Doomed from the beginning

Unknown / Marguerite Duras / Blanca Varela / Ramona Ausubel / Anne Carson / Heather Havrilesky / Michael Cunningham / Lisel Mueller / Richard Siken x Dungeon Meshi by Ryoko Kui

Just as she has issues with the rest of the life cycle, Marcille clearly has a complicated relationship with sexuality, likely due to being developmentally out of step with her peers. Her succubus is a fictional character - a safe unchanging fantasy - and compared to Chilchuck getting smooched into oblivion, hers gives her a chaste kiss to the hand. The demon dresses her in an uncharacteristically revealing outfit but pairs it with earmuffs that are considered by many elves to be childish. While giving her that outfit, he kisses her and (I think?) steals some of her emotions, leaving her seeming dazed and checked out.

I don't know if Kui intended to write her as having a crush on Falin (probably not) but given how she didn't grow up with a stable peer group, I'm not sure Marcille would recognize a crush, and if she did, I think she'd suppress it much in the same way she does interact with Falin - by insisting on viewing her as a safe, non-threatening child instead of acknowledging that she's grown up and will grow old.

The winged lion would successfully get me though because I have already stated on this blog that I feel morally you should free magically captured beings. Especially if they're cats.

Thistle didn't even know the winged lion was a demon that wanted to eat his memories, he just went 'wow you're annoying and I hate your vibes. get in the book'

Laios after Marcille speedruns a corruption arc in like 5 minutes: Maybe the dungeon's power is evil

I will have to ponder this more but there's something there with the goat demon's attack on Mithrun coming across like a sexual assault, elves repeatedly taunting Marcille about being infertile (which she doesn't seem to give a shit about to be fair), and then the winged lion emerging out of her pants looking like the wings are unfurling from her belly.

unit-1312 said: yeaashhhh idk why she did that 😅 like its clear from kabru she can draw a perfectly fine dark skinned person so???? but also there’s cithis who’s regular dark-skinned so???????? maybe they’re supposed to represent dark elves which is a whole nother box to unpack because-im-freaking-greed said: There’s also regular dark skinned elves because-im-freaking-greed said: There’s lore in the adventurers bible, but basically the elf queen always has this phenotype, so the throne is passed down like that instead of direct lineage (this specific character is a cousin a few generation removed to the current queen, and one of only 3 candidates for the throne). It’s probably a condition analogous to hypermelanism, but also another way in which elves are sincerely biologically different from other human races because-im-freaking-greed said: Also, this isn’t what dark elves are in dungeon meshi, dark elves are a tallman/halffoot superstition from the early days of their recorded history; early on certain elves were very actively helpful out of some mixture of genuine altruism and infantilization, so would basically go Gandalf at them for a while, which then lead to tallmen and halffeet encountering elves that weren’t like that, getting rebuffed or into conflict because-im-freaking-greed said: And going home and telling stories of elves with darkness in their hearts, aka dark elves

This is giving me flashbacks to Her Imperious Condescension tbh. But whatever is going on (hyperpigmentation?) I do not think taking elves with the same features as the white elves and dipping them in ink is the #diversity win that one post I saw thought it was.

Thistle was disgusted and judgmental when Laios got too into choosing between dragon breath murder weapons and then turns around and sticks him into some sort of bondage forcefeeding situation.

Gonna be honest here, when I saw someone say that Dungeon Meshi had Black elves this was not what I had in mind

Like that a core part of their plan to defeat Falin is Laios 'special interest in monsters' Touden going 'this chimera design is poorly thought out and won't work biologically'

Biggest challenge of running the PGW blog is looking at tags for podcasts I haven't listened to yet and taking my best guess on which characters qualify as podcast women.

Iirc there was a line in one of the Hi Nay episodes saying one Elder is pretty sure The Benefactor is Sauvard, and it's also heavily implied that the unhoused guy who wanders around and helps people out might be Sauvard, so my almost certainly incorrect guess is that he did some variant of the focus-creating process and split himself into two different facets of himself. I do not remember enough details to disabuse myself of this notion but I think it would be fun.

Haven't had a chance to read further yet, but after the rabbits incident, the winged lion starts seriously considering Marcille as dungeon lord material, and I think it's interesting that Kabru hasn't. He knows Marcille knows ancient magic and even observes that she'll probably be recruited as a canary, but he's fixated on Laios as the likely dungeon lord candidate. Blinded by his protagonist aura perhaps

youre an olympic level hater. i respect it.

they asked me to represent my country in the sport of hating i said no. i hate my country

Picked up a book at the library entirely because it was called Interesting Facts about Space since I felt that I had to, legally, but beyond collecting interesting facts about space, the protagonist also has an information science degree and hearing loss. I feel threatened.

Terrible, horrible metafan comic based on Kate Beaton's Poe shortie at Hark! A vagrant featuring the worst possible space lyctor ship; please enjoy

I'm also going to include a detail shot because this was my proudest moment

Scene from the end of Lady Knight - Kel digging her own grave 💀