a thought about kabru and mithrun and their time in the dungeon. (I love kabumisu but this is more about their canon relationship)
I have seen several people say that they dont think that kabru really cared about or liked mithrun. that he was just doing things cause he had to, etc. but I feel like this ignores something pretty cool about kabru. Kabru always has an inner monologue going on, one that we get to see.
several times when we see kabru doing nice things we can see that his inner monologue doesnt actually match. we see him kindly doing things that actively distress him several times. we as an audience are made very aware when kabru is doing something he doesnt really like.
so what kind of an inner monologue does kabru have when he performs caring tasks for mithrun? does he think about the advantages of having mithrun or the canaries on his side? does he think bitterly of mithrun? does he think about how much he hates this? the worst he thinks is "to think I'd get roped into this for the sake of that lot." and "this isnt seeing to his needs, this is nursing!" pretty early on in their journey together. this is while he is still digesting the full picture of mithruns condition and all the things hes going to need to do, the full weight of the situation now apparent.
after this, all we see is compassion. him thinking he would like to make mithrun something nice to eat, even if it wouldnt matter to him. him empathizing and reflecting on how not having desires would be really rough. him coming to understand where some of mithruns quirks, like his sense of direction, come from.
by the end, he has trusted mithrun enough to tell him about laios, and mithrun has given him all the information he has been searching for for YEARS.
and this is just the dungeon. kabru continues to involve himself with mithrun when its not his problem anymore. when really, he should be doing anything but. and after everything is done, if he truly did not care about mithrun, he has NO reason to do anything he does in chapter 94.
they are FRIENDS okay??? Kabru cares about him. it isnt just obligation. ty.
as far as mithrun goes, he gives kabru information, he asks him what he wants to do with that little smile (doesnt wait for his squad), slaps him out of his panic attack, and then kabru is the person he eventually confides his true desire to.
theyre FRIENDS and Im tired of people acting like they dont even like each other just bc they dont like the ship. you dont have to ship it, but if you think these 2 didnt drastically change each others lives in a positive way and that they dont care about each other...you maybe need to read again.
and also I think a lot of these takes veer on dehumanizing mithrun. like how could kabru even like him or see him as a friend when hes like that. like do yall forget mithrun was busy keeping kabrus ass from getting killed. or the way he perceptively sees straight through kabrus bs every single time until kabru finally tells the truth? I know kabrus confession to laios is a lot more emotionally intense, but laios isnt the only character that forces kabru to be honest.
"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.
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