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fumiku · 6 months

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Hear ye hear ye!

I come bringing two Dungeon Meshi marchil fanfics to share

Enough

He got crumbs of it in moments, here and there, and it would be more than enough to last the winter. Chil knew how to live on little, with only what he could afford. But love? Love he had had enough of for a lifetime.

I'll start with the shorter one that I wrote first, a quick Chilchuck POV 1.3k words oneshot that's bittersweet if not just plainly sad. It’s about repressing a crush essentially, but the marchil is mostly a front for a character study about Chilchuck’s complex feelings on his marital situation and love in general. I’ve been told many times in comments that even without shipping marchil it was enjoyable, so give it a shot if that sounds interesting!

He soaked her in, like hard bread softening in broth.

Grind Me Down Sweetly

Even years after their journey into the dungeon, Marcille wasn’t quite over her existential dread over short lifespans… And it showed. Every other day, she came by to Chilchuck’s locksmith shop with a shocking lack of locks to smith.

Coffeeshop au except it’s not an au and there’s no coffeeshop. This one is a long oneshot of 17k words, and contains flashbacks that are meant to loosely span over a year. This fic can pretty much be entirely read as platonic. They’re just close friends but they give married energy is all. Slice of life and cozy with a side of banter & tsundere behavior, and existential dread hurt/comfort as the cherry on the sundae. It contains some classic Dungeon Meshi things like storytelling through cooking and sharing meals~ If you like the Marcille and Chilchuck dynamic in canon, this is pretty much just a bunch of that, shenanigans abound!

She clung to her friends like time was always running out.

Blonde hair is the epitome of beauty to him meanwhile his greying hair brings her existential despair. I am composed and collected about this

"I am going to chase you out with a broom"

Some related-ish memes I made!

Extra author notes and marchil rambling under cut

With how chil is so irritable and private about romance and his feelings it makes sense that their romance would have passive-agressive energy. Are they just friends or pining? Oh wouldn’t you like to know. Are they just lightheartedly bantering or is he legitimately pissed or are they blinking in morse code their true feelings at each other? Yes

My post-canon timeline is Chilchuck lives a nice life living alone in his house-shop except his friends all visit him and care, and even though he likes living alone it’s also bittersweet and every corner of his life is haunted by the ones he loves and loved and the moments he had with them. That’s it that’s all I want… (mostly the nice life part lol)

My marchil manifesto is that she grows on him stubbornly like fungal yeast and it brings out his flavor like beer <3 Because she stubbornly puts her nose everywhere and refuses to give up on getting closer to her friends and it makes him open up and repress his feelings less and aaaa <33 Obligatory shout out to the dunmeshi discord serv for engaging with my rambles

For someone who dislikes alcohol I’m having so much fun working beer metaphors and stuff into the writing, Chilchuck has all the fun motifs to play with fr... Traps, lockpicking, married life, work, destitution, starvation, rejection, repression, opening urself up to the world. Give me the most domestic fluff and give it a subtle foundation of angst and hurt comfort 👌

And I do think that Marcille takes a particular interest in Chilchuck especially because he’s so set on being a closed book as well. Yeah she def is like 👀 at him. Aaah the way she wants to meet his family so bad 😭💕 I think she romanticizes him & his family life/idealizes him as a virtuous husband a lot too. Like how she tends to think of things in a more flowery story-like way.

I do compare him to bread and her to soup in that he soaks up in her warm vibes and softens up. Which has become a personal favorite. He was bread, she was soup, can I make it any more obvious /lyr Soggy bread Chilchuck is so funny to me. Like, you know that rock solid bread but then you soak it in soup and then it just becomes the softest crumbliest thing. I think Chilchuck is a really hard bread that will break your teeth if you don’t put him in some soup beforehand. Or wine. I wracked my brain a lot about what food Chil would like (because his Adventurer’s Bible profile just says he love alcohol and hates sweet dishes rip) and I end up giving him a bread motif a lot, since it pairs well with alcohol and whatnot.

