#like that casting was spot on

[lutheban]

Death: The Time of Your Life comic panel edits with Kirby

Original bellow:

[meep-meep-richie]

Can’t wait till he calls Tommy “tiger”

[hajihiko]

look on the bright side!

[possamble]

Like take for example how she treats healing Laios leg!! We *never* see someone who was healed have lasting symptoms from a heal. It *itches* terribly — Laios looks like he will scratch it raw. The itching implies an incomplete heal — you only itch that bad when something is being regrown or scabbing like when you get tattoos. There’s something that needs to finish healing. This scene always stood out to me— because Falin notices and *heals* it. And that brought up a ton of questions for me (We see her cast magic, was it to soothe the itching? A phantom pain? Why was it itching in the first place? Didn’t Marcille finish the job? Why was he having after effects we never see someone have any before?) and i’m breaking my brain over it because is this an sign of Marcille’s engagement with healing in general? Perfunctory—a means to an end? Morals? I feel like there is something there for us because that scene wasn’t necessary to the plot so why did Ryoko Kui add this interaction? I think how Marcille engages with healing was telling us a lot more than I previously realized because she was in a medical researcher position before coming into the dungeon however when we see how this was practically applied by her was really interesting!! She’s so divorced from feeling empathy for the pain of healing and i think that’s some sort of self-preservation instinct. Idk i just feel like her engagement with healing is so fucking fascinating when juxtaposed with her beliefs on death pls share thots if any

I think what gets hidden in the details about Marcille’s healing is that no, she’s not a talented cleric and healer in the way that Falin is. But Fantasy settings tend to relegate healing towards “holy” and “good” magic that never causes harm—

and Marcille is what you’d get if you put a doctor and a surgeon with a modern, more realistic approach towards medicine in a genre that doesn’t usually allow for that. 

Like, you’ll see surgeons or doctors secretly being incredibly efficient serial killers in TV thrillers everywhere—but a fantasy series with a cleric or healer that’s secretly great at killing is a bit more rare to find(though not nonexistent, admittedly). Healing magic tends to be painted as either a religious discipline that’s not accessible to those who don’t have a tie to a deity or some ineffable force in the universe, or a matter of accessing some natural “life force” that exists in all living beings. 

Dungeon Meshi, of course, loves bending fantasy conventions in the most incredible ways, so that’s not how it works here. The series allows itself to contend with the fact that healing a human body requires extensive and painstakingly detailed knowledge of that body.

The reason that Falin might appear to be a much more talented healer than Marcille is because Kui dresses her up in all the archetypal traits of a Caring Cleric, and that immediately clicks with readers expecting fantasy conventions in ways that Marcille's expertise doesn't.

This isn’t to discredit Falin, obviously. She is a talented healer, as attested to by Marcille herself:

But the interesting thing is that she does it all on instinct, so it’s not an exact knowledge. Furthermore, she uses the gnomish system of healing, which is implied to rely more on the judgment and knowledge of natural spirits (and therefore takes less mana). So it’s not hard to imagine that she would have less exact knowledge of how the human body operates than Marcille does as a medical researcher. 

And that in and of itself raises questions: In a world where magic can immediately re-attach a limb, why would medical research be necessary? But Dungeon Meshi makes it clear that healing magic isn’t perfect, nor “holy” magic—it’s simply magic, like any other, carefully tailored to operate within the confines of what a human body needs in order to keep living. It’s not able to cure everything, and it especially seems to have gaps in terms of being able to treat illnesses that aren’t immediately solvable injuries.

And that all ties into Marcille's attitude towards it: It's a scientific and magical discipline like any other that requires careful study. There's nothing inherently good or bad about it—it was made by people, for people, and what matters is how you use it.

So, Marcille was at the academy, studying the ways that illness happens in a body, and carefully writing new magic to counteract or at least mitigate it.

