It's a Mushroom Surprise!

Dungeon Meshi (Delicious in Dungeon) sideblog. Queer. They/them. Adult. Writer and artist. I write Dungeon Meshi fanfic! Check my pinned for all the stuff I've made :3

[room-surprise]

Delicious in Dungeon Master Post

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS AND NON-FICTION

Anime episode reviews

Theories  |  Public Service Announcements  | Analysis

Answering Asks | Excerpts from The Essay

THE ESSAY: Cultural and Linguistic References in DM (69k words, WIP)

How to calculate comparative ages between races in DM

How old is Thistle? |  Follow-up regarding the 1:5 aging ratio

CREATIVE CONTENT

I run this KabruxMithrun sideblog for recommendations and following the AO3 feed.

Memes  |  Headcanons  |  Elf Fashion Inspiration | Dungeon Meshi Inspiration

Fake Adventurer’s Guide Profile for Mithrun’s older brother

My art/My spouse’s art/Comissioned/Gift art I’ve gotten

See my AO3 or my Dungeon Meshi Fanfic Master Post for my creative writing.

I have a backup of my work available here.

[seeingteacupsindragons]

”Ryland Grace’s life was valued less because he was single,” is such a weird take because it depends entirely on the idea that Eva Stratt might have hesitated if he weren’t.

Eva. Stratt. Eva Stratt is a bulldozer who takes out Antarctica and the Sahara and commanders an entire Chinese naval aircraft carrier.

Eva Stratt would have thrown his ass on that rocket if he had ten wives.

[seeingteacupsindragons]

[stonelionhearts]

sometimes i wonder if we have forgotten that sharing creative work is, fundamentally, a bid for human connection. like I'm not posting art or fic for 'engagement' i'm posting it looking for other sickos to play with! i'd be making it anyway for my own gratification because there's something wrong with me, i'm sharing it hoping we can have something wrong with us together <3

[grimark]

i do love grace and rocky forever on the other side of a barrier from each other, how the logistical difficulties of the barrier makes acts of intimacy more intentional than they would be for two people who can just touch each other casually like it's no big deal. but i also just think grace and rocky experimenting with the ways in which they can touch each other again is so interesting. the fact that even under the most carefully controlled experimental conditions, direct skin-to-carapace contact is gonna hurt and damage them both. even with an airtight gasket around one limb, the pressure and temperature differential is gonna hurt rocky. depending on how the minerals in rocky's carapace respond to oxygen exposure, that might damage him too. and depending on whether they go for a quick glancing touch or longer contact, grace is gonna get burnt. and maybe it's only damage in superficial ways that they can easily heal from, but it still hurts. i just love the idea of them both taking control of their bodily autonomy like that, playing jump rope with the concept of self harm. yes, this is damaging to me, but it's a small harm in service of a greater good, and i want it, and it's worth it. and also it's a sex thing.

[grimark]

what if we all just exploded.

[mosswall]

"English doesn't really have any equivalent whatsoever to Japanese honorifics, so we just completely leave them out of our subtitles because there's no way that our English-speaking audience could possibly grasp their significance in explaining these character's relationship with each other"

There is a character named Robert Thomson.

At work, he's known as Robert by his coworkers and Thomson by his boss. At home, the people in his neighborhood call him Rob. His parents, spouse, and closest friends call him Robbie. His best friend from childhood calls him Robbie and also sometimes calls him Roberto. The children in his neighborhood call him Mr. Rob but when he does volunteer work at the library the kids there call him Mr. Thomson. Children in the wild who don't know him personally call him sir. When he goes to anywhere with reception, he's typically addressed as Thomson.

