Anime’s Meatiest Lore (Literally): Delicious in Dungeon

fantasy's most alluring quality is how it transports us to new places and makes us believe the unbelievable we love getting lost in Worlds entirely unlike our own yet the Paradox of truly fantastic World building is it often hinges on the most mundane of questions can you make paper from parasitic plant monsters how would life evolve in a world beset by cyclical hurricanes which type of monster person the best perhaps the most essential of these questions lodged long ago in my brain by one of History's great video essays is what do they eat throughout time across

the Earth man has always been driven by the search for his next meal and there's no reason to assume that would change on some other Earth aboard an Airship or in the depths of an ancient dungeon though of course the logistics of answering it do get a lot trickier the further one flies from plane and pasture dudes on regular real ships died by the boatload because they forgot to say oranges and they had boats to carry their loads of food in on a months long foray into a maze full of monsters where every pound of

preserved Provisions in your pack further encumbers you in battle at a certain point you may as well just start eating the monsters but that raises a whole new Avenue of where World building inquiry what do you think a giant half snake half chicken tastes like delicious in Dungeon adapted by the inimitable Studio trigger from roko kui's manga of the same name preoccupies itself with answering that exact question plus many others like it and in so doing Cooks up one of the richest juiciest most tantalizingly textured traditional fantasy settings I have ever had the pleasure of

exploring a place briming with old magic intermingling cultures and authentically organic life that paints a picture of a much broader World from the vantage point of one lone Island a world which you and I are about to explore some more in just a sec after this word from today's sponsor nraa blade point is a thrilling melee and movement focused Battle Royale where 60 players duke it out for dominance with their choice of 17 playable Heroes combining a weapon based combat system reminiscent of Soul Caliber with the Zippy aerial action of an anime fighter there's no

other game quite like it and the skill ceiling is positively cavernous plus it just got a little more anime with the latest update which introduces a Brand New Mecca skin for UA Shan supervised by the father of Gundam himself kunio okawara the Striking red blue and white color scheme with gold accents gives the Mecca a classically captivating visual appeal especially once it spreads its Majestic mechanical wings and takes to the sky it's sure to impress your foes as you bear down on them and your friends should you choose to add the delightful tie-in model kit

to your collection but even if you don't man Yan you can still have a bit of anime fun wielding the updates new beam sword weapon which adds some futuristic flare to nara's World Of Far East Legends with its dazzling strike effects and dynamic attack Trails if you want to get grappling hooked on nara's uniquely addictive gameplay click the link below to download the game today two key ingredients are needed to cook up a satisfying answer to what do monsters taste like the most obvious being a keen grasp of cooking which roko kui obviously has in

Spades you need only look at the many delicious drawings spread throughout the manga and anime plus the highly detailed step-by-step recipes that accompany them to see that for yourself and if you need further Evidence look no further than YouTube and Tik Tok where people are cooking those recipes in real life obviously substituting real ingredients for the madeup ones which they can do because of course they're based on real recipes from around the real world even the grilled treasure bugs and centipede skewers are based on dishes from Japan ch China and Thailand the fact that Marcel

is the least hesitant to eat those out of all the monsters is the biggest giveaway that the series didn't come from a western fantasy writer which honestly you won't find many of watching or reading this series because kuy Sensei is so clearly well read not just on the traditional tropes of Western fantasy and RPGs but the traditional folklore that underpins so much of it the beastiary here is is every bit as Rich diverse and well researched as that of The Witcher but of course you're never going to know what madeup monsters taste like or what

to sub them for in real recipes no matter how many old folk tales you read about them for that you need the other key ingredient in DND D's worldbuilding stew biology the series imagines its delicious dungeon is a thriving varied ecosystem inventing naturalistic EXP explanations for how creatures straight out of a D and D monster manual could not just plausibly exist but co-exist mimics for example are reimagined as massive hermit crabs that hide inside chests and cabinets rather than seashells or the 69 different kinds of collectible trash in another crab's treasure snipping and stabbing anyone

who approaches them with insufficient caution a deadly predator for any AD Adventurer but also natural prey for the aforementioned treasure bugs which simultaneously reproduce and set themselves up to trick unwitting treasure Hunters by laying their eggs inside of living mimics and eating them from the inside out the law of the dungeon is the law of the Jungle eat or be eaten and every creature adheres to that law as it carves out its own niche in the ecosystem so carnivorous Flora's got to be extra aggressive and adopt a variety of clever strategies to compete with and