(How I interpreted this was that she was likely part of research teams dealing with complicated things like autoimmune diseases, cancer, and other things where the body isn’t technically injured by a foreign element, but erroneously harming itself due to internal reasons.)

For me, this kind of explains her approach to pain in healing:

Honestly, what this immediately reminded me of was that a friend of mine had to have surgery on their throat when they were younger, and part of the procedure was waking them up without anaesthesia right after the surgery to make sure that they could still feel everything. They told me it was the worst pain they’d ever felt in their entire life—but from a medical perspective, it was necessary to make sure that none of the critical nerves in the neck had been affected. 

Sometimes in medicine, pain is necessary because it’s not some uncomplicated and bad thing—it’s a response of your nervous system, and sometimes the only indicator that your body is still working the way it should. And I think this is the mindset that Marcille has, which is why she seems so blase about it—she doesn’t think that she’s actually hurting people, it’s just a necessary part of the healing process. 

And in some ways, she just sees it as a realistic downside of the fact that you have to recover quickly in dungeon situations:

Normal recovery would take months. Healing magic shortens that to a few seconds. The pain is a result/tradeoff of forcing something that would naturally take a long time into such a short timespan. This all makes sense and is Right and Correct and Normal in Marcille's mind. It's not that she lacks empathy and doesn't care enough about not harming her patients: she doesn't think that it's "harm" at all.

Not a shred of guilt in that face before causing extreme pain. Contrast this to her constant fussing over Izutsumi on the smallest things—it's hard to believe she wouldn't even be a little apologetic if she actually believed this would be hurtful in a way that matters.

I think this is overall, less indicative of any lack of empathy so much as her incredibly stubborn and sometimes ridiculous way of compartmentalizing things to her own internal rules. I’d even argue that this mindset is preferable in surface situations, where people have the luxury of time. Dungeon healing hurts because it has to be fast and instantaneous—but if you're just treating a broken bone that can be put in a cast with slower healing magic to help, wouldn't you prefer that over an instant heal with the chance to cause brain damage, no matter how minuscule the chance is? Shouldn’t your long-term health matter more than short-term recovery and some pain?

To touch on Laios’s leg injury—we actually do see this kind of reaction to healing magic later on in the manga. When Marcille is teaching Laios how to heal, she ends up bowling him over because her cut gets super itchy:

but then she reacts positively and tells him that it's supposed to happen, before trusting him enough to try it on Senshi.

So while yes, it was an “incomplete” heal, I don’t think it was particularly telling about her approach to healing. And honestly, judging by the fact that it only distracted him when he was relaxed enough to be cleaning his armour before bed, it looks like she connected all the major muscles and nerves enough not to cause pain or risk re-injury by moving, but just left superficial stuff for Laios’s body to naturally heal. 

Her mindset makes sense in context: She also had to heal Chilchuck and Senshi, while conserving enough energy to immediately start digging for Falin’s body and potentially do a very taxing resurrection spell as soon as possible. 

After that, Falin healed the rest of Laios’s leg injury in a situation where it wasn’t needed, but there were no other high stakes to discourage it. Also, she can’t bear to see others in pain. ambrosiagourmet already did an incredible analysis of how this empathy doesn't really signify perfect altruism so much as Falin's deep discomfort with having to witness pain, so I won't go into that too much—but the important part is, Falin isn't inherently a more caring healer than Marcille. They are both making decisions for the patient based on their own approaches to healing—it's just that Falin's approach is preferable for dungeoneering overall.

(In Marcille's defense, it seems that dungeons are an incredibly specific environment that falls way outside the realm of what's actually taught to mages in most schools. Being a combat-oriented mage actually seems pretty frowned upon.)

So, in a lot of ways, Marcille is both realistic about dungeon healing (mana conservation by not doing full heals when not necessary, thinking about pain as the condensation of the time it would have taken to naturally heal, etc.) and very unrealistic about it. What she doesn’t realize is that the pain matters: In a dungeon, people have to be up and ready to continue right away, over and over. If it hurts every time, that makes them very averse to being healed, stressed out about getting injured, and affects their performance as dungeoneers.

