he has visible ribs and cheekbones, his limbs are pretty skinny, and Laios' shirt is relatively baggy on him
add in this panel from the mimic fight + a bit of trivia from the Adventurer's Bible
that man is not eating enough! he is malnourished! the dungeon crawling lifestyle has caused Chilchuck to develop disordered eating habits, if not a full on ED!!
you absolutely should not read dunmesh for the yaoi, you will be disappointed. dont read it for the yuri either, i did and was sorely disappointed. read it because you have autism and you will be obsessed with this intricate and beautiful world and story and the sincere and complex picture of living with autism and food and class and above all desires, the ones we repress the ones we overindulge the ones that hurt us and the ones no one will allow us to fill
What’s the difference between a dog and a wolf?
yet another thing i really like about dungeon meshi:
a lot of ink has been spilled on this idea that "people dont have autism/ADHD the problem is actually capitalism". usually paired with the notion that in agrarian societies being neurodiverget was actually super useful and that neurodivergent people would have been content with menial tasks like sorting berries or watcing over cattle, instead of the modern fallen state in which we find ourselves where we have to go to 9 to 5 jobs and sit in boring offices all day or whatever.
i wont rehash all the reasons this is clearly nonesense, instead what i will do is point out how brilliant ryoko kui was, yet again, for finding the way of eating her cake and keeping it too. dungeon meshi is clearly this power fantasy consisting of "what if your hyperfixation was actually extremely useful and was the thing that allowed you to thrive in this niche field". so in this case laios autism actually works almost as a superpower for him.
but then every single detail we come to learn about his past shows us how incredibly maladapted he was to the life he was born in. he couldnt meet his parent's expectations or those of his town, he couldnt fit in the army as a soldier, living on his own at a caravan he was malnourished, dirty, dressed in tatters and covered in fleas. and even after he manages to establish himself as an adventurer he gets constantly taken advantage by other people.
a lot of the reason why he is thriving in the story is because he is a) in the very specific niche of circumstances where his peculiarities actually are incredibly useful, in a dungeon filled with monsters where he doesnt have to deal with other people and b) surrounded by people who are either just as weird as he is or care about him deeply (or are consumate professionals like chilchuck)
What’s your thoughts on Delicious in Dungeons Character Designs?
Ryoko Kui is the best to ever do it.
To expand on this a little bit: Ryoko Kui takes the tools of character design seriously, and uses them with forethought and consideration to set her characters apart, give them personality and specificity, and thinks very carefully about what each piece of design communicates and how it interacts with all the other design in her story.
Body shape, face shape, noses, eyes, brows, hair, proportion, fashion, ears, posture, roundness and angularity, broadness and slenderness, posture... Kui clearly thinks about ALL of it, and incorporates all of it.
And this is part of what gives her story such a profound sense of taking place within a world, a whole world inhabited by thousands of people each of whom are as full and unique and distinct as every other one. You look at a group of her characters and none of them feel like Copy Pasted NPC Placeholder #3457, they each feel as though there is a life there, an individuality, even if they are never actually deeply explored in the story.
Compare and contrast with something like Genshin Impact's style of character design:
Now, I don't bring this up just to sh** on Genshin - its character design style is adapted very effectively to the kind of story and world it is trying to build, which is to say a gacha story where every part of a character is formulated towards the singular goal of appeal. It's a world inhabited by nothing but main characters, essentially, and it is a laser-focused power fantasy structured around constantly pursuing the high of maximum damage numbers pumped out by maximally cool and badass battle moves executed with maximal grace by physically perfect avatars who provide the player with maximal aesthetic pleasure.
But because of that, its character design style is under severe pressure to regress to the mean - i.e. skinny bodies, young bodies, beauty ideals, and a minimal amount of physical difference. This style of character design tends to focus all of its effort in colorful, detailed and attention-grabbing fashion and hair styles, and generally avoids "alienating" design features like, well, literally anything that could be conceptualized by anyone as "ugly." Big strong noses, for example, or larger ears, or wrinkles, scarring, skin folds and so on. Fatness functionally does not exist in Genshin Impact's character roster for this reason, and it's part of the reason why the franchise struggles so notably to design characters of color - the concept of "beauty" is deeply bound up in systemic biases of class, race, gender and nationalism, and since Genshin's character design ethos is "make every character as broadly beautiful as possible" it has to keep hitting the same limited set of beats over and over and over again, and it reinforces the biases it inherits with its inability to step outside of them.
So Genshin Impact characters have a tendency, for me at least, to all kinda blur together into a brightly colored cavalcade of lowest-common-denominator ambulatory clothing racks, characters whose bodies exist for the primary purpose of transporting a highly elaborate costume around.
