the ending of chainsaw man was like watching sisyphus roll his boulder up the hill again and again and again for 8 straight years and then suddenly his boulder turns around and says "hey sis i know we've got a good thing going here, we've had a lot of adventures and i love you a lot, but when i fall next time im gonna bounce down the hill so hard i shatter on impact, so you don't have to deal with me again." and fujim i mean sisyphus going "what the fuck??? no don't go! i love being sisyphus! noooooo!" and then the boulder slipping out of his grasp and rolling down the hill and bouncing on a rock and shattering into a billion pieces, and then there's one more chapter of sisyphus trudging down the hill, picking one piece of boulder up, being able to hold it in his hands, and then trudging back up the hill, but this time getting to the very top and setting it down, and it staying put, and then walking back down the hill again.
and then the entire internet going "WHAT THE FUCK TRASH ENDING HELLO???? RUSHED UNFINISHED BULLSHIT I WANTED TO SEE SISYPHUS GOING UP THAT HILL FOR ANOTHER EIGHT YEARS!!! WHAT ABOUT THE FURIES??? WHAT ABOUT HADES AND THANATOS AND ESCAPING DEATH AGAIN??? I IMAGINED SISYPHUS SMILING ISN'T THAT SUPPOSED TO BE THE POINT???" like yay
All i can think about is getting pounded out by lots of cock. In my mouth, in my cunt, in my ass. Being rubbed all over me. So many hands i lose track of the number of pairs.
I want to be fucked numb. Drooling and dumb. I want to forget myself in the heat of it all. I want to feel worn and used after. Not being able to lift my limbs.
Then i want them all to kiss me and rub my head and carry me to bed, to worship me after the hell they put me thru. All of them telling me what a good job I've done, they're all proud that i could take it so well.
Round after round and i lay there all the cum pouring out of me, they all think I'm the most beautiful thing they've ever seen.
definitely my favorite thing of picking up Witch Hat Atelier right after finishing up Dungeon Meshi was seeing the contrast between the two on how they tackle trad western fantasy tropes
like imo the heart of dunmeshi is in finding the mundane in the fantastical. there's an emphasis on rote motion and not just on clear but relatable expressions that really draws you into the world. fantastical monsters are pared down into recognizable ingredients and woven together into delicious meals. there are no hero shots in dungeon meshi, and if there were they'd be immediately undercut by a panel of our heroes dead facedown in a puddle of water because they got surprise-attacked by a gaggle of monsters (rip kabru)
but then there's witch hat which is ALL about finding the fantastical in the mundane. beautifully overwrought and carefully designed cloaks and hats that flow and ripple and frame every scene, magic that's found in simple acts of creation (drawing, writing, painting) but that is rendered in fantastic detail, the physicality of moving and walking and talking making every scene feel like it's right out of a stage play
what im saying is this panel has lived rent free in my mind ever since i first saw it
bro you're putting dishes away. why do you look like a leyendecker illustration. if this were dunmeshi he'd be an half-naked elf and he'd wind up finding the most graceless possible way to shove some dishes up out of sight, but because this is witch hat he looks like a statue. it's awesome
it's really easy to imagine someone who is ontologically incapable of growth, and then get mad at that someone. it's so easy, people have been doing it for millennia. your parents did that, when they talk to you about why it's disappointing you still work at starbucks with a graduate degree. your rapist did that, when they talked to you about how upsetting it is to constantly be footing the bill, even if they have a salary and you're a part-time wageslave. it's really fucking easy. i do it, when i start seething about all the work i do around my house, and how stressed and in pain and desperate i am for something to give, wasting my life one minute at a time at starbucks still after all these years.
but like, i used to be that girl. and i grew. i know that girl, i woke up at 4 am to clean vomit off that girl's floor, i pay that girl's rent, i hold that girl and reassure her for the hundredth time about the same fear she's had for months. if i did it, so can they. i do not give into that resentment. i'm a whole ass woman and i communicate. i do not secretly think about how that girl is just like the men in her family.
we get introduced to the gender swap au stuff first in the August 2018 Reverse Fellows omake, but this page was included later in one of the Daydream Hours (for the life of me I can't find a source for it, probably a leak from an unreleased edition) and is really instructive to Ryoko Kui's approach to how sex and gender informs her characters and her designs.
like, look at everyone except Kabru. aside from some hairstyle changes and some robes changing length, everyone else is dressed basically exactly the same as before. and this makes sense, because we're told in the story and in the Daydream Hours that dungeon gear prioritizes comfort, function and readability above all else. There are some obvious cultural touches here and there (dwarf's propensity for fur and lighter armor styles, the floofy healer robes, the elf-mage look), but mostly it all lends itself to those three criteria above. Your shit has to be comfortable to move around and fight in, it has to keep the blood inside your body, and it has to clearly communicate your role to others (the later adventurer's bible has a note about how wearing healer robes without knowing the requisite healing spells is illegal on the island).
now look at Kabru. I know Kabru was raised by elves and elves seem to have an overriding cultural imperative for serving cunt, but like. girl. girl. the waist-high leather boots, cleavage down to here and no armor whatsoever, it's like she went out of her way to specifically violate each unspoken tenet of dungeon gear.
and i think she did, purposefully. but to understand why, we need to look at kabru, and also laios.
