#this is kinda insane yknow

[widevibratobitch]

ugh. hi. yeah. do yall ever think about

You rush headlong into a deed you deem sublime. Do not deceive yourself: I know you well. Long have you thirsted for it. If your pride but have its fill, what matters it to you though thousand hearts should break. Oh, now, at length, I comprehend your feelings - 'tis the love of admiration which has won your heart!

and

A man like me will do amazing things to be seen. (...) So all those stories that you would have my biographers tally as courage - it's all vanity. Always has been. And we're at the end of vanity.

cause i do. like a lot.

[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.

[skitskatdacat63]

"We are not the easiest opponent for everybody else, let's put it that way."

[cannibaltranssexual]

DON'T YOU REALIZE OUR BODYS COULD FALL APART AT ANY SECOND?

[general-cyno]

one of my favorite things about wano is that it has a whole bunch of zoro protecting luffy bits. from their reunion all the way to the start of the raid and during their confrontation with kaido + big mom

zoro protecting luffy always has a special spot for me ngl. luffy's the strongest in the crew and he's normally the one facing the most dangerous enemies, taking on the biggest risks and such. although luffy has definitely gotten help from/been saved by other straw hats and non-crew characters before, throughout the manga zoro's been shown consistently worrying about his safety and jumping in to save him whenever it's needed. he's usually the one to notice and signal to the others when luffy's genuinely in danger too (and luffy in turn has done the same for zoro). points at thriller bark again one of zoro's most impactful moments in the story is about protecting luffy, even.

but luffy does worry about him too! he's shown reacting to zoro getting hurt the few times it happens in his presence:

plus - after zoro momentarily stops kaido and big mom's conquest of the sea (taking the brunt of it by himself/redirecting it? the panels are a bit confusing to me but otherwise luffy and the rest would've looked injured from that particular blast imo), which leaves him pretty wounded as law later points out, luffy's already angrily going after kaido

I love this arc.

[minalots]

🚬💭

(Redraw of this image below from Blue Submarine No.6)

[karamazovanon]

a collection of the live action raskolnikov from this post :D i thought this version was SO visually interesting so i did a bunch of redraws of stills (most of which aren't in that post oops, thank you @rknchan for sending them!!! <3)

[starflungwaddledee]

kirbytober 2023 21 + 26 : fav characters + ship [ prev || next ]

putting this at the top because it's extremely important but i received a message implying that some folks headcanon these two as drastically different ages. you may headcanon whatever you like of course, but in my work i firmly think that they're both full adults who are at least 25+. this is abundantly clear in my work. i'm not interested in headcanoning any of them as literal children and i would never touch that shit. dni if you think that sort of ship would actually be okay. don't be a freak. thanks.

very typical to take your favs and then also shove them together but isn't that the point. anyway i have literally never seen anybody else ship them (if you're out there... hello... 😭) despite them both being very main characters and i don't know why?? they could be so cute i think...

they are both industrious adventurers, prolific hard-workers (team task doers), and a little cheekily competitive!

i think that bandee is no stranger to a wide variety of close and intense relationships; he's beloved by many and loves them all equally but distinctly in turn. magolor on the other hand has been sooo isolated and lonely for such a long-ass time, he barely knows how to be friends let alone really care for someone. bandee is smart enough to be suitably wary but kind enough to give him a chance despite that, which i think would knock him off his non-existent feet instantly. in reply, magolor could give him something unique by loving and prioritising him utterly singularly, in a way bandee wouldn't even have realised he was missing

in awtdy (pictured in the sketch page; if you see a tattered looking magolor in my art it's probably this au) in particular they are both thrown into the angst soup together and come out insanely trauma bonded at the hip. their friendship/relationship is central to the plotline; together they're working on a solution to the timeline anomaly, while also hiding that they even really know each other the whole time

[storm-driver]

nomura coming outta the woodwork to say he's aiming to retire and nonchalantly mentioning that kh4 is gonna begin an ending narrative is some of the wildest stuff to hear during the drought

[scruncheduppaper]

i love stanford pines can we please get an amen in the chat

[absurdumsid]

good MORNING silly creatures on my phone !!!!

[marcsnuffy]

I don't think that differently about Kaiser now

[thou-babbling-brook]

Basim and the dichotomy of a college student, circa 2024

[sf3uuf]

I WATCHED THE SPY X FAMILY MOVIE ON THE 20TH AND OMG IT WAS SOOOO GOOD I LOVED IT SO MUCH!!

To make a long story short without spoilers, it was a mix of seriousness and unseriousness, and I know a lot of people didn't like that, (which I can totally understand) but I think it fit well! I loved it!! Also Anya was just a ball of adorableness as always!! Just LOOK AT HER!!🥺

Also, you guys already KNOW when my pookie bear Franky Franklin came on screen, I was going INSANE XDD!! My brother literally said to me, "That's your bae!" Which made me laugh. I sound more normal about it than I actually was LMAO.

Anyways, if you need a good mix of seriousness and silliness, this movie is for you!

[prismartist]

hell is other people.

that is, hell is the child you failed to raise. or rather, hell is the child who is aware that you failed them. hell is that nether-red bow atop a head that finally realized just how horrible you are. hell is running after an apparition hard-wired to refuse you even as you burn your knees on hell's floor. hell is begging to be forgiven.

hell is other people. that is, hell is the father who should have never been one. hell is the father who curses you out for changing your mind. hell is his incompetence at both survival and repentance. hell is the father who says "forgive me" more than he says "i'm sorry". hell is wondering why you ever told him you love him.

hell is other people; that is, hell is your family.

[b4kuch1n]

tdov was like a week ago already but I just wanna say when I came over to vacation slash help my sworn brother move flat he told me, "ever since you said you wanted to get top surgery I've been thinking about it. it's straight up number two on my bucket list"