Kui by contrast very very actively seeks out elements of physical difference, and incorporates them into her design process - she seems to delight in inventing as many nose shapes as possible, as many different kinds of eyes as she can think of, and the result is that she has a character roster which is recognizable even if you change or remove very important parts of their basic design.
Where Genshin Impact (and that style of character design) would severely struggle to make characters recognizable without their costumes, because the characters in large part are their costumes, Kui's design style makes characters extremely recognizable not only in and out of costume, but even if the fundamental nature of their bodies change across species, and it makes her characters of the same race and species eminently recognizable from one another, even while sharing many physical traits and aesthetic features.
anyway tl;dr Ryoko Kui is the best to ever do it.
DUNGEON MESHI OST ART I OWE YOU MY LIFE
The testimonials from band kids are truly taking this to another level, thank you
Who up hurding they gurd
#no ones gonna talk about how falin on the french horn is spot fucking on#and laios trombone. god this is top tier(via @xaveria)
I know he's not on here, but Kabru's the most Trumpet dude who's ever lived u_u u_u
Lately, I've been thinking about Mithrun and the ways he is dehumanized in canon.
people need more than the bare minimum to live even and especially if they don't know this
I think my favorite part of dungeon meshi + why I absolutely adore Ryoko Kui's characterization is that every single main character is unlikable. Not just in a surface level give your characters flaws way, but in a way that encumbers them and affects the people around them. laios is outright rude and negligent at times. marcille is judgemental and shortsighted. chilchuck is grumpy and mean. senshi is obstinate and often careless. They're all good-hearted and lovable and easy to root for, but they have flaws! Not only do they have flaws, but those flaws affect their relationships and are explored by the narrative!
I don't know it's just so refreshing when fiction lets its characters be bad people at times. It makes the "found family" trope so much more satisfying cause it's like yes. I'll love you and take care of you even though you suck sometimes and you've accidentally hurt me before. I've done the same to you and know you still love me back. Gosh what a good story.
Like idk but-- something about how Laios is never once portrayed as desirable in the traditional way really gets to me. The entire series is about every kind of desire and how people deal with it, but as for the main character?? Sexually?? Romantically?? Not one single person. (There was that one auxiliary character but she was after his favor as team leader/perceived birth status, though he actually ran away from it all.)
There are even several jokes about how undesirable he is from a sexual/romantic standpoint. And while yes that does have some aroace flavor to it, given that he (in the show/manga anyway) shows no interest in romance or sex himself, so of course he wouldn't try to be appealing that way, I find it comforting from just-- a general standpoint??
Like that an author sat down and wrote a main character that's just plain awkward and unattractive in-universe, noticed, joked about sometimes (after all it is a comedy series), but the character himself is never ever The Joke, Laios is always shown as worth it. Worth watching. Worth knowing.
He's socially inept, the only reason he even shaves and cuts his hair is because he doesn't want to look like his father, he doesn't even care about romance let alone have the skills to be a good partner, and just... so what?? The story never asks us why. He just is.
He's the main character, he's himself. His story is worth telling, screw the love interest sideplot. It's worth seeing through.
He's enough.
I'm loving Dungeon Meshi's mix of quasi-probable speculative magical biology and "It's magic fuck you."
Red dragons swallow their prey whole and use the undigestible remains as fuel for their fire breath, which is lit by creating a spark with their tongue. Living armors are colonies of mollusks who expand and contract to mimic muscle movement. Actually "man-eating" plants is a misnomer, they catch small animals with a filament that retracts when touched and they use their decomposing prey as compost.
These mushrooms can turn you into a gnome. It's magic fuck you.
I’ve seen a few very good posts about how Laios is helping Senshi through his trauma by eating the griffin, and while rewatching the show, I realized something: Laios is trying to do it this way because this is how he processed his own trauma from his first death at the hands of a suit of Living Armor. He tried to figure out how to eat it.
hi! i was wondering if in dunmeshi, before falin was eaten by the dragon and before present events, laios and his party were earning money for k*lling monsters in the dungeon? i don't understand if someone was paying them, how they were making money and how it worked
I want to write a proper, thorough reply to this with citations to specific references and mentions in the story, but uh, a tree fell on my house so I've been a bit too busy to do that lmao.
BUT, to give an incomplete answer:
Yes, adventurers get paid for work they do inside of the dungeon, or, they just harvest monsters/plants/treasure that they find. The dungeons are a kind of boom town, similar to a gold or silver rush, which means that the entire local economy is based on people trying to extract wealth from the dungeon, since it's dangerous but easy work, anyone can try to do it with very little resources, and the potential for profit is huge.
Someone with almost no money could, potentially, go into the dungeon and walk away with enough money to start a business, or buy a house or a boat. If they don't die. If they're lucky. Desperate people cling to the hope that they will be one of the lucky ones who become insanely wealthy.
