What I'm Watching: Dungeon Meshi
I'm working on some meatier projects, but while those are still cooking, I wanted to get out some shorter posts. I've been seeing a lot of stuff lately that seems like it might make its way into my own personal list of inspirations, so I thought I'd start a series about "What I'm Watching" or "What I'm Reading."
I recently started watching the show Dungeon Meshi (or Delicious in Dungeon), and it's pretty enjoyable. I'd heard a lot about it in the past couple years, even from people who don't seem to be super into TTRPGs, which is interesting considering how niche I'd expect a show based on classic D&D tropes to be.
I think some people in more OSR-y spaces are alienated by the way that official D&D seems to be moving towards an increasingly reified product powered by recycling its own tropes.1 I don't know that this is necessarily a new phenomenon with D&D, honestly, but I understand why people think it's, at the very least, a bit silly and not to their tastes. By this token, I could see people bouncing off of Dungeon Meshi, because it is set in a world where "dungeoncrawling" is an established occupation, to the point that some characters have apparently been resurrected multiple times. However, I think Dungeon Meshi is interesting as a work of D&D-derived fiction primarily because it tries to explore the ways that a dungeon ecosystem would actually work, specifically through the lens of thinking about how humans (or dwarves, elves, etc.) would extract nutritious food from such an ecosystem. It has some deep cuts, too: I've been listening through Monster Man at the same time, and I listened to the episode about goldbugs, a monster I had never heard of before, mere days before seeing goldbugs appear in Dungeon Meshi.
I think the show also contributes back to the source from which it's taking, in a way. It has cool ideas for how dungeon life can be made more interesting: the episode about living armor (spoilers) has them not being magic constructs but a kind of mollusc which lives in the cracks between plates of armor. One of these molluscs attaches to a character's sword and is later responsible for giving the sword a kind of intelligence, which is a neat take on the "intelligent sword" trope.
Finally, I think the show's existence is good as a tool for pitching people on OSR-style play. The most popular media about D&D are these really heroic, often railroad-y high production value campaigns using 5th edition, and Dungeon Meshi comes across to me as scrappier, more sandboxy, more lethal, and more like a collection of random encounters that only form a coherent narrative after the fact. I'm only about a quarter of the way into it, so I'll have to see if it continues to hold up.
See also Star Wars.↩