Someone asked me what housekeeping skills Iâd recommend learning.
Keep in ming that this is not me shaming you, I know you have your reasons, folks. This is just a guy who enjoys clean spaces asking that you start learning now.
Hereâs what I suggest as an adult who has lived with other adults who didnât have housekeeping skills:
First and foremost, learn about all the places in your house that need to be cleaned and understand how often they should be cleaned. the American Cleaning Institute (I guess thatâs a thing) has a good article about basic cleaning info. Plus this video on cleaning tips is great!
Learn how to do your dishes. HOT water is the only way to clean your dishes.
Learn how to clean your shower head, especially if you live in a place with hard water. Same goes for your sinks.
Learn how to do your laundry correctly. Even without the whole âseparating whites and colorsâ thing, there are things you need to learn about washing your clothes. Learn what the tags mean, too.
Also, you donât have to use fabric softener and you shouldnât use it on towels or any fabric meant to absorb. (Learn about laundromats)
And please learn how to clean out your dryer vent, itâs a safety hazard!
Get a disinfecting cleaner for your high-touch areas, especially the gross ones like the bathroom. Just because it doesnât look dirty, doesnât mean itâs clean!
Learn how to sweep, mop, and vacuum effectively.
Youâll also want to make sure to change out your homeâs air filters.
TL;DR, here are some cleaning videos.
How to Clean Everything in Your Bathroom
How to Clean Everything in Your Kitchen
Livingroom Cleaning Routine
How to Clean Everything in Your Bedroom
Now these resources are not the end-all-be-all, but I think if you donât know much about cleaning your space this is a good way to start.
Evidence that Kabru from Delicious in Dungeon is Indian, a Masterpost
(Some of this info is taken from my upcoming essay about the names and cultural origins of all the characters in Dungeon Meshi. There's a link in the source to the AO3 version of this essay.)
Since Kabruâs first appearance in the anime is upon us, I wanted to write something that compiles all the evidence we have that Kabru is meant to be a person of South or Central Asian ethnicity, or at least whatever the equivalent to that is in the Dungeon Meshi world.Â
Ryoko Kui can and does draw people of many different ethnicities, and the way she draws Kabru matches the way she draws other Asian characters in Dungeon Meshi. He doesnât look Black, or Hispanic, or any other ethnicity because he isnât supposed to. He looks like a dark-skinned South or Central Asian person, because thatâs what Ryoko Kui probably intends him to be.
So letâs go through the evidence!
(There are no spoilers for the plot of Dungeon Meshi below, but there ARE spoilers for Kabru's backstory as explained in the manga, and in extra materials like the Daydream Hour and Adventurer's Guide book.)
KABRUâS NAME
The Dungeon Meshi Adventurer's Bible tells us Kabruâs real name is unknown. There are other characters whose real names are only told to us in the Adventurer's Bible and were never revealed in the manga, but then Kabru, Thistle and Izutsumiâs entries simply say their real names are unknown, and though Kui could tell us their true names, she doesnât. I assume this means that the characters themselves donât know what their real names are, and that the names they go by are not their birth names, but this is only a supposition on my part.
KABRU THE MOUNTAIN
Kabru (à€à€Ÿà€Źà„à€°à„) is the name of a mountain on the border of Nepal and India, and part of the Himalayan range. Itâs the 65th tallest mountain in the world and it is very snowy and icy, with frequent avalanches. Because of this, even though itâs not the tallest mountain in the world, climbing it is challenging, and is not often attempted. Those few that have managed to climb it consider it a major achievement.
âThis prohibitively fearful icefall⊠had thwarted numerous expeditions, perhaps even the 'thought' of attempting the mountain⊠Unstable seracs of the icefall, a complex maze of chasms, and delicate snow bridges spanning seemingly never ending, near bottomless crevasses⊠Each time the members stepped into the icefall, they stood a good chance of never returning.â (Kabru - Mountain of the Gods, Major A. Abbey, Himalayan Journal 52, 1996, editor Harish Kapadia)
WHAT DOES KABRUâS NAME MEAN?
Kabru is a character that is known for being very good at charming people, but who doesnât express himself honestly, because heâs trying to manipulate the people and situations around him in order to maintain control at all times. I think nobody really knows who Kabru is deep inside, maybe not even Kabru himself, so a remote, hostile, icy mountain thatâs hard to climb seems like an extremely appropriate name.Â
Some of the oldest English sources I found regarding Kabru suggest that Kabru isnât the correct local name for the mountain (a common problem in early Himalayan exploration by Europeans) and might just be a descriptor, or that itâs a misspelling.Â
This makes the name seem even more appropriate, since Kuiâs told us Kabruâs true name is unknown. Itâs possible that Kabru was a place-name or a descriptor that Milsiril (Kabruâs elven foster mother) was given when she picked up a traumatized 7 year old Kabru, and she just started using it as his name, and that even he doesnât remember his real name thanks to his severe trauma.