pre on all the hyper aggressive fauna around it and when you see a kraken of course like any squid it's going to have Kraken sized parasites big enough to have their own parasites also its sperm is to scale and lios no likey which is unusual for him since monsters and monster ecology are his special interest by the way Big Time pro tip for any prospective World Builders out there put a guy in your story who's as into magic or Monsters or history or spaceships or whatever is this gu into trains and the naturalistic exposition writes

itself speaking of loos's predeliction for monsters though that in itself is a great aspect of the series World building because just like in real life he's not alone in it there are a lot of guys like him all over his world with different areas of monster Obsession and expertise Mushroom Hunters run all over our world collecting and cataloging interesting fungi so in another world where the mushrooms are fun little guys who go around and stuff one can only imagine how much more excited those kinds of guys would get about them likewise bug collecting is a

common Hobby in real life where rare and exceptional specimens can sell for 10 tens of thousands of real dollars so if there were insects that looked like literal jewelry it's easy to see those sorts spending an equally pretty penny to acquire them nerd culture has been an enduring facet of human culture since thus of the Dem of exone carefully cataloged the comings and goings of every ship at the Port of pus and acknowledging that makes the series human and demium cultures feel that much more real realer still is the way that lios feels positively inadequate

in his passion for Dragons specifically compared to the real DieHard Dragon fans who can tell you the age species gender and habitat of a specimen from a single tongue click like that's me right there talking tokusatu history with all my old taku friends who can identify a Godzilla movie from the condition and model of the suit I'm such a fraud what am I even doing in Japan speaking of dragons though popular as they are this is far from the first work of fiction to invent a biological explanation for fire breathing in particular but I especially

love the Elegance of delicious IND dungeon solution where dragons store non-digestible biomass from the food they eat to convert into fuel later and ignite it by clicking their tongue we've come a long way from the dragons They Ride On per eating special rocks just to turn their stomach acid into pyrro foric gas though we've also come a long way from the initial question we set out to answer now haven't we luckily if you're still wondering what a basilisk or cockatrice tastes like that's one of the easiest questions to plug into this biological framework the chicken

part would obviously taste like chicken while the snake part would taste like snake which tastes like chicken so yeah they taste like chicken but while your curiosity's got you here the manga also asks and answers some other fascinating questions about these chimeric Critters such as how they taste other things with both mouths and where those things go once they're digested out the chicken butt which both stomachs connect to in a y shape though interestingly the snakes reproductive tract and nervous system appear to be dominant as evidenced by their snake likee eggs and the fact that

the snake part lives a little longer when you cut them in half which yeah that's basically exactly how they did science back in those days great world building all around and considerations like those are consistent throughout the series informing how each new monster behaves in subtle and fascinating ways for instance because hippogriffs have half the digestive tract of a horse they're natural omnivores and thus less aggressive Hunters than their all carnivore cousin the Griffin which is one of the chief clues that lios uses to sus out that the monster got changeling but on that note

the series is at its absolute best when it's able to tie those biological facts into the very fabric of the original folklore changeling myths have long been attributed to fairies and west Western European culture typically they'll Spirit a child away for a variety of purposes to adopt in some of the nicer stories or as tithes to the devil in less nice ones leaving one of their own behind is an imperfect replacement these myths don't involve fairy rings at realworld phenomena where mushrooms grow in Arc and circle patterns often withering other plant life within their radius

but there are a lot of superstitions involving people getting cursed or dis appeared when they step into those so it's not hard to see how Rio coui would have drawn that connection she also Blends in elements of Scandinavian folklore though where changelings are connected to trolls instead of fairies those Subterranean creatures don't have any particular use for the human child it said but rather want their own troll children to be raised by humans to give them better lives one thing these Scandinavian myths do have in common with their European counterparts though are the harsh often

deadly methods used to expose and drive out suspected changelings which range from beating them to tossing them in ovens a Superstition that's put at least one real world mother in jail but kuy Sensei combines that idea with a different real world Horror Story to complete her concept of changeling mushrooms namely Corps and other fungal parasites which reprod prod and spread by manipulating and ultimately killing their mostly insect hosts in this case changelings driven out of their social groups or left to starve in the wilderness or possibly just killed in an oven and the corpses then

spread their spores to start the cycle a new it's a very clever and creative Twist on the real fungal reproductive strategy manipulating the social behavior of larger animals instead of trying to directly control nervous systems exponentially more complex than anything Corps prays on in nature like say the zombies in The Last of Us it's not necessarily a more realistic take on the concept than that but it does feel far more magical and in a world where magical is the Baseline for reality that somehow makes it easier to swallow it helps quite a bit that the