Kabru was always intended to be a foil for Laios. They're both cut from a lot of the same cloth, being melee fighters in mail who lead their respective parties, but the similarities end there. Whereas Laios is very very often flatfooted in social situations, Kabru is the picture of grace; whereas Laios probably received some basic combat training before deserting the army, Kabru is highly lethal and trained under a Canary from childhood; and of course, whereas Laios's special interest is in all things monsters, Kabru is hyperfixated on people and their social intricacies. He has the same kind of keen eye and wealth of knowledge that Laios has, just turned in the opposite direction. Because he correctly surmised that knowing where your friends and foes lie relative to you, what they think of you and others, can be just as much of a tool (and a weapon) as a dagger or a sword or a spell.
And this is expanded upon pretty plainly in their designs. Look at Laios. Between the cuirass and the mail hauberk he's most heavily protected his chest and vitals, and kinda winds up looking like a turtle; the cuirass specifically, with the exaggerated anti-dungeon rabbit gorget, was purchased because it was designed to protect against monsters. What we get is a picture of a fighter who places efficacy against monsters as the most important element of his armor, and it kinds winds up screwing him in the actual function department; like, how often do we see Laios getting killed or just straight up throwing himself into death and danger, relying on his teammates to bail them out of trouble? it's part of his strategy ofc, his faith in his party and his intuitive understanding that his body and health are just as much elements to be used as collateral in fights against monsters (who also instinctively understand this, any hunt is always a life-or-death situation), but it also reads as dangerously gung-ho and presumptive, a fact that many characters remark on throughout the story, and something that causes Kabru a great deal of consternation when he's considering the problem of Laios.
Then there's Kabru. Already, when compared to Laios, he looks much more well-armored. He's got the greaves and the poleyn, and while this particular drawing from the Adventurer's Bible doesn't include them, he also wears gauntlets with an exaggerated lower cannon which stretches up to protect his elbow. Taken alongside the leather cuirass and the mail hauberk, he looks way better protected than Laios. Like, he looks more like a man-at-arms or a mercenary, someone who knows what he's doing (and keenly, someone who considers other people to be his main enemy). He looks like the respectable leader of an up-and-coming party who have a solid chance at conquering the dungeon—which he is! And, i can spill ink about how this style of armor can probably help him in x, y and z ways during combat, distributing weight and lending him better protection against slashes and stabs and blah blah
but i think the most important element for Kabru isn't its function or defense against people or whatever: it's what it makes him appear like to other people. for Kabru, the assumptions other people make about him because of how he looks is the most important thing about his gear. that it makes him look competent but not foolhardy, approachable but not vulnerable, reasonable but not naive. With a sword strapped to his waist, he looks like he fights primarily with a sword, when in reality, he's probably comfortable using literally any kind of weapon to its maximum lethality. he understands that before he can spill any blood, the very first blade he can slip past the enemy's guard is in the assumptions they make about him. that he's a friendly, charming guy, a lady's man they've seen flirting with girls at the bar up on the island, a swordfighter who is honorable and kind and definitely won't immediately go for the jugular the second the opportunity presents itself.
Kabru has an intuitive understanding that his image and reputation are collateral that should be used whenever the chips are down. he understands that while his training lends itself to opportunistic hunter-killer shit, the easiest path forward is to wear the mask of the good guy dungeon adventurer, and only let it slip in moments where being as cutthroat as possible is advantageous. its another way he's a foil for Laios: they both think about the dungeon in very animal/monstrous ways (as a holistic ecosystem in which they themselves are a part of a greater whole), it's just that Kabru's animal of choice is the human animal (which does wind up with him getting the shaft by how often he gets party-wiped by the same monsters Laios's party is able to handle).
which brings us back finally to fem!Kabru.
