The Time of Monsters (part 3)

(second part of the series is here)

 

Synthesis

 So there are two implicit referential strands in Delicious in Dungeon: Lovecraft and Tolkien.  How are these brought together?

Before getting into this, one final side alley: to illuminate a better example of some popular genre, it's sometimes good to look at an absolutely bargain basement lowest common denominator one: I give you "The Strongest Tank’s Labyrinth Raids  -A Tank with a Rare 9999 Resistance Skill Got Kicked from the Hero’s Party", an isekai title which looks like it was put together by randomly selecting tropes that are currently popular.  The minor variation that minutely separates this from similar series is that the main character is a "tank" (as opposed to a healer, a tamer, a mage, a thief, or various forms of damage dealers all of which have had their own series) so it's the only one based around a big, burly, classically muscled guy, something which is not finally used to any really interesting purpose.  I bring it up because the protagonist becomes both the leader of the local adventurer's guild *and* the master of the local dungeon, who creates monsters (huge gorillas, dinosaurs) who are sentient enough to fight on the people's side when commanded to do and who the adventurers hunt for their hides and other parts.  So he is a kind of local magnate who runs an early-capitalism business: the adventurers sometimes get killed, the monsters are endlessly created and sacrificed, but presumably the little hell world of unending needless death and conflict is worth it for the economic benefits.

Since "The Strongest Tank" (etc) is a minor work this conflict is never resolved or even acknowledged.  How is Delicious in Dungeon addressing it?  After all, if Laios does become king it will involve control of the dungeon in some way: is he similarly going to have people hunting and dying in order to eat an endless stream of created sentient victims?

The first step in recognizing this as a conflict is by considering cooking itself.  Cooking is a creative act, and one that transforms Thanatos (killing all those monsters, risking death) into Eros (creating the source of life for oneself and others).  As I write about in Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds , a characteristic part of the isekai genre, and one that often applies to generic fantasy anime, is that they serve as hopeful fantasies based around Eros rather than Thanatos -- fantasies in which people have the power to create a better world -- and this includes "humble" arts such as cooking.

So Delicious in Dungeon is overtly interested in ecology and is in some fundamental sense about our ecological crisis.  There is embedded in it a horror-world that we uneasily fear may be coming into being -- "Soylent Green is people!" and the whole mythos of things getting so bad that we are gradually acclimated into cannibalism.  ("Do you have any better ideas?" Laios asks when proposing that they eat his sister.)  There is also the hope of something else: the creation of a new ecology in which we all have enough to eat because we have changed what we eat.  Giving up meat for climate purposes?  Instead we can eat insects, protein grown from bacteria, or whatever and they are really delicious if prepared in the right way.  The second story starts from Tolkien and his "reject technology to preserve bucolic England", but it can not really end there because we have passed the point where preservation could work: we need a new system.

Laios is a monstrous figure because he stands at the juncture of these two stories.  No one can understand him or why he is so focused on eating monsters.  The new system has not yet come into being and might never do so: he might end as a monster, or he might prefigure the time when we have eaten our monsters and something that can sustain us into the future can arise.

(end of the series)

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 )

The Time of Monsters (part 1)

 "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."

 

This is an extended critical piece about the amine Delicious in Dungeon, sometimes called Dungeon Meshi by people who want to call it by something that is like its Japanese name (transliterated as "Danjon Meshi") .  The direct translation would be "Dungeon Meal".    I've based it on the first 24 episodes and have lazily not looked up anything about the writer, the artist(s), or the (completed) manga that it's based on.  There will be spoilers for these episodes and this piece assumes familiarity with them.

How, exactly, is Laios monstrous?  I suggest that he is because, as in the Gramsci quote above, he stands in an old world while a new one is uncertainly coming into being around him.  This leads him to greater and greater acts of cannibalism, culminating in a plan to save his sister from being bodily merged with a dragon by killing her, cutting off her "dragon parts" (the anime shows an envisioned neat and bloodless sectioning, like parts of a cow separated in an illustration at a butcher's shop) and calling in everyone he knows for a great feast where they eat all of the parts of his sister that they want to dispose of before resurrecting her.  Laios is (clearly, in my opinion) slated to become king, and this is going to be a central story for his kingdom.

