This post mentions cannibalism and has spoilers for the first series of Dungeon Meshi, though I will try to keep the plot specifics vague.

The question of the relationship of the soul to the body, of what constitutes a living person and the implications of cannibalism within such metaphysics are important to the plot of Dungeon Meshi. In the dungeon souls are anchored to the corpses of the dead, allowing them to be resurrected as long as the body is not destroyed. The more intact the body is the easier this is and even if one has lost a lot of blood or even a whole limb it can all be safely reconstituted back into the body with the right spell as long as it’s nearby. And as long as nothing has eaten it. Consumption and digestion of a body breaks it down, deidentifying it and reconstituting it into the new self. While rewatching the finale of the first series I was reminded of something I once read about Christian theology¹. I do not remember where I read this originally but I will try to share my half-remembered version.

The Book of Revelation speaks of the resurrection of the dead. These days most Christians think of the soul as leaving the body when one dies, of the dead ascending into Heaven (or descending into Hell), of reuniting with your loved ones in the afterlife. Early Christian belief tended to have a much more literal interpretation of resurrection. The dead are dead and it is only in the last days that the faithful will, like Jesus, physically rise from the dead and live in the Kingdom of God, which is to be understood not as an metaphysical afterlife but as an actual kingdom on Earth that will be established by Jesus. As such it becomes important to keep the bodies of the dead intact. Cremation as a burial practise died off in Europe as Christianity rose to primacy, only becoming common again in the last century or two. If a body was destroyed, how could it be revived?

Even if one thought that, like in Dungeon Meshi, the constituent parts of the body, if scattered, could be reassembled and brought back together by the power of God for resurrection, what of cannibalism? If your body becomes part of my body, then, come the end of days, who has claim to the rotted meat that is to be resorted to life? Christian scholars took this idea seriously. To me this is a funny little intellectual exercise, but for many this question was important and existential. Can a body be destroyed in such a way as to sever someone from their flesh, putting themselves outside the reach of God, dooming them to oblivion? Dungeon Meshi ends up asking similar questions, though with the view of saving someone rather than damning them. I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising that an author who tries to examine and interrogate fantasy tropes and systems of magic, to take them seriously and think through all that they imply, might come to the same ideas and questions that theologians would when trying to seriously consider miracles and acts of God.

I don’t really have a great source and I didn’t want to spend time researching it, but a quick search turned up an old post on a Catholic blog that I am not going to take too seriously² but at least quotes Augustine of Hippo and Voltaire musings on this question, showing it to be an old one.

When I first watched this it took me a while to get over the overtly gamey aspects of the setting. It’s an acquired taste, y’know? Need to chew on it for a while. But there is a great satisfaction in seeing the concept of a dungeon being carefully examined, butchered, and picked part. To consider how it works and what needs to be true for it to exist and for it to continue to exist. Its economy, its ecology, its lifecycle. And there is a funny, compelling and interesting story woven throughout. It is not just wanking itself off about lore. The story is almost fractal in nature. Examining from the top down the world, the dungeon, the adventures in it, and the monsters that make their way into the adventurers’ stomachs. There are so many little things to pick up on and watch out for on rewatch. As a small but amusing one I don’t think that I noticed on my first watch: During the first intro there is a party trying to use a dog to harvest mandrakes.

I do think it feels like overly direct in adaptation at times. Awkward asides that interrupt the flow of conversations and various little visuals that I think work better in a comic than on television. And the way episodes are so clearly two chapters stabled together with more than often very abrupt and obvious transitions in the middle. Towards the end these start to feel like they’ve really gotten out of sync with the storytelling, with a run of episodes where the first half of one episode continues quite directly from the second half of the previous episode, only to change to something different in the second half that will be continued in the first half of the next. The Golden Country, griffin, and changeling episodes all follow this pattern with the somewhat underwhelming finale being confined to only the second part of episode twenty-four.

Still, I am very much looking forward to the second half of this show.

I have been setting up a few mementos of Ellie in my house. One of the things that I’ve gotten was some prints of her Discord avatar from the original artist, Aitor Sebastián.

Also pictured: A small print of a render of a crystal by Luna which I got at the same time.

I’ll post some more photos of my little memorial to her when it’s more complete.

I have pretty bad impulse control around eating. If there is food in front of me I struggle not to keep picking at it even if I’m already uncomfortably full and even if I don’t like it that much. I generally don’t keep sweets or alcohol in my house because I tend to binge through it if it’s there. Moderation is not something I am good at.

One thing Ellie used to do sometimes is hide chocolate bars around my house and then, when I was in need of a treat, tell me where to find one or pull them out herself. She was incredibly sweet. I found a Galaxy caramel bar in the back of the kitchen press this morning. One last birthday present from her.

And now I guess I just want to share stories about her. We watched a lot of TV together. Just cuddling on the sofa or in bed and watching television had honestly become of my favourite things. I came over to her place once when she was watching Evil, enjoyed it and then she rewatched it with me from the start and we carried through all the way to the end together. She talked about watching a video essay (I do not recall who by) about Miraculous Ladybug and how it matures and grows more complex each season and I basically downloaded it and made her watch the first few episodes as a joke and then just sort of fell into continuing it because I cannot resist sticking to a bit well beyond what is warranted. It was a bit of mindless fun to put on and cuddle and chat. We were most of the way through the third series.