So explain to me again why English speaking audiences can't grasp that those kids are calling that woman Oneechan because she's a young adult woman that they aren't personally acquainted with, and more importantly why you chose to localize that to her given name and not the equivalent of "Miss" or even "Miss Given Name"? Because if your goal is to replicate the experience that the original Japanese audience would have with those characters, you're failing spectacularly. Because now not only do you have a bunch of kids going around calling adults by their given names when in the original language they're calling them a cultural equivalent to Miss or Mister, but your insistence on removing all honorifics and just using names means that there's no absolutely zero difference in the way a person is addressed by the people closest to them and total strangers. Which is not only wildly inaccurate to how the Japanese audience would experience that, it's not even that accurate to English, either.

[wordstream]

i agree 100%!!

But I can answer some of it, and while cost/simplicity is some of it, it's mainly because it's what gets the least amount of hate mail.

On the cost side, almost nothing is translated by a single person, so for any names and concepts specific to the work, there is a database of how to translate it so all the transltors do it the same way. The more complex that database is, the more time the translators and editors have to spend looking things up, and the higher cost the translation is. Worse, these days most of it is translated by machine and a team of humans just correct the errors, so no one is actually looking at the entire work and thinking about characterization and plot structure. Some times the translation editors have no idea what the show is about; they are just emailed a couple thousand words of machine translation taken from the middle of the work, with no background explaination, and told to check for errors.

On the more historical side of things, whenever translators invented nicknames to try to match honorifics, they'd get tons of hatemail. Fans have made it very very 100% clear that they absolutly do not want that. (Because everyone has a different opinion of the emotional connotation of say, Kay instead of Kei-chan for a character named Keiko. No one's opinion of nicknames and when to use Ms. vs Miss vs Ma'am vs full name is ever correct because it is different in different areas of the Engish speaking word and even between different groups. People in NY use names differently than people in Texas, churchgoers tend to use them diferently thsn athiests, etc.)

Fans want the original Japanese honorifics. But the average non-fan viewer simply won't watch many shows that use the original honorifics. Taking out honorifics results in a very noticiable uptick in viewership...but also a LOT of complaints from the hardcore anime fans. So if a show was likely to be watched mainly by anime fans, they'd leave them in. If a show didn't have preexisting fans and they are hoping to catch the attention of the general public, they just use names even when it matches neither English usage nor the Japanese honorifics.

Now that so much is machine translated and anime is more mainstream, the default is just names, with all honorifics and nicknames removed. You only get honorifics if someone specifically decides to tell the software to use them, which pretty much means its a high end property so humans are actually involved, or someone on the localization team is a big fan. (Which isn't as common as you think because if you're a fan of a work, you are almost never happy with the financially-limited localization, so they either choose not to work on their favorites for their own mental health or burn out and leave the industry. (Not everyone though. Pleanty of people can do it just fine, and do! It's just, a lot of people assume that translators must be big fans of all the works they translate, and it's actually only a small percentage.)

Also, no one really sends hatemail for awkward and unnatural sounding translations. Everyone just shrugs it off. So using just the name in all situations is both cheaper and avoids pissing people off, even if it results in a lower quality work overall.

[cowardsexual]

book!grace design attempt numero uno. i call this one "stealing ray porter's entire shit"

[ephemeral-roses]

I think it is extremely important for everyone in the Greek mythology community to know that even though Greeks can have light skin and light hair, and that white supremacists like talking about Ancient Greece and using statues as their profile pictures, it doesn't mean white supremacists actually like Greek people.

White supremacists use Ancient Greece to insert themselves and their beliefs, completely erasing an accurate Ancient Greece and actual Greek people and culture from the narrative. There's a reason why when discussing the casting of Helen in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, they only show pictures of blonde, blue-eyed, Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon women, and never actresses who are actually Greek or of Greek descent. Just like how a black woman playing Helen is an issue to them, a Greek woman playing Helen is also an issue to them.

Since the very beginning of the concept of whiteness, beginning in the 19th century, white supremacists have excluded Greek people from whiteness, like they did for other ethnicities that you may now consider white, such as the Irish and Italians. Whiteness did not exist before the 19th century. When whiteness was conceptualized, it was purposefully created to not just view people native to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania as lesser than, but to also view other Europeans as lesser than.

