i love the extras of dungeon meshi in how it fleshes out the world because they make it so much more evident how race affects every part of the story while avoiding the zootopia racism problem. like obv a main theme of the story is like, humanity and desire, 'to eat is to live', etc, but since the majority of it takes place in the dungeon isolated from society and thru the lens of laios, the racial aspects play out more like shadows on a wall for most of the story.
then in the extras we get comics like this
which at a glance fleshes out the racial aspects via a character explaining the racial rules of universe - humans have x amount of bones, while orcs and kobolds have more. however, if u take it less straightforwardly, it points out how the concept of 'human' is a constructed concept in the world. the fact that there are different categories of human in different parts of the world based off of what types of humanoids occur there is already a demonstration of this. in response, the bones explanation seems to kabru and the characters as an objective way of measuring humans vs nonhumans.
but obv, when the culture was deciding what humanoids were humans and nonhumans, they weren't blindly analyzing skeletons and then deciding. just visually, one can glean that orcs and kobolds look less like the ingroup of tallmen, elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc. the bones explanation appears as a justification for that immediate prejudice under a scientific guise - I'm sure that one could come up with the same number of physical differences between a gnome and an elf that they would find between a tallman and an orc. it sounds a lot better to say 'well, an orc has 230 bones while a human has 206' then 'well, an orc looks ewwww yucky yucky to me while a human looks normal'.
and what i like abt the comic is that the characters take the explanation at face value for the most part. when a contradiction is brought up in the oni, kabru can neatly slot them into the predetermined number of bones framework. bc that's kinda how it works irl - there r cultural prejudices that we can posthumously justify, and if we find something outside of it, we can twist it to fit into our predetermined binary. however, since the reader does not live in a world where there are orcs and kobolds to be prejudiced against, we can see that flaw in the cultural logic. when the party encounters the orcs, the number of bones has no bearing on their humanity. They r shown to be cliquish and distrusting of outsiders, but not any more than the elves are later in the story.
tldr dungeon meshi worldbuilding is so good
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A thing about Zuko that is criminally under-talked and underwritten about is his absolutely dry sarcasm. Everyone hyper focuses on how he can’t tell a normal joke to save this life - true - but zuko’s strength is complete deadpan snark. In Zuko Alone when Li throws the egg at the soldier’s head and they think it’s Zuko and they keep pestering him and Zuko just stands there like 😑 maybe a chicken flew over. ICONIC!! The Boiling Rock when Sokka wants to take Appa and Zuko responds with oh yeah definitely I’m sure the most infamous fire nation prison in a VOLCANO will take care of him in their reputable sky bison day care centre 😡 or when they’re at Ember Island and Aang is spiralling abt murdering Ozai and poses his insane gluebending thought and Zuko’s like and then you can show him his baby pictures and that’s going to cure his chronic disease of being a fucking bitch🙄
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orv fans constantly recruiting readers like the worlds most fucked up pyramid scheme literally no other story does this to such an extent to people every orv fan is in a perpetual state of recommending it to 20 peopl.e in their life
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Daniel plays "Never Have I Ever" on Grill the Grid
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