the "big picture" - whether that refers to some detached, calculated greater good; ruthless ambition and progress for the sake of progress; or even the dear listeners' cosmic indifference - as an antagonistic force in wolf 359 is so fascinating to me because of the way eiffel as a protagonist is set up to oppose it, just by nature of who he is. eiffel retains his humanity even under the most inhumane circumstances. his strength is in connection, and with that he's able to reach others who share his core values, but he's operating under a fundamentally different framework from the show's antagonists. he can never understand where they're coming from or be swayed by their points of view because, for better or worse, he can only see the world through a close personal lens.
it's an ideological conflict he has with all of them, but notably with hilbert: "you talk about helping people, but what about the real, live people around you? [...] that's your problem. you're so zoomed out." eiffel will never, ever see that "big picture" because he is so zoomed in. at his best, he puts things into perspective and grounds the people around him. at his worst, his perspective narrows so drastically inwards that he becomes blind to everyone and everything else. his failings are deeply, tragically human - they're personal, they're impulsive, they're self-destructive. they're selfish. no matter how much he might try to narrativize or escape from himself, he's still left with doug eiffel: "it's taken me this long to realize that running from everyone else means that you're alone with yourself." eiffel could never be convinced to harm others on purpose, but he has hurt people, and it's never been because he didn't care. the very fact that he cares so much, that he's incapable of reconciling the hurt he's caused with the things he values, is what keeps him from real growth for so long. where many of the other characters in wolf 359 will justify their cruelty in service of something they consider more important, eiffel is so caught up in vilifying himself and the fear that he's always going to harm the people he cares for without meaning to that he shuts himself off from the people who care about him and perpetuates his own self-fulfilling prophecy.
231 notes
·
View notes
My thoughts on ZADR:
I’m completely neutral on it. I don’t hate it, I don’t mind seeing it, but I also don’t actively ship it (although this is mostly because I like the idea of Zim being aroace and not because I dislike the ship itself). And here’s why.
DISCLAIMER! VERY BIG DISCLAIMER!
I am not a proshiper. If you ship pedophilic or incestuous shit, you will get no defence here. Get lost and don’t come back. I’ve seen enough shit in other fandoms already.
I’m saying this because ZADR is believed by many to be a proship, which is why many people dislike it. When in reality, ZADR isn’t a proship and I explain why in this post.
I just wanted to say this to reiterate that I am not a proshiper, nor do I condone proshiping. I’m constantly paranoid about people getting the wrong idea or misinterpreting me and really want to avoid that. I’m not looking for drama or a fight. That being said, if you ship pedophilic stuff, incestuous stuff, beastiality or any of that horrible stuff, get the fuck off my blog. You aren’t welcome here.
DISCLAIMER OVER!
Now onto why ZADR (and other ships involving irkens) isn’t a proship or anything really worth throwing a fit over.
Dib is canonically 12 years old. That’s a fact. But the thing is, while Dib has a canonical age, Zim doesn’t, and never will. Zim’s age is up to viewer interpretation.
Zim’s age, despite what many people believe, isn’t set in stone.
Zim’s age was never mentioned in canon. In fact, not a single irken has ever had their age revealed.
The wiki seems to have pulled the “Zim is 160 in human years and 16 in irken years” fact out of its ass because I can’t find a source for it anywhere, plus the wiki has a tendency to make stuff up and present it as fact with no evidence. So it isn’t a reliable source of information in any way.
Jhonen has stated Zim’s age three different times (that I know of), and he’s changed his answer every time, calling Zim a child, an adult and a teenager. So he obviously doesn’t have a clue of what Zim’s age is and most likely never really meant to give Zim a canonical age in the first place when he created the show. So not even the creator of the show himself is a reliable source of information when it comes to Zim’s age.
Although Zim’s age is never explicitly mentioned, we get some possible small hints in canon. HOWEVER, these hints all contradict each other and can go either way in proving that Zim is a child or an adult.
Zim could be an adult because he has a high ranking military job that seems impossible for a child to achieve (an invader, at least before his first banishment) plus he worked as a scientist before, so he’s held multiple adult jobs. He also seems to be the same height as other (presumably) adult irkens. He also has a long history involving his scientist job, his joining of the military and his entire work up the military hierarchy to become an invader, plus his banishment to Foodcourtia, which probably all happened over a long course of time. He’s also allowed to pilot a ship and other various vehicles, which, assuming that irkens follow the same sort of rules for ships as we do for cars, shouldn’t be given to children. It’s also revealed in The Trial that irkens can live for several centuries.