The fact that people in the real world canât seem to agree on the mountain Kabruâs name, or what it means, reminds me of the running gag of Laios repeatedly getting Kabruâs name wrong in the manga.
"All the people near the Kabru massif call it 'Kaboor'." (The Alpine Journal, 1921-22 Volume 34, Edited by George Yeld and J. P. Farrar)Â
âIt is also said that the name applies to a peak close to Kinchinjunga on the southeast, and not to the peak known to Europeans as Kabru⊠[The real name is] Pahung Ri [Pauhunri].â (Appendix I: Place Names in Darjeeling. The appendix says it was âcompiled mainly from an article written by Colonel Waddell and published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Vol. LX, part I, 1891)â)
âKangchen is a Tibetan name⊠the Sikkhimese use it as the name for the peak called Kabru by Europeans.â (Charles Bell, Dyhrenfurth's Himalaya (Berlin, 1931))
â...Kyabru or the horn of protection. The name is⊠Kabur⊠possibly a corruption of Kangbur or the swelling of snow; it might also mean the white swelling (kar-bur).â (Appendix I: Place Names in Darjeeling.)Â
âKabru literally means the 'White Avalanche' peak (Ka means 'white' and bru means 'avalanche').â (Kabru - Mountain of the Gods, Major A. Abbey, Himalayan Journal 52, 1996, editor Harish Kapadia)
Iâve seen one other mountaineering article cite the âwhite avalancheâ meaning, and I think itâs plausible since the Appendix says it can mean âwhite swellingâ or âswelling of snowâ, which may very well be a literal translation for âwhite avalancheâ.Â
WHAT ABOUT UTAYA? IS THAT INDIAN TOO?
Utaya means âraisedâ or âupliftedâ in Hindi, but itâs also a real village and a Japanese boyâs name.
Utaya (ăŠăżă€) is the name of the village that Kabru was raised in before his mother died and he was adopted by the elf Milsiril. Utaya is located in the southeast of the Western Continent. Itâs worth noting that Kabru probably wasnât born in Utaya, since his mother had to flee from her home to keep Kabru alive, so Utaya may be some distance away from his birth place⊠Not so far that a woman with a newborn baby couldnât survive the trip, but far enough that her husbandâs family gave up on chasing her. So Kabru was probably born in a close-by area.
In the real world, Utaya (Yakut: ĐŁŃĐ°ĐčĐ°) is in an extremely rural and isolated area with a population of less than a hundred people. Itâs located in the Sakha Republic, which is in the Northeastern part of Asia in the Russian Federation. The Yakut/Sakha are a Siberian Turkic people. Â
The Turkic peoples are a collection of diverse ethnic groups of West, Central, East, and North Asia as well as parts of Europe, who speak Turkic languages.Â
Early and medieval Turkic groups exhibited a wide range of both East Asian and West-Eurasian physical appearances and genetic origins, in part through long-term contact with neighboring peoples such as Iranian, Mongolic, Tocharian, Uralic/Yeniseian peoples, and others. Turkic peoples share, to varying degrees, non-linguistic characteristics like cultural traits, ancestry from a common gene pool, and historical experiences.Â
JAPANESE MEANINGS FOR UTAYA
Utaya can be a Japanese boyâs name with several different meanings, depending on which kanji itâs spelled with.
In most of the spellings: Poetry, sing a poem, singing, compose poetry
In many of the spellings: The place where the sun shines, it's been a long time, distant, big, to shoot with a bow, to swear, affirmation, question.
The Utaya disaster happened a long time ago.
If Utaya is up in the mountains above the clouds itâs a place where the sun shines brightly.
 Kabru has sworn to himself that he will prevent another Utaya tragedy from happening.
In only a few of the spellings: to mend, feathers, wings, a word for counting birds and rabbits, sort them out, washing with water to separate the good from the bad, roof, house with a roof, a world covered with a big sky, infinite space, song that praises the Buddha, Eight.
Counting birds and rabbits makes me think of divination and also that the people of Utaya were like little birds and rabbits (small prey animals) to the monsters that devoured them.
Separating the good and the bad could hint to the âjudgmentâ of Utaya and the greed of its people that led to their downfall, also sorting through things to separate good and bad is something thatâs done with food and other resources.
The Himalayan region is often referred to as the âroof of the worldâ, with a big open sky above it.Â
The infinite could refer to the dimension the demon comes from, or to the sky above the mountains.Â
Buddhism is a common religion in the Himalayan region, and eight has auspicious connotations in Buddhism.Â
With all that in mind, Utaya as a name for Kabruâs home village is an interesting choice, and adds another layer to his origins, maybe suggesting not just North Indian/Himalayan, but Central or North Asian cultural influence as well.Â
It is also possible that the name is just telling us that Utaya is âupâ in the mountains, or that it was âupliftedâ by the wealth of the dungeon, or even that Kabru was âraisedâ there⊠The Japanese name meanings are also extremely fascinating and hint at similar ideas, as well as the tragedy that happened to Utaya.