With marchil I either do unrequited angst because Chilchuck will NOT allow himself to feel, or the most domestic fluffy shit ever but in a mostly platonic dimension because once again -gestures at Chilchuck- But in a true Marcille "If I was Chilchuck’s wife" Donato fashion she manages to get her nose into the most stubborn’s people stuff like a barnacle and it’s. So married people coded anyways. They’re a lil messed up but it’s ok they’ll iron out those bumps. Ironing because they are gonna do the most domestic chores together 🔥🔥 MARRIEDCORE I TELL YOU I should get around to making more fics and more different vibes though, I already have a bunch of prompts written down~

Even more rambling and headcanons!!

I hc that when he gets his shop all his living quarters are half-foot sized so whenever the party comes to visit they suffer sitting down at the dinner table and whatnot

There’s a very specific horror in not being able to grow old with your loved one… It’s gotta be rough being in a relationship where you don’t mature at the same speed/rate. It must be so heartbreaking to turn around and your lover suddenly looks 70 while you’re still like 26 Chilchuck living until he lives with either Meijack or Flertom or at the castle and spends his days grumbling about people being even more incompetent than they used to be real. He can live longer than 50 🙏 come on peepaw you can make it to 70. He’s got so many friends ready to nurse him, prob while he complains about it. This is why I find elderly half-foots a funny mental picture. For a while I wondered if half-foots aged visually much at all in the traditional sense, and then I remembered these.

In my post-canon headcanons I’ve adopted the idea that Marcille doesn’t do her hair, it’s always someone else making her hairdos like an attendant or Kabru and like maybe Falin learns. In the "it takes a village to raise someone" community mutual aid energy… And the rare times where the task befalls Chilchuck he learns how to put it in a single braid (even if it’s so much hair for him to hold in his small hands all at once rip) because the one time he braided it in two in canon it reminded him of Meijack and gave him psychic damage. WHICH. Ohhh my god you have no idea how much I care about Chilchuck’s daughters now. After writing the first half of Grind Me Down Sweetly I am forever changed I know them all by name and know everything there is to know about them, I am making so many headcanons every day… Meijack wears thigh-high boots because she hates when sand, dirt or snow gets in her shoes- I have fanart coming up of them over at @fuumiku and I’d love making fics centered around them as well eventually yippee The angst of old senile Chilchuck still tying marcille's hair... Old senile chilchuck confusing marcille for one of his daughters… "Have you gotten taller? Oh how much you’ve grown" -breaking his neck looking up at her- I want Chilchuck to get the top notch elder treatment.

Ok this is the alcoholism tangent. I really want to believe Chilchuck can be super old, but… Realistically he’s gonna drink himself to an early grave, he’s a work hard play hard kinda guy.

Marcille would be horrified if she knew the extent of it fr fr, but I do think it’d drive a wedge between them if she tried getting him to lay off of it… If he’s open to it though that’d be so nice and sweet. Hey hey btw did you know, Chilchuck is canonically underweight due to extremely strict dieting and alcohol can act as a good hunger suppressant! Lots of issues to dig into here It’d be cute if his daughters visit him often and collectively keep tabs on him in a caring way. It’s less cute actually beinh the daughter and having to deal with it but- CHILCHUCK IS WORTH IT okay!!! Where’s that meme of "You can fix him? So is 5 other people y’all look like a construction crew" bc this increasingly looks like ‘Marcille Senshi Laios Izutsumi and his family make sure he doesn’t poison himself like a dog with chocolate’ mission.

Truly for some people reason just flies out the window when it comes to alcohol, coherence gives way to excuses. He reminds of someone I know who got a grave disease that’s worsened by alcohol and just. Continues to take it regularly. You know that thing that’s said where "an alcoholic parent will have 2 kids, one will grow to be alcoholic too while the other will never touch a drop of alcohol" and Chilchuck is def the first I think. He gives the vibe that he’d say "An alcoholic parent puts a strain on familial relationships?? Pshh, my father was and look at me! I turned out great!". I don’t think Chil could really get shaken out of it at this point tbh, seems very ingrained in him, would prob fight it back. I relate with my own familial situation ughh. Maybe if he realized how it hurt the people around him and not only himself though…. I’d def like to see him ease up on it. Drinking is often a social activity though. That gives me hope, especially with the whole dunmeshi lesson of sharing meals, that he might be able to/have recontextualized how or when he likes to take alcohol, that alcohol is better when you have others with you and you’re still able to talk and whatnot. Chilchuck says that he’s pretty picky with alcohol tho, like he has specific tastes or a high bar. Laios can ban good beer in the kingdom and then Chilchuck just stops because it all tastes awful and he’s not rich enough to import. The brewery he likes mysteriously burns down in a fireball incident one night. Marcille risks prison for her loved ones part 2, now with diplomatic immunity! ✨

