Last weeks thread - 16 Comments
Dungeon Meshi is a well liked manga, and an adaptation by Studio Trigger is now airing. If you haven’t picked this one up, consider joining us. Both for fun and as a way of contributing to activity on Lemmy.
Episodes are available to stream on Netflix.
Last weeks episode ended on quite a cliffhanger, with Laios holding his sisters skull. We now find out how that turns out, with Marcille revealing what she’s really an expert in.
Forbidden magic. The dark arts.
Using an illegal spell, she brings back Falin from nothing but bones, using the flesh of the dragon to fuel the spell.
And so, this arc concludes. With the gang, now joined by Falin, cooking up some goddamn dragon!!
Remember not to spoil anything if you’re a manga reader, but feel free to elaborate on tidbits of lore that may not be coming through in the adaptation.
It is very, very rare that a piece of media brings me to tears. My having read the manga and being so fond of these characters likely helped, but seeing Laios and Marcille be relieved when the resurrection spell is successful, made me cry. It happened again towards the end of the episode when Laios hugs his sister after she healed his leg and he tells her off for getting herself killed saving the party.
What a culmination. The music and the voice acting especially made this episode emotional and special. Falin is back! What a relief! And she is absolutely adorable!! Like brother, like sister!
And boy the Farcille shippers are eating well tonight!
Time to start Falinposting along with my Marcilleposting!
Wait… Anyone else having flashbacks to the beginning of Fullmetal Alchemist? This can’t be this easy…
What manga chapter is this…? checks notes 34? … Out of 97?!
…
Oh.
I guess that dark elf wasn’t part of the paintings…
Farcille shippers
I had thought that this was fairly explicit from way back when Marcy was so insistent on how special Falin was to her in episode 1 and why she needed to accompany Laios back into the dungeon. I had always thought from that point on that Marcille had viewed Falin as more than just a party member. Perhaps that is just my anime/manga riddled brain seeing yuri in places where it doesn’t need to exist though.
Like brother, like sister!
Her getting excited about eating monsters was great. Up until that point I was curious if there were going to be any lasting effects to her personality, but the way she was just totally on the same wavelength as Laios in that scene made me realize lasting effects were likely physical rather than psychological.
Aside from Shuros already mentioned infatuation with Falin, romance isn’t really a thing in the show.
But I do love how openly the characters show affection for each other. It’s adorable and heartwarming.
There’s also an age gap between Falin and Marcille that isn’t too pronounced, but the school flashback along with Marcille going “you’ll always be my little girl” makes me think Marcilles feelings are somewhat maternal.
Similar stuff is explored in Sousou no Frieren, where for a long-lived person, the lives of other races fly by almost too fast for them to have a chance to matter.
But Marcille is very different from Frieren, it’s clear she gets very involved in the lives of shorter-lived races. Loving openly and intimately, even if not romantically.
I suspect it’s likely she knew from the start that her secret talents would be needed to revive Falin then and there, when and if they found her digested remains. She was ready to do whatever it takes from day one.
She’s an elven mage who was considered a prodigy, once, but now she’s dungeon delving who knows why. She could be off being a respected scholar somewhere, but her choice of research subject may have burned some bridges with her own kind.
At 50, she’s had plenty of chances to love and lose a lot of people. Right now, the Touden siblings are her family, she’s closer to Falin, but Laios is important to her, too. She really doesn’t want to lose the Toudens, likely dreading their inevitable aging to death.
Alright! Falin’s back! Mission accomplished! Everybody lived happily ever after, right? Right???
One of the things I find interesting about how this season has played out is that this episode feels like a pretty satisfying conclusion. If this was a typical 12-episode single-cour anime, this would feel like a perfectly natural point to end the season. It would have given the casual viewer a relatively satisfying conclusion and the more interested viewer with some really interesting plot hooks to move some manga sales. I don’t really know if I have a point with this, but just found it was interesting how neatly the story lined up with a typical seasonal anime’s pace. In any case, we are going to dive straight into part 2 next week. I will be sad to see one of my favorite EDs disappear, but alas…
Welp, now that we have Falin back, there is something different about her… There are two things that I think are pretty non-typical about Falin’s resurrection:
- The “Dark Magic” ritual that Marcille uses
- The flesh used for the ritual came from a dungeon monster rather than livestock that is typically used
I suspect that both of these are going to be important in unraveling what is different about her (I don’t have much to speculate about #1 yet). We have had a couple breadcrumbs already about how magic flows and works in a dungeon, a topic that Falin was an expert in per the school flashback. I suspect that her new proficiency with magic like not needing to chant, is due to her body having been constructed from dungeon monster meat. This also ties into the whole cooking conceit of the show. A recurring theme this whole time is how novel and unusual it is to consume monster meat. Now, Falin has taken this to the next level by having a body constructed using monster meat, perhaps letting her channel the magic in the dungeon much easier.
The other side of this coin, I suspect, was hinted at this episode. When they were preparing the ritual, Laios asked about whether the ritual would revive the monsters as well and Marcy helpfully explains that monsters aren’t cursed in the same way humans are, so they can’t/won’t be revived. I am guessing now that Falin is made from monster stuff, that her soul might not be bound to her body in the same way it was before.
Finally, I am curious where the gang goes from here. Do they actually backtrack their whole way through the dungeon to the surface? Do they go hang with the orcs again? Maybe help Senshi be the janitor of that other floor for a while? Not sure what the plan is going forward, but I am sure we will find out next week.
What’s coming next has already had its groundwork laid down. I’ve been pointing out the winged lions all over the place, for example :D
But there are more blatant hints, why was the dragon active? Why was it roaming the fifth level city, which isn’t its normal habitat? It caused the orcs to get displaced to the third level. Why was there a Kraken loose on the fourth level?
Who is the dark elf?
The focus on the story has been on saving Falin, but all the while, it seems to have coincided with a change in the dungeon itself.
Could it have something to do with the treasures starting to run dry, causing adventurers to delve deeper and deeper? Why does the elven nation suddenly want the land the dungeon is on back? Does Mr. Tansu really expect to decipher an immortality-spell from its secrets?
…
I fucking love this franchise.
I’m going in to this series blind, so I have no idea what’s going to happen (the living armor blew my mind) but the revival!! It was so cool, I love when they change art styles. I thought she was going to stay red at first because red dragon, glad I was wrong 😆
Also wtf the kid in the door 👀 the brother said he wouldn’t keep secrets from the group, that’s a pretty big one!
I thought she was going to stay red at first
I had this thought as well! I had thought she became like a blood golem or something. Glad to know I wasn’t alone.
The kid is dead.
Falin can see and speak to the dead (as seen in several flashbacks). The child is a spirit, roaming the house she once lived in.
Laios and Falin aren’t really keeping a secret, he’s just used to Falin talking to something he can’t see.
Dungeon Meshi - episode 12
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Skull-Bones 205 + Red Dragon Blood ――――> Falin
Are we sure this is how the alchemical reaction goes? I think there should be something leftover.
Speaking of dark forbidden magic, I had no idea that lemmy-flavored markdown could do notation like that. Seems to only render right in lemmy-ui though. None of the mobile clients I tried show it correctly.
It’s really convenient that the dungeon has some kind of magic that keeps souls around.
Finding the raw materials to trade in for that is what really tripped up the Elric brothers.
