Spoiler Warning for the first season of the Delicious in Dungeon anime.

I’ve long had Delicious in Dungeon on my to-watch list, but a lot of my TV watching time has gone to other things this year. Various Star Wars movies and shows, Hunter x Hunter, the huge number of video games that came out, and plenty of books have taken up a lot of the time I might have otherwise spent on anime. Still, when my dearest friend came to visit last month, we were talking about media and he mentioned Delicious in Dungeon once again. While I first heard of the show through general cultural osmosis (the sort of thing that happens when you exist online), this friend was the person who specifically reached out to me to tell me that it would be something I’d love. I’d been very carefully avoiding most spoilers for the show (I couldn’t avoid all of them, unfortunately, but that’s also just the sort of thing that happens when you exist online) so we didn’t talk at length about it, but he’d said enough to convince me that I should watch it immediately the next time I subscribed to Netflix. As luck would have it, in the days prior to my friends’ visit (he was in the state visiting family and stopped by my place to visit before leaving), the podcast I was listening to as part of watching Star Wars (I genuinely can’t recommend A More Civilized Age enough) took a break from the TV show it was watching to spend some time on a set of books from the old Expanded Universe while one of the hosts was unavailable for a few months. Without that podcast, I had no reason to keep up my Disney+ account and decided to cancel it as my friend and I talked so that we could sit down to watch Delicious in Dungeon as our evening’s activity.

I was instantly hooked on the show. Like I said, I’d picked up bits and pieces through online cultural osmosis, but I’d avoided learning pretty much anything about the show. All I knew was that it involved eating monsters and that there was a woman who got turned into some kind of chimeric dragon-bird thing who was somehow important to the four characters I knew where involved. I figured it was the Human, Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling eating the monsters and figured that some weird side-effect of that was how that one woman got turned into the bird/dragon chimera, but that was literally all I knew or thought about the show. So coming into episode one as a dungeoneering squad got taken apart by a dragon confused me. I love an in medias res opening as much as (if not more than) the next person, but it was strange to see what had been described as a show that seemed to be based on someone’s Dungeons and Dragons campaign to start with what looked like it was going to be a total party kill. I quickly learned that this was not the case, that the woman I’d seen was someone the party wanted to rescue, and that the complex workings of the dungeon itself was actually the core element of the story at play, which is what it made it so interesting that the party chose to eat the monsters that they found within it. It was also very interesting to learn that the party was doing that despite there being a pretty significant taboo against eating those monsters. It makes sense, given that things that are “unclean” are often described as “evil” (which has led to the vilification of entire groups of people and cultures through human history) and that things that are “evil” are often described as “unclean.” Most people probably won’t want to eat monsters since they’re seen as creatures to be killed rather than understood or seen as things that might be a part of a strange but still rock-solid ecology.

As I got deeper into the show (exactly half an episode), I quickly fell in love with the characters (Senshi quickly became my favorite character and remains so to this day) and it took me all of two episodes to fall in love with the entire premise. Watching the characters grow to understand the dungeon they were in as a complex system that they were only a small part of was fascinating since that’s often the sort of thing that I consider when I’m preparing for a Dungeons and Dragons (or other TTRPG) campaign. Creating a world that has either found some kind of balance or is currently out of balance and heading toward some new form of it is one of my favorite parts of the worldbuilding process. Even in some of my more recent games, where I’ve built a world drastically out of balance (as we’d understand it), the core theme of the world is that it will eventually achieve some new form of homeostasis regardless of what the player characters might do. Seeing an entire show built not just around exploring the idea of eating monsters but also around exploring the kind of systems that support renewing dungeon life and how even the lives of adventurers not only support the dungeon’s systems but can become a part of it (by living in the dungeon, eating of it, and giving back in some way or another) was an absolute delight. It made me want to run a game with a similar level of systemic depth (which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, much like my Modern Fantasy game), but that will have to wait since I’ve already got enough games going on these days (and I lack the player-base required to start another group, so I wouldn’t be able to start another one even if I had the time).

In the meantime, though, I will continue to wait on the next season of the anime. Because on top of creating this incredibly interesting ecology that the characters in the show explore, it also introduced a lot of dramatic tension in the form of the party’s attempt to save their companion, the introduction of the Mad Mage, the introduction of a group of Elves (and maybe a human?) that are planning to take over the island where the dungeon is located to do some kind of thing with it. Ostensibly, they say the plan is to clear out the dungeon and end the threat it poses to the people living on the surface (as a town is sure to spring up around any dungeon that draws adventurers as heavily as this one days), but there’s plenty of reason to doubt that this is actually what they plan to do. There’s a lot of tension simmering under the surface between the so-called “black” magic, the ecology of dungeons, the sources of magic that fuel dungeons, and the history of the world that supposedly included devastation so cataclysmic that the two major powers (Dwarves and Elves) disarmed themselves and patronizingly stand in the way of any other species of people that wants to advance past a point those two powers deem is acceptable. AND there’s the chance that the protagonist party might actually get to the bottom of the dungeon, deal with the Mad Mage, and gain whatever reward is granted for doing so (I suspect that it might not be the promised kingdom from the opening of the show).

Also, speaking of openings, I think the opening for the first half of the first season might be my favorite opening ever. My favorite closing is still Jujusu Kaisen’s first closing theme, but Delicious in Dungeon’s first opening just blew past every single competitor the first time I saw it, so much so that I refused to ever skip it. I was alright skipping the second one most of the time, since it felt less… in-step with the show, maybe? It felt less relevant. I feel like the first opening was showing me something important and significant while the second one felt like the sort of thing you come up with to put in front of a show when you want to avoid showing any important details but need to change up the opening a bit since you feel like the details in the first one aren’t important anymore. I’m not sure I’d agree that the first opening isn’t relevant or important after the midway point and the first major reveal of the show, but I can’t do anything about this other than write about it here. Regardless, the first opening slaps and I really love this show and I think you will to. If you haven’t already watched it, I say give it an episode or two and if you don’t like it by then, you probably never will since the show only ever becomes more of what it already is. Also, the manga this show is based on ended with twenty-four volumes, which means we’ll probably see another season or two out of it at most, so you won’t have to wait forever to enjoy it all! Which is great! Things with endings are good. I like things that end. One Piece is great, but I started doing a full re-read of the entire series and as much as I enjoyed myself, I still got tired of it by around volume ninety, stopped reading for a bit, and haven’t gone back to it. Endings can really be good, sometimes, and I get the feeling that this series will end very well. After all, it has all its (amazing, absolutely stupendous) goals laid out already, so I’m sure we’ll get to see them all come to pass (or not) in a fairly timely manner.