But on the other hand, Zim could very easily be a child or a teenager because the empire may use child soldiers, which does have some possible evidence like Smeets graduating at the age of 10, irken military equipment seeming similar to video games and the fact that the irken empire is a power hungry dictatorship. It would also explain why Zim chose to infiltrate Earth by posing as a human child attending a human school, along with the immaturity and pettiness that Zim shows throughout the series. Not to mention the fact that Zim is directly implied to be particularly young by irken standards, with the Tallest mentioning in The Trial that Zim is supposed to have a trial in several centuries, but they chose to force it to happen now, implying that Zim hasn’t hit the age where a trial usually happens, which is presumably adulthood or later. Zim being a child or a teenager also explains why the Tallest are so immature, as they are the same age as Zim, so if he’s not an adult but is instead a child/teenager, the Tallest are as well.
So the evidence goes both ways. Zim’s age is entirely up to viewer interpretation. If you believe that Zim is an adult, he’s an adult. If you believe that he’s a child, he’s a child. If you believe that he’s a teenager, he’s a teenager. Zim’s age is a literal question mark, and unless new, official content is released that explicitly confirms Zim’s age, that’s not going to change. As mentioned before, Jhonen Vazquez, despite being the creator of the show, isn’t a reliable source because he’s contradicted himself at least three times now and doesn’t seem to have given Zim (or any irken for that matter) a canonical age in the first place.
And going by those rules when you look at ZADR, you quickly realize that the entire dynamic of ZADR and every other ship involving irkens in any way also depends entirely on viewer interpretation. If you interpret Zim as being a child that’s a similar age to Dib, he’s a child that’s a similar age to Dib. If you interpret Zim as being an adult, he’s an adult. Zim’s age is a blank space that you can fill out however you want.
ZADR is only a pedophilic proship between a child and an adult if you believe that it is a ship between a child and an adult and/or you actively make it that way when making the content, because Zim’s age is whatever you say it is. A random number generator could be used to decide Zim’s age and it would be equally canon as everyone else’s opinions regarding Zim’s age, including the words of Jhonen himself.
So long story short, ZADR isn’t a problematic ship unless you make it a problematic ship or it is explicitly mentioned to be a problematic ship in whatever work of fiction you’re seeing it in. So just don’t make a big deal of it and ignore it if you don’t like it.
189 notes
·
View notes
I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got paid to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.
So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."
I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?
It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.
Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.
So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.
Update: This is literally just a thought exercise to help you be more intentional with how you critique media. I'm not enforcing this as some divine rule that must be followed any time you have an opinion on fiction, and I'm definitely not saying that you have to structure every single sentence in a review to contain zero negative phrases. I'm just saying that I repurposed a rule we had at that specific reviewer to be a helpful tool to check myself when writing critiques now. If you don't want to use the tool, literally no one (especially not me) can or wants to force you to use it. As with all advice, it is a totally reasonable and normal thing to not have use for every piece of it that exists from random strangers on the internet. Use it to whatever extent it helps you or not at all.
44K notes
·
View notes
"mithrun is the only real monsterfucker in dungeon meshi" is objectively the funniest bit you can get out of his everything, but in all seriousness i think his attraction to his love interest is deliberately overstated—and that makes sense, because romantic jealousy is a classic and digestible motive, which is explicitly what kabru was aiming for in condensing mithrun's backstory, and also because until chapter 94, mithrun wasn't willing to admit to the true nature of his desires.
but because romantic envy is both classic and digestible, it probably isn’t a unique enough or complicated enough desire to tempt a demon’s appetite. mithrun’s wish, as far as we can figure from kabru’s reduced retelling, was to have a life in which he had never become one of the canaries, and that carries like 3857 implications and desires within it. that’s delicious. his love interest acts as sort of a red herring to his motivation for making it, though. (side note: i'm saying "love interest" here because, keeping in mind that i barely speak japanese on a good day anymore, "想い人" is something i'd usually take as just kind of an old-fashioned and romantic way to refer to a lover, but in context i wonder if both the connotation of yearning and the vagueness are intentional, and i think this phrasing gets those aspects of it more effectively. anyway.)
