deep scar from Utaya, one that was exacerbated by the fact that he never got an answer to any of his questions about what happened or why. This, despite the fact that Milsiril knows about the demon and how it works. Do you think Kabru, with his social perceptiveness that borders on the superhuman, wasn't aware that she knew more than she would tell him?

Given that, the fact that he gets to a place where he "doesn't have any particularly negative feelings about [elves/long-lived species]" .... well, to put it bluntly, I believe that he thinks that's the case, but I kind of doubt it. After all, if he did have resentment, of Milsiril (someone who was his primary provider and caretaker since age six, and who despite her flaws, loves him and who I do think he loves) or of elves (who he has had to play nice with for most of his life, in order to survive, and will still have to play nice with in order to achieve his goals, since they hold all the power) what would that do except hurt him and make his life harder? Kabru is Mr. Pragmatic, so I don't think he'd let himself acknowledge any such feelings he did have. Exactly because he can't acknowledge them, they're well placed to get internalised as beliefs about the Fundamental Unchangeable Nature of the World.

However, these stated beliefs seem to contradict his actions. Despite his belief in the impossibility of forming a mutual understanding, he certainly seems to try to understand long-lived people, just as much as he does short-lived people. There's no noticeable difference between his treatment of Daya & Holm versus Mickbell & Rin that isn't clearly down to their relationship with him. His skills of human analysis were honed and developed while living amongst elves, and as soon as he's alone with Mithrun he immediately sets to understanding him - his interests, his motivations, his needs, and his past.

He treats him considerately and without bias, and despite the fact that Mithrun conquering the dungeon for the elves is both a reenactment of a core part of his childhood trauma and a political disaster for his aims, that doesn't seem to colour his perspective on Mithrun negatively at all.

This is something I find extremely laudable about Kabru, and it's another way he parallels Laios. He seems to understand that people, as a rule, (in Laios' case, he understands this about monsters - and eventually, all living beings) will act in their own interests, and if those interests conflict with yours, might harm you. But that's just their nature, and it's not something that should be held against them; you're also doing the same thing, after all. The crux of Laios' arc is precisely that he has to accept the responsibility of hurting someone else in order to achieve what he wants.

Kabru is deeply concerned with his own morals, what he should and shouldn't do, but mostly in the context of responsibility for the consequences - a responsibility he takes onto himself. He isn't scrupulous about what he needs to do in order to create the outcome he wants, but if he fails to create that outcome, then....

He blames himself to the point of thinking he should die. He doesn't blame Laios, or seem at all angry with him, despite concluding he should have killed him to prevent this outcome. That's because in his eyes, ultimately Laios was going to act according to his own nature, and it's Kabru's fault for not understanding that nature well enough. He's extremely confident in his ability to understand and predict others, (including elves and other long-lived people). Then, where does his conviction that mutual understanding is impossible come from?

Partially, it's the "mutual" part. I'm sure Kabru, who isn't able or willing to deny Otta's insinuation that Milsiril saw him more like a pet than a son, has felt that his full interiority, the depth of his feelings and his ability to grow, act, and think as a fully equal being, was something that the elves around him just couldn't grasp. Because that was their excuse for it, he came to understand this as a gulf between short-lived and long-lived beings, an inevitable difference in outlook caused by their different lifespans.

This experience might be part of what leads to his iconic “fake” behaviour. He trusts his ability to understand others, but if they aren’t able to understand him, then there isn’t any benefit to being honest about his feelings and thoughts. If his attempts to reach mutual understanding with his caretakers were never able to be fulfilled, then it isn’t any wonder that he reacts with such surprise and horror at blurting out his desire to be Laios’ friend.

In his experience, making yourself vulnerable in that way only leads to being hurt. Soothing him, hushing him, lying to him, talking to him like a child that isn’t able to use proper judgement – that’s an inadequate and deeply hurtful way to respond to genuine distress, the desire for autonomy, or disagreement. Ultimately, I think that’s why he comes out on the side of being grateful to Milsiril; because she did equip him with the skills and knowledge he’d need to reach his goal, and let him go.