All that to say… I personally believe that Marcille is very passionate about healing people. Not healing magic necessarily, but medicine as a whole. It’s not just a means to an end—it’s her main area of study only second to her research into ancient magic. And sure, she might have gotten into it because of her fear of death—but what I think people don’t give enough credit to is that her motivations changed from when she was a child. 

You see it here, when she’s laying her dream outright to the Winged Lion: 

She might be kinda racist herself, hypocritical, and short-sighted (mostly out of ignorance, I’d argue), but at heart, she hates that people hurt each other. She hates that long-lived races look down on everyone else just because of lifespan. She has—arguably very correctly—identified the disparity in lifespans as one of the main causes of interracial strife, and she wants to get rid of it so that everyone can fully understand and relate to each other as equals. 

And in some ways, it’s not even that insane of a dream. 

Knowing that people used to live as long as she’ll have to, and something changed in the eons since, is it really that weird for her to want to change it back somehow? 

But all that aside—the most important part of this to me is that… originally, she wasn’t actually that hung up on completely equalizing lifespans. She got into medicine because she wanted to, at the very least, close the gap as much as she could in her very long life. 

She was realistic about it at first. She thought that, by studying ancient magic’s ability to pull from the infinite, she could harness that infinite energy in tandem with medical knowledge to give more life to the short-lived races. 

But as she says it herself, it changed when she realized that she doesn’t have time to gradually unravel it on her own. 

So, yes. She got desperate. She got crazy. In light of all she did as dungeon lord, it’s easy to assume that she never cared much about healing as a profession, and is just a self-obsessed little girl caged by her trauma and trying to change the entire world to make sure she doesn’t have to be hurt. 

And… she is all that. She's my blorbo supreme but I'll be the first to insist that she is very much a complete hot mess. But my point is that these were very extreme circumstances, and Ryoko Kui has given us all the understated evidence we need to know that she’s actually a very passionate doctor otherwise. This is the girl who freaks out if she’s not useful to other people and not allowed to help:

Did actually get excited about making safe dungeons for helpful purposes beyond just learning more about ancient magic to fulfill her dream: 

And in tandem with her own personal trauma—not in opposition to it or to obscure it—cared about making life more peaceful and equal for everyone in the world. Not to mention, she had to have done some insane work to be acknowledged as the most talented researcher at the academy and be allowed onto teams that were researching new healing magics.

TL:DR, I think she has a lot of empathy for people and passion for helping them, it’s just expressed in a way you wouldn’t expect in a fantasy because Ryoko Kui doesn’t fuck around with her storytelling and genre subversion. She might not be a good archetypal healer, but she's an extremely knowledgeable doctor with a point-blank and intense attitude towards healing and medical treatment (see: her strictness about physical touch when teaching Laios about healing).

For me, all evidence points towards her going back to what she was doing before the story on top of her duties as Court Mage, kind of becoming a sort of Surgeon General for Melini as the head of health and safety for the country and whatnot. 

PS. I will admit that there's explicit evidence she's not good at healing here:

But this was also like... chapter 3. Written years ago. I personally feel that everything Kui has said about Marcille's background since is enough evidence that it was just a one-off joke before she had an airtight idea about who Marcille was and would be, but I'll concede that it's mostly conjecture.

But again, as I said, I believe that while she might not be the best at the heal spell that's used in Dungeons, she's passionate about being a medical researcher and the field of medicine as a whole.

[hylianane]

We need to give these three women their flowers immediately, I pray that they’re being properly paid by Netflix. Like these women must be out there preforming some ancient blood pacts that bring perfect copies of fictional characters to life and that’s why we now have a fucking 1.96 meter tall italian man with a handsome face and a big forehead and a silly pet dog playing Sir Crocodile. Cause besties this is ridiculous.

