#but even with that said

[sk3tch404]

i NEED to see ghiacchio next, please.....😭😭

You beg and you shall receive

I take hands half seriously 😁😋

The verbal abuse goes crazy but at least he won't give you frost bite the first couple of times!!

When you comply with your mentally unstable tsundere yandere but they're still not very nice with you (unsurpringly you're not the problem!! #survivalskills)

Tbh I had a bit of difficulty bc one, poses/canvas room 💀, two, Ghiaccio as a yandere is very scary due to his 0 to 100 anger. Getting yelled at by a murderous male assassin is actually terrifying irl and just to think about, so here's mildly tame Ghia + him being a meanie with his words as per usual :DD

No glasses ver beloww

[sheepydraws]

The secret Dungeon Meshi sauce that's getting people to eat better is that it's so non-judgmental. Senshi and the rest of the gang never talk about what not to eat besides things that taste bad and literal poison. They don't even talk about "health" that much besides the importance of a balanced diet. It's so much easier to eat well when you think of food simply as something your body needs, and that it's often worth the extra effort to make it taste good, especially when you understand how to connect "things your body needs" with "things that taste good"

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[wildbasil]

things haven't been great but i think they will be. eventually 🌻🌼🩷

[captainsaltypear]

IS ANYONE ELSE GONNA TALK ABOUT THIS OR

[bardofavon]

not to be controversial bc I know this is like…not in line with shifting opinions on fanfic comment culture but if there’s a glaring typo in my work I will NOT be offended by pointing it out. if ao3 fucks up the formatting…I will also not be offended by having this pointed out…

‘looking forward to the next update’ and ‘I hope you update soon!’ are different vibes than a demand, and should be read in good faith because a reader is finding their way to tell you how much they love it. I will not be mad at this.

‘I don’t usually like this ship but this fic made me feel something’ is also incredibly high praise. I’m not going to get mad at this.

even ‘I love this fic but I’m curious about why you made [x] choice’ is just another way a reader is engaging in and putting thought into your work.

I just feel like a lot of authors take any comment that’s not perfectly articulated glowing praise in the exact manner they’re hoping to receive it in bad faith.

fic engagement has been dropping across the board over the last several years, and yes it’s frustrating but it isn’t as though I can’t see how it happens. comment anxiety can be a real thing. the last thing anyone wants to do is offend an author they love, and that means sometimes people default to silence.

idk where I’m going with this I guess aside from saying unless a comment is outright attacking me I’m never going to get mad at it, and I think a lot of authors should feel the same way. ESPECIALLY TYPOS PLZ GOD POINT OUT MY TYPOS.

[inkpotsprite]

This was after he blew up all of the Leagues tech.

[mynnthia]

was talking with a friend about how some of dunmeshi fаndom misunderstands kabru's initial feelings towards laios.

to sum up kabru's situation via a self-contained modernized metaphor:

kabru is like a guy who lost his entire family in a highly traumatic car accident. years later he joins a discord server and takes note of laios, another server member who seems interesting, so they start chatting. then laios reveals his special interest and favorite movie of all time is David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), and invites kabru to go watch a demolition derby with him

[unidentifiedgothamite]

duke: who do you guys think is bruce's favorite child?

jason: it's probably fingerstripes

dick: me?! it's obviously you, jay

tim: it's jason

steph: facts. b lets him get away with everything, including murder

cass: jason

damian: as much as i loathe to admit it, father does treat todd differently

jason: ya'll are trippin'

meanwhile...

clark: b, just curious, but, do you have a favorite child?

bruce: hn, what date is it?

clark: um, may 12th?

bruce: then it's batcow

clark: what

bruce: did i stutter?

[cistematicchaos]

I keep thinking about this discussion I was watching the other day where two people were talking about tattoos and how people say younger people shouldn't be allowed to get tattoos because "they might regret them later."

One of the people spoke up and said something along the lines of that if she got a tattoo when they were younger and regretted it later, they didn't think that meant they shouldn't have been allowed to get the tattoo.

Because her younger self deserved the right to get that tattoo and enjoy it, even if they didn't like it 100 evolutions of character later. Their younger self still deserved the right to make that choice, just like her [insert age] self deserves the right to get tattoos their 90 year old self would despise. It would be a disrespect to claim otherwise.

Your younger self deserved the right to your body just as much as you do now, even if you don't like or agree with what they did with it.

What a beautiful mentality that applies to so many things.

[baguantte]

why is there two of them...

[several-breathing-eyes]

I saw somebody say that watching the Percy Jackson show made them realize that in the first books Percy doesn't even say half the stuff he thinks and he's just a quiet kid silently judging everyone, like they're so right.

Think about it from Grover's perspective. You know Percy as a quiet boy who certainly has his judgy thoughts but (aside from telling them to you) keeps them to himself. He's just trying to make it through school, for his mom.

Then his mom dies. And he loses the ability to give absolutely any fucks. He starts saying all this shit he never said out loud and to people who could do infinitely worse things to him than anything Nancy Bobifit ever even tried. And it only gets worse as he gets older.

Like bro went from quiet kid in the back of the class to fist fighting a god in the span of like a week. Then he openly told the gods to pay their child support. Grover was having heart attacks every other minute.

[shadowtraveled]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[lazylittledragon]

one of those 'only wine in the camp supplies' nights [X]

[neutral-towards-mindmaps]

can't stop thinking about tamsyn muir's choice to present her deep, morally and politically complex science fantasy world with a central web of magic, secrets and lies reaching back ten thousand years through the eyes of three characters who:

1. tune out and start thinking about hot women whenever the magic system or worldbuilding are being explained

2. experience hallucinations on a daily basis, have brain damage and are being deceived and misled by their peers, authority figures, themselves and God

3. don't know who they are, have spent their entire life in one place and are, on all levels but physical, six months old

[casasupernovas]

Remember ages ago when I said Freema did an interview talking about Martha and what she was and wasn't happy with in regards to the story? I found it!

Transcript:

Interviewer: ...Do you still think about her? How do you think about Martha in the year 2019.

Freema: Ah yeah I just did a convention with David [Tennant] recently actually and he said something that um, I hadn't heard before, and he was asked about that relationship between the two chatacters and he said 'I think that the Doctor wasn't fair on her' and I sorta looked at him and I was like...I've never heard your take on that before because I knew at the time you know she was...for me there was definitely a kind of beat that they struck on that stayed maybe a little bit too long. It was the unrequited storyline an I think they stopped exploring her as a fully rounded human being in light of that and Russell [T. Davies] did say you know, it's important to him though that people can sometimes see that...you know love doesn't always have to be reciprocated and it's okay to kind of...most of us probably have that in common that we have unreciprocated...emotions than reciprocated and I was like no that's cool I get that but people also tune in for escapism and for romance and all of the magic and the, you know, the imagination so sometimes to be like grounded back down into hard truth isn't very attractive. *Laughs* So I kind of felt like she got stuck a little bit amd when people ask me if if I would go back it would only be to explore her as a fully rounded person more and she had so much going on and then it got stuck for whatever reason. But I had the best time and I feel like there's so much more potential to that person.