#note: bc this is specifically laios thinking of kabru

[curapicas]

how come they made it even gayer

[crownconstellation]

complaining about dungeon meshi as i said i was gonna do in prev post's tags. i rly am incredibly sick of how Shipping has become the centric focus of this series and -- even as someone who generally prioritises f/f when i think about romance in media -- how post-anime farcille is being held up by its fans. like i have been a fan of DM for 6 years i have not seen anyone talk about shipping like this until the anime started coming out

earlier i saw a post talking about how pushback against farcille feels like... suspicious or whatever bc it's the first Big Thing with the biggest pairing being f/f, and i get what it's trying to say, but i also inherently disagree with it. i don't think this is a misogyny issue i think this is an issue more than anything of dungeon meshi being so noticeably and genuinely really, really compelling in itself, so it being swallowed by shipping is more apparent than it would be with like.... idk seasonal anime #48 with yaoi focus. and so people are going to be loud about it when this happens. i think it's rly moreso just the fact that there's Ship Focus in general than it being about a f/f pairing specifically

although honestly, even if it's not about it being f/f specifically, there IS something to be said regarding how fans of it are handling the pairing that makes it particularly grating. this is not a case of "people overextrapolating for it" for this ship as the post said. i have seen people say farcille is the heart and center of dunmeshi and that their love is the focus of it. i have seen people infer that laios and the rest of his party's efforts mean nothing, because it's marcille who had the greatest hand in everything and she did what she did for falin's sake. that is not overextrapolating. that is corroding the story from the inside out because people want to make it about romance when it's not.

i also think that the way farcille fans have been treating the characters around them gets very odd. like for a big one i'm thinking abt the dismissal of laibru as "two guys standing next to each other" or whatevre ppl have been pulling out for farcille bc it is ridiculous and goes back to what i complained abt in prev post's tags re: alnst with how not everything is MID yaoi vs GODLY yuri. sometimes the m/m pairing is good. the two of them are intentional foils and build a close friendship by the end of the series. their relationship is compelling and to dismiss it to hype farcille shows a lack of understanding of the text you're fighting for.

it also tends to approach... at the very least, lacking a sense of intersectionality. this isn't just Yaoi V. Yuri. kabru, who is the centre of both dunmeshi's most popular m/m pairings, is a brown man. put against a white f/f pairing since because people keep insisting on engaging in some stupid yaoi v yuri war, and he gets thrown under the bus a lot here for that. (not to say the pairings he's part of don't have any issues with how fans portray them, but farcille fan hostility towards pairings that both end up involving him can... approach a weird place.) ((on that note the insane hostility they extend towards toshiro is also really nuts. again. think for a sec before you address this moc you feel is like... threatening your white f/f pairing.)

[bi-hop]

4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13 for the fic writer asks!

hehe alright

4. What detail in [insert fic] are you really proud of?

Hm. In general, I'm always pretty proud of the worldbuilding I do. Elf-made and gnome-approved T-gel in Only I See You, plays being forced to only have Noxian elements in My New Boyfriend Has Blood On His Hands?!?, even just the general fact of how subtly wrong the framing fairytale is in Birdcages All The Way Down. I like building off of a world or warping it.

... I REALLY want to say a detail of The Loyal Spouse, but I can't yet-

5. What do you wish someone would ask you about [insert fic]? Answer it now!

Honestly, for some of my fics, I just wish they'd get comments at all. Does that make sense? I have no specific questions I need in mind. I'm usually happy to answer 'why did you choose to write this exact moment/dialogue' questions though bc I always have an absurd answer.

6. What’s one fact about the universe of [insert fic] that you didn’t get a chance to mention in the fic itself?

I dunno if this has ever happened to me? I'm always saying shit in the fic directly. But lemme look at my notes real quick.

... Okay, yeah, if you don't read my author's notes, you will NOT know every emoji Laios uses for his friends and teacher. And so the latest chapter's joke might be confusing.

There's just no organic way to mention all of them without someone else going through his phone or something like that, because he doesn't see his sorting system as remarkable.

10. How do you decide what to write?

Copy and pasting this one from an earlier post. It really is just a matter of chance. As in, what am I interested in or hyperfixated on right now? What stories do I think that I am good at telling with this material? What stories do I think are missing in this space?

With Only I See You, for example, I just decided to write it on a whim. I wanted to write about university stuff in a comedy. And that’s what came out. The Loyal Spouse though, which is what I’m also writing right now? It’ll make more sense when the story comes out, but I wanted to write something I wasn’t really seeing being done with Kabru. And that’s all I can say.

12. Are there any tropes you used to dislike but have grown on you?

No one is ever going to believe this, but I used to hate stories where manipulative characters were 100 percent accepted in a friend group. Or got much love in general. Part of it, I think, is just that I was dealing with too much at the time. I was railing against the concept of manipulation with no nuance due to the relationships I was being subjected to, especially because multiple people were calling me manipulative to hurt me at the time. You can even see this in my old characters, where I'd always have at least one person who was wise to the cruelty and openly disdainful.

Obviously, now, I write manipulators basically everyday. Hi, Jhin! Hi, Kabru! Hi, [insert OCs] here! And they're all very different, of course, because manipulation on its own doesn't mean much. I could guide someone into giving someone else a scholarship, and I could also make it so they'd never consider giving that money away. (General I, not me. I can't persuade anyone-)

13. Are there any tropes you used to like but don’t anymore?

Hm... I used to read a lot of soulmate fanfiction when I was little. I got into fanfiction as a thing because I wanted to see two characters from that wizard school series (lmao) get together. And I liked the mini genre of fics where they were destined to be together, where the canon ships they were in were just mistakes or the product of manipulation (lmao, see?), and where they even all seemed to have telepathic links?

I wouldn't say I hate soulmate fanfiction, but the telepathic link and the use of gods to justify it as a thing isn't something I see much. But I can't write it myself or I'll be forever reminded of Harry Potter LMAOOO I can't win