Even if Greeks are viewed as white today, white supremacists still won't accept them because their culture does not fit into their vision of whiteness, and they don't accept them as descendants of the Ancient Greeks because they think it is impossible for them to be related to a past where they've inserted their perfect image of white society onto.

[cloudabserk]

i know adrian is widely headcanoned as green. but they could really be any color

[room-surprise]

If Grace had arbitrarily decided that Rocky was she/her, possible horrible cringefail names he might have chosen are:

Roxanne (Rocks-anne), Roxy or Rocksy for short.

Rockette

Rockuel (Raquel)

And obviously if Rocky was she/her then Grace would also arbitrarily decide that her spouse must be he/him and therefore: Adrien.

[room-surprise]

I'm so spoiled u guys. My spouse draws all these wonderful little sketches of whatever we're into at the moment and right now their sketchbook is full of little Grace and Rocky and Adrians and they're like noooooooo I can't show anyone but I sometimes get shown the pages and they're perfect every time.

Their Grace is so good, when I see Ryan Gosling now I'm like "who is this, not the guy in my head"

[awacatin]

Roki y chile en nogada yay

[fruitlessfangs]

I love the fact that gracerocky shippers, who are shipping a conventionally attractive guy with a literal alien rock, seem more attracted to the alien rock than the guy. Most tumblr thing ever

[room-surprise]

I know everybody loves Big Green Adrian and making all the Eridians extremely different looking from each other, but do you know how funny it would be if Grace arrives on Erid and struggles to tell Eridians apart thanks to other-race-bias?

Humans often struggle to identify people from other human races/ethnic groups that they don't belong to, and we know this is worse with wild animals (which tend to have a more uniform appearance than domesticated animals), most people cannot tell the difference between two different wolves unless they've spent a lot of time studying them.

Grace arrives on Erid and he can (mostly) pick Rocky out of a crowd, but it's 80% based on the exact way and frequency of Rocky's fidgeting. If he holds perfectly still and changes his clothes Grace panics.

Anyway, Grace casually starting to talk to Rocky (?) only to realize actually that's Adrian, or one of 5 other random scientists that are always visiting him, could lead to a lot of amusing nonsense.

[regonym]

Rocky's awakening (with director's commentary by Lord & Miller)

Project Hail Mary (2026) dir. Phil Lord, Chris Miller

[regonym]

yeah :') Phil says "it's like day breaking" with such reverence too. And then right after, Chris says that he always gets a little choked up at the hug part!!!

[room-surprise]

They probably don't intend it to be romantic, but they are also the people who put like ... 3-5 love songs in the movie during scenes about Grace and Rocky's "friendship" and added several "no homo" jokes not present in the novel just in case the audience was getting uncomfortable and needed to be reassured that this is just a bromance. Like, you don't add no homo jokes if you don't feel like there's something you need to refute. They wouldn't be read as funny if things didn't seem suspiciously romantic!

[beansterpie]

ok so like. I keep seeing posts about how grace and rocky's relationships in phm is so lovely because it's not romantic-- people claiming that romance between the two would have been predictable and uninteresting, because a relationship like theirs ending in a romance is The Done Thing in movies and I-- really just have to laugh.

Uh no. A movie like this with a male, human protagonist who forms a friendship with an extremely non-humanoid alien who was basically assigned male by the narrative would not.... would not likely end in a romance between the two. Lol. Lmfao. If it DID end with a romance between the two, my mind would have been actually blown in the theater. And I guarantee that most people leaving said theater would have been weirded out by it. Because human characters forming romances with non-humanoid characters in fiction is usually used as an indicator that either the human character is a weirdo, that the relationship is unnatural and strange, or that we're supposed to laugh at the relationship. There are definitely exceptions, but by and large that's how that trope appears in fiction ime.

So grace and rocky's relationship ending at a deep friendship is vey literally the expected outcome. I'm not saying that as a bad thing, I love their friendship and how important they are to one another and I love this story, but a human and a non-humanoid aliens relationship staying within the bounds of 'friendship' isn't somehow more subversive and progressive than if it had included romance.