[halichor]

Redesigned Elian for an AU but I don't have an outfit for him yet, so have this lil sketch I made while working between comms ✨

[blackstarmylove]

[brother-emperors]

Crassus, Caelius, Cicero, Catiline, Conspiracy

boy howdy these four sure are something. not featured in this soup of C names, Caesar! what on earth happened here.

Plutarch, Crassus

Sallust on Crassus, Ronald Syme

Patron and Client, Father and Son in Cicero's "Pro Caelio"

Crassus' New Friends and Pompey's Return, Eve J. Parrish

Catullus and His World, T.P. Wiseman

Cicero's Catilinarians, D.H. Berry

[utilitycaster]

Hi there,

You said in the answer you just gave that, "the Nein mechanically played really well to the casts strength." Could you talk more about that? I'm someone who hasn't actually played D&D before, and everything I've learned has been through osmosis with CR, and your more crunchy posts have been really interesting to read, too.

Hi anon,

Thank you! I can answer but this is definitely pretty subjective in terms of how I see the classes they played and my view of the cast's mechanical strengths so know that you're getting one very specific perspective here. You will notice as a theme that I am not one for indecision.

Anyway: I think Liam and Travis are both notable within the cast for being decisive, in and out of combat, and both played characters with a huge array of options, as arcane utility spellcasters (plus Fjord's melee and, later, paladin abilities) and so having people who can make a quick, confident decision and stick to it with their spellcasting was crucial. Travis also has, as I once put it, court sense, and so having a character with options at basically any range in combat (from melee to eldritch blast range) was extremely good for him. I also just think they like utility casting, which, as my url indicates, I obviously think is awesome; but not all people like it and that's okay! I also just think they like it - both have mentioned on 4SD that Orym and Chetney are much more limited in what they can do.

I think Sam can get really hung up on the optimal and ideal thing to do at times. Really, the best way to put it - and FCG's death is a great example actually - is that Sam is not precious at all with his own characters but is worried about letting other people down. So I think the fact that Veth had a limited but interesting number of choices was actually quite good for him - he could make creative decisions (and even think outside the box, as with fluffernutter) but didn't have an endless list. It also still provided spellcasting, which is important to him.

I think Marisha is one of the strongest players on adding flavor to combat which is purely non-mechanical but is important in actual play if you are playing a character who does mostly the same thing. For what it's worth a lot of the things Beau played to her strengths were on the RP side (give the notetaker a character who has a reason to know a lot of lore) and also, I like monks but they are very straightforward characters to play in battle for the most part so there's not a ton to say, but I think she had a good sense of melee combat and would love to see her play more melee characters; Keyleth was obviously incredibly versatile, but this meant she did spend a lot of time in melee! Marisha also has decent instincts for tanking (Keyleth as regular tank thanks to wildshape and Beau as a dodge tank) so Beau allowed her to exercise that.

Taliesin is also a generally strong player in terms of mechanics and I think, honestly, his strength is that he doesn't seem to have a strong preference on what sort of class he plays and therefore was able to lean into a character who was almost purely support without any resentment over not getting the kill. In general I think Taliesin is very good at just...doing what his character is built to do, which seems damning with faint praise but honestly I think people who get really obsessive about Subverting Their D&D Class are annoying so this is praise and respect.

Laura is an interesting one in that I think she really likes to do Big Damage but she actually is quite skilled at utility casting. Having Caduceus definitely allowed Jester to shine in that she didn't have to serve as dedicated healer, but she also was a strong healer. Laura can be somewhat precious about her characters and I think being a healer is a good antidote for that in that you have the power to heal yourself if you get worried (honestly, this is why I started off as someone who played healers until I allowed myself to accept that dying on graph paper, as Taliesin once said, is fine). Being a prepared caster is also good for someone who, like Laura, can be competitive - it's interesting because she and Sam have a lot of similarities but I think respond in different ways, and Laura having a lot of options and knowing she can change them works well for her approach.