Manga and Anime almost never invoke magic unless they absolutely have to even in cases where other fantasy stories happily take that shortcut animated armor has long been a staple of D andd and its many derivatives and it's moved by Magic in every single one characters in The Don Mesi Universe assume that's how it works there too but it turns out to be a colony of mollusks with iron-like shells that connect to mimic the musculature of man which is just genius on so many levels and even where magic is needed there's always some kind of logic

backing it up like the spores causing that transformation shape shifters are Illusions given physical Dimension with magically moving leaves by skullking nine-tailed Tanuki off in the shadows the enchanting power of a mermaid song can be disrupted by anything that distorts or overpowers the sound waves carrying it a typo or poor handwriting in the magical code animating a gold can have disastrous consequences as can putting its core in a substance it wasn't built for succubi drain a person's life forced by well I'll leave you to discover that yourself in season two it's fun the same goes

for any magic used by people which needs to be controlled by incantation and channeled with intent through a physical medium generally though whenever someone in the series breaks that rule it's a sure sign there's something very wrong going on and all magic becomes more potent the deeper one goes into a dungeon because the Mana in the air is thicker down there which includes the Mana that lets bigger and more complex monsters defy conventional rules of physics and macrobians why weaker smaller less clever monsters tend to be found on the higher floors while bigger beasts and

more devious Magic users lurk down below basic RPG game balance is built into the World building and it correlates with the balance of the magical ecosystem slimes appear in every dungeon in this world not just thanks to the enduring influence of Wizardry and Dragon Quest in Japanese popular culture but because their ability to break down organic matter into Mana stabilizes the dungeon's magic Supply providing an essential mechanism for it to grow organically by absorbing more organic matter from the outside and those slimes also factor into the anime's Cooking System since as you'd expect naturally occurring

gelatin is a pretty darn versatile ingredient with slimes as its digestive agents and cleaners serving self-repair functions the dungeon almost starts to look like a giant living magical organism unto itself and that naturally raises the question what does it eat which the anime then just kind of leaves ominously hanging in the Dank Dusty air to gnaw at the back of our minds as the party gets on with their adventuring it's a little more subtle about it than say made in Abyss but rest assured there is plenty of nightmare fuel to go around down in this

deadly hole in the ground too the bigger difference though is that the more delicious dungeon is as full of history as it is Horrors instead of crumbling away as unnatural nature retakes it like the abyss evidence of the civilizations that once stood where the dungeon now yawns have been preserved in almost their original state down there treasure bugs and Living Armor mimic the winged lion motif of the golden country's heraldry which we can also see adorning wall fixtures and statues from the second floor down long before those details are explained in the hidden village the

first floor is more of a generic tunnel maze type dungeon but that's only because the architecture has been repurposed from the island Village's Crypt which wasn't originally part of the castle town and below the castle connected to its sewers on the fifth floor we find an ancient Dwarven sistern at the heart of which lies a long abandoned Fortress from the old war between dwarves gnomes and elves likely obs absorbed into the dungeon long before the Mad Mage ever Rose to power which subtly implies the golden country's vast wealth might have originated from the same sort

of dunge engineering profiteering Our Heroes now engage in all these layers of the past are stacked up on each other like a cake baked into the dungeon's visual design for observant viewers and readers to pick up on as the heroes meet and eat each monster of the week but they're also o occasionally laid bare in the plot before they actually get laid bare in the exposition chapter especially when those Heroes deal with magic instead of Monsters the illusions of the living paintings for instance clearly reflect the Mad mage's dearest and most accursed memories doubling is

traps for intruders and ways for him to cling to what Little's left of his sanity which is what lios finds him doing when he goes in there looking for food though I really hope doodle lios never had to run into him poor little guy haven't felt that sorry for a up drawing since paper jam Dipper actually pretty much whenever illusion magic comes into play it tends to reveal interesting aspects of both the characters and the world like how the shapes the aformentioned shifters take reflect both the personalities of these specific characters that conjured them as

well as more General biases about other races that were baked into their cultural upbringings a clever way of revealing what race relations are like outside the dungeon without ever actually having to leave it and a great rare example of one of my personal favorite flavors of immersive fiction microcosmic World building the standard approach to building a fantasy world is to just well build the whole damn thing and put it on display for the audience to enjoy sending the characters on a cross country cross continent or even cross Cosmos Odyssey that conveniently takes them by and

through every nook and cranny the author has so carefully crammed cultural and historical details into Lord of the Rings one piece frein Stormlight Archive the expanse Star Wars there are many such cases but say you're building a world for something like a video game where it's just not feasible to keep making new locations forever or maybe budget's not the issue but it just doesn't make sense in the context of your story for your characters to leave where they're at like if their Noble house has been assigned to watch over production of the spice milange essential

