#hiiii i'm back

[bandzboy]

[mewsfire]

serireiweek2023 day 2 - sleeping

[id in alt]

[takeapeck]

oh to be this mallard drinking from a fountain

[wildasarah234]

Moving fast towards to.... marriage I guess?

[tofixtheshadows]

Id love to hear ur interpretation and analysis on falin! She’s one of my favorite characters and and I was wondering what ur thoughts on her are

Man, I struggle to think of anything I could say about Falin that others have not already said. But she's one of my favorite things about Dungeon Meshi too.

So much of the story revolves around Falin, and she's not even there. Tumblr loves to talk about haunting the narrative, but Falin might be one of the best examples of it ever put to page. She's dead. She's alive. She's dead. She's alive. She's alive but she's missing, she's alive but she isn't herself. She's dead but she might wake. She's dead but she's frozen in ice. She's alive but she's sleepwalking. They chase her ghost and they chase her body all through the story.

I think what Kui does with her is fascinating. Not just as character with a personality we can analyze, but as an object in a narrative- that's why I say she's one of my favorite things about the story, because I also mean it in a mechanical sense. As a writer, Kui's really good at misdirection- that is, setting you up to believe or expect something about a character or a plot, and then turning that on its head. It's most apparent with Kabru, but it works really well with Falin too.

Because the precious little sister is a very well known character archetype, right? So is the gentle healer. The heart of the party. The white mage girl. The damsel in distress. The martyr.

And this isn't a Laura Palmer situation, where we find out that beneath her wholesome surface there's something dark and troubled. No, Falin truly is a kind and gentle person. That isn't where the misdirection leads (and that, too, I think, is another misdirection- it's not "Plot twist, she isn't as nice as you thought!", which would almost be too easy).

The misdirection here is more about structure than about character (but also, yeah- a little about character).

What I mean is, with these archetypes firmly in mind, along with a whole other host of fantasy genre expectations, I think anyone who goes into Dungeon Meshi un-spoiled probably expects Falin's rescue to be an endgame event; at least on a subconscious level, where you're not really thinking about it but in the back of your head you're already stretching out the story to place Falin firmly in the distance. Fire breathing dragon at the bottom of the dungeon is perfect final boss material, right? Slay the dragon. Rescue the princess.

And Falin is the perfect prize in the traditional old school fantasy that the concept of the titular dungeon is a send-up to. Blonde (white), soft-spoken, sweet-natured, beloved by everyone. An angelic figure.

Maybe that's why Ryoko Kui gave her white wings.

It is sort of jarring when chapter 23 rolls around and it's already time to fight the red dragon. And it takes a few chapters, but they succeed. And then Falin's impossible resurrection succeeds. But by then you guess that this is not going to be the story you expected it to be.

I want to point out that Falin spends a lot of time getting, well, babied, post-resurrection. Marcille washes her in the bath, despite Falin stating that she's capable of washing herself. Marcille schools her about her mana use despite Falin demonstrating that she is not hurting for mana, and brushes aside Falin's explanations. Both Marcille and Laios refuse to actually tell her what happened. Laios scruffs up her hair like she's a little kid and scolds her for something she can't remember doing. Marcille explicitly calls her a little kid when Falin tries to talk about how much she's grown.

Of course I'm not saying that Laios was wrong to act like a big brother, or that Marcille shouldn't be worried about taking care of her shell-shocked friend in the bath. But the framing of it clearly shows a Falin who is struggling to be heard.

If you'd like to address the big gay elephant in the room while we're here, I want to state for the record that- whether you read her as gay or not -I think Marcille is completely oblivious during this. Because Falin is her little friend from school. Her best friend, yes, but also the young tallman student she, in her infinite elven wisdom, had to mentor and look after. Marcille has not yet accepted that Falin is an adult now, nor has she accepted that she, herself, is only barely past teenagerhood developmentally and is not nearly as mature as she believes. Of course she'd scrub Falin in the bath and fuss over her.

