#this is also about kabru and mithrun stop focusing so hard on how it was ‘forced upon’ kabru as if it’s the most evil thing in the world

[baristabomb]

...weird amount of dunmeshi fans have been saying being a caretaker in a relationship is the worst thing ever..marcille must want to killl everyone soo bad because doing things for people suuuucks sooo muchh

it's an act of love, not just a job i promise. we all want someone who's willing to take care of us in some way, just like how senshi shows care for others by cooking for them :'|

[loriache]

@ambrosiagourmet: #reblog#yesssss yes#my take on this scene is focused more on him regretting stuff w Laios bc it was selfish and messy and vulnerable#he expressed a want for himself rather than for the Greater Good#BUT stopping Mithrun was also selfish. but it was a different kind of selfish#I reread that chapter the other day and it hit me hard in the face how much Kabru was straight up triggered into action#his thoughts going to ‘maybe this is impossible for a short-life species to handle’ right before he acts#but yeah back to your point: his action there very much gave him MORE control

Highlighting these tags & what you say about him being triggered is just so true actually. I had the thought recently that the elves conquering the dungeon would basically be re-enacting a key part of Kabru's trauma about Utaya - the part where the elves showed up, took over, fenced the place off behind a barrier, and never told him anything about what happened & why. Including Milsiril, his adoptive mother, who definitely knew and definitely denied that she knew and who he could definitely tell was lying.

Denying there even is something that is being kept secret from you, being told to calm down, talking "as if you're soothing a child", must trigger Kabru in a huge way. You're right, he's pushed to take action in the first place by thinking that there's no way a short-lived person could have handled this to begin with, but I think this response by Cithis escalates the situation and pushes him to further extremes (including Pit Diving).

I think that it's an interesting character note that what Kabru blames himself for is where he restrained himself and didn't act.

He didn't kill Laios when he had the chance. Now, if the world had ended I do think he would bear some responsibility here... not to the extent he feels he does, which is driven to extremes by his survivor's guilt. It's certainly not "entirely his fault"! After all, if the world had ended, some of the blame should definitely go to Laios! And it's not really "blame", since the outcome is ultimately a great one - the demon is defeated! But, essentially, it is true that Kabru's presence in the story is instrumental in getting to the point we are at in chapter 90.

But what I'd pinpoint as the reason for that responsibility is not because he didn't kill Laios, but because he intervened to stop Mithrun killing Thistle and conquering the dungeon, and then intervened again to stop Laios from being captured by Lycion.

In this moment, these interventions don't even occur to Kabru. He's such an action-oriented character that he instinctively reaches for a place where he didn't act, rather than the places where he did. It's like he needs it to be the case that "I could have stopped this if I'd done more", rather than "I could have stopped this if I hadn't involved myself". I think that's really telling about the kind of person that he is. It also links compellingly to a self-soothing narrative, where "I can fix this and control the outcome if I work out the right set of actions to take," which is a result of the way he's processed the trauma of his childhood.