this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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If you like realism in a fantasy setting, Delicious in Dungeon absolutely delivers. They take world building to a whole new level of detail.
It's a bit light on the high level stuff like global politics and history. But for an example of the level of detail they went for (keeping it vague to avoid spoiling anything), one problem they solve involves a character knowing how dragons are able to breathe fire. Even though they have magic in this world, they still came up with a plausible physical mechanism for how dragons breathe fire and wove it into the plot.
At another point, a character gives advice about best practices if you're about to turn into stone.
meh. if magic conforms to physics, it's not magic. magic has no rules because it's magic.
That's what I mean, though! They had a world that included magic, so they could have hand waved the whole fire breathing as just a magical thing dragons do (just like pretty much every other piece of media that includes fire breathing dragons), but instead came up with a way that would (theoretically) work with real world physics.
and now dragons just became boring. take the magic away, and you, well, take the magic away.
i like mythic fantasy, not sci fi fantasy. if you consider magic to be a form of 'hand waiving', then maybe you don't really like mythology.
A dragon is still just as formidable of an opponent whether its fire is summoned magically or is the result of using a spark generated by striking something on its tongue against its teeth to ignite oil produced in an organ that all undigestable things from the digestive tract end up in.
And it didn't upset me that it was summoned or created by magic and bound by magic, nor has it ever upset me when a story didn't bother to dive into the details of how the dragon can make fire. I was just impressed that they did.
my point is that the dragon just becomes a beast with napalm sacks in this case. dragons are a mythotype (i made that word up) that are inextricably linked to something deep in the psyche of man - something that has been there since before written history across multiple cultures. that's special. that's an insight into who we are. that's more than just 'big lizard with fire breath'. they have an esoteric quality to them that makes them purely magical to me, and to make them anything less than that just cheapens them into something flimsy and 2 dimensional.
I'll have to check it out, thanks!
I do appreciate realism, but I think I care more that magic (or technology) use is proportional to its impact on the plot. For example, I love hard-scifi stories, but only where the details truly matter for the plot (e.g. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) and not as much where it distracts from the plot. I also don't mind totally unrealistic settings, provided the magic/tech isn't needed to drive the plot (e.g. The Wheel of Time 1&2 is more concerned with character development than how the magic actually works).
It's hard to gauge where this one would fall in that regard tbh. The plot is written around the level of detail and kinda even feels secondary, like it's just there to give them a goal to work towards while the show itself is about a party navigating their decision to just cook and eat monsters they defeat in the dungeon instead of buying rations.
The only thing I don't like about Delicious in Dungeon is that there's not enough cooking. Maybe Senshi could teach us about preserving food in various ways - pickling, brining, salting, smoking, maybe even canning - in future episodes.
Even better if it happens accidentally due to some monster just being a monster around some food they initially think is ruined but then realize was just changed.
Yeah! Maybe there's a monster plant that makes vinegar and it gets on some onions and cucumbers