Falin, meanwhile, seems more than aware of her own adult body and the inappropriate way Marcille is treating it.

The mana-sharing scene is, I think, Falin trying to get a little of her own back. How do you like it, Marcille?

And she tries again in bed.

Maybe she's wondering if their relationship will change now that they're grown ups. If Marcille prefers her as a little girl, or at least as a woman who lets herself be guided like one; if Marcille will react badly if Falin keeps trying to assert herself. She also might be subtly trying to signal to Marcille that bed sharing, like bathing, carries a different weight to it when you do it as adults rather than as children.

With all this in mind, the decision to turn Falin from the precious prize they rescued into to the vicious dragon they have to slay, hits a lot harder.

Falin with a powerful, monstrous, destructive body. Falin, who couldn't even stand to cause people pain from using healing spells, slaughtering half a dozen people in brutal ways. And that's not her, she's being mind-controlled, but as an object in the story she has completely flipped. From damsel to threat.

And I love that she carries a little bit of that with her when she's resurrected again.

Because she's no longer the girl who's going to let herself be stifled by her brother's and her best friend's co-dependency, no matter how much she loves them. She's different now: stronger, eyes open, forging her own path instead of following in their wake. Falin is still going to come back to them again, but this time it won't be because they chased her. It'll be because they let her go.

[fairytail-incorrectquotes]

Levy: Pspspsps

Gajeel, walking over to her: Are you trying to call a cat?

Levy, frantically taking notes: Holy shit it worked

[drrba]

[sleepsucks]

[yourbitchystudentartist]

Check out my DnD party, the baddest bitches on the block

@bifurious-rex @whiskeytangerine @sloppy-grandma @nekron

[haseulove]

ed teach // S2E4 fun and games

[lorogy662]

"SO, WITH ADVICE OF THE DEAD, AND A HALO OVER MY HEAD"

[sodaspringz]

tntduo but quackity is pissed, because fucking wilbur left without a goddamn goodbye, so he prank calls the gas station daily just to ruin his day. doesn't matter when he does it or what he says, as long as it happens before midnight every 24 hours. when he can't do it for whatever reason he employs someone else to make the call, which is a nice variety for wilbur's mental health

it doesn't take long for wilbur to figure out who's doing this, but quackity refuses to crack, even when called out, and eventually it becomes so routine that it's the highlight of wilbur's day. he picks up the phone extra cheery every time, and they both tell themselves it's just to grate on quackity's nerves and not because wilbur's actually happy to talk with him. they talk for two hours one particularly slow night and wilbur has to spend the rest of his shift coping

[kehlani]

Bad News - Kehlani (2020)

[archduchessofnowhere]

Of his [Thomas Buchanan Read] portraits, of which he painted many, that of the ex-Queen of Naples was his pet and pride. It is a full-length figure clad in white gauze, with a profusion of gauze about the shoulders and arms, and strings of pearls around the neck, and looping up heavy masses of dark hair. It only needed wings to be the picture of an angel, if gauze is the fabric in which angels dress.

Sallie A. Brock, My Souvenirs. In Appletons' Journal, July 17 of 1875

[kermit-coded]

body talk (1005 words) by kermit_coded Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Grayson (Comics), The Authority (DC Comics), DCU (Comics) Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Dick Grayson & Midnighter Characters: Dick Grayson, Midnighter (DCU) Additional Tags: references to midnighter's wildstorm backstory bc i hate what dc did, Sexual Harassment, sometimes it's easier to talk about things with people you don't really know, Past Rape/Non-con, Minor Apollo | Andrew Pulaski/Midnighter, Protective Midnighter (DCU), Dick Grayson Has Issues, POV Midnighter (DCU), Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Developing Friendships, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Hyper-Sexuality Summary: Midnighter was built to see things. Dick Grayson has secrets that he doesn't want seen.

[amusingmusie]

Bitch I'm back