#has no desire to.

[gibbearish]

love when ppl defend the aggressive monetization of the internet with "what, do you just expect it to be free and them not make a profit???" like. yeah that would be really nice actually i would love that:)! thanks for asking

[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.

[ironinkpen]

there's something so poetic about kipperlilly copperkettle—who hated one of her classmates for daring to be better than her and having a dead dad, who refused to improve herself and instead chose to be bitter and entitled, who was so obsessed with being Special and Important like she felt she deserved that she willingly worked with a rage god, betrayed her party, and killed her friend—getting killed by fucking. Hold Person. her fancy optimal build IMMEDIATELY folding in the face of riz's cleverness and experience and applied knowledge. she spends years fixated solely on racking up EXP and getting the Best Abilities, and then when she dies, she's killed not in glorious combat but by a clever, practical application of a 2nd level spell that she NEVER would have ever thought of using because she has no creativity or adventurers' spirit, cast by the same classmate she always hated with a watch his dead dad gave him.

[vio-lenceee]

gale just knows morena and tara bought this billboard for him alright original meme under the cut

[pencilscratchins]

atla renaissance pt 3 calls to me like a siren

[libraryleopard]

the cat king being desire's son is a great headcanon but also given that the other child of desire in sandman is part of a multi-decade scheme to topple dream of the endless i think it would be funny if desire considers him kind of a family disappointment because he just seems to hang out in this one town in the pacific northwest being dramatic. yeah this is my son he hasn't gotten close to destroying reality even once. he lives in an abandoned warehouse. he's hung up on an uptight edwardian ghost who won't even give him the time of day. cringe.

[my-fool]

I dont get people who write a Wyll that gets nervous and an Astarion who doesn't. Wyll gets tortured in front of the group and still doesn't miss a beat, aside from if you let his father die, I think there's only one or two lines where his dialogue strays from "affable/charming". Good luck trying to get through that shell, lol. Meanwhile Astarion has dozens of shrill, nervous, panicked dialogue lines. Astarion is a character who is influenced strongly by player choice and never goes it alone whereas Wyll leaves the camp if you fuck him around too much.

I feel like if you make Astarion cool and suave you are falling for the façade that is supposed to be deconstructed by the viewer and if you make Wyll fumbling, naïve and nervous you are forgetting that this man has been locked in a 24/7 one-on-one psycho-sexual mental battle with a billion-year-old demon from the 9th circle of Hell for the entirety of his adult life at this point, so. Jot that down.

[liverpepper]

(on the subject of heart hands 🫶 happy belated strifehart sunday!) Roxas: Who is that?? Cloud: Squall. Roxas: No, but, like, who is that??? Cloud: That's Squall. sora: technically this is your fault for teaching him to use photoshop Cloud: That isn't photoshop that's just Squall. Roxas: Doubt................ Leon: (???)

[edlucavalden]

Oh my god.. this post was cooking i had to..

[sunderwight]

Bingqiu AU where Luo Binghe's the chosen village sacrifice to the evil deity who lives up the mountain.

Normally the village sends maidens, but they've more or less run out of expendable girls of the right age and, ahem, "virtues". So of course Luo Binghe's early life bad luck kicks in. In the wake of his mother's death there's no one to really care about what happens to him, he's fairly pretty, and the village leaders decide that if they dress him up like a girl the teenaged homeless kid should pass well enough. And hey, y'know, he's probably got a hard life ahead for him anyway -- dying in a brothel of some venereal disease or on the streets of exposure or starvation. At least as a sacrifice, everyone else gets to benefit from his loss! And the kid will get added to a shrine and be remembered as a hero! If anything, he should be happy about this!

Binghe is not happy about this.

But he's also a skinny underfed nobody who is easily overpowered, dressed up like a bride, and tied to a post. So. Not much he can do but wait for the evil deity to come and do whatever horrible thing he's gonna do to him.

Meanwhile, Shen Yuan is pretty sure he's been isekai'd into the over-powered hero of some kind of supernatural adventure story? He's not totally sure because he doesn't recognize the setting, but the signs are there. He's got a shrine-like base of operations (though it seems to have become corrupted/ruined, probably he has to restore it somehow), he has a very resilient and handsome new body with spiritual energy of some kind flowing through him, and a very clearly magical sword. Plus lots of neat starter powers! Though it feels like he has other abilities that have been blocked somehow? Probably he has to level up in order to access them.

When he treks out of his "base" and finds what seems to be a distressed maiden, he takes it for his beginner hero mission. The girl claims that she's been doomed to be sacrificed to an evil god. That sounds a little above Shen Yuan's pay grade for dealing with, so he unties her and decides that they had better just get out of the whole region altogether. He already packed up anything useful from his base, anticipating he might get caught up in an adventure once he left, so they follow the river away from the settlement until they reach another one.

While they travel, Luo Binghe tells Shen Yuan about the cursed deity, Shen Qingqiu, who was cast out of the heavens for slaughtering one of his brethren and has apparently being do-who-knows what to maidens from the local village in exchange for his "protection" ever since. Sounds like a real asshole! And also mid-level boss type bad guy at least. Shen Yuan hopes he doesn't have to fight him, but he probably will.

Thank goodness he found Binghe, though! Clearly the helpful little sister type! He's definitely going to require her assistance if he's going to figure out how to navigate this world and level up his skills enough to take on a god.

[antiamericanaction]

brennan lee mulligan really couldn't make it through the introduction scene of a transfem character without making a joke about her genitals god damn

the joke wasn't even funny someone asked her zodiac and she said "Ophiuchus" which means Serpent Bearer. The punchline is literally just "woman has penis"

and this is in a series where one of the main characters is a trans man and his transness is treated with a lot of respect, both by other characters and the cast itself

transmisogyny is the rule, and it looks like dimension 20 is no exception

[tiredbitchposts]

Ok, but Shen Jiu being Shen Yuan's father is so funny in a very tragic way. Shen Jiu is a ball of traumas and all types of issues and i truly believe there's not a single one that man doesn't have, so, you give him a baby!Shen Yuan, a little ball of life that depends on him for survival, cannot walk away from him and is culturally wired to pretty much love him and if not, to at the least respect him above all else, you cannot tell me that this man would be normal about him. Also, imagine Shen Jiu, who'd be the type of parent to project traumas the way only a mother could, having a child that looks like him but with a "sweeter" personality (which, by the way, is bullshit, they just have never seen that boy rip into a book he disliked but wouldn't stop reading) that has the effect on men Shen Yuan has, he'd lock that boy up in a tower to "cultivate" and consequently create a rumor about the Qing Jing's beauty who was so bewitching their peak lord father locked them in a tower because that's just his luck. Loving Shen Yuan wouldn't fix him, but it'd create a whole new set of issues that'd cancel out the other ones

[infernal-lamb]

some rushed doodles of our new goat darling........I have so many plans for them

[llamahearted]

what's worse -- feeling the depths of your desire for the first time, or having all your closest friends around to witness it?

prints ♣︎ song

[kendallsroyco]

Gray sweatpants whore VS Black boxers DILF

[k-wame]

ANDRÉ LAMOGLIA as Iván Carvalho & FERNANDO LÍNDEZ as 'Joel' ÉLITƎ Series 7 · EP02 · dir. Lino Escalera