WHY ELSE DO YOU THINK KABRU AND UTAYA ARE HIMALAYAN?
In the real world, the Himalayan mountain range is an extremely popular tourist destination, and the amount of people who want to visit and attempt to climb the mountains far outpaces the local ability to support it. This makes me think of the dungeon of Utaya and how people overcrowded it in their desire to conquer and exploit it.Â
Dungeons as an unsustainable way for locals to make a living that leads to the destruction of their homes when the dungeon inevitably collapses is a major plot point in Dungeon Meshi, so I think the parallel is likely intentional. Characters often talk about someone âconqueringâ the dungeon, and âconquerâ is also the terminology commonly used for climbing a mountain. This terminology obviously has a hostile, imperialist subtext in the real world, since itâs most commonly used by outsiders talking about proving their strength by climbing a mountain.
Also, there are local legends in the areas surrounding Mt. Kabru that there is a valley of immortality hidden on its slopes, which reminds me of the way that the dungeons can grant conditional immortality to the people inside of them.
This image of Utaya could be showing us a village built on a mountainside. The house shapes seem a bit more Middle Eastern than Nepali/Indian, but itâs not a detailed drawing and the roof styles are a mix of flat and peaked.
CULTURE
In the Daydream Hour sketchbook, Ryoko Kui included a small comic about characters sharing desserts from their home countries. A young Kabru is shown enthusiastically trying to share an unnamed sweet, and he is interrupted by his elven foster mother, who insists he present a type of elven cake instead. We know that Kabru hates this type of cake, and he seems disappointed to have to eat it and talk about it.
The white balls in Kabruâs dessert are very likely meant to be an Indian sweet called rasgulla (literally "syrup filled ball"). Rasgulla are a dessert popular in the eastern part of South Asia, made from ball-shaped dumplings of chhena dough, cooked in light sugar syrup. While it is near-universally agreed upon that the dessert originated in the eastern Indian subcontinent, the exact origin is disputed. Rasgulla are as culturally important to the Bengal and Odisha regions of India as Parmesan cheese is to the region of Parma in Italy. Â
Rasgulla are also popular in Nepal, where they are called rasbari.Â
KABRUâS PHYSICAL APPEARANCE
Kabru is one of several characters in Dungeon Meshi with clearly non-European features: he has brown skin and thick black/dark brown curly hair. He has almond-shaped eyes with long, dark lashes (fans like to joke that heâs wearing eyeliner). All of these are traits common to people from the Indian subcontinent. His blue eyes are not common for someone with his skin/hair color, but blue or green eyes are not unheard of in that region either.Â
(Indian man with blue eyes)
Blue or light eyes are often a cause for discrimination, like what Kabru experienced as a child. More on this in a moment.
Kabru is 5â7â (170cm) tall, which is short for a Northern European man (180), tall for a Nepali man (162cm), but close to the average height of Indian men (177cm). He has a slender build, which is also common for Asian people in general, and South Asian men in particular.
Compared to the European-looking tall-men in Dungeon Meshi (such as Laios, Falin, Delgal, Marcilleâs father), Kabruâs facial features look more like the other Asian characters, such as Toshiro and his party.Â
CAN DARK-SKINNED PEOPLE HAVE BLUE EYES?
Yes. Light-colored eyes are very uncommon in parts of the world where most people have dark eyes, since dark eyes are a dominant trait in real-world human beings. That means that in order for two parents with dark eyes to have a child with light eyes, both parents need to have a recessive light-eyes gene (or for there to be an illness or genetic mutation), and thatâs rare in populations that donât have a lot of light-eyed people to begin with.  Â
THEN WHY DO SO MANY DARK-SKINNED CHARACTERS HAVE BLUE EYES?
Anime and manga often give characters with dark skin light colored eyes instead of allowing them to have brown or black eyes, which is much more common in real life. Itâs a hurtful design trope that makes many readers feel that their natural dark eyes are somehow ugly or inferior to blue eyes.
This trope is used over and over again by authors who want their characters to look âcoolâ and âexoticâ, and for their eyes to be high-contrast to make it easier to show their emotions.
