Jack of All Trades, Master of Fun

there's no greater betrayal than finally starting to read a book you've had sitting for months on your shelf or your desk or your nightstand and then finding out it's bad. like. i gave you a fucking home.

to me the funniest part of Laios is a character is the fact that he's genuinely really good at what he does. it would be one thing if he was just a monster geek in a way other people find really offputting, but he can also bisect something twice his size in a single blow

in this way, like so many others, he and marcille are secretly The Same

dungeon meshi has the Mob Psycho Sauce where it's funny even when its serious and serious even when its funny. like, this is a hilarious thing about laios — but also ties into the fundamental logic of the story.

Laois is not good at what he does AND a monster geek. he is good at what he does BECAUSE he is a monster geek. in dungeon meshi, survival in the dungeon isn't due to physical strength or dnd-style party balance or asskicking ability or Willpower. the narrative takes great pains to show that it is respect, knowledge and love of a place that gives one the ability to survive and thrive in that place. that's why we see people like Kabru's party, who are clearly very skilled warriors in their own right, look like absolute CLOWNS in their encounters with dungeon dangers that are barely a hiccup for laois's party

Like, Laois can't bisect something twice his size in a single blow because he's a Strong Cool Protagonist, but because all the things he's fighting are things he deeply loves, respects, and is autistically insane about enough to know their weaknesses. the special interest that makes him a weirdo on the surface makes the dungeon his natural habitat.

We see it in literally the first "encounter" when they're preparing the walking mushroom, and Senshi shows him how to cut it properly for food. Laios immediately goes "Oh, I see!" and imagines attacking one with his sword vertically instead of horizontally.

This man loves monsters, loves learning about them, and in the dungeon, he can finally apply all the stuff he knows.

i like this guy

Our blessed tumblr

A holy site

Nah nah nah, you ain’t hiding this in the tags

Not one of the 7 deadly sins, but a secret 8th sin

sorry what

the fact that kobolds seem to be this more "animalistic" race, with kuro talking in broken language and like improper grammar. this, coupled with the fact that he seems unaware of the fact that he's being exploited by mick, makes kobolds appear to be less intelligent than other races.

but we actually find out that the simple speech patterns are in fact due to common being kuro's second language. and in a scene where kabru talks to kuro in his native language, it's actually kabru with the simple speech patterns.

we even learn that kuro seems to actually have a much better understanding of his situation with mick than we first imagine. merely wanting to stay with them so they can have someone who they can feel relaxed around.

this, coupled with a bunch of other things, really makes dungeon meshi stand out from other fantasy media. there are no "dumb" or "evil" races, they're all just people.

Okay, so: the premise of the Final Fantasy VII remake is that the audience's demand for the remake to follow exactly the same plot as the original has manifested as a horde of evil ghosts who intervene in order to keep the story on the expected rails, with a particular emphasis on ensuring that characters in the remake die at the same times and under the same circumstances as their original counterparts. At the end of the remake's first instalment, Cloud and friends fight and defeat the king of the Evil Plot Ghosts, an act which breaks time and creates a multiverse where everybody's fanfic is real. Sephiroth subsequently merges with all the fanfic versions of himself and becomes some sort of fucked up metanarrative god. Later, Cloud simultaneously succeeds and fails in preventing Aerith's death, which partially dislocates him from the prime narrative reality, and he begins perceiving an adjacent fixit-fic universe where Zack never died. The Aerith of that universe then teams up with Cloud to fight Hyperdimensional Meta Bullshit Sephiroth, a battle that ends inconclusively when Sephiroth flees, stranding Zack-lives-universe Aerith in the prime narrative reality, though only Cloud can see her. The game closes with the revelation that, unbeknownst to everyone else, Sephiroth slipped the Black Materia into Cloud's pocket during their fight, setting in motion the events of the unpublished third instalment. Have I got all that straight?

the first day of my hand drafting class in my senior year of college, after the prof taught us how to frame up on the drafting table and went over how to use the tools we'd bought, he had us all take our pencils and make a mark on the top right corner of the vellum. then he walked us through the setup steps - the border, the title block, etc.

and he told us to erase the mark.

when someone - rosie, i think - asked what the mark was for he smiled.