to all space travel and then they're betrayed and have to wage a gorilla War to rest control of the planet back in the process effectively taking over the entire universe by leveraging that one vital resource you can still tell us a great deal about the greater Universe through the characters who've lived and adventured out there the culture they've brought back with them the economy and politics they're mixed up in and rumors of places they've never been without having to actually go there then maybe they can go to some of those places in future books and

then much later after you're dead your talentless failon can keep milking your notes on those other places and historical events that happened there forever without ever creating anything of his own just for example what I'm trying to say is if your plot needs to stay put you can always bring the world to your characters by painting a smaller detailed picture that lets your audience grasp the essence of the big one like how Harry Seldon developed his psychohistorical model of the entire Galactic Empire and Foundation by observing all the different cultures on its City Planet capital

of tranor or how harri a dub cobbles together a workable enough understanding of Elian politics history and metaphysical geography stumbling around the crumbling former capital of the world revisa but your setting needn't be something so Grand as a capital and your protag needn't be named Harry either any sizable Hub of culture or trade can serve as a microcosm of The Wider world that spins around it and while this sort of thing's a bit more common in sci-fi dungeons with their promise of Fame and Fortune for those Brave or stupid enough to Plum their depths are

a particularly strong narrative tool for bringing people from all over and all walks of life together once a small poor Village of fishing folk and Olive Farmers the island above the dungeon particularly its Lord has grown fat and rich in the last few years off the wealth dredged up from the Golden Country and that's attracted plenty of adventurers academics middlemen and straight up criminals looking for their own cut of the pie elves and dwarves gnomes and halflings Cobalts and catg girls poor orphans from out west and mighty warrior princes of the East each carrying their

own distinctive piece of the puzzle that is the wider world for instance the island Lord's hostility toward dwarves ostensibly stems from blaming all of them for the actions of a few criminals a few years ago but I think that really just confirmed in him a deeper more culturally rooted bigotry that blames dwarves for creating the dungeons they're so good at digging up in contrast his muing deference to the elves even as he and the gnomish scholar tansu are plotting to use the dungeons immortality curse to raise themselves to their level reflects how elves have put

themselves above the other races using the wisdom gained from their longevity and monopolization of ancient dark magic secrets on on that note it's also telling that the Nish magic system is the one most commonly used in schools and by adventurers gnomes are more willing to share their Arcane Traditions with other races which is in keeping with their cultures view of magic as cooperation with Spirits as opposed to Elvish magic which controls them though it may not be entirely altruistic gnomes might be fostering cooperation with other races to gain a leg up on the elves Mr

tansu does show quite a bit of personal animosity toward elves and a tendency to use other people to his own Advantage without asking even if he does try to return the favor after the fact I really appreciate how dungeon meshy doesn't actually have to tell us how the old Wars between the longlived races ended we simply see it through their present day stances and standing in the world though it does subtly guide the audience towards some of the finer points of its Big Picture by occasionally shifting our perspective from lios to cabu who has a

special interest in people rather than Monsters Where lios and seni look at dungeons through an ecological lens kabu wants to understand them as a sociological phenomenon to solve the many societal problems that spring up from them when they boom and bust his perspective greatly AIDS our understanding of how the adventuring society around the dungeon is structured but even within the dungeon we can apply that same lens to learn more about the world since culture is an essential component of good character writing and dungeon mesh's character writing is very good the party is naturally well suited

to serve as a microcosm within this microcosm unusually Well Suited in fact thanks to Marcel who's one of the few Elven adventurers on the island admittedly she is an outlier among the elves with her deep personal interest in the lives of humans and other races her desire to share the secrets and benefits of ancient magic with the world and her General sense of humility but exceptions help us understand rules and her interactions with other elves like the Mad Mage Thistle and the canaries tell us a great deal about the structure of their isolated Society chil

Chu's cynical attitude and strict code of honor are both reflections of of the mistreatment and exploitation faced by half foots on the island before he founded his Guild a safeguard that mcbell the younger half foot in Cab's party doesn't seem to fully appreciate as he just sees the union taking money out of his pocket and holding him back from exploiting his Cobalt companion Kuro interesting bit of commentary there on how younger Generations tend to take the gains won for them by unions for granted half foots generally seem to be the least Trust ing of other

races justifiably so as we see in one of the bonus Comics which are flush with great jokes and worldbuilding Nuggets if you haven't read them where it's revealed that uh half- foots are used as early mermaid Warning Systems on certain ships from certain countries and as a reflection of that in another one of those Comics we learned trolls aren't actually real but rather myths stemming from old scary bedtime stories that half foots used to tell their kids about tall men or trolls in their language in another of those delightful bonus Comics we learn that dwarves

