#this is about several things

[cookiebomba-blog]

joining my first community dedicated to a game: "Wow, everyone here is so enlightened and wise! The devs don't know shit. These guys are the boots on the ground who put their passion into the game and know instinctively what's best for the community and balance. I should listen to these wise elders so that I may achieve a greater understanding of the game and spread my enlightenment to others."

joining my 12th community dedicated to a game: "Have you dumbfucks even played the game."

Bonus points if 9/10 times the devs are clearly trying their best and are still catching strays because DemonKing69 thinks that the game is dead because a character was strong for one (1) patch.

[spaydekingcayde]

…People forget that not everything is done out of genuine deliberate malice and sometimes things just have unfortunate unintended connotations that weren’t fully thought through. It obviously does not excuse anything but to automatically insist that there is genuine calculated malice in something that is most likely the result of not fully thinking implications through is just poor critical thinking. It’s a nuance that you are all missing and it does not mean that the person thinking this and not making these hard fast assumptions is actually a bigot. You have to run down the list of possibilities and be willing to say “This is most likely not deliberate BUT—“ instead of “this is absolutely 100% deliberate malice,” etc.

You aren’t in the heads of the writers nor were you in the board room when the concept was brought up, you can’t assume deliberate malice nor can you assume accidental and unfortunate connotations. There are some exceptions to this where the intention is very much clear through the rest of the writing or event through the beliefs of the writer(s), but there are also cases where this is not the case. There are some examples where the thing written out of ignorance is particularly egregious, and there are some where it isn’t.

And people also gotta learn that this line of thinking is also not a defence, you do not have to jump to a 100% black or 100% white conclusion when you do not have all the information about the writers or what the writers were thinking in the board room. You should not make assumptions that you cannot 100% back up with at least some concrete evidence, because that is a gamble and none of you are willing to lose that gamble.

[verdantmeadows]

"Bigotry towards this specific group isn't a thing, it's just another version of this other bigotry" is a sentiment I see WAY too many people in spaces that are supposed to be supportive and progressive FAR too often.

[cosmic-muses]

Y'all ever get tempted to do things you know aren't the smartest?

[newtsinboots]

Face the Wind

-prints-

[lovef0ols]

if you aren't autistic you have 0 right to talk over autistic people. stay out of it. stop infantilizing us.

[the-aerispace]

Gritting my teeth and loving the media despite everything

[spitblaze]

I don't see people gas up gnc and butch transfems nearly enough, can we get a fuckin round of applause for gnc and butch transfems

[atalana]

but seriously i do find it so funny that ford was like OH GOD MY PRECIOUS REPUTATION after bill possessed him around other people for all of one night

and then he gets back to this dimension after thirty years and this is now the photo the press associates with his name

[artkaninchenbau]

A h-heartfelt reunion..?

Bonus

[nonbinary-sticks-the-badger]

btw if any starline fans are following. sorry for everything.

[bitchesandbrosandnonbinaryhoes]

i swear, im getting bastard fatigue

stop being mean to eachother i am going to gnaw through my laptop

[prokopetz]

One of my favourite bits of linguistic trivia is that in Ancient Greek, the word ἰχώρ (cognate to the modern English "ichor") is attested in extant literature to mean both "the bodily fluid which gods possess instead of blood", and also "gravy", which implies several things about Ancient Greek culinary culture's attitude toward gravy.

[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.

[schmackarys]

I need to get out of this cycle, man

[someguyinc]

guys will see stories about a familial cycle of violence and you are home but you can never go home and go: hell yeah 😂