#so kind of have to ask her..

[inkskinned]

the problem is that being single is seen as the consolidation prize, and not the natural neutral state of being-a-person. at the end of the movie or the book or the poetry, there is a person waiting for you at the altar, and they love you. if the play is a comedy, everyone gets married. the metaphor is about how you are not-whole. the metaphor is about how everyone is going to be happily-ever-after. the metaphor is that romantic love is the most important resource on the planet, not just all-love. all-love is not a thing, that is a disappointment. the treasure is not the friends we made along the way. the treasure is the girl you landed.

the metaphor is that you cannot be alone, that means you are broken. are you getting over someone? that is acceptable, you can be getting over someone, but not for long. you must be single because you would rather not be single. you must be single and looking to not-be-single. you must want to date, eventually.

friendship and community are never seen as being equal-to or even-better than romantic connection. that person is your one! you need to find them. you need to hunt through the sand particles until you can shift out some kind of gem. this is regardless to your own experience of the beach and the sun. you need to be somewhere with someone.

if you are taking this time alone to heal, that is so sad. everyone gives you this little pitying look. the understanding is that you are not actually happier than you were before you were single. it is seen as a sort of pity - oh, you are choosing yourself, making yourself the priority? - that isn't quite right. you must mean that you are making yourself ready for the right person. you are just laying the bed better this time. open up your heart. you'll find them, we promise!

what do you mean you're really-truly genuinely-very happy? you are probably misremembering what it was like to be in a relationship. and besides, once you meet your person, that time will look grey and bland and wasted. your person is the only way for you to see in color. so what if you have taken this time - for the first time in your entire life - to actually-for-real do the fucking work. you can be proud of yourself, sure. but the way we need to know that you got better is that you get a partner. you're healed enough for the next bad part!

people don't choose to be single, they just say they're choosing to be single - they actually mean "nobody wants to date me." it doesn't matter how many people you have gently rejected or how many times you've talked it over carefully in therapy. what matters is that you are single, and by all accounts - that means you are something worth our pity. your successes and life all seem pale in the sunlight. sure, you have done amazing things and finally found your way in life. what matters is that there wasn't a person in the room with you while you did it.

you want to tell them - that's the whole thing. i didn't know how to be alone in the room. i didn't know how to handle the silence. every moment was so sharp, and i kept choosing the wrong way to close the door. i have spent my entire life in the empty well, living in the ricochet of someone else's cruelty. for once i have built myself a ladder. for once everything i taste is all mine, every bite of sunshine and laughter. i have learned how to sleep out in the open with my memories. recently, they have started to purr.

your father rolls his eyes. listen. this isn't about you. i just want a grandchild in my future.

[heartorbit]

find another role, carry on the show

[shorthaltsjester]

watching the sdcc panel and i am just very :) about how sweet their answers to “what are some of the micro moments from the game that have stuck with you the most over the years?” are. taliesin saying what the fuck is up with that which was the first like The Party Gets To Know Each Other moments of c3. travis saying asking his wife if he could kiss her in campaign. marisha going way back to the cannonball competition in campaign one. ashley choosing the beauyasha date but also just the silly goat noise matt made. liam adding onto that to compliment matt roleplaying grass so well and then saying his favourite moment was writing a story for laura and reading it to her as caleb for jester. and then matt saying that was his answer, and that his favourite moments of the game are when they find ways to give gifts to each other whether tangible or not. and sam saying his favourite moments have less to do with the story and is more so when he can just. see his friends across the table from him. when marisha perches and when laura and ashley are (badly) drawing dicks and liam saying he loves when sam sneezes and ashley tells him to stop it and just. yeah. they Are an extremely popular online powerhouse, but i’m so happy that they’re also friends building a world together out of gifts to and love for one another.

like i Am so enamoured with the characters and the world of exandria but the moments when you can feel the love that those people have for each other reach out from behind the stained glass of their performances (to steal a metaphor from brennan lee mulligan) are so extremely special and i am endlessly grateful that they decided to share their silly little home game with the world.