Though he could understand them, they couldn't understand him. To the extent that was true - which I'm sure it was - it wasn't due to anything about lifespan. It was due to the elves’ racism, and the solipsitic mindset & prejudiced attitude that it caused them to approach him with.

Because, if it needs to be said, the idea that there is an unbreachable gap in understanding between the long-lived and short-lived species is not true. Marcille and Laios have a much greater difference in lifespan than any full elf from any short-lived person, and they’re able to understand each other – maybe not perfectly, but better than many other people who are closer in life-span to them.

That doesn’t mean that I think Kabru is wrong about this, however. Because there’s an interpretation of his statement that is reflected in his actions and is true. When he talks about his problem with elves, it’s not just their attitudes: it’s their power, and what they use it to do. They “explain nothing and take everything”. Though it’s presented in the guise of ‘guiding and protecting’, in fact it’s a simple case of a powerful nation using their military power, wealth, access to resources, and historically stolen land – including the island itself – to protect their own interests and advance their own agenda. That’s why they’d be able to show up, seize the dungeon, and forcibly take Kabru’s party and Laios’ party to the West. If Kabru wants to stop that from happening, or change that status quo, persuasion or a bid to be understood would be completely pointless. Between the political blocs formed by long-lived species and the interests of short-lived species, “mutual understanding”, given their current, unequal terms, would be impossible. This is something that we see reflected in Kabru’s actions; before he asks his questions about the dungeon, he grabs Mithrun as leverage. He never really attempts to persuade the canaries to see his point of view, because that would be pointless: they’re agents of the Northern Central Continent’s monarchy, and will act in its interests regardless of any individual relationship with him.  

I don’t think Kabru sees the different dimensions of this belief of his in quite such clear terms, however, as is evidenced by the other group who he thinks it’s impossible to communicate with.

Demi-Humans & Unknowable Objects

The other place that we see his conviction about the impossibility of mutual understanding is in the kobold extra.

I'm including the whole thing, because I think it's an excellent and clever piece of world-building. Aside from what it says about Kabru, which I'll expand on shortly, what this extra does is deconstruct and call into question the usual "fantasy ontological biology" present in these sort of DnD-like settings. Essentially, the kind of worldbuilding where a race (such as kobolds) can be described as war-like, and that's establishing something essential about their biological nature. That's common to the point that if Kui didn't include this, some people would probably come away thinking that's the case about, e.g., the orcs.

But here, despite what Kabru is saying, the information the reader actually gets is:

the conflict between short-lived humans and demi-humans such as kobolds is mostly over access to material resources that they need to survive.

These resources are scarce because powerful nations, such as the elves, have monopolised them.

Kabru, who has grown up in a place at the centre of these conflicts, ascribes essential, negative traits to a cultural group which was in direct conflict with his own. Communication with this other group is impossible; they aren't people, they're more like objects.

oh yes! just like this conflict between groups of tall-men, a conflict which the reader will immediately interpret as more clearly analogous to real-life racism. Our other protagonists also carry prejudices from growing up in a place where a marginalised group was in conflict with the dominant group over scarce resources. It's definitely impossible to communicate with these people, and you can only kill them.

Woah, when you say it like that, it sounds pretty bad!

But also, nobody walks away having had a realisation or unlearned their prejudices - because they don't have the tools they need to do that work. Yet. I do think, to an extent, it could happen - especially with Kabru, since it's suggested in the epilogue that Melini might become a safe-haven for demi-humans.

To focus in on Kabru, the key here is his statement that you should think of demi-humans as "unknowable objects". Even his extraordinary powers of understanding have seemingly hit a limit. Part of this is just inherited prejudice, and doesn't need to have a complicated psychological explanation, any more than the elves who were prejudiced against him need one.