why the fuck is she dressed like that? because fundamentally, she's still Kabru, and she still understands that people are assuming shit all day long. she correctly surmised that she can weaponize people's assumptions against them, but this also starts laying bare her understanding of human cultural conceptions of sex and gender. Ironically it also winds up revealing how much masc!Kabru has also thought about how his own gender plays into people's assumptions—it's not that i don't think Kabru isn't authentically a lady's man, but that he's keenly aware what acting the playboy does for his image; likewise, understanding that human culture isn't nearly as equitable across gendered lines as elf culture, that a cultural tradition exists that devalues the physical abilities of women in human societies, that aside from Rin and Falin we basically never see human women in the dungeon as adventurers, and that she has no inclinations or talent for magic, fem!Kabru probably figured out the following:
being raised and trained by insane Canary dilf Milsiril, she's probably the best melee fighter in the dungeon (against other humans)
but wearing armor like a man would mostly just have negative ramifications for her image and reputation among other humans; girls don't wear armor, duh (probably get in better with dwarf girls, but you get the idea)
however, because of her training, she probably doesn't even really need the armor; Canary armor is a lot like modern Kevlar, prioritizing ease of movement while maximizing protection, so Milsiril probably passed a lot of that same ethos onto Kabru. Wearing elf armor would also have negative ramifications for her image, for obvious reasons (elfs are fucking annoying)
so what does she do? lean really really really hard into "i'm just a girl teehee". Waist-high leather boots, floofy shirt with cleavage, gloves. that's it. she looks like a swashbuckler, or a rogue, but more than that she looks like a girl pretending to be a swashbuckler. prioritizing looks and fashion over function or protection or any other reasonable dungeon standards makes her look dumb, which is precisely the point.
as always, Kabru's first move happens when his enemies first lay eyes on him. he invites them to make a fatal assumption; in fem!Kabru's case, she's begging them to make that fatal assumption. fem!Kabru isn't the kind of adventurer you'd wanna try reasoning with, because she's a dumb girl and not worth your time: she's the kind you'd tie up and take back to your base, only for her to slip her bonds (which she could've done this whole time) and cut everyone's throats (with the dagger in her boots) when the idiot who was supposed to be watching her passed out drunk. fem!Kabru's design is laser-focused on getting people to underestimate her, and just like masc!Kabru, it also sucks complete shit when it comes to fighting monsters. but this is Kabru we're talking about, so that's not a surprise. she's a femme fatale to a T, n i think it's a testament to how fucking stellar Ryoko Kui is at character design that all of this is communicated in a Daydream Hour doodle following up on an omake she drew probably 5 or so years ago at the time.
why do you think solarpunk sucks? i always thought of it as an optimistic, if naive, idea about a way of life. is it something to do with the conservative myth of self-sufficiency?
solarpunk is just an aesthetic, and that makes it vulnerable to co-opting by fascist movements who fucking loooove aesthetics. like, fascism is primarily an aesthetic politics, and its derivatives to the left (the more milquetoast conservatisms up to liberal progressivism) all traffic primarily in aesthetics and acceptability, which is why all politics in the west have to be filtered through what *looks* and *feels* nice (or what looks and feels badass in the case of fascism), rather than what actually, materially might work. so, to your point, yeah it's deeply naive and that naivete is why i think it sucks
also there's something deeply fucked about solarpunk's fixation on technology, like it's techno-fetishistic in the same way liberal democracies nowadays imagine technology and science as being able to wipe away all problems and solve all issues, we just need to get Advanced enough to solve climate change and world hunger and everything else. the eradication of capitalism can't meaningfully affect our technologically advanced lives (which we enjoy as a result of extractive hyperviolence inflicted on the global south), we can't just Lose our toys and screens, that would! suck! better to imagine we can all live lives where we can larp as neo-pastoralist farmers without having to engage in any of the backbreaking labor that sustains a lifestyle like that, like we all have fucking cloud seeders and microlight drones and mechs that snip perfectly ripe tropical fruit off the branch to enjoy whenever.
all this to say, as has been mentioned in a post ive seen floating around, solarpunk steals a lot from Afropunk and Indigenous futurist thought and just strips a lot of the Black and brown influences, or reduces it to cute little checkbox-style diversity wins. i've got a game ive been wanting to publish about my general thoughts on this for a hot minute, but thank u for ur question hehe, gave me an opportunity to distill them
ironically “perma-preteen caught in a dissociative haze” is a healthier stage of growth than the alternative, “normative adult convinced the dissociative haze is normal and good actually”, you just need to make sure you progress to the next stage, “adorkable latter-teens star of a mid-10s coming-of-age flick”
watched most of TADC tonight, it's genuinely incredible that everyone didn't immediately see that jax is tfem. it's like. text.
what felt especially poignant was ribbit. like, it's text that ribbit and kaufmo are just jax's closest friends that he's lost to suicide, right. which makes ragatha's invocation of her during the softball game read insanely obviously as "cis ally throwing trans suicide rates as a gotcha" levels of insensitive.
esp contrasted against zooble being explicitly queer and also shockingly well-adjusted, it's a really powerful statement about queer acceptability and its limits.
i just also think its funny (read: not at all surprising) how little of this i got through tw feed osmosis n stuff. most of it was just discourse about jax n gooseworx n glitch n blah blah blah. idk, i guess i just was Not expecting this to hit me as hard as it did
this shit is heartbreaking. i know this girl. ive been this girl.