I donât think this is what Ryoko Kui is doing in Dungeon Meshi.Â
UNREALISTIC HAIR AND EYE COLOR COMBOS IN ANIME
In a lot of anime/manga, blue eyes (regardless of skin color) donât actually mean anything in the narrative, in the same way characters having green or pink hair doesnât mean anything, the colors are non-diegetic, they donât actually exist in the world, like the music that plays in the background without an on-screen source.Â
Itâs an artistic shorthand to make characters visually stand out, instead of giving them all black hair and eyes like most real-life Japanese people⊠Which is what most anime/manga characters are meant to be: Japanese people.Â
Dungeon Meshi has a large cast of characters that are explicitly meant to be non-Japanese. We know this because thereâs a group of characters that are Japanese, and theyâre drawn differently from everyone else, they wear ethnically Japanese clothing, and have ethnically Japanese names.Â
Unlike other series, where eye and hair color donât mean anything, Dungeon Meshi has no unrealistic skin, hair, or eye color combinations.Â
(Except for the elves, who seem to have different genetics than real world-humans. Iâll get into that another time.)
Ryoko Kui must be aware of the dark skin, blue-eyes design trope, because if she gave Kabru blue eyes just because she thought it looked good, surely she would have made some of the other Asian or dark-skinned characters have light eyes. Out of 9 Asian or dark-skinned tall-man characters, Kabru is the only one with blue eyes.
Kabru having light-colored eyes is central to his story, and Kui talks about it.
KABRUâS STORY AND WHY HIS BLUE EYES MATTER
Kabruâs father and his family tried to kill Kabru when he was born because he had blue eyes. Kabruâs mother ran away, and ended up raising Kabru by herself in Utaya. She didnât try to return home to her own birth family, but instead struggled to raise a child completely on her own with no money or support, which implies she had no other options, due to the fear people of their region have for people with blue eyes.
This is a real thing that used to happen frequently in areas where most of the population has dark eyes, and it still happens to this day.
In a realistic story, this is logically what would happen to a character with dark skin born with blue eyes in a place like the Utaya region. Itâs rare for manga or anime to show dark-skinned blue-eyed characters facing this.Â
WHAT IS THE âEVIL EYEâ?
The âevil eyeâ is a supernatural belief in a curse brought about by a person looking at you. The belief in the evil eye has existed since prehistory, as long as 5,000 years ago. It is estimated that around 40% of the modern world's population believes in the evil eye. This concept is most common across the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia, areas where light-colored eyes are uncommon.Â
In areas where light-colored eyes are rare, people with green eyes, and especially blue eyes, are thought to bestow the curse, intentionally or unintentionally. Just one look from a blue-eyed person is often considered enough to inflict a curse.
One of the most famous and widespread talismans against the evil eye is the nazar, a glass amulet featuring concentric circles in dark blue, white, light blue and black. Itâs supposed to âbounceâ the curse away from the wearer.Â
HOW DOES THIS APPLY TO KABRU?
Imagine Kabru growing up in a village surrounded by people wearing and hanging talismans that look like his eyes, because the people around him think blue eyes are evil. They call his mother a witch for birthing him, and a whore because she doesnât have a husband. Imagine parents forbidding their children from playing with or even talking to Kabru. People crossing the street to get away from him, or chasing him away by throwing rocks.
I think the reason young Kabru was able to learn how to speak some kobold is likely because he was so heavily ostracized by the other tall-men around him, the only children he could occasionally interact with in Utaya were kobolds, who might not share the same cultural superstitions that the tall-man do.Â
This childhood trauma, combined with Kabruâs experience of the dungeon collapse in Utaya, and being raised by an elf that treated him more like a pet than a human being, set Kabru up as a character who has never had a home where he belongs. He has been an outsider from the instant he was born, and every place he has lived treats him as an âother.â
To his fatherâs family, he was a curse. To his mother, although she loved him, he was a burden. To the people of Utaya, he was a monster. To the elves, heâs a tall-man baby (no matter how old he gets) with funny looking eyes, to the people on Merini Island, heâs a foreigner from the West with elven ways and education.Â
CONCLUSION
I wanted to write this because I know some people will see Kabru in the anime for the first time today and think "Oh, another dark skinned blue eyed character! This is a bad character design that is evidence that the author is racist at worst or ignorant at best.â And I donât think thatâs a fair assessment of Ryoko Kuiâs work in Dungeon Meshi.
This isnât to say that Ryoko Kui has never done anything wrong, or that her work couldnât be more inclusive, or that thereâs no way in which she could improve.Â
But there are pages and pages of artwork sheâs done that shows she cares about these issues, and I think itâs worth celebrating when someone makes that kind of effort with their artwork.
ANYWAYâŠ
If youâve read this far, youâre very strong hahaha. I hope you enjoyed this essay. Iâll be publishing more soon when I finish my Dungeon Meshi research on the names and cultures of all the characters. Wish me luck!
in honor of dungeon meshi anime my favorite dungeon meshi bit is when laios reveals his favorite food and kabru gets really really mad it's not a monster in any way