"if you give a novice student an expensive, blank piece of paper, they panic. they think if i start using that i will ruin it. so the first thing i want all of you to do, any time you stare at a blank piece of paper, is to ruin it a little and take the pressure off yourself. pencil erases. anxiety has to be managed."

i hated that man for a myriad of reasons, but that was some of the best advice i've ever been given.

What I find really really compelling about Laios' special interest is this:

As a person who's special interest is dogs, I'll tell you right now that I fucking love them. I live in a city full of strays, and I actively go out of my way to pet, play with, and interact with them. It brings me a lot of joy and comfort to be able to be surrounded by puppies.

I will also be the first to tell you that, like it or not, dogs are animals - and animals, ultimately, can be unpredictable. They can be scared, they can be territorial, and they can be impulsive. And while I genuinely believe that there's no such thing as a bad dog or an angry dog - only a scared one - I also don't believe it makes a functional difference once a dog has bitten you what intentions it may have had.

Dogs are dangerous. I've seen people get bitten, I've been bitten, I've had close calls, some of which were my own fault and others which were not.

And Laios reflects this so beautifully, especially in the Kelpie arc. He's not blinded by his love for these creatures, he's not overtaken by baseless empathy - he understands, understands better than anyone, that these are at the end of the day monsters, and they are dangerous, and when push comes to shove sometimes you've just got to kill them. In fact it's his love for them that lands him this knowledge and understanding in the first place - just as I know that there's no room for fear and weakness when it comes to interacting with dogs, he knows there's no room for hesitation and empathy when it comes to interacting with montsers.

It's so fucking realistic of someone who genuinely researches and cares about these creatures, rather than superficially "liking animals" and then trying to assign human qualities to inherently inhuman creatures.

God.

Laios is fantastic fucking representation.

For those that are going to miss the eclipse on Monday, I have created a simulation of what the eclipse will look like along the path of totality

having a tumblr blog is for those of us who could never manage to keep a diary for more than two weeks when we were twelve

I think it's better than that. A Tumblr blog isn't just a journal or diary; it's more of what was known as a commonplace book.

Commonplace books aren't just for recording your thoughts and personal histories. They include quotes, stories, drawings, ephemera, and other pieces of things that catch your attention or that you find significant. If one heard a poem they wanted to keep, or saw a field they wanted to sketch, or had an insightful thought about a play, they would collect all that in the commonplace book.

Isn't that what we do here? We collect and create art, and jokes, and commentary, and political thought, and a lot of us cram it all onto the same blog and throw it at our followers who can then choose to keep it for themselves or let it pass by. We're basically in a salon passing our commonplace books to one another and occasionally copying a passage (reblogging), making an addition (reblogging with commentary), or making an aside to our companions (commenting in the tags/replying).

And I like that a lot.

marcille, confronted with boiled mushroom: ewwwww it was just up and walking arooouuuund

marcille, confronted with her best friend's skeleton: [etching an evil necromantic circle into the ground] the concepts of "right" and "wrong" were crafted by empires of men to shackle and puppet us

big fan of the semi-recurring bit where they wait to see if Laios gets poisoned before they start eating

nasa: we're going to shoot three rockets directly at the sun during the total eclipse. for study and research purposes.

me: oh cool

nasa: we have named the rockets apep. this stands for atmospheric perturbations [in the] eclipse path.

me: oh cool

nasa: apep is also the ancient egyptian deity of chaos and darkness, who ceaselessly seeks to extinguish the sun. we launch these rockets directly at the sun in the name of apep.

me: oh... cool?

I think that Izutsumi and Mithrun would be friends but they're the kind of friends who sit in dead silence for three hours and aren't even entirely sure of each other's names. Izutsumi gives Mithrun the foods she doesn't like and he eats them without question, but then he says something completely out-of-pocket about the legal ramifications of free beastkin (which is out of date by thirty years anyway) and Izutsumi scratches the shit out of his arm and the next day they're back to being best buds. Izutsumi is the one who does "he asked for no pickles!" even though he did NOT ask for no pickles she just wants to steal his burger.

#izutsumi likes mithrun in the way that cats tend to like people who don’t give them too much attention

Reblog if you can hear this image I'm trying to see something