Delicious in Dungeon, also known as Dungeon Meshi, premiered on Netflix on January 4, 2024. A rare weekly release for the streaming platform, the anime about adventurers eating monsters as they explored a dungeon became a quiet hit in the winter season. This season being a double cour, we’re now firmly in the second batch of episodes for Delicious in Dungeon’s first season, and the show is already going from good to great!
Though already a beautifully produced and hilariously written show, DinD’s seventeenth episode “Harpy; Chimera” lays the show’s themes bare and dial’s up that worked in the show’s opening episodes.
To back up a little, Delicious in Dungeon followed the adventures Laios, Marcille, Chilchuk, and Senshi as they ventured into the dungeon to save Laios’ sister, Falin.This lost member of the party was eaten by a Dragon on a previous trip into the dungeon, because the party failed eat and rest properly before fighting it. This made the opening episodes themes on the importance of physical and mental wellness abundantly clear. Even if our heroes were in a race against the clock to save Falin, taking time to nourish their minds and bodies through cooking allowed them to remain healthy and capable while on their mission.
However, the opening batch of episodes persistently hinted at larger issues going on with this world and its characters. Why would the Mad Mage who created the dungeon make it so easy to revive the adventures who parish inside of it? Why are the differences between fantasy races, and especially their lifespans, mentioned so often? Why are Laios’ usual shonen protagonist earnestness and hyper fixation on monsters so off putting to other characters?
While I won’t spoil the rest of the series here, the answers lie in Delicious in Dungeon being so much more than an anime about people eating monsters while on an adventure. We’ve reached a turning point in the anime, and the themes it tackles are about to become much more compelling and varied. Learning how to accept death, how to balance your ambition with the needs of others, and how to fit into a community as a neurotypical person are all prominent themes in the rest of Delicious in Dungeon’s run.
Of course, that original focus on wellness will still be present and is going to ramp up too! There’s about to be an entire, fan favorite, character who takes the importance of self and communal care to the extreme. All the while, we’ll get some of the most novel and interesting worldbuilding we’ve seen in a fantasy anime in a long time.
If the shocking developments of “Harpy; Chimera” felt like a turning point in the show to you, that’s because they were. Delicious in Dungeon is about to explore ideas and subjects not commonly seen in anime, and become even more charming in the process. In short, the anime just reached the part of the manga that elevates the series to something unforgettable, and anime fans should get ready for this show to become the best anime airing in any given week.
The Delicious in Dungeon anime is streaming on Netflix, and the manga is handled by Yen Press outside Japan.