mithrun considered his love interest to be untrustworthy. there was a minute where i thought that comment might be about a similar-looking elf (yugin, one of his squad members), but comparing the two…
the "sketchy" arrow is definitely referring to the elf we know as his love interest—the bangs go toward her right, she only has the one forehead ornament, and, most notably, her ears aren't notched.
every time she’s given a full-body depiction in his dungeon, she’s drawn as a chimera, with the body of a snake from the waist down. (side note: the “what if a dungeon has chimeras before reaching level 4?”/“then the dungeon lord is unstable” exchange just being mithrun grilling his past self alive is so funny. he’s so. but anyway) there are a couple things about this.
first, the snake part of the chimera appears to be modeled after some species of coral snake mimic
which, in the biology-for-fun manga, i… doubt is a coincidence, especially with the added context of the “untrustworthy” comment. the dungeon’s conjured illusion of mithrun’s love interest was a harmless copycat of a venomous original. for whatever reason, he felt this person was a threat and made up a "safe" version of her to be in a relationship with, and while it’s definitely possible to be attracted to or even love someone you find to be toxic and/or intimidating, when you take that into consideration alongside the configuration of her body, you get some interesting implications.
which brings us to our second point: if we assume that mithrun was not in fact fucking a snake, then sexual attraction, at least, was so far removed from his idea of a relationship with this person that he did not even bother to keep her dungeon copy human enough to maintain the illusion of the option of a sexual relationship. this is somewhat echoed in the depictions of their interactions, which also imply a frankly unexpected romantic distance. she kisses his cheek and he doesn't seem to react; she's at the edge of a narrow bed with only one set of pillows, on top of his blankets while he's underneath them.
the kiss is particularly interesting because it seems to contrast the text. kabru's narration tells us this was everything mithrun could have asked for, but mithrun is there looking unreadable to pensive, likely because this is right before the panel that makes it clear things in the dungeon are beginning to go wrong.
walking through this backwards for a minute, we have the physical barrier of his bedding and the spatial separation inherent in a bed made for one person, the emotional barrier of his mounting anxiety getting in the way of his ability to enjoy the affection he sought, and... the snake, which historically carries the connotation of temptation, yes, but also mistrust, barring physical intimacy. okay. ok. if a dungeon reflects the mentality of its lord, all of this might suggest that mithrun was not able to have any real desire for a relationship with this person. his unwillingness to be vulnerable or let another person in was insurmountable. but in that case, why was she such a focal point that she remained to the end, after his dungeon had stopped creating iterations of his friends to come and visit him? why would he get so upset over her meeting with his brother that he became lord of a dungeon about it?
well. mithrun's brother was also interested in her, probably genuinely. and mithrun had to win.
you have an older brother who your parents completely ignore, probably in part because he is chronically ill/disabled and almost definitely in part because he received a ton of recessive traits that resulted in rumors that he was an illegitimate child. you are aware, most likely because those same parents fucking told you, that you actually are an illegitimate child. but they keep you around because you had the good fortune of looking just like your mother. what can that possibly teach you but that you, like your brother, are disposable?
it's utterly unsurprising that mithrun, under these circumstances, developed a pathological need to be better than everyone around him. people don't keep you otherwise. i'd argue this is also why he says he looked down on everyone he knew while milsiril claims his dungeon reeked of feelings of inferiority—he sought out people's worst traits and prioritized them in his mind to protect his already extremely fragile sense of self-worth, and all the while he tried to be as likable and high-performing as he possibly could be. his parents disposed of him anyway, but even then he tried to keep up the performance. he was kind to everyone. he never once lost to a dungeon.
when he saw his "love interest" meeting up with his brother, what he saw was himself being replaced by a person his parents had always treated as worthless, and if that was what they thought of the child they'd kept, what value could anyone possibly see in the bastard they'd given away to die? mithrun and kabru tell the story like he wanted to win this unnamed elf's heart, but it was never about being with her. it was about cementing his worth, proving that he didn't deserve to be thrown away.
and so it's particularly cruel that his demon discarded him, too. but maybe it's also particularly gentle that, in the end, there was someone who refused to even consider giving up on him.
kui laid it out in three panels better than i could hope to.
yeah. it's love. you wanted to be loved, even when the only way you were able to understand it was through the desire to be wanted, and you wanted that so badly that the idea of being consumed felt like the promise of finally mattering to someone.
7K notes
·
View notes