Why bother? (Why bother?) It's gonna hurt me. (It's gonna hurt me.) It's gonna kill when- (Why bother!) -You desert me! (Gonna hurt me!)

Set after Nightmare. Laios is reminiscing and contemplating.

P is for the painful way she makes me feel some days. U is for Utopia, the other times with her. N is for the new wave dreams she had back in her teens. K is for the kid in her, my PUNK girl.

I don’t think he was like ever that physically affectionate but I like to think he doted on Falin a lot in his own way. Falin got to be his Daughter who has special needs that he has to step up as a father to accomodate and Laios had to be his Son and Heir. And its all mixed in with that classic older sibling-younger sibling and brother-sister experience of knowing drastically different versions of your parents.

Faren

NAVIGATION / READ THIS FIRST

Welcome to my dungeon meshi mind palace!

Miscellaneous drawings are tagged only with character tags, ship names, or the general #dungeon meshi tag if it’s a lot of characters with none that are particularly prominent. I talk a lot in the tags of my posts too. Comics (actual comics + any drawings with speech or thought bubbles) are tagged as #my comics

Videos (edits, animatics) are tagged as #my videos

Text posts (meta, analysis, rambling) are tagged as #text post , HOWEVER don’t expect this much, this is my absolute last resort for conveying my thoughts when I can’t think of a way to do it with drawings/comics. If you really want my meta it will be in the tags of my drawings and comics.

NOTE: if you rb (and dont feel u have to ever i dgaf about notes i do this for the love of the game: yaoismo, yurismo, love and peace on planet earth etc.) write your thoughts in the tags it makes me happy. Sharing my ideas is the whole reason this blog exists, so even if I don’t interact in the conventional social media way, I really do love reading them. Lurking, reading tags on my posts, and also just posting my own work is my way to interact on here, and when people mention stuff in tags, I try to respond through my comic/drawing posts if I have an idea to share. For that reason, I don’t like, follow, or reblog EVER from ANYONE nothing personal it’s just what suits me best 🫶. Exception is if I draw/mention an idea by someone else I’ll tag them if possible and link their post/fanart/fic.

Pre-canon one-sided psychic heart to heart. As in real life, ranting in your mind is not enough to get you out of interpersonal no man’s land.

Shuro got roped into drinking with him as he is often swept up in things. There’s been a few hours of trivia-based talking but things are winding down now…

Traveling alone is quite dangerous for a girl.

(my toshiro overcompensating trans man hc)

bonus 1

bonus 2 ft. toshiyuki (middle brother) grown up a little but still a menace

dungeon crossing!

Metal Gear Shushu

its pretty cool how his family is very much like espionage/spies since his retainers are all ninjas I wonder if he was like the stealthy guy of the party aside from Chilchuck, and Laios was always just fucking it up by being like OMG SHURO WHY ARE YOU GOING OVER THERE BY YOURSELF🥺

(even though shuro and Namari were the teams big hitters if he had a character sheet in an rpg I like to think he’d have significant points in stealth for a warrior type like it would be a fun interface spoiler before you meet his party)

bonus

Shakespeare’s sonnets leave me cold (My bird, sings sweetly)

On the hidden repressed suburban white emo boy darkness in Laios’ heart

LET ME BE CLEAR: i like Laios, this is not a hate post, his flaws and darker parts of who he is round out his character and make him the character I love. Also this isn’t proper meta or analysis just my literal sleepy off the cuff rambling

I think Laios can be very comfortably summed up as someone who feels he was never indulged and the person he is in the series grew over those scars. I really enjoy how much Laios genuinely has a lot of darkness in his heart his emo-boy ness is really underrated. He canonically thought of (and is implied to sometimes still think of) his bullies (and sometimes people in general) like this

