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.