dontforgetthedragon

[dontforgetthedragon]

I think it’s so interesting that Kui decided to show us how differences in lifespan affect tallmen and elf relationships from both angles with Kabru and Thistle and also how that reflects real-life abusive situations. And then goes on to deconstruct that by showing how genuine understanding and respect CAN exist between the races with other characters!

Kabru being raised by an elf (who is shown to only have a superficial respect for short-lived races, the same one might have for a pet in a lot of ways) and treated like a child even though he’s in his 20s. After all, a 20 year old elf would be a kindergartener, and Milsiril seems to have a rather toxic combination of overprotectiveness and dehumanizing tendencies that leads to perpetually seeing the children she raises as children, even well into adulthood for their race.

And yet, we see with characters like Otta that this doesn’t have to be true of EVERY elf (nor should it logically be, especially those who spend actual time around short-lived races.) For all the jokes made at her expense I actually think it’s really interesting that she’s also canonically queer since recognizing the agency and maturity of short-lived races is in itself a type of queerness in elf society from what we’ve seen. Senshi too, as funny as his misconstruing Chilchuck as a child is I think it’s really important that he realizes his mistake and rethinks his assumptions on short-lived races following his example. It doesn’t HAVE to be the way it is, but it will take work on each side to improve things.

Then on Thistle’s end… woof. Complete opposite of Kabru, it was difficult for the tallmen of the golden kingdom to comprehend how someone in their, like, 60s could still behave like a teenager and chalked that up to a personal and moral failing rather than literal differences in biology (kind of an autistic mood but that’s a conversation for later.) It’s just as disturbing as Milsiril’s treatment of the children she adopts really, since they explicitly didn’t want an adult that could exert their own agency and control over their situation. And the thing is it’s not like that’s totally uncalled for, the previous points show how a non-insignificant number of members of long-lived races do genuinely see short-lived races as inferior, or are otherwise ignorant, like with below.

It ended up working out just how they wanted, because Thistle’s child-like innocence and singleminded desire to make the only family he had happy meant he was never going to do anything he didn’t think would help them… which then backfired, because of course it would. It’s overcontrolling and manipulative parenting, but with the added spice of lifespan differences and magic. Kabru ended up detesting the elves that raised him and wanting nothing to do with them, and Thistle basically had a massive breakdown trying too hard to please everyone. Infantilization vs adultification, as some have said, with predictable results.

#dungeon meshi

[dontforgetthedragon]

Shout out to Thistle who's dragon turned into a human girl and he didn't even question it he was just like "that's literally not your fucking job I told you to look for delgal get back to work" and didn't even question when some adventurers tried to fight him over it he just did not give a fuck he's so funny and silly I love my little jester boy

#dungeon meshi

[dontforgetthedragon]

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[dontforgetthedragon]

[dontforgetthedragon]

People underestimate how much it fucks you up to be subtly excluded as a kid. I would try to talk to my classmates and be met with disinterest or annoyance. The one friend I had, who I clung to and nodded along to his every word, had other friends he liked just as much or more. And his other friends didn’t care for me at all.

I look back at pictures from the time and see how separated I was from them. I remember knowing I was different. I remember posing questions about the world to the girls playing next to me and realizing that they had never asked the same ones to themselves. That the ways we thought couldn’t be more different.

I kept myself amused with my own fanatical stories and musings in my head. I would wander the playground on a circular path, imagining a friend and being sorely disappointed when it didn’t feel as real as I’d hoped.

There was a bubble separating me from everyone else, thin, and nearly invisible, but with a pearly sheen you could catch under the right conditions. I knew it was there, they knew it was there, and it changed me

[dontforgetthedragon]

My nuanced opinion is this: they're not the most evilest greediest capitalist pig dogs to ever exist let's get out the guillotine etc etc, HOWEVER Watcher TV is still the dumbest fucking decision they could have possibly made

[dontforgetthedragon]

APHRODITE AREIA!?!?