get gassy when there's too much Mana in their system which might explain the superstitions that make CI as skittish about magic as Marcel is about monster meet when the Story begins though that may also be rooted in the dwarf's long-standing conflict with elves meanwhile his passion for Ecology and respecting the balance of nature seems to be something he inherited from the Orcs who effectively raised him after his Dwarven Guardians died as a quick side note I love this series take on Orcs as victims of colonization whose violent reputation is used as a post Hawk justification

by The Elves and men who drove them from their land and into lives of pillage and plunder in the first place speaking of demihumans isumi is kind of late to the party but she provides some interesting insights into how Easter Island cultures treat demihumans like pets if they're lucky with the hag curse she comes to Marcel to get cured serving as something like a magic shock collar the curse they can't cure meanwhile prompts dungeon meshy to start exploring the shape and nature of the human soul though we won't get into the meat or uh yoke

of that topic until season 2 lios doesn't pick up on a lot of this of course because he's more interested in Monster than people but that too is a reflection of his experience in Thal man society in his nightmares we see a lot of people have mocked and taken advantage of his naive tactless nature in the past not to mention mistreated his sister for no good reason so it makes sense that he'd be drawn to the more straightforward eat or be eaten logic of monsters just as a lot of real people on the Spectrum prefer

the company of real animals he particularly struggles dealing with shuro who comes from a more collectivist confucianist culture where unspoken Customs abound and reading the atmosphere is socially expected mistaking his efforts to be polite for genuine friendliness something that again reflects how in the real world such societies can be difficult for the A- neurotypical to navigate even if in some cases they're also more accommodating than European individualism interestingly Shiro's culture is is just about the only human thing we ever see lios take more than a cursory interest in as evidenced by his choice to name

his sword kensuke which might make him the fantasy equivalent of a weeb through these sorts of details we can extrapolate more about eastern and western tall man cultures than we see on the page or screen based on what we know about their real world equivalence in the same way that prior knowledge of tol keenes fantasy and RPG probes can help to connect other implied details about the setting and by looking at the clothing and naming conventions of characters from other races and continents we can further infer and fill in even more specific details about the

world and its people than the Manga and Anime have time for of course we can't say anything for certain about any aspect of the World building that's not covered in the original text or the official adventurers Bible World guide but then even with in the text there's an everpresent possibility that things we learn secondhand might be distorted truths or straight up lies like how trolls are just tall men or loos's favorite book The Dungeon Gourmet guide is actually just a kids book written by a guy who's never eaten a cockatrice in his life though there

is still some educational value in there with its biological trivia about monsters the unreliable nature of this info doesn't really harm the World building though at least not for me rather it helps me further immerse myself in the medieval pre-to early Renaissance Viewpoint of the setting by taking me back to a time when most people never traveled beyond their own neck of the woods and the only things they really knew for sure about the world were what little they could verify with their own eyes that's the true value of World building in microcosm at least

when it comes to Fantasy in sci-fi it more helps to sell the idea that space is vastly hugely mind bogglingly big though I guess that's kind of the same thing when you think about it just relative to spaceships and light speed communication rather than horse and carriages and pigeon mail well actually delicious in dungeons World already has high-speed long-distance communication via magic plus teleportation for travelers who don't mind the slight possibility of arriving in the middle of a wall or another person which goes some way to explaining how dungeon mesh's Society has a more developed

Global nerd culture than we did back on medieval Earth without that I'm sure they'd still have local mandre growing competitions but not internationally recognized ones of course the downside of smaller scale fantasy is it doesn't really leave much room for all the fascinating implications of having those communication capabilities in that time period but if you want to see that explored in more depth you can always go read disw world for its CLA Network or play the trails games for their oral Tech dungeon mesy happily fills its own particular ecological niche within the greater fantasy landscape

and that's exactly what makes exploring its World alongside its characters feel so special it fixates on the same things they fixate on from their same perspective because those characters are what really matters to its story and by making the World immediately around them feels so deliciously real it's able to bring lios his friends and all the adventurers they cross paths with to more Vivid and convincing life that's the third secret ingredient in its World building stew dungeon meshy knows a meal is only as good as the people you share it with and I'm very glad

I got to share this one not just with these lovable weirdos but all of you as well I look forward to reading your comments on your favorite aspects of dungeon mesh's World down below and while you're leaving them if there's some other anime or movie or video game or comic or Book World you'd like to see me explore in this style please tell me about that too I'm Jeff th imaginary travel auger thanking you for joining me on this journey [Music]