Lion Equals Square

let's get ✨vulnerable✨

ダンジョン飯 by 並木風磨@namiki_kazama

Pots n Picks Week: Day 5 [Cuddling]

Reference ☝️

you know. the conclusion of "the monsters we eat and digest lose individuality and can't be resurrected" and killing something and eating it to make it part of you, and specifically in relation to falin eating the monstrous half of someone you love to save their humanity... felt profound to me before i even finished the manga and it's taken me this long to put my finger exactly on why

it's processing something horrible, accepting it into yourself, but not giving it any power over you. digesting the terrible things that happen in life is the only way to truly kill them. perhaps you've had people help eat them, share the burden of processing when it's too much to bear on your own. they lose their individuality once they've been eaten. they can't be reanimated once you process them. they become part of you, and you are alive because you've eaten them.

Senshi drawings (cutie patootie)

i am starting a collection

a face you'd find on the side of a milk carton

today in: i'm not a comic artist

people do correctly identify that laios is autistic fairly often but a lot of the reasoning begins and ends with his special interest and social difficulties, but honestly it goes far deeper into the build of his character than just those two things

his pain tolerance is wildly inconsistent, unable to tolerate a drop of hot oil (or any heat) but able to shrug off both his leg being bitten off and it being reattached

hes sensory seeking in the extreme. he rubs the bat bones against his face, pets and fluffs the shapeshifter tail.

his desire to eat monsters comes from three very autistic places. 1) the rules for why monsters are not okay to eat but animals are are arbitrary to him so he cannot follow them easily: he cannot understand the 'feelings' argument others make. 2) this too is a sensory seeking behavior. he wants to experience these new things, new flavors and new textures. 3) it completes his knowledge of the monster in question to also have data on its edibility. because he cannot draw that arbitrary line around all monsters, he wants to evaluate them case-by-case and see if real patterns emerge. butchering and eating the monsters improves his knowledge of them greatly and highlights their importance in their ecosystem, as well as making him a part of that same ecosystem

he cannot emote the way others expect him to. he compartmentalizes his feelings (to an unhealthy degree) because he needs a pragmatic solution. so as long as there is a problem to solve, that matters far more than evaluating his emotions and allowing himself to experience them. while this is also a coping mechanism for ptsd, it is a trait found in many autistic people regardless of trauma, as we have trouble sorting the feelings we have and often need time to think about what we feel, so it becomes easier to simply not do it and pretend we dont need to. laios emotions certainly affect him, with or without his processing them, but others do not see what they expect to see and thus dismiss that he is feeling what they would feel

he is incredibly gifted with pattern recognition, observation, and analysis within realms he understands. to understand subjects that dont come easily to him, he must filter them through his established schema (his special interest--this is why they are so special! they help us sort the world). when he isnt sure about the social cues and details hes observed in the shapeshifter arc, he filters it through the lens he understands best: monsters. he was making correct observations about his friends all along, but he could not be confident in that the way he was about their behavior when it came to his interest (chilchucks caution, senshis passions, and marcilles carelessness)

Two guys cuddling, nothing else

are you hungry?

communication is key 💪

with everything else that happened it's easy to forget what an incredible entrance this was

found someone on twitter who stitched together the pan up and. dude.

Thursday is dungeon day now!! First art piece that wasn't work-related in months a a a

the monster beyond the veil