But also... this is probably somewhat linked to the way demi-humans seem to be considered "pseudo-monsters". They're the place that the strict delineation between the human and the monstrous is permeated. Laios, who is not interested in humans, remembers and is excited by Kuro. Chilchuck and Laios argue over whether it's OK to eat a mermaid. Kabru's prepared to (pretend to) roll with the idea that Laios ate the orcs.

But these are people, aren't they? Of course, this is a social construction, as we see from the fact that in the Eastern Archipelago, the label of "human" is reserved for tallmen, but in most of the rest of the world it depends on some obviously arbirary classification based on number of bones; "demi-humans" aren't in any essential way monstrous, except to an extent in their appearance, and physical location - due to their marginal social status, they're pushed out to live in unsafe places such as dungeons.

Therefore, Kabru's view of demi-humans as fundamentally "other", unable to be understood - monstrous - could be read as akin to abjection, the psychoanalytical concept described by Julia Kristeva. In order to create a bounded, secure superego, that thing which permeates and calls into question the border between self and other, human and animal, life and death, is rejected and pushed to the margin.

“Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing.[...] On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.” (Kristeva et al., 1984, p. 11) “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. ” (Kristeva et al., 1984, p. 13) “The pure will be that which conforms to an established taxonomy; the impure, that which unsettles it, establishes intermixture and disorder. [...] the impure will be those that do not confine themselves to one element but point to admixture and confusion.” (Kristeva et al., 1984, p. 107) (discussing food prohibitions in Leviticus)

This is both (due to its affinity with food-loathing and disgust) a very fruitful concept to apply to dunmeshi, and a psychoanalytical theory which I wouldn't exactly cosign as True Facts About Human Psychological Development. You may also know the abject from its utilisation in the classic essay "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine" by Barbara Creed - that's a lot more approachable than Kristeva if anyone's interested.

Key here, though, is that through the symbol of the "demi-human" is embodied a step between "human" and "monster" - and that's a prospect that puts at risk the whole notion of an absolute separation between those two categories in the first place. To Laios, that's something wonderful, and to Kabru, it's terrifying. We can see this principle further embodied in the relationship both characters have with the notion of becoming monstrous.

To Laios, this is transcendent, and represents a renunciation of everything human - in fact, if it didn't, it wouldn't "count".

To Kabru, it's a deeply-held fear, established by his childhood alienation (due to his illegitimacy, his eyes, and perhaps also his neurodivergency), deepened by monster-related trauma and the sense of responsibility and survivors guilt he feels for what happened at Utaya. His identity as a human who is not monstrous is key to his sense of stability and safety; he doesn't want to touch monsters, he doesn't even want to see them.

To acknowledge a kinship, a possibility of similarity between the things he loves (humans) and the things he hates (monsters) would be more than touching them - it would be putting them inside him. We know, quite explicitly, that this notion is triggering to Kabru. He literally has what seems to be a flashback when he's about to eat the harpy omelette.

So he abjects it, classifying the demi-human as fundamentally unlike him - an unknowable object, or an object that he refuses to know. Because in understanding it, he would interject the things he hates and fears into his self, which is already, always under threat by that hated and feared object.

Of course, again, Kabru isn't very good at enacting this refusal in practice. For one, when he chooses between his desires and ingesting the feared object, eating monsters... he eats monsters. Part of this is treating himself badly, the "ends justify the means" mentality. His goal is to destroy all monsters, so if he needs to become monster-like to do that, he will. But part of it is also the other motivation that he didn't even seem to know about until he said it: he wants to become Laios' friend, and to learn from him how a person can like monsters. He wants, at least in some part of him, to reconcile the feared and hated object into something he can understand.

For another:

Kabru can speak the kobold language. In the first place, while this may have been common in Utaya, it also could have been something he chose to learn, an early expression of his interest in understanding and talking to all sorts of people. It isn't the kind of thing you learn if you believe that communication between yourself and the group that speak it is impossible, is it?