 What kind of story is this? At first it seems something like the stories from Joseph Campbell's book _Primitive Mythology_ about ceremonial kings who had the best of everything the community could provide and then were ritually sacrificed and eaten to ensure the turning of the seasons and continued fertility.   But Campbell is increasingly out of favor and this usage of "primitive" as a stage that humanity went through is no longer held.  More to the point, this is not a story about natural cycles, but about an incredible *un*naturalness.  Here is the voice over at the end of the 24th episode: "Dungeon food. To eat or be eaten.  There is no hierarchy here.  Only the simple concept that eating is a privilege of the living."  But the series has already made it clear that this dungeon has the unusual property that people killed here do not really die: their souls stay attached to their bodies and they may be brought back to life at any time if part of their body still exists.  For the monsters' part, they are created by magic.  So the dungeon is a hell world where creatures live to eat the dead, then die and are eaten, then are returned to life again to kill and eat.  Un-nature red in tooth and claw.

Descent to the Dungeons of Madness

 It is possible to interpret the series as an often sought after contemporary mashup, the cheery, cutesy Lovecraftian horror story.  It would go something like this.  A party is forced to descend into a dungeon without supplies in order to save and resurrect one of their party members who has been eaten by a dragon.  The party leader, Laios, has always been fascinated by the idea of eating monsters, and even has a sort of cookbook for doing so, but it seems like he's never really tried it.  Luckily they meet a dwarf, Senshi, who is an expert cook specializing in the use of monster parts.  They descend the dungeon and are forced to subsist on Senshi's cooking: some party members are repulsed by the idea of eating monsters but they all agree that the meals are delicious.

As they go on and the initial resistance of the party members to eating monsters fades, there is a new controversy: some of the monsters are partially humanoid and eating pieces of them is uncomfortably like eating human parts.  Some party members object: it is agreed that there will be some restrictions on this kind of food but this partial agreement is subverted, especially when food gets short.  They find and kill the dragon that ate their missing party member, Laios' sister Falin, and eat meat from the dragon even though it ate and mostly digested Falin.  Falin is resurrected and then lost when she is partially transformed into the dragon that ate her.

Then there is an absolutely critical bit of back story for this interpretation.  Senshi, as a young dwarf, was part of a dwarven expedition to this dungeon that went wrong, and he was the sole survivor.  To save his life, the leader of the expedition gave him a mysterious bowl of bad tasting meat, which Senshi devoured to avoid starvation.  Senshi has since then always suspected that he was cannibalistically fed the meat of another dwarf, and it is implied that a major reason why he took up cooking monsters was to taste them and find out whether it was a monster he ate or another person.  This lifelong trauma underlies the series.

Then, at episode 24, there is a suggestion of how the rest of the series will go: the dungeon, presided over by "the mad mage", has slowly changed the party into monsters, although they are physically no different from how they once were.  Laios enthusiastically proposes that they can separate their missing party member from the dragon she has been partly transformed into by calling in everyone they know to a great feast where they will all eat his sister Falin.  This will dispose of her "monstrous parts", but of course the monstrosity will have gone into the feasters as they insensibly enjoy themselves, their jaws dripping with dragon/human blood.

Lovecraft wrote more than one short story about cannibalism, I believe, and not cannibalism as a "primitive rite" -- there is at least one where a New England settler gains everlasting life for at long as he can kill and eat other people.   This reading is part of the series, but only a part.  This particular anime rehearses certain kinds on contemporary social tension, and the Lovecraftian reading functions as one of its component levels.  In future parts of this series I hope to look at how this horror is the base of a larger horror of our time and the hope of its eventual resolution.

Next part is here.