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tropiyas · 3 years

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(my longest analysis post so far, get ready)

I don't know how to write about this in a way that's not too weird, but recently, Dungeon Meshi has been good at making you feel uncomfortable. I really appreciate Kui for challenging the reader like that - it shakes you out of auto-pilot and is a sort of "speed bump" for the story beats if you're reading too fast, and makes you appreciate the manga as a whole:

The main villains of the story are established to be the Demons (in DM's fantasy setting, they are an eldritch entity a class above regular sentient species/monsters that the main characters deal with). Rather than eating other creatures or people, their main food is desire - they come from an alternate dimension of infinite mana where desire doesn't exist, so they set up in the titular dungeons to cultivate+feed on adventurer's desires (for gold/fame/immortality/etc).

This is all very abstract, of course, compared to eating fantasy creatures based on IRL organisms - how would you "eat" someone's desire? A standard approach would be a creature sucking on/eating someone's brain, which is the typical organ you'd think of with regards to a person's desire. But that's too realistic and rooted in biology, so Kui decided to make it much more physically disconcerting.

So far, we've seen two demons feast on a persons desire, and each time it was very disturbing - the demon pins down the victim, phases into the victim's abdomen, and starts eating away at the desire. The act itself is depicted very physically, but the victims don't experience any bodily harm, they're just screaming at the demon because they know they're losing part of themselves and can't resist (one of the first things a demon eats is a victim's desire to resist). To me, it 100% reads as an allusion to sexual assault and definitely made me shift uncomfortably as I read and digested what the author's showing me.

Okay, so with these moments, Kui definitely wants to tell the reader "Demons are definitely the bad guys in this story, they should not coexist with our main dimension if their entire diet relies on cruelty to sentient peoples." But how do exactly do you stop demons? The Elves, being a long lived race, seem to have decent experience with dealing with dungeons and defeating demons before they become too strong.

In DM Chapter 74, Kui hits us with ANOTHER set of uncomfortable moments since our protagonists are dealing with a demon that is about to become too strong (it just ate a ton of desire and is about to be unsealed from its tome, two events which we've never seen before). Mithrun, the captain of the Canaries (a demon-hunting party of elves), is the victim pictured above, who somehow managed to survive his encounter because the goat left him with a desire for revenge against demons. So, Mithrun is unhinged and wants to stop the current dungeon's demon by any means, and when he finds out that our main half-elf protagonist Marcille is in possession of the tomes containing the demon, he's ignoring all boundaries.

Mithrun is a victim of a demon, and wants to stop Marcille from being another victim, but his mix of desperation and trauma (I headcanon he's lost the desire to be sensitive/kinder to other people which ends up w/ shit like this) has resulted in even more unsettling behavior that STILL makes the reader go "woah, shit dude" even though we're on his side! Kui's basically reaffirming "the demons are a severe enough threat that someone with personal experience with one is going this far to stop another."

Mithrun's party members end up pulling him away (which makes sense, none of them even know if Marcille has the tomes on her person, and they want to defuse the situation). This gives Marcille just enough time to release the demon, and I'll let these last few panels circle back to what I meant at the beginning of this post.

This new tone is a far cry from the beginning of the manga, which was 90% whimsical adventures about eating fantasy foods. BUT, the best part of Kui's storytelling is that she's still keeping to the theme of eating (this yoked up motherfucker is just trying to devour his next meal even if it is Bad), so the progression between the light/dark moments of Dungeon Meshi is totally natural as the conflict revolves around who eats whom.

#dungeon meshi analysis #dungeon meshi spoilers #dungeon meshi ch 74 #ask to tag #dungeon meshi

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