godimsotired

It was 20 years ago (ish) :: Empire magazine publishes The Lord of the Rings: A Celebration, a special booklet enclosed with the magazine's January 2004 issue, which was released in December 2003. The booklet carried interviews with the principal cast of the LOTR trilogy as well as a significant amount of the creatives involved. The photography was taken in Watford, New York, Wellington, London, Sydney, Los Angeles, Surrey, Melbourne, and Vancouver between February and October 2003. Shown here: Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Elijah Wood (Frodo), Billy Boyd (Pippin); John Rhys-Davies (Gimli/Treebeard), Dominic Monaghan (Merry), Sean Bean (Boromir); Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Sean Astin (Sam), Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn); Miranda Otto (Eowyn), Andy Serkis (Gollum/Smeagol), Liv Tyler (Arwen); Bernard Hill (Theoden), Christopher Lee (Saruman), Karl Urban (Eomer); Hugo Weaving (Elrond), David Wenham (Faramir), and Cate Blanchett (Galadriel). [Note: Dominic Monaghan's photo here is an outtake; the actual shot in the booklet can be seen here. These photoshoots provided several excellent outtakes that I'd be happy to share if there is interest.]

'Up in our country we are human!' said the hunter. 'And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.'

The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began 'comparing power with power, measuring, calculating' and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.

It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization. If Nietzsche's analysis of debt is helpful to us, then, it is because it reveals that when we start from the assumption that human thought is essentially a matter of commercial calculation, that buying and selling are the basis of human society — then, yes, once we begin to think about our relationship with the cosmos, we will necessarily conceive of it in terms of debt."

hematophagia

I've seen pieces from this extra comic before, but never read the full thing until today. And holy shit does it hammer home just how much the story is about class.

Multiple times, when food comes up in this comic, it’s also in context of money:

I've seen this last panel on the right brought up before in context of like, dungeon meshi's relationship with fat and eating, but in the full context of the comic it really hits how much adventuring directly consumes bodies for money.

As much as this has been part of the story the whole time, showcased as early chapters 19 and 20...

It never fully hit me before how often adventuring comes down to having no other way to make money but to throw yourself into death repeatedly. To be used, whether it’s by individual selfish people (like the resurrection group that is happy to try and get Kabru's group to kill each other to get extra gold from them in chapter 32), or by the greater cog of the Dungeon Economy in general.

Which, to be clear, is all too often how things work in the real world, too. So many jobs burn through the health and lives of workers. Dungeon Meshi just makes it literal in a new way: by making the healing and resurrection, a core part to the adventuring loop, directly use fat, muscle, and energy from the body being healed.

Imagine Amazon, but if you got injured at work, they could literally burn up some of your body to get you back to working sooner. And that was seen as an advantage of the job.

And then you have Laios, thinking about eating monsters:

Not just because he likes monsters a lot. But because it would help. He says something similar in the actual manga too, during the chapter discussing his dream with the Winged Lion

Laios wants to be able to make a home for Falin. He wants to give her a place where she never has to eat alone. And when he gets a party, he wants to give them a way to eat well. And when he runs a country, well…

He wants to ensure that everyone has enough to eat.

Food is political. Food ties into class, and money. What is deemed "proper" to eat, what is a luxury, what is crass… so much of it comes down to money.

Being judged for eating what's available, when what is “proper” isn't affordable, is already a thing that happens. People forced into work that consumes their energy is already a thing that happens.