To be clear, I'm all for aro/ace headcanons for grace, and I totally get why this story in particular attracts those headcanons, but acting as though people who ship grocky (specifically eridian!rocky and human!grace) aren't in their own way participating in something subversive feels a little disingenuous.

And this is reflected in the numbers! On ao3, Grace & Rocky as a platonic relationship outnumbers Grace/Rocky by about three times. And even MORE telling, Grace/Simon (from Iron Lung) is over double the number of Grace/Rocky fics. If grace and rocky's relationship is so beautiful because of the absence of romance, then why does that not extend to the ship with two human dudes that doesn't involve the alien?

I'm 100% sure that tons of people who love aro/ace grace and platonic grocky are earnestly engaging with the fact that their friendship is framed as the most important relationship in, at least, grace's life, especially because the movie seems to pointedly subvert any romance between grace and stratt, which I would argue is the much more expected place for a romance to happen.

But I'm also 100% sure that the popularity of the aro/ace reading, or at the very least the popularity of platonic grocky, is due to rocky being a rock spider alien. because unfortunately, a lot of people just find the idea of shipping a human with an eridian off-putting because they're lame and boring.

[room-surprise]

If Rocky and Adrian have kids, I think we can all probably agree that Grace is going to be a major fixture of those kids' lives, assuming the Eridians keep him alive longer than normal so he can be around long enough for the kids to grow up. This is hilarious to me for a few reasons:

Distraught and confused 5 year old Eridian asking "What do you mean everybody doesn't have an (insert family term of endearment) Grace?" Can't imagine a family structure that doesn't have a leaky space blob as part of it. Doesn't everybody have an alien???

They're going to have to work hard to make sure the kids don't end up with weird speech impediments, like talking too slowly, avoiding big words, and leaving out high and low registers of the Eridian language that humans can't hear.

But I think the funniest potential outcome is that like those birds hand-reared by humans who are now attracted to humans and kill other birds that try to mate with them, at least a few of these kids imprint on Grace in a weird way. This leads to growing up with social difficulties (struggling to befriend or form romantic relationships with other Eridians)... Which seem to miraculously vanish when those kids grow up and finally encounter some humans that aren't their parental figure.

Just imagine the frantic message sent home by one of the kids that's "normal", complaining that their sibling who's leading the Eridian mission to Earth keeps flirting with and hooking up with random scientists and military personnel who are their first point of contact with humans. Everyone thought they were so responsible and hard-working, not interested in personal relationships, focused on their career and the advancement of science. That's why they were made mission leader.

Actually they're just exclusively attracted to humans.

Imagine being one of those humans! You've dreamed all your life of meeting aliens. You think you've had a profound, life-altering personal connection with an alien lifeform... Actually you're just the first human they met and they're now working their way through all of your coworkers because after a hundred plus years of celibacy they just realized there is in fact something that makes them Feel That Way, and it's Homo Sapiens.

MOOOOOOM DAAAAD UNCLEEEEE (gender neutral) MAKE THEM STOP, WE CAN'T GET ANYTHING DONE LIKE THIS!!!!

[cowardsexual]

if i made first contact and built an entire tunnel to connect our ships, made a plurimaterial divider wall to see what the alien's senses were better at dealing with, unmade it, REmade it in their preference, figured out the atmospheric composition for their side AND supplied it, made an airlock, built an improvised life support system for myself to enter the alien's ship, unmade the ENTIRE TUNNEL AGAIN and then rebuilt it with an even bigger airlock to pass through it so the alien is working in his own environment while i live in the equivalent of a human hamster ball and after all this the alien camel gurgled because i asked him to help me bring in my stuff and disconnect the tunnel. because I'm in a hamster ball. so we can do this in his environment. rocky i am so sorry. 46 years of traumatic isolation and 1 inch of solid xenonite are the only things standing between ryland grace and the most deserved ass beating of his life oooh my god you fucking brat. get over yourself