It's possible to harbour prejudices against a group while being kind to an individual, and given Kabru has those prejudices regardless of his reasons, that is what he is doing. But also, his treatment of Kuro doesn't reflect a sincerely held belief that he's an "unknowable object" at all. His approach is exactly the same as it is to any other person: an analysis of goal and motive, and an attempt to help if he's sympathetic and their goals align - going out of his way to give language and local knowledge lessons in secret. His conviction that Mickbell and Kuro will truly become friends when they can properly communicate is completely contradictory to any sense of demi-humans as fundamentally different, or impossible to reach mutual understanding with. To me, it seems like this self-protective shield against the corruptive force demi-humans as an idea present to his identity, this abjection, when Kabru is face-to-face with one, just simply can't hold up against his finely honed skill of intellectual empathy. Perhaps because he's autistic, it seems his "empathy" is less an emotional mirror response, and more a set of cognitive skills for analysis of others. That instinctual, emotional empathy might not trigger when presented with a member of an out-group, but if it’s possible for Kabru to turn his cognitive empathy off, we don’t see him do it.

This isn't to say that this prejudice doesn't affect his behaviour. For one, it could negatively impact his judgement of politics and policy, where individual people don't enter into it. For another, I'm not convinced he'd be willing to overlook Mickbell's exploitative relationship with Kuro if Kuro wasn't a kobold. As it is, since both of them are satisfied, he doesn't feel like he needs to intervene, regardless of the fact Mickbell isn't paying Kuro. But if Daya and Holm were in a relationship, and Holm took both Daya's and his own share from their ventures, but only compensated her in living expenses and kept the rest, do you think he'd tolerate it, for example? Even if she said it was OK?

Conclusion

The kelpie chapter establishes that "people can never know what monsters are really thinking." That isn't just true of monsters, though.

True mutual understanding is impossible - between anyone. We can never truly understand another person's heart. This is touched on in, for example, the existence of shapeshifters and dopplegangers. Even a monster that seemed like a perfect copy of a person wouldn’t be that person, and wouldn’t be a satisfactory replacement.

We’re intended, I think, to understand the winged lion's repeated suggestions to just replace people who have been lost with copies as something uncanny, which demonstrates the way that the winged lion never manages to attain a complete understanding of humans. A version of a person who was created to fulfil your memories of them, to be the person who you wanted them to be, would be a terrible, miserable thing.

Disagreeing, coming into conflict, and misunderstanding each other, are essential parts of what it means to be living beings, as fundamental as the need to eat.

The only thing to do is not to take more than you need to eat to survive, and not impose your own desires onto others. To do your best to sincerely communicate your desires, even if they're embarrassing or vulnerable or strange, like Kabru eventually does with Laios; like Laios does, bit by bit, with the people around him; like Marcille does, Chilchuck does, Senshi does... to hope they will accept you, and do your best to understand them in return.

We can re-examine, in that context, Kabru's line about the elves' tendency to "explain nothing and take everything".

They have the power to impose their preferred "menu" onto less powerful groups. And in that context, mutual understanding being impossible just means that they won't give up their power because they're asked nicely. Kabru's goal is to seize the truth that they won't give to him, and to create a situation where they can't take everything. Because he's accurately surmised that nothing about the treatment of short-lived races will change so long as the power imbalance remains. Despite the way he mistakenly ascribes part of that to "long-lived vs short-lived" or "human vs demi-human", the actual gulfs in understanding he identifies are structural, are about power and about access to material resources and safety.

I think he could come to recognise this. Yaad is teaching him political science after all, and while a prince's lessons on political science won't exactly get at much that's radical or invested in the interests and perspectives of the marginalised (Capital is a critique of for a reason after all...) I believe in Kabru's ability to learn critically and get more from a lesson than it was intended to teach.