[choccy-milky]

seb wants to be pet, too 😤💕 ((TYSM to @angel-fr0m-venus for asking how seb would react to clora petting all the cats around the school/hogsmeade BAHAHA. like a neglected puppy, thats how🐶))

[enjoythepetrichor]

I love the dynamic Julian and Jadzia have around S3 and 4 when they allowed Julian to be over his crush on her so they could genuinely be besties (extremely queer dynamic to have, wildly underrepresented imo)

Like in Rejoined when she does her lame magic tricks and Julian hypes her up so much, I think they should do that for each other. Every time Julian enters Quark's Jadzia is there like "Here is DS9's most special guy, your CMO: Julian Bashir!" and he would do the same stupid little curtsy she does when he does it to her and everyone hates it, they do this shit every night but it never gets old to them, like what is life if you're not wildly cringe about and with your friends!!

Too bad DS9 dropped the ball on their bestie era but to me it's real forever

[dayurno]

robin cross and kevin day parallels actually go so crazy. they both spent their formative years in a basement underground with exy-obsessed captors. they both saw exy as freedom. they both were isolated even within the foxes’ group of outcasts. they were both under andrew’s protection. it cost kevin jean to leave the nest and it cost robin another girl’s life to escape her kidnapper. robin carried her racquet with her to self-soothe and kevin restrings the net of his when he’s anxious. they’re even bird coded

[welcometogrouchland]

my Stephanie Brown hot take is that she should get mad bitches now that she's single in comics. Yes yes shipping BUT the one time she had sex she was punished by the narrative via teen pregnancy. I think she should be allowed to have as much sex as she wants with zero consequences. Could be a lot of sex, could be a little. Point is she should get to do it without getting narratively baby trapped this time. she should get them pregnant, actually.

[ibetittering]

Going back to my roots

[rapidhighway]

the way I was introduced to dc was teen titans in which nobody ever uses their secret identity ever. They never use their names, only their pseudonyms and that has stuck with me for some reason. Idek if they know what Robin looks like. Robin is Robin, Starfire is Starfire. Stop calling him dick grayson stop deadnaming him

[blaithnne]

I like how I gave Frida two flags when she only needed one, meanwhile David has to squish both flags together. To be fair, it’s just like Frida to be incredibly organised and bring multiple back up flags, and for David to panic and not do that.

[vee-lociraptor]

rat john doe malevolent in the fourth dimension what will he do

inspiration is obvious but for the uninitiated. @james-spooky 's malevatouille which won't get out of my head. also this post by lotte that made me realize i needed to crochet him because i cant draw.

anyway. read malevatouille it's really good. james is plaguing us all with it /pos

[theylovevenus]

Updated relationship chart for my Naruto 2000s au!!

[ssaemilyhotchner]

rewatching S7E24 and thinking about the contrast between the two conversations about leaving that Emily has before the wedding

how she earnestly asks Morgan, “can we please talk about this later?” to which he replies, “no” and persists in questioning her

and then the photo negative with Hotch. for all intents and purposes, it’s the same exchange as above but with Emily’s pride and will preserved, never escalating to a point where she has to beg. Hotch poses it as a question rather than an insistence—“do you want to talk about it?”

and when Emily replies, “absolutely. but not now,” what does he do?

he respects her answer.

[hopeswriting]

daily life arc miura haru. does anyone know who i'm talking about. do you guys remember her. i still can't believe what happened to her 😔

[possamble]

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.

[halflifebutawesome]

"gordon and alyx can have a sibling dynamic i think" wrong interpretation: Gordon sees Alyx as a little sister to be humored and protected, Alyx sees Gordon as an idolized big brother figure correct interpretation: these are two adults who know each other on such a deep level that they are a fucking nightmare. they're the time when i worked food service and my brother came in and asked "hey can i get something to eat" and I glared at him and sneered "I don't know, CAN you?" and scared my unknowing coworkers into thinking I'd finally snapped. except my brother and i don't have alien superpowers yet

YOU GET IT EXACTLYYYYYYYYYYYYY . they're like two cats bonded at a shelter. You get it you understand completely THANK YOU for wording it so perfectly . Yeah. Yeah 🧡 this is so beautiful