Dungeon Meshi – Episode 23 Review

「グリフィンのスープ/ダンプリング1」 (Gurifin no Suupu/Danpuringu 1)
“GriffinSoup/Dumplings -1-“

There just aren’t a lot of breather episodes of Delicious in Dungeon at this point. Both the breadth and depth of the story, which have been hinted at all along, are revealing themselves at an accelerating rate. That’s one reason I’m so curious to know what the production committee has planned, because the brick wall of the season’s end is coming and Dungeon Meshi is about to crash into it with the entire final arc unadapted. At this point it’s almost inconceivable that they’re going to try and fit everything into two cours, but it’s certainly odd that there’s been no hint of an announcement.

One thing I’ve noted before is the huge tonal range with this series. We’ve seen eps with a balance of the extremes, but maybe not one where the two faces of Dungeon Meshi were so starkly contrasted with each other. First off we got the meat (pun intended) of Senshi’s backstory, and it was pretty heavy stuff. As teased last week, young Senshi (Ookuma Kenta) encountered a griffin while adventuring with a party of gold-hunting dwarves as a young man. But that wasn’t even the most harrowing part of that journey, as it turns out.

Senshi was 36 at the time, but the dwarves are one of the long-lived races, and the rest of his party considered him a kid. That certainly extends to Gillin (Takagi Wataru) the de facto leader. It’s now plain where Senshi got his “got to make sure the young ones are fed” mentality. Gillin looked after Senshi even when things turned sour and the rest the party, especially Brigan (Maki Shunichi) started to resent it. That was after it became clear the dwarves were lost in what was not just a ruin, but a dungeon. Food grew scarce, and they had to eat their horse (note that Senshi would later give the same name to his kelpie friend). Not only that, they were attacked repeatedly by a griffin – or at least what Gillin assumed was a griffin.

The long and the short of it is that eventually only the three of them were left, and Brigan became increasingly hostile to the idea of giving a “useless kid” any more of the meager food they scavenged. Eventually it came to violence between the two adults, Gillin returned to Senshi with what he said was griffin meat, and then walked out to relieve himself and never came back. And the gamey taste of that soup has haunted Senshi ever since, as the awful truth about what might have happened plagued him.

This arc closes with Laios just being Laios in his full flower of obnoxiousness. Incredibly insensitive (of course Chilchuck is right, he just wants to eat griffin), and somehow winds up “winning” the moment. The griffin soup doesn’t match Senshi’s memory, his worst fear. But Laios surmises that the changeling mushroom ring nearby might be the cause, and that the monster that tormented the dwarves might not have been a griffin at all but a horny hippogriff. And using the mushrooms to transform the griffin meat back to its true hippogriff form, he’s able to ease the burden of Senshi’s memory.

After that things just get hilariously silly. But not before Senshi shares the very interesting reflection that the dungeon responds to desires of those who adventure in it. If they’re like the orcs who just want to exist, the dungeon is mellow. But it shows its teeth when adventurers are seeking something, and the Laios party is now seeking an awful lot – Falin, the Lunatic Magician, the winged lion. Oh, and more fairy mushrooms – because the goofs stepped in the ring of them and transformed themselves sick, and when they were well enough to move the dungeon had already shifted.

This is pure fanservice here, but Dungeon Meshi has always excelled at delivering that. Laios is a dwarf, Marcille a half-foot, Chilchuck a tall man (the first thing he does is check out his junk), Izutsumi a cat-eared kobold. And best of all Senshi an elf idol (the shapeshifter episode foreshadowed a lot of this). Laios, freak that he is, seems quite taken by this turn of events and speculates that group could stay as is and keep searching. Of course, that’s before he realizes that it’s not easy to drag all that bulk around in a scuffle – which arises when a group of gargoyles emerges from behind a magical door and assaults them.

It sounds funny to say, but I really think an important element of the success of this series is that the main cast has no dignity at all. They’re just goofs and anything goes with them, no guard rails. So when stuff like this goes down we can step right into the moment and really enjoy it. Something as random as the four of them in transformed bodies making and eating dumplings shouldn’t be as entertaining as it is – but it is. That, I think, is why the disparate elements of the series blend together as harmoniously as they do.