#gray posts

Everyone wants to talk about how Senshi is a tumblr sexyman but...Senshi is actually attractive. Like even aside from the fact that he's pretty good-looking he's a nice, sweet guy and he can cook and loves doing it. He's a perfectly eligible candidate for marriage, which kind of goes against the spirit of a tumblr sexyman.

I think the reason the Ryoko Kui interview is making these kinds of waves that it is is because a distressing number of people have somehow, without any real, solid evidence, convinced themselves that Kui is "one of us." There's this idea that only someone just like you can accurately depict your struggles in fiction, that someone can only ever write what they know and if they're writing what they don't know then you, the reader, will be able to tell immediately. Many readers are quicker to ascribe the way the characters in Dungeon Meshi personally resonate with you to Kui being like you, rather than her simply being a very good writer. So when Kui reveals that she has a different interpretation of her own work, that she's not the type of person people assumed she was based solely on the content of her work, that she's not "one of us," it breaks these people. It breaks them to face the fact that you can't always know an artist just from their art, and that authors put things they don't intend into their work all the time. Death of the author is a concept that is often misunderstood and twisted in fandom spaces, so it's destabilizing when it comes to the surface this blatantly. Is Laios autistic? You can certainly read him that way. But that clearly wasn't something that Kui was thinking about when she was writing him, and you can't assume anything in the creative process was autobiographical in any way. Is it really so hard to believe that a writer simply wrote a good character?