#I'm back for a bit

[girlyteeth]

Using Plastic Surgery + Dieting to Promote Clothes - Jirai-Chan/AnkRouge Collaboration

Another collaboration between this influencer has been taking place, and a new setup has been released. While the clothing itself is cute (and hopefully, not a Taobao replica this time), the way it's being promoted is unnecessarily critical of the buyer's overall appearance.

This goes to show that the jirai subculture is still a place that promotes self-destructive thinking and behavior, and is often fueling the fire for unhealthy comparison.

Wearing girly fashion does not require you to look a certain way or weigh a certain amount. East Asian beauty standards are harshly critical of natural human features, especially towards feminine-presenting people. As someone who's being affected by this harsh criteria every day, sometimes I need to remind myself that tummy rolls are normal (and gorgeous), hip dips are normal (and stunning!), and that it's not my fault if Secret Honey dresses don't accommodate my wide shoulders.

I desperately wish more girly brands could expand their size options instead of doing the opposite :'3

[sweetestlamb]

So...I might have written a story for SunSol (no idea if that's their official couple name but I think it's cute because it's like SunSun and they are both so sunny and cute) couple and it's really self indulgent and a wee bit filthy if anyone's interested still lmao it drops tomorrow 🤭

[aisling-saoirse]

Long Valley, NJ - May 12th 2023

[chaotic-neutral-knitter]

I think one of the kindest things you can do for people with various mental health struggles is just... let people back into your life after they've been absent for a while.

Making friends as an adult is so fucking hard already and isolating yourself from other people is a very common symptom of depression, anxiety, burnout, ocd, trauma, grief, etc. Which means that someone will do the hard work of recovery/healing and resurface back into a world where their previous friends have written them off because they stopped showing up.

So if you know someone where you're like "yeah we could have been better friends but they fell off the map a bit" and that person suddenly reaches out, or starts showing up to events even though you kind of forgot they were still in the group chat... well they may have been Going Through It and you don't actually have to punish them for their absence you can just be glad that they're back.

[1alchemistart]

cries mournfully. guess who's been reading fics lately JSDFKLSDKL

[nipuni]

"I am a higher dimension life form, I am a complex space-time event"

A step by step process of this will be available at my Patreon next month, you can find prints of my work at my Store 😊

[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.

[kimeoshi]

Corrupted Ratio for Twitter! Reached 2k followers and he won in a prompt game

Timelapse:

[teaboot]

Ollie is 8 weeks old tomorrow and we have made an important discovery:

HIM LIKE BOWLING

[hinamie]

bunch of portraits

[forestofsprites]

tail end of season seven you will always be famous

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I know those eyes.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[snarkspawn]

advocatus diaboli

[wardingshout]

Zelda goes mushroom girl

[bamsara]

I have a INPRINT shop now! You can get my art as prints and posters here in many different sizes and materials.

Not all my art is on there, but I'm slowly getting my other pieces ready. You can use the code '0WXYC1' on order over $30 to get 15% for one week, plus the sitewide discounts currently going on. The discount will end 7/09/24.

If there are any art pieces I've done you'd like to see as a print, please let me know! (Also heads up! I have no way to remove the white border that inprint adds onto the fine art prints, but 'canvas' and other options do not include the white border that they add! Feel free to cut off the borders if you prefer!)