#I don't have one of the basic elements to sustain life (two actually because my water is moldy but I'm asking so much already)

[aftermathing]

When you lay yourself bare to ask for help with food insecurity and they say "you can just buy food at the dollar store" hello can you hear me. I am telling you I am too disabled to drive or get out of bed or move.

[pelleas-at-castle-nox]

I'm surprised I haven't really seen anybody talking about the food sourcing theme in dungeon meshi. Like, the very first thing it made me think about when I started reading the manga was like "oh yeah, this really makes you think about food, where it comes from, the work needed to create enough food for one person, let alone a small group, to eat comfortably and nutritiously. Laios even specifically calls out that 'regular' food is also made using shit and dirt, intentionally grounding it in reality and subtly asking the reader to introspect on the food they eat and where it comes from."

Like, it's fair to say kui has the old "world builder's" spirit, it's easy to extrapolate a whole world when you're willing to both ask "how does x mundane task work?" And being willing to give it as fanciful or grounded an answer as you feel is appropriate, food is the central theme, but that sort of thinking extends to every corner of the lore and world building where you can practically begin to trace back a lot of world elements to these basic questions, like "what would happen if there were people who lived for 500 years, what would happen if you fought a creature with two heads" and I think that's really cool-

But like, that core question "where does the food that sustains you come from" is like such a relevant question that we should all be asking ourselves. I suppose it's just that I think about that often, both when I'm world building, and in modern and historical contexts.

In a lot of ways it's alienation of labor, most USAmericans (to keep it at least slightly contained in scope) don't get to know where any of the food they eat actually comes from. At best, you might buy your own groceries and maybe even be able to google some information as to the conditions at the place this food was grown, maybe you're lucky/resourced enough to grow some of your own food in like a garden. At worst you get your food premade and prepackaged and you're even completely divorced from the preparation aspect.

A major symptom of this is clearly shown in dungeon meshi's opening and especially in kabru shuro and even the canaries: when food is taken for granted, it becomes easy to neglect. The party initially wiped simply because they'd not considered how suicidal it was to press onward while exhausted, Kabru is so dissociated and focused that he shuts out most of his own biological signifiers of hunger, Shuro starves himself, equating food with leisure instead of a vital practice to sustain life and energy, and of course there's mister no desires.

It's no mistake that in all of the above cases, it's seemed to be heavily implied that food is either an after thought, or someone else's responsibility, or a simple logistical concern. Senshi's whole rant (in volume 1!!) about "oh the youths of today just buying prepackaged meat wine and bread" is especially tied in to this main theme of "do you know where your food comes from?" By taking it to the next level and asking "do you know why you're eating what you're eating?"

To take a personal side tangent, I was recently diagnosed as diabetic, and it's completely changed my relationship to food on a pretty fundamental level, but I'd say I'd always had a pretty good and healthy relationship with food (after I stopped having an eating disorder but that's a story for another day) so it was an easy enough adjustment to have to start actually thinking about how much of my diet was carbs and things like that, it just became a matter of considering what I was eating and when and why. I'm still not perfect at it and it's still a learning process but I'm working on it.

Anyways, my main theory as to why I've not seen it being pontificated on is just that in general people really hate being asked "do you know what you're eating?" Around these parts in a general fashion, but like, especially with weaponized starvation going on and very real issues of things like food desserts in America, and the fact that we all have to pay for just about every little meal, I think it's important for leftists to contemplate the political implications of meals.

An army runs on its stomach after all. Rant over

[sapphire-strikes]

▪︎Some LEGO Monkie Kid Headcanons Pt. 2!▪︎

Ayoooo~ Part 2 finally! Decided to write some more headcanons to warm myself up after another massive break. These headcanons have all been pretty general so far, but I will absolutely be adding some reader-insert elements eventually since they are kinda meant to tie into my Ao3 series.

Part 1 Part 2

~

• You know that common anxiety a lot of people struggle with where you worry that all of your friends secretly hate you? Well, MK's thought process works completely opposite of that.

• He's so genuinely earnest in how much he cares for his friends that it comes full circle, and it's hard for him not to believe that they feel the same way. (And luckily, in his case, they absolutely do.)

• It does play some into how oblivious he can be though, because a lot of times, he will not pick up on it if someone is mad at him unless blatantly told. Basically, as long as you're sharing a space relatively peacefully with him, he automatically assumes that everything's okay and you're on good terms.

• I think that explains his relationship with Red Son and the Demon Bull Family pretty well.

• What's that, Red Son? This ceasefire is just a temporary truce until Demon Bull Family's next opportunity to rise to power? Too bad. The SECOND they stopped actively acting as antagonists and worked together, MK began considering them friends. Want to change his mind? Gonna have to start trying to kill him again. Otherwise, get used to the sleepovers, noodles and beach parties.

• Mei is absolutely the type of person to ~grip~, smack, hang off of, or cling to the person closest to her when she starts laughing. MK does this as well to a lesser agree, but it amplifies when Mei's around and they happen to be standing next to each other, just because they feed off eachothers energy so much. The two often end up in absolute hysterics when they're together and something funny happens, leaving them clinging to eachother mirthfully, OR to whoever has the misfortune of standing in between them when they begin cracking up.

• I like to think that Macaque and Wukong both hold primarily vegetarian diets, y'know, on account of them both being monkeys.