Aside being autistic, well into his 20s Laios really inhabits this very imo teenage mindset/outlook thats a combination of outsider and contrarian (the latter secretly). And the Winged Lion sees this immediately for what it is, this idea of being an alienated outsider due to your unique understanding of the world (I don’t mean Laios thinks hes like a nobel prize winner but more that he has a lot of resentment for how the things he’s interested in are not valued in the way he values them) and the percieved dull conformism of others (eg. his father), and how these feelings of his come from a deliberate (as in i feel hes actively trying to make himself think this as a coping mechanism) lack of intellectual and emotional curiosity about people or things that he’s unable to box into this Different category i.e the grass is always greener (of course in addition to his Traumas). For example monsters obviously, but also his fascination with Toshiro’s foreignness, like the island was probably full of strong cool warrior types but they weren’t so distinctly “exotic” (unfortunate but true 😔, many such cases see Japanism and also ironically cause thats how i hc the toudens, the way scandinavia is weirdly idolised by a great deal of the world, or even the way people will see an indie movie set in like small town absolutely anywhere else in the world from where they are and be like waow so cool and different unlike my LAME hometown imagine that meme of the ships thats like their barbaric practices etc.) and an emblem of this cool different world that he could idealise and escape into.  Shuro represents a kind of escapist fantasy for Laios, like in addition to just being (to Laios) This Super Nice Guy Who Always Saves Me And Says Yes To Me And Never Gets Mad, he’s also Nothing Like Those Boors from the village/school/ the military. And he probably dgaf about Rin or like Eastern diaspora in Melini and would say offensive things to them running along the lines of what he said to Lycion (“so you only look different on the outside, nothing is different internally , how disappointing”). Like you can compare Kabru’s curiosity towards people which is driven by a genuine passion for humanity, to Laios’ at times objectifying curiosity toward Shuro which is shaped by the pain of the past and immediately see the sickness in the head Laios has lol. Unconsciously, Laios I think can also be a deeply self-centred guy at his core (evidenced by the nature of his curse at the end of the story too haha).

I wanted to draw Laios worrying big brother moments.

I see him as the type of older sibling who sometimes lives in their own head and in trying to do right by their sibling, will subconsciously say or do something that whilst might nominally be for their sibling’s sake, ultimately is a way to indulge their own deep-rooted unacknowledged feelings (eg. how Laios percieves his father’s relationship with Falin).

(Falin is trans btw and still growing her hair out for the first time in the first pic 🫶)

Young Laios and Falin (maybe about 8 and 5 here respectively).

very long rambling hcs about Falin, Laios and Touden Papa under the cut

I’m always been so compelled by the different experiences Laios and Falin had of their father, in a way thats so true to the reality of many siblings. In my mind, to Laios, their father always had to put on his Lord hat around Laios because of Laios’ importance as the heir. Vs with Falin who as the Spare got to experience him much more when he wore his Father hat. Like raising Laios was his duty and raising Falin was his passion. Which is another reason why I really like Falin being a trans girl (in addition to it just being real and true Kui came to me in a vision when I first started reading in 2018), and one who recognised it and transitioned very early on, since it adds another layer to the different gendered expectations he’d then have of her vs Laios.

Also I think it’d make bonding with her and accomodating her different needs as an autistic child (from a “normal” child), much more “okay” in their father’s mind (He’s also autistic to me 🫶). Kind of the way that a lot of fathers irl will not hug their adult sons but have no problem showing affection for and indulging their daughters. I suppose that also has to do with like the idea of gendered expectations and how there is often a tension between sons and fathers, mothers and daughters (I don’t think there was though between Falin and her mom just because of the way Falin is as a person and especially as a child). Taking care of her and watching out for her could easily be a way to kind of indulge the child he once was too, especially since he ultimately sends her to magic school and is shown to have been curious about the outside world (the mythological elvish names of Nussa and Anowtrid…URGHHH I’ve thought this forever but Falin needs to bring home Marcille STATTTTT he would love her he’d think she’s so cool). It wouldn’t be in the conventional ways because they’re not those kind of characters but definitely Falin was a daddy’s girl to me.

I can also definitely see Laios and their mother constantly misinterpreting them both even when trying to be charitable (canon for Laios haha). Their mother since I like to hc that like often w IRL marriages of this time period, she wasn’t from that village at all and was completely isolated, already sickly with a nervous disposition, and then her husband is this cold, unreadable man. Her daughter also puzzles and worries her deeply. Laios of course because in that kind of belligerent teenage boy way he can’t help but project his own complicated, painful feelings for their father, and even for other people in general, onto Falin.

Falin and Shuro headcanons ( they’re trans your honour 🫡)

I really like the idea of them both representing a chance at a certain type of marriage that they feel they’re not going to get again.