A young woman is walking outside ████████. It just so happens that today, the 3rd of March 2006, is this young woman's birthday. Though it was seventeen years ago she was given life, it is only today she will be given a name!
What will the name of this gothic young woman be?
> Enter Name.
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I've been thinking a lot lately about how Kabru deprives himself.
Kabru as a character is intertwined with the idea that sometimes we have to sacrifice the needs of the few for the good of the many. He ultimately subverts this first by sabotaging the Canaries and then by letting Laios go, but in practice he's already been living a life of self-sacrifice.
Saving people, and learning the secrets of the dungeons to seal them, are what's important. Not his own comforts. Not his own desires. He forces them down until he doesn't know they're there, until one of them has to come spilling out during the confession in chapter 76.
Specifically, I think it's very significant, in a story about food and all that it entails, that Kabru is rarely shown eating. He's the deuteragonist of Dungeon Meshi, the cooking manga, but while meals are the anchoring points of Laios's journey, given loving focus, for Kabru, they're ... not.
I'm sure he eats during dungeon expeditions, in the routine way that adventurers must when they sit down to camp. But on the surface, you get the idea that Kabru spends most of his time doing his self-assigned dungeon-related tasks: meeting with people, studying them, putting together that evidence board, researching the dungeon, god knows what else. Feeding himself is secondary.
He's introduced during a meal, eating at a restaurant, just to set up the contrast between his party and Laios's. And it's the last normal meal we see him eating until the communal ending feast (if you consider Falin's dragon parts normal).
First, we get this:
Kabru's response here is such a non-answer, it strongly implies to me that he wasn't thinking about it until Rin brought it up. That he might not even be feeling the hunger signals that he logically knew he should.
They sit down to eat, but Kabru is never drawn reaching for food or eating it like the rest of his party. He only drinks.
It's possible this means nothing, that we can just assume he's putting food in his mouth off-panel, but again, this entire manga is about food. Cooking it, eating it, appreciating it, taking pleasure in it, grounding yourself in the necessary routine of it and affirming your right to live by consuming it. It's given such a huge focus.
We don't see him eat again until the harpy egg.
What a significant question for the protagonist to ask his foil in this story about eating! Aren't you hungry? Aren't you, Kabru?
He was revived only minutes ago after a violent encounter. And then he chokes down food that causes him further harm by triggering him, all because he's so determined to stay in Laios's good graces.
In his flashback, we see Milsiril trying to spoon-feed young Kabru cake that we know he doesn't like. He doesn't want to eat: he wants to be training.
Then with Mithrun, we see him eating the least-monstery monster food he can get his hands on, for the sake of survival- walking mushroom, barometz, an egg. The barometz is his first chance to make something like an a real meal, and he actually seems excited about it because he wants to replicate a lamb dish his mother used to make him!
...but he doesn't get to enjoy it like he wanted to.
Then, when all the Canaries are eating field rations ... Kabru still isn't shown eating. He's only shown giving food to Mithrun.
And of course the next time he eats is the bavarois, which for his sake is at least plant based ... but he still has to use a coping mechanism to get through it.
I don't think Kabru does this all on purpose. I think Kui does this all on purpose. Kabru's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder should be understood as informing his character just as much as Laios's autism informs his. It's another way that Kabru and Laios act as foils: where Laios takes pleasure in meals and approaches food with the excitement of discovery, Kabru's experiences with eating are tainted by his trauma. Laios indulges; Kabru denies himself. Laios is shown enjoying food, Kabru is shown struggling with it.
And I can very easily imagine a reason why Kabru might have a subconscious aversion towards eating.
Meals are the privilege of the living.
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just a friendly reminder that, just because slavery was formally "abolished" in the so-called united states* in 1865, enslavement itself is still ongoing in the form of incarceration, which disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous people
(*i say "so-called" because the US is a settler-colonial construction founded on greed, extraction, and white supremacy)
recommended readings/resources:
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
"How the 13th Amendment Kept Slavery Alive: Perspectives From the Prison Where Slavery Never Ended" by Daniele Selby
"So You're Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist" by Mariame Kaba
"The Case for Prison Abolition: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on COVID-19, Racial Capitalism & Decarceration" from Democracy Now! [VIDEO]
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this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.
good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.
sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.
so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.
one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.
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please consider how you engage with aaron bushnell's death. you may react to it as you will, but it's crucial to remember that his death was specifically a call to action. it was not meant solely to shock but to draw attention to a vast moral hypocrisy: that to many, a soldier dying in a campaign backed by the U.S. government is noble, even if the soldier kills innocents to do so, even if the cause is morally bankrupt--but this? this is insanity. a man taking his own life, on his own terms, in an attempt to help others while hurting nobody else, is somehow less rational and more horrifying than the mass killing of civilians.
of course aaron's death was horrific. but as he said beforehand, it is realistically no more horrific than what's happening in gaza. if we can't stomach this, then why can we stomach children being bombed? thousands being starved? for all that self immolation is, it brings death in a matter of minutes. it is a fraction of the amount of pain, fear, and grief that people in gaza are experiencing. it's just that we are able to quantify it. and this tiny, quantifiable sliver of horror is still so unbelievably awful. how can anyone bear to think about anything else when this horror is happening a millionfold in palestine? this is the question aaron bushnell was asking. and he wanted you to face it, head-on, watching him burn to death.
I've been seeing people make fanart. minimalist graphics to sell on t-shirts. to commodify his death, to mythologize it not a day afterwards, is not only in poor taste but a hindrance to his message. the answer is not commodification, nor is it defeatism, nor is it rejoicing in his death. if you want to honor aaron's legacy, take action. channel your horror and your outrage into making a material change. this wasn't about him. this was about palestine. remember that it was always about palestine.
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