#hades #hades ii

[dontforgetthedragon]

I finally watched Dungeon Meshi! Here is my contribution to the fandom.

[ID: the meme that goes "Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture. / They're the same picture." The first image shown is Kabru saying "This is way worse than I thought" and blushing, after he learns that Laois's party did black magic. The second image is Mu Qing looking excited when he hears that Xie Lian did a massacre. /end ID]

#tgcf

[dontforgetthedragon]

#tgcf

[dontforgetthedragon]

Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun Chapter 149 © Cash Money Chiyo (@grolia, jinky, @waxlightjohn, and our newest member bissou!)

#gsnk

[dontforgetthedragon]

Save him from Kabru’s wrath

#dungeon meshi

[dontforgetthedragon]

so there’s this story that my grandmother loves telling (well, in recent years. for the first seventy years of her life she did not talk about her childhood at all.)

the story is that a family friend of theirs was Austria’s finance minister*, and Jewish, and after the anschluss he realized he was in trouble, but like many of Austria’s Jews he seriously underestimated how much trouble. by the time he realized it was too late to get out safely. He was also old and in failing health, so dramatics weren’t ideal.

so he asked a family member to drive him to the mountains on the Italian-Austrian border, and he’d cross there. It was easy enough to avoid the Austrian authorities going out, but you didn’t have a chance of avoiding the Italian ones, and they stopped him. 

“Oh,” he said to them, “Benito knows me. Tell him I’m here and he’ll call me a car.” And indeed, they called Mussolini and he called him a car. My reaction the first time I heard this story - and the reaction of everyone I’ve told it to - has been “so Mussolini opposed the Holocaust? He was helping smuggle Jews out of Austria?” And, no, he didn’t and wasn’t. But he knew this guy, they were old friends, the guy was in town, so Benito called him a car. Which is more characteristic of humans than the version where Mussolini was secretly a decent person, really. A million is a statistic, but this guy? I know this guy. He’s a great guy. There’s the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, and I think it applies, but the word that’s always come to my mind is the myopia of evil, the tendency to treat People well but just not look out at the world and see billions of People, not believe that the principles you apply to the ones you know apply to all of them everywhere.

[dontforgetthedragon]

I'm once again thinking about the Adventurer's Bible entry on kobolds and the accompanying comic

Kabru speaks kobold and he still says that it's best to assume communication is impossible despite him knowing their language. But from the previous page kobolds are probably hostile to other races because kobolds are captured and sold as slaves. So kobolds being "cruel and aggressive as a rule" likely comes from how kobolds (justifiably!) act hostile towards tall-men if tall-men have been known to kidnap them and sell them into slavery where they "meet unfortunate ends." Kabru could be conflating this with all kobolds being inherently aggressive because he has been shown to be very "human centric" and I could see it being hard for him to put himself in the shoes of a demi-human (piled on top of his entire childhood being trauma probably doesn't help either).

But then Ryoko Kui adds Laios and Falin talking about "mountain people" at the bottom of the comic, who are human but from their perspective they fit into the same stereotypes Kabru brings up about kobolds. They are saying something ignorant and bigoted here about an entire society of human people and we as the readers can easily see that since they're talking about humans, not demi-humans.

A lesser writer would have stopped at just the top half of the comic and called it a day. By pairing Kabru's dialogue on kobolds with Laios's and Falin's dialogue on "mountain people" Ryoko Kui frames Kabru's own thoughts as more likely to be based on his own lived experiences and the society he grew up in and not as blanket fact.

#dungeon meshi

[dontforgetthedragon]

Senshi's "I have to feed the youngsters" moment is so funny on first reading and fucking devastating on a second read through 🥲

#dungeon meshi

[dontforgetthedragon]

happy birthday teru!!! smooch smooch, i love u!!!

[dontforgetthedragon]

[dontforgetthedragon]

the male body (linocut)