Ashley is also quite strong at flavor descriptors but I also think she likes doing damage, and I think Yasha was very much a "right character at the right time" for her in that barbarians are complicated in the sense of maneuvering, but not in the sense of options - it's a much easier character to jump back into after being away because she is, for the most part, going to be hitting things with a sword. I think she's doing a great job with Fearne too, but wildfire druid is MUCH harder to put down and pick up.

Really, in short, I think the cast members who thrive on having a ton of decisions had them; the cast members who at times have trouble picking what to do had a much more limited list which helped them; and those who don't really have a strong preference had other stylistic elements that were a good fit.

(I also happen to think, as I alluded to especially for Marisha's portrayal of Beau, that the Nein played to the cast's RP strengths as well and/or were given the time and space for the cast to grow into things they were less confident doing, eg: Travis and romance; and I think that does bleed into combat in that it helps you take actions that feel right for the character which in turn helps the other people around you predict what you'll do. It's the drift compatibility.)

[jackmkelly]

i hope newsies uk knows this move will never not piss me off they were not slick & this was in fact weird as hell! fix it before u come back!!

(clarice is not here bc im using the program after cast change btw. the girls were already on tv. it was not a “surprise” anymore. they were just ….)

[teddybearty]

💕😈 🎶Chi-bi Chibi Devi! 🎶💕😈

[don-quixotine]

AVATAR NATION HOW ARE WE FEELING

[keefechambers]

Direwolves south of The Wall...talk of the Walkers...and my brother might be the next Hand of the King. Winter is coming.

[mazojo]

Me too the fuck

[man-down-in-hatchet-town]

Brad Callahan, Quarterback

So Brad, instead of Max, being the Nighthawks QB is one of the more interesting minor details in Yellow Jacket. Of course a lot of time has passed since the timelines diverged, so it's perfectly possible that Max's family moved, or that the try-outs played out differently. But also could there be the Implication(TM) that Max is, you know... dead?

I highly doubt that a version of Nerdy Prudes played out in this timeline, since it's hard to see Steph and Pete going along with anything Grace says now that they're free of the Witch Wood and her reign of summer camp terror. But we still have Grace herself, who in this timeline possesses both untainted prudishness and an alliance with Little Jerry, and is already a bit mad with power by the time their senior year starts. And it's hard to imagine a version of Max who doesn't hit on Grace any chance he gets. So what if, to punish him for his carnal desires, the Grace of Nightmare Time 2 lured Max out into the woods (just as, a couple of branches over, she had him lured to the Waylon House) and let the Axe Man do his work on her behalf? Leaving Brad Callahan to step forward and torment Hannah with his enlarged ego and Justin Bieber haircut.

I know there's a lot of what-ifs in this, but we can't deny that the Max of the Nightmare Time 2 timeline is conspicuous in his absence. It just makes sense to me, that the Grace of Abstinence Camp would also rain demonic justice down on Max and call it divine. And I love the idea that Max and Grace are another pattern that echoes out across the web of timelines, like some twisted inversion of Paulkins or Lautski. Paul and Emma will always find each other, as will Steph and Pete. Lex and Ethan will always love each other and it will always be doomed. And Grace Chasity will oh-so-righteously send Max Jagerman to his demise. Even if we don't see it happen.

It's just so fucked up and therefore so very Them.

[jack-kellys]

racetrack in uksies!!

well guys! i did it- i finally started paying attention to the newsie i was pretty sick of for a while! and i was generously rewarded. here is some stuff i observed from josh barnett's racetrack higgins:

disclaimer: racetrack, in the script, is quite literally only noted as "RACE, a little tough guy". there is no one way to characterize him, and no features about him are universal/should be universally accepted beside what he says.

that said. this mf is a damn little tough guy!!!

his place as one of jack's main two lieutenants (the other being crutchie) is a lot more solidified in how he acts around the other boys, he certainly comes off older and more in charge

king of new york has him singing out from downstage to the audience as all the chaos (swinging from lamps...tapping...spinning and shit...) he incited occurs behind him. like it is his song this time which is cool, and makes sense- he's the last "original" (sorry davey) leader left that the newsies can look to and it shows.

