#meant a lot

[sugarcub]

[mer-se]

lil things

[sloppy-syrup]

“I’m gonna go trade his cup with water…”

[trainwreckgenerator]

a face you'd find on the side of a milk carton

[dellerose]

"oh so it's like canon?" "why won't toby fox make them canon" the important thing you gotta know is toby fox never points to two characters and goes "they dated/they're dating" ever. he usually avoids questions about how he writes queer rep but it seems to be the overall attitude that if he needs to explicitly state the relationship between two characters, then he has failed as a writer to properly convey their dynamic with extra implications and all.

like... legit the only times a thing is blatantly obviously canon is though the characters, through what the CHARACTERS want to say about the other. like alphys and undyne are implied to be into each other but toby fox never said they're a couple, the game did, when alphys confessed her love and they got together at the very end of the story. and it seems everyone else takes this approach, whether the relationship is queer or not. sans "befriending" toriel and the rest is left up to interpretation. suselle with noelle being so flustered and into susie but never needing to go "I'm in love with her" cause we know cause it's just so well written. the implications of asgore giving rudy who's in an unhappy marriage boquets of flowers (berdly even comments on this if you land him in the hospital dismissing it as a "bro" thing to poke fun at how homoeroticism is dismissed as platonic friendship between men). tenna calling spamton his "old partner" (not business partner! JUST PARTNER. A REALLY LOADED WORD). and a bunch more scattered moments here and there for other things like krerdly and krusie and kriselle and so on.

because he's just a writer who takes the approach that if he needs to tell you, he hasn't done a good enough job showing you, and I just really appreciate that. it's really refreshing even 10 years later to throw yourself into writing such deep relationships that still trust readers to figure it out and know what's going on and leave wiggle room for interpretation and yet are so obvious in what they are, so blatantly and without shame or doubt, that everyone realizes what it is. and it's pretty admirable cause it makes these characters more real. nobody really goes around casually saying they're in love with someone, it's a build up, or it might be more complicated, or so on, but they show it in every other way that toby fox manages to capture with careful words.

[canisalbus]

[chloesimaginationthings]

William Afton lost two baddies in FNAF..

[pissnvinegarchips]

This ask got me blocked lmfao. My first and only interaction with this dude. I know I'm not the most well spoken, but I had to say something. I gave it a few days until I checked as well, assuming he hadn't replied because he was just busy having a life (lol)

This pocket deer boy asswipe isn't interested in hearing from trans men that disagree with him on his opinion on OUR own issues and lived experiences. He's only interested in being a transandrophobic freak, and socializing with trans people that enable him to wave his hate boner around proudly.

Fuck you to all the trans people that are validating him. How dare you speak over trans men discussing the discrimination we face? Trans men have enough fucking problems without our own community encouraging cis people to speak on OUR FUCKING ISSUES.

Trans men don't benefit from the patriarchy. I was trying to be as charitable to his arguments as possible in my ask by giving a perfect situation in which a trans man could potentially benefit from the patriarchy in a very shallow and meaningless way.

"Passing" privilege is only skin deep. As soon as a "passing" trans man/masc needs reproductive care, or we get outed, or we go to prison, or we need our OWN COMMUNITY to take our word on our OWN OPPRESSION over the words of the nearest cis guy that hates us almost as much as the trans community as a whole hates us, we're completely fucked.

[clumsypuppy]

wait for me

[doctorsiren]

God now I’m seriously thinking of an Undertale route with Spamton and Tenna, specifically how they would affect the ending phone call… I feel like if you kill Tenna, especially if you kill nobody else, Spamton goes completely insane forever. Maybe throws himself into the core again, like how Alphys dies if you kill Mettaton.

If you kill Spamton but fix Tenna, though, since Tenna doesn’t know he’s alive… maybe he joins Mettaton’s network but he’s hollow inside? Has no real purpose and no real friends, just shuts himself down every night alone. You know, a neutral ending!

Neutral Route if you kill only Tenna

Spamton spirals even further, tricking himself into believing that he can still fix Tenna, but he soon realizes that there’s nothing he can do. So I believe he would jump into the Core again or do SOMETHING. Either way, his shop is closed down after the player’s choice to kill Tenna.

Neutral Route if you kill only Spamton

I like that idea a lot. He’s always wants to help people and lift their spirits, so being a TV star after being repaired sounds perfect to him. Before his Spinel moment, he thought Spamton had died when he jumped into the core. And so, if the player kills Spamton and later repairs Tenna, Tenna will be conscious again still believing Spamton to have never been alive since the Core incident. However, he quickly finds the evidence of him all through the underground. His abandoned shop, his strange graffiti, and reports and rumours from other monsters that one of the old Royal Scientists used to leave all this stuff, but disappeared suddenly. Tenna realizes if he had just stayed awake and not shut himself off to fruitlessly wait for Chara and Asriel, he could have found Spamton and helped him. He wallows in regret and sits alone in his room every night, watching the same VHS tape over and over, which was filled with little moments of the Dreemurr family before everything went bad, including moments of Tenna and Spamton. …and I realized I could make them even more tragic if I made them fiancés, who then had a falling out before they even got married (the falling out being after Gaster fell into the core and Spamton started losing it and blaming Tenna to deflect his own guilt). Tenna doesn’t even care about the fight anymore and he’s not mad at Spamton. He just wishes he hadn’t been powered off for all those years while Spamton clearly still cared about him and had been trying to fix him up.

[scriblesandbits]

YOU KNOW S3RK3T TH3Y R34LLY L1K3 YOU AROUND H3R3

YOU SHOULD V1S1T SOM3T1M3, YOUD G3T 4 K1CK OUT OF 1T

4NYW4Y

S33 YOU 4ROUND, 1 GU3SS

[hinamie]

in spite of everything, I had fun <3

[starliteonearth]

A lot of people seem to think Sieun's and Suho's relationship is just sweet and lovey dovey and nice, and completely miss the darker, violent side of their connection. For hurting Sieun, Suho breaks Yeongbin's hand like nothing and sits there completely unbothered while that boy cries in pain at his feet. For hurting Suho, Sieun smashes Wooyoung's ankle with a dumbbell and leaves him screaming on the floor, utterly uncaring. Both are capable of great violence and are deeply obsessed with each other to the point of unleashing it on others with no fucks given.

[shadowtraveled]

"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.

[adriles]

when we’re done with our overwhelming grief we’ll eat i guess