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)