his trio consists of specs, albert, and himself it looked like. sometimes finch but that's for more lighthearted moments. they all have trousers and not knickers, signifying their older age, and they frequent the aisles together. also specs is definitely some kind of leader based off of what he does in the show and his demeanor.

race and al are like...the soakers. they are picking fights or mocking fights when they are together LMAO.. at the gate when the headline goes up albert is like Right Up At It to make the delanceys rattle the bars to make him step aside (no one else does this). race and al also imitate jack socking the delanceys with crutchie's crutch, al fake punching race in the gut and race making a face lmfao. they also together circle around the delanceys when they're shoving crutchie around.

^something i've noticed every time but only now clocked as intentional: race's cap is the only one, out of everyone's, that has a ripped seam at the brim. it's frayed, it's been there a while, it's intentional as hell. this kid's a fighter, and he's literally rough around the edges. love it SO much omfg

another fun thing about this race: he. fucking. does. not. like. davey. for the entirety of act 1.

"hoi poloi" is mean. he says it at davey instead of around him to the boys at the circulation center. tbh the newsies in general give davey a sort of sus once-over when he mentions having a mother, but race is leading that charge and like... not for laughs exactly?? idk it felt like more at davey's expense.

race gets fucking pissed at "well if you look, and see brooklyn, then they're with us!" he pushes davey's chest and says either "don't be smart with me/right now." I AM OBSESSED WITH THIS. it is everything to me– it shows how short race's temper can be when he's stressed, pushing it onto davey– because davey got them all into this, didn't he? so what right does he have to make jokes right now, especially about brooklyn, whose backing would ensure that davey's idea of the strike wouldn't get all of them beat into the ground? (because. let's face it. of course race is going to blame davey and not jack.)

while davey is singing his piece of seize the day, race confers with jack, and (this staging was sooo good for woodside last night) points at les, who is standing right in the window between where race and jack are standing a ways away from the kid. like a "why the fuck did he bring the kid here". race definitely thinks that davey doesn't understand who's really at stake here, which is so.. protective<3.

king of new york is like a mini arc for them. at the top of the song, daveys still at the center table, race is there too, and like. he punches davey's arm. of which davey is literally like "ow", and then rubs at it through... half the whole song. what's funny abt him getting hit then is that he sings his lyrics pretty soon after, so it's like a literal push from race to get more involved (since they're the only two leaders left). as davey does get more involved, messing around with les and involving him w/ the rest of the boys, race warms up to him a lot more and their last time near each other, race gives him a smile and ruffles davey's hat. atta boy, if u will.

i think race's general refusal to trust davey with his boys is just so. fucking sick. race can trust him with the strike inner workings if jack does, crutchie actually is shown talking to davey a lot more than race and trusts him via that, and jack trusts him because jack refuses to leave anyone even remotely like his boys behind (and he recognizes they need someone like him if they want to succeed). the four of them r so. intimate to me.

but. what is also quite fascinating to me.

is that everything i've said so far about the lack of trust, the hot-headed nature, the protectiveness... y'all know who we usually 'assign' those traits to, right?

spot. conlon.

like this race is like.. if 92sies spot was in the musical..mixed w/ 92sies race LMFAO!! and you fuckin know what? i loved him for it. i have always loved characters like that, i think they're fun, very... greaser vibed, hard-hitting, etc. this spot is almost more ready to hit than protect, and the holding out on the strike therefore seems like manhattan/jack needs to prove himself to brooklyn vs. spot having to look after their newsies first.

anyway yes congratulations to uksies racer for making me enjoy the character again!!!

FUN FACT: earlier this week, someone was. literally on their laptop during. the fucking show. in richmond, which is p close to the stage. so during one of his exits, he went up to the person and said like "close your laptop. that's fucking disgusting." josh>