Based on things Kui's told us in the manga and the extra materials, we know:
Laios' group had an assignment from the island lord to try and find the giant doors on the 6th floor that nobody had been able to get past. That was what they were trying to do when they ran into the red dragon and Falin got eaten!
Despite everything, at that time Laios' party was the number one team on the island, capable of going the deepest into the dungeon.
Kabru's team is also considered pretty good, despite how often we see them dying - this should tell you how bad many of the teams that go in are! Most of them don't accomplish much or anything... Just like a boom town, where most miners go into debt trying to find gold, and only a few strike it rich.
This is what Rin is talking about in her first appearance, when she scolds Kabru for being too modest around other adventurers. She wants those other people to know that they are not going into the dungeon for profit and that they're not like the rest of them, dream-chasing fools hoping to make a payday.
She's offended anyone would mistake them for people like that, meanwhile Kabru would rather keep their motivations obscure and not advertise that they're in the dungeon on a moral crusade, not a financial one.
It should also be noted that the dungeon has a lot of criminal activity going on inside of it, because it's not well monitored and it's easy to conceal your activities. There's also a population of people who can "no longer live on the surface" for various reasons, such as being wanted criminals, exiles hiding to avoid vigilante justice, people too poor to leave because they wasted all their money trying to get rich and now they can't afford to live on the surface, or leave the island.
Essentially there is a population of homeless people living in the dungeon, eating anything they can scavenge, begging and stealing to stay alive. This could even be part of the taboo on eating monsters in the dungeon - that's something poor and desperate people do, and doing it is seen as a sign of how low Laios' party has fallen.
This is also why Kabru is so worried about the Touden party: their financials are a mess, but they keep going into the dungeon. Why? People think they are good, but maybe they're secretly criminals? Are they on the run from the law? Kabru has no idea, since "they just really love monsters and this is fun" is not a motivation ANYONE ELSE ON EARTH HAS.
The Toudens can't even say "we're monster researchers trying to write a book on monsters." They're just hobbyists, they just like them a lot. Kui tells us that Laios was encouraged to become a monster researcher but the studying was too intense for him.
It would be like finding out someone who works in a coal mine that kills 80% of the miners doesn't actually care about being paid, they just loooove coal and want to be around coal all the time.
just fully processed that fleki dungeon meshi is canonically bare ass bare pussying it. that's sof ucking funny
ryoko kui likes to pay attention to lots of important little minor character design details. like how fleki has her whole bare ass naked cartoon butt and entire vagina hanging out at all times.
get your bare ass OFF of that chair!!!!
Senshi is a Beautiful Flower u_u You Understand u_u u_u
Broke: Chilchuck Tims is child coded.
Woke: Chilchuck Tims isn't child coded, he's a middle-aged, divorced man with grown up children.
Bespoke: Chilchuck Tims cannot be accurately described as either "child coded" or "not child coded" because he is a deliberate commentary on the idea of "child coding" itself.
Conclusion: Chilchuck is definitely not "child-coded" in the way that a 700 year old shapeshifter that looks and behaves indistinguishably from a little kid for contrived reasons. However, he is intentionally designed to make it seem plausible for people who know he's an adult to still not fully believe it and this can make the viewers fall for it too. Which I guess is "child-coding" in a sense. But the message the work is trying to send is very clearly "Don't decide that grown-ass adults are equivalent to children and treat them like children because they have physical characteristics that remind you of a child you dipshit."
While hobbits aren't real and Chilchuck's traits that get him mistaken for a child are exaggerated compared to the vast, vast majority of real people, infantilization of grown-ass adults due to ableism, racism, or just people being dumbasses who forget short people exist is a real issue, and if you start shit with people for shipping Divorced Dad Chilchuck Tims with other characters or whatever you are displaying the exact attitude that's being criticized.
i love this chapter page. all the different ways our party is and could have been formed. you can even make your own!
i'm a big fan of "Baby Squad and Their Begrudging Adoptive Father"
I just love love love that there’s a guy wandering about Dungeon Meshi going, ‘but what are the socioeconomic and geopolitical consequences of this fantasy quest adventure, both while it’s ongoing and after its inevitable completion?! The skillset required to find and kill a Mad Mage is different than that required to responsibly, benevolently and effectively rule a kingdom. I personally must either find a good candidate, somehow make one, or, most likely, take on the whole Mageslayer/King role myself.” Except he doesn’t have the first skillset, and his whole party keeps dying while these highly competent chucklefucks wander past, kill and eat the monster, and save their bodies for the nth time. Kabru would demand to know if Aragorn is familiar with Gondorin tax law. His isekai energy is off the charts, because this is all exactly what I would do if dropped into a fantasy quest adventure, right down to repeatedly dying due to not actually being suited to the genre conventions.
