The Time of Monsters (part 2)

(first part is here)

 Can you eat Ents?

The reason why a Lovecraftian reading of Delicious in Dungeon is incomplete is because the series is also very interested in ecology, something that Lovecraft had no feeling for.  Before I can try to describe how these interact I have to go back to: where do these characters come from?  What more or less stock setting are they drawing on?

For a lot of this I'm going to be relying on analysis of the isekai subgenre that I wrote up as Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: if you like reading this you may want to read that at some point.  Delicious in Dungeon is not an isekai (none of the characters are from other worlds) but there are similarities between isekai and generic fantasy anime.  In particular, isekai are almost universally done as a type of fantasy world that uses conventions from after the transition from tabletop RPGs to computer game RPGs.

Delicious in Dungeon notably leaves out the computer game RPG conventions entirely.  There are no status windows through which characters can see their stats, no hyper-focus on numerical ratings and lists of skills.  In addition, although there clearly is some influence from tabletop RPGs (the concept of "dungeoning", "parties", some of the monsters) the characters are not really operating within a tabletop RPG system.  No one has a "level" as far as I can remember.  No one really has a "character class": Laios the fighter can be taught how to use basic magic if anyone bothers to teach him.  The combat system fundamentally does not use hit points: there is a scene where a burly fighter has a water spirit shoot a sort of spear of water through her skull and she is instantly dead in a way that no hit point based system would really allow.  The combat is generally brutal and people are killed when a vital spot is hit.

 What the characters do have is Tolkien-similar races, filtered through Tolkien's influence on the tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons.  Thus Chilchuck is a "half-foot" because Tolkein's hobbits were renamed to halflings in D&D because of copyright concerns.  In short, they are a party whose composition is somewhat like that of the Fellowship of the Ring: Laios the human future king is Aragorn, Chilchuck the trap expert (note: not a "thief") is a mixture of the various hobbits, Marcille the mage elf combines Legolas and Gandalf, and Senshi is Gimli.  The core party in Delicious in Dungeon has various members that were part of the group earlier or who joined later, and I could push the analogy further, but this is far enough for my purposes.

Are they really similar to these Tolkien models?  They are sort of reverse caricatures or jokes about them, distancing devices:

* Laios is one of the least classifiable characters in recent anime: anime has many doofus character stock types (the doofus who is OK because they are incredibly powerful, the one who makes bad decisions but always lucks out, the one driven by incredible horniness, the one who is just comic relief) and he isn't any of them.  He's socially awkward but not to the extent of being classifiable as having what people currently think of as a disability.  Mostly he is someone who just does not fit in: his backstory has him doing a number of combat-related jobs all of which he left without some precipitating crisis and without particularly learning anything from them.

* Marcille might be the closest to a Tolkien original type because Tolkien's elves notably sometimes had their magical creations go bad.  But she's a lesbian and Tolkien is probably the least lesbian fantasy writer imaginable.  She could conceivably be bi or pan or something -- it's not like we know her exact preference -- but the anime makes it as clear as it can without her saying "Hi, I'm a lesbian" that she's attracted to Falin (the scene where they rescue Falin and suddenly Marcille is all flirty and "sleep next to me") and probably in love with her (the scene where Marcille starts crying, thinking about a difficult part of Falin's life.)   By the way, what is it about anime fans even in the current day that made me encounter "Do Laios and Marcille end up getting married?" as a recurring question when looking up basic facts about the series?  Of course they don't.

* Chilchuck is almost a reverse hobbit: a good person on the inside to his friends, but close-mouthed, secretive (his long-term party doesn't even know he's married), cynical, not notably interested in food, an adult who has children.  Tolkien hobbits would have thought it was the greatest thing ever to eat all these tasty monsters.  There have been other Tolkien-derived halfling characters who were members of thieves guilds and the like -- Regis from the R.A. Salvatore Drizzt books, for instance -- but they tend to maintain outward good nature as a kind of racial trait.

* Senshi is a driven, complex personality without being in any way concerned with any of the things that Tolkien dwarves are concerned about.  He doesn't care about his clan.  He doesn't care about treasure: there's an amusing scene where they are cooking and eating bugs that look like coins and he throws some gold coins that were mixed with them away because gold is useless.  He doesn't care about his axe and his prized implements are his cooking tools.

So the series has made it very clear that although this may look like Tolkien it is not.  Why go this far for the look and then spend so much effort playing against type?  I suspect that it has something to do with the Ring (as in the the temptation to use power that works out badly), the Ents, and the Scouring of the Shire, these last not standing for a real ecological consciousness but at least a preservationist one.  The world of Delicious in Dungeon is one where the ancient elves and dwarves had rather modern technology, steampunk level if not contemporary, and gave it up.

Because there are many overt references to ecology in the series.  Marcille is interested in dungeons and how to create them because she is interested in magical self-sustaining systems.  Senshi purposefully does not destroy golems on a particular dungeon floor because to do so would throw off the dungeon's ecological balance, and he sees himself as a maintainer of that balance.  The dungeon is kept in repair not merely by "magic" but by actual creatures that mimic the walls when they are damaged and secrete new shells to replace them.  (Laios, of course, tries to eat these creatures because he must eat everything.)

To make a long story short, I think that the series is fundamentally about our contemporary ecological crises, and these have to take off from Tolkien in this context because that's the last branch of the series Tolkien -> tabletop RPG -> computer RPG where they really appear.  More about that in the next part.

(the second part is here )