Just feeling the warmth of her body against mine is one of the things that I miss most of all. I got her a rose gold Zippo lighter for her last birthday. She liked fire and burning little things. She could be a real little very tall gremlin. She had left the lighter in my house a few days before she died. I had it with me to give back to her when we found her body. Sometimes I light it for a while and then just feel the warmth of it in my hand. Somehow that feels like the closest thing to having her here again.

We were also rewatching shows we liked as teenagers together. She was showing me Wolf’s Rain, I was showing her Outlaw Star and we were revisiting The Big O together. She loved R. Dorothy. We had also started rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist together and had gotten as far as The Alchemy Exam back in September and then it took eight months till she was finally in the mood where she was happy to sit through Night of the Chimera’s Cry again just a few days before she died. Seeing as this has turned into the anime paragraph I will also say that we had both enjoyed Dungeon Meshi but had watched it separately as I was watching the dub and she was watching with subs. She loved Falin, too. She related a lot to robot girls and monster girls.

She was a big, lovely, autistic, dork and I cannot describe how wonderful it was watching her unmask and being earnest and silly about things she was self-concious about. I understand deeply the shame of trying to be normal, of burying stuff you are enthusiastic about, and I loved seeing her dig it all up. One time while we were hanging out at home I turned a corner to see her standing stimming in the middle of the living room, shaking her hands back and forth and bouncing a little. When she saw me she withdrew a little bit. She was a bashful about it but it was adorable. I wanted to encourage her. I asked her to keep doing it and when she demurred I cupped her head in my hands and begged her “Ellie, I need you to be more autistic!” She cringed into herself shyly from that but smiled and giggled and said, mock-ominously “You know not what you ask!” and I just kept saying it until she said she would. From then on “I need you be more autistic” became something I would implore when she was being self-conscious about herself.

She really liked making characters and just fucking around in games. I’d watch her play WWE 2K24 and she would often play a random match and not even particularly try to win. Just have fun and being playful with the narrative of a wrestling match, showboating, playing a referee and being as obviously biased as possible to the worse wrestler. She talked to me about some of her RPG characters. She had restarted Baldur’s Gate 3 a few times but had never actually gotten to the end. Her current character was named Drizz and she had a whole backstory thought out for him that she spent an evening explaining to me (with a lot of interruptions to explain details about the world because I do not know much about Dungeons & Dragons).

Drizz was a drow trans man, raised to be an assassin in a cult dedicated to Lolth, who was shunned for not wanting to be a woman, betrayed by his mentor and ended up living rough for a long time. There was a lot more detail but I confess my memory is very poor and I don’t know that she ever wrote any of this down. She played Drizz as angry, brash and socially inept, deliberately making obviously risky or poor choices with him that would piss people in the game off. She saw a bunch of scenes she hadn’t before with previous characters as a result. Also it’s definitely Drizz and not Drizzt. He gets mad if you call him Drizzt. He did not name himself after Drizzt and is annoyed at people who assume he did.

I am not good at conclusions. She was wonderful. She’s gone, but she was wonderful.

This lettering is annoying me because I know exactly what mistake was made when typesetting it and it’s consistent through the entire volume.

(the i should only be written with serifs when it’s a pronoun, but the font they used encodes this by having the capital i being seriffed, so they’ve ended up writing every sentence that starts with an i with a seriffed i)

I picked this up on a whim when I saw it in a bookshop that I have a gift voucher for. I’ve watched the show before and enjoyed it so what I’m mostly interested in here is how it works as a comic in comparison to that.

And I do think there’s a lot here that works better on page. Something I’ve never liked in anime is quick cutaways in the middle of dialogue for asides or inner monologue. I think these work better in a comic panel where it’s just a little bit of extra annotation on the page but is almost universally awkward in a show where it’s cut into the middle of dialogue and messes with the flow of conversation. Dungeon Meshi isn’t the worst offender but it’s still not great.

The diagrams that pop up when people are going on a bit of a monologue also work a lot better when you can take time to sit on them, and especially the panels where the meals are shown off after cooking. The extra details of listing out the ingredients and nutritional information really adds to it (and as for the show’s version of that, I am a hater when it comes to overly shiny anime food, shit looks like it’s made of plastic half the time).

That said, the actual cooking sequences do benefit from getting to be animated. Those little montages of methodical preparation are satisfying. The actors in the show are also really good. I am fully just hearing the actors from the show in my head as I read. Except Falin. I never liked her voice. Sorry. (I watched it in English, mostly).

Then there are some issues I take with how they’ve lettered this in English. They have used a comic font with a seriffed I on the uppercase and a sans serif I on the lowercase. This is a standard way of encoding a comic font but the serif I is only meant to be used for the pronoun I and acronyms but they have clearly just typeset it by typing in the sentences normally, so any sentence that starts with I has it seriffed when it shouldn’t be. They also use a different font for asides which doesn’t have a seriffed I.

And then the onomatopoeias are awkward. It seems like some of them have been redrawn but most of them they have just scribbled in a transliteration followed by an attempt at an English approximation in brackets under it. Maybe that’s the standard way to do it?—I don’t read much manga—and I don’t know what would be the ideal approach would be but this way strikes me an awkward middle-ground that clutters the page and slows down my reading.

I think I will just wait for the show to come out and watch it as it does rather than continue reading this, though.