• There's a part in JTTW where Wukong and the rest of the pilgrams are trying to bring the emperor of a kingdom called "Crow-Cock" back to life. Wukong goes up to heaven and extorts some soul-restoring exlier from Lao tzu, but even after giving it to the emperor's corspe, one of them has to "breath life back into him" as the final step. Zhu Bajie actually volunteers but Tripitaka stops him, saying that among the three disciples (Wukong, Bajie, and Wujing), Wukong was the only one of them with "pure breath", having sustained himself in nothing but fruits and nuts his whole life.

• Technically, I have seen one part from the book referenced where Wukong supposedly implies that he has eaten human before, so either I'm not there yet, I missed it or I don't remember it, and if true, it would be a direct contradiction to the moment mentioned above. So that's where the headcanon part of this comes in, and I'm gonna run with the idea that in that particular instance, he was joking.

• For Wukong, his diet is just a preference. It's mentioned at least once in JTTW that he's not a fan of cooked food, and eating raw meat doesn't appeal to him in the slightest.

• Macaque, on the other hand, can't stand the taste of meat. Cooked or raw, to him, it tastes like blood either way. Secretly wishes he could stomach it just because, being a monkey, he subconsciously views eating meat as predatory behavior and has always been a little baffled by that fact that humans are consistently meat-eaters despite their docile, unintimidating nature.• Macaque also, however, doesn't dislike cooked in the way that Wukong does. He's actually a big fan of tofu in almost any form.

• Oh, but yes, they do both eat bugs.

• All the monkeys, and I mean ALL of the monkeys on FFM, retire to water-curtain cave at night. The little guys like to sleep with their king, so there will be hundreds of them sleeping scattered about the inside of Wukong's shack and around the surrounding cavern. Anyone spending the night will inevitably find themselves completely surrounded by morning.

• After the events of season 4, Macaque actually returns to Flower Fruit Mountain to live. He and Wukong still aren't on good terms, but it's a big island, so they never have to see each other.

•According to Macaque, Wukong can call himself it's king all he wants, but it was his home before he and Wukong were friends, and now that things are mostly peaceful, it will go back for being his home for a long time afterwards.

• He has his own little hideout in an underground cavern on the other side of the mountain. The little monkeys actually come in to visit him all the time, but he has them sworn to secrecy so that none of them tell Wukong exactly where he lives. He doesn't care that Wukong knows he's back, but he'd rather not give him the means to drop in if he ever felt like it.

[swashbucklery]

Do you write original fiction as well or just fanfiction?

I was thinking of how to answer this, because my kneejerk reaction was one of self-justification - oh-I-write-fic-but-I-aspire-to-original-fiction-someday sort of breathlessly, which I see so often in fandom spaces. But then I was like: wait fuck that.

Because here is the thing anon and I don't think I would expect you to know this, but this is a space were I get to talk about myself and like. In 2019 I was someone who wrote (fanfiction) regularly and often, and felt like I was always working hard to balance art and work but managing, and doing a pretty decent job of protecting time for art. And then, I had the privilege of being in a healthcare job in March 2020. Which I talk about here but only a little, because this isn't really a space where I want to share a ton about the IRL parts of myself but basically: the experience of being Essential and being asked to Do My Part For Society Because It's A Big Crisis really dismantled my entire system of work-life balance and left it dismantled for uhhhh the past two to three years.

So that has been a time where I didn't have a lot of words to write. Not because I didn't have stories that I dreamed about or things to say - I had so much to say - but for me, writing is something that happens when it feels safe. Taking characters on emotional journeys, working through the puzzle of the highs and lows of connection and what that character needs and the gaps in the story and getting to fill them in - that's not compatible with a crisis, at least for me. That's slow and quiet and it requires time and space for slowness and silence to happen. And using 100% of my mental and emotional energy to Be Essential, For Society, took up all of the spaces where writing fiction would normally be.

And I bring this up because - I don't think it's after. I don't think it's going to be after for a long while if I'm being honest. But it's a season of late-pandemic transition, and a season of trying to reassemble the components that worked well for me for balance in the Before Times.

And one of the things I’ve done as part of reassembling the parts of my life that exist beyond my Essential Workerhood has been a lot of reframing to make more sense of what the pandemic has meant as a part of my life. While I'm in the midst of this, finding time to get my words out in a way that feels like play and feels like fun is a big, huge achievement. In a way that's hard to explain to folks who didn't have The Essential Worker Experience but that I want, very badly, to communicate well.

Right now, I personally am celebrating my success at being able to sustain play and wellness and the core things that I value despite the crushing stress I've had to work through. I'm so proud of the fact that last year and this year I've been able to turn towards rediscovering joy and processing the grief and stress of 2020 onward because that's what my soul needs and has needed. I’ve devoted so much time to working, and the thing that is best for me in my downtime is actually to intentionally add elements of rest and play instead of making my hobbies efficient or turning them into opportunities for side hustles.

I do think that I have original stories to tell, and I think that I'm still figuring out how the trajectory of my life will go to know exactly when but. At some point, I think it will feel really important to prioritize giving myself time and space to get those words out and maybe I'll publish something original. I’d really like to set up a pen name and submit some works to erotica anthologies and write weird romance novels.

But in the meantime, the best thing for my heart is to have writing and words be a place to play. And the easiest way to play is to take someone else's characters for a spin and have the best time with it, and that's what fanfiction is for me. So anyway: I just write fanfiction, anon, and I’m really pleased about it.