I have hcs about Chil’s family dynamic, about his daughters and how alcoholism or workaholism may have affected everyone (not me inferring that Puckpatti being the most idealistic and optimistic from Chil’s daughters is probably a result from her being the youngest and perhaps Chil being the most often at work during that time and so she was mostly raised by her mother without much involvement from him). That’s a topic for another day though, for now I leave you all with thoughts of Flertom painting flowers on a shitty ceramic mug when she was 3 and Chil begrudgingly asking Marcille advice on picking a birthday gift for Puckpatti :) Oh yeah, because if we look at the timeline in The Adventurer’s Bible and combine it with when Chilchuck said that "Due to certain circumstances he hasn’t seen his wife or daughters in years" in the Senshi backstory chapter, besides letters with Flertom he has seemingly not seen them in 4 years. 4 YEARS. Thank god dungeons disappeared, it took that much for him to retire

#dungeon meshi #fanfiction #chilchuck tims #marcille donato #marchil #CHILCHUCK IS UNDER ATTACK!!#Breaking news #old man who refuses to open his heart and accept love fighting for his life against nosy friend #Everyone thinks Laios is the rabid dog of the party but when it comes to Chilchuck it totally becomes Marcille and I love that for them #My favorite marchil dynamic is that they’re close friends but they give married energy #not casual reminder at all that Chilchuck is canonically underweight #Y’all that follow my meme dumps are getting a sneak peek #So many headcanons and so much rambling oops #A lot of it’s copy pasted from the dunmeshi discord hi friendos #fumiku fanfic #fumiku fics

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acorrespondence · 8 months

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@freekicks Oh man I have lots; so many that I’m making this a new post so I don’t clog up that poor person’s replies with 50 messages, haha! Basically, it’s an expansion on the idea that everyone has headcanons/canon details that are absolutely integral to their enjoyment of the story and any transformative works based on it (hard), and headcanons/canon details that they’re fond of but could still get pretty much unaltered enjoyment out of a fic that contradicts them (soft). Obviously all these are just opinions and what I get out of the story isn’t and shouldn’t have to be the same as what anyone else gets out of it.

One thing that sort of falls in the middle of the headcanon/canon divide is Raylan’s age when his mother died. The show contradicts itself on this point several times, and so it’s sort of fungible. I personally find the idea that Raylan’s mother died when he was very young, like younger than Loretta, while it may serve the parallels between them, to be much less compelling than the idea that she died later. It’s just so much more… boring for a character whose mother died when he was ten or so to have a gross misrepresentation of who she was as a person in his mental image of her. It’s much more compelling to me if he held onto that despite direct evidence to the contrary that he was old enough to understand. Of course he’d forget the hatchet story if it happened when he was eight. If it happened when he was eighteen, that opens up a much realer possibility that he just straight up repressed it, which is fascinating. Also, I don’t think it makes sense if he grew up with Helen in the house for the second half of his life there. To me that doesn’t really jive with their current relationship. (And on a less story-driven note, I am fascinated by the idea that, if Raylan’s mother died when he was thirty, he might not have attended her funeral. Because part of him knew it would challenge the version of her he had to remember in order to maintain his black and white perception of the world.)

Obviously, the mine and what it represents is a necessary component (though the time and place less so—my Old Guard au places them in the miners’ strikes of the 30s, and I’ve read a wonderful fic where the mine in question was on a different planet entirely. However, it does have to be placed in Harlan, or whatever approximation of Harlan fits the broader setting). The boys and their relationships with their daddies is another nonnegotiable for me. Specifically, the way they grew up; different times and causes of death for Bo and Arlo can work just as well. If Raylan and Boyd don’t meet until they’re established adults, that immediately kills my interest. Their rich history is so integral to why I’m drawn to the ship in the first place. It’s a hard sell for me to have Boyd leave or Raylan stay directly after the mine, but I’ve been known to make an exception if the story is compelling enough and doesn’t sacrifice characterization.

I think Boyd’s criminal history is important, though the nature of it less so. And even more important is the fact that Boyd never really makes it big as a criminal—making him some kind of fief lord of crime makes him much less interesting to me. His plans only succeed inasmuch as he always manages to survive their unraveling. I think it’s important that he’s spent time incarcerated. I’m not a huge fan of stories where they meet again outside of Harlan and never go back, it takes away the central tension between them and the place that made them that Raylan so struggles with and Boyd embraces so wholly, which for me is a really interesting part of their relationship, this dichotomy. I also don’t care for stories that give them a ton of good friends outside each other, or casual friends who actually know them and hang out with them—they’re too big of assholes for that. Of course, this doesn’t include the characters they’re close with in canon; I love Raylan and Rachel’s friendship, in particular, and their understanding of each other despite their vast superficial differences is fascinating. I guess I should say instead that I don’t buy either of them having typical friendships, period. They’re just too weird and fucked up for that. They trauma bonded at nineteen and it continues to be one of the most important relationships in either of their lives. Winona puts up with Raylan’s relational weirdness for love; no one is doing that for their drinking buddy. So they may have close friendships, but they don’t look the way you’d expect.

I’d never make their relationship uncomplicatedly sweet and unfraught, or sand down the kind of feral edges of it, and I don’t think they’d be much for traditional PDA—I just love the way in canon the physical (and otherwise) manifestations of their intimacy are so outside of what’s expected from buddies OR lovers. In the same vein, I don’t love it when Raylan goes crazy with the terms of endearment, because he doesn’t use them much with his love interests in canon. I have him use them with the girls in heavy heart more as verbal tics he picked up after spending too much time around Boyd, who LOVES to use them, plus I think he models at least some of his displays of parental affection after Helen, who canonically calls him “honey”. I’m fine with Boyd throwing endearments around liberally; I just don’t do it in my own fics because I love the way in canon he twists Raylan’s name itself into almost an endearment. He just can’t stop saying it every other sentence, so why would he give up the chance to say it by replacing it with another word? Plus, it fits in with how weird they are about each other in general.

More broadly, I have never really enjoyed full aus (based on any story) that don’t try to approximate at least the broader beats of place and history from canon, but I really really love stories that manage it. I respect authors who can sort of map canon onto a completely different stage, like the space au mentioned above, so much. I hope that I manage that at least somewhat with catching bullets.

That’s all the big ones I can think of at the moment, though I’m sure there’s more I’ve forgotten (most of the rest fall more under ic-ness vs ooc-ness, which is harder to articulate; “what makes them themselves?” is a much more difficult question). Ultimately, I think probably a lot of these come across through cross-referencing both of my WIPs—basically, if it shows up in both, there’s a very good chance it’s a nonnegotiable for me, and if it changes between the two, then I can obviously live without it.

#blanket disclaimer that these are just my personal tastes and everyone is going to have different things they could take or leave abt canon!#justified #raylan/boyd #yeats freekicks #writing #catching bullets #heavy heart #long post #my fic #caveat to most of these is: without a very good reason that maintains the spirit of the law if not the letter #or is really well explained by the story in a way that acknowledges its importance #but makes the divergence necessary #sorry if this ruins anyone’s dreams of me one day righting a fic where they were never in the mines bc raylan was born to a loving father in #miami and only met boyd the wildly successful drug kingpin when he was assigned to kentucky and had to leave his 137 good friends #the existence and relevance of bowman winona and ava is also important to me #wrt fusion aus i’m just personally looking for ‘what would these elements to *this* story’#not ‘what would these characters add to this other story’#because for me pretty much all of who they are as characters is tied to their history so an honest au of this kind REQUIRES ooc-ness #at which point they’re not the same characters #and you’ve lost me completely lol

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