sailor_meshi | I Have Been Bullied Onto The Bandwagon

I was gonna wait until I had more icons but all y'all are just so goddamn industrious that apparently that's gotta wait until I write my stupid info post. (Why yes, I would jump off a bridge, clearly there's some cool shit down there). Everyone give a warm, Fandom welcome to Senshi of Izganda, from the anime smash hit (and manga sensation), Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi!

A Very Serious Anime

Delicious in Dungeon takes place in a bog-standard fantasy world populated by your typical fantasy races: humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, with magic and dungeons (and dragons) galore! It follows a small band of adventurers as they traverse a magical dungeon in search of one of their fallen members, first to resurrect her, and then later, to rescue her from the power of the mysterious and magical Lunatic Magician.

Six years before the series begins, a dungeon appeared and an ancient, nameless man stumbled out of it, claiming to be the king of a golden kingdom that had been sealed away by a "Lunatic Magician" over a thousand years ago. With his dying breath he declared that anyone who could defeat the Lunatic Magician would be the rightful heir to the kingdom and then he turned into dust as the weight of a thousand years caught up with him. ("Amateur," snorts Liliana.)

Hearing that, a bunch of adventurers descended into the dungeon for miles and miles (put the words "golden" and "kingdom" together and you get a bunch of really motivated people), divided into floors, with each "floor" having a different environment and, more importantly, different monsters, which get larger and more dangerous as one descends. In the beginning, there was gold everywhere, the buildings covered with it and full of treasure, which, shockingly didn't last long because people started literally prying it off the walls. There are elven glyphs written on the walls, all in the same hand, assumed to be that of the Lunatic Magician. The Lunatic Magician is an incredibly powerful elven sorcerer who not only sealed the kingdom away into the dungeon, but also cast a Spell of Immortality on the environs. While the peasants are all scrabbling for gold, the mages of the world (particularly the elves) are far more interested in discovering the Spell of Immortality. Why settle for whatever gold you can steal from a monster when you can sell immortality to the highest bidders?

Too many paragraphs, not enough gifs

Our story begins when a band of adventurers are fighting a red dragon. Unfortunately, before the fight, they'd run slow on supplies and were distracted by hunger and exhaustion. The red dragon catches one of the party's mages, Falin, who casts a warp spell that teleports her entire party out of the dungeon before they have to watch her finish getting messily devoured, Upon awakening, party leader Laios is determined to return to the dungeon to rescue his sister and bring her body back to the surface for resurrection.

There are, of course, two problems with this. The first is that Falin had been swallowed by the dragon as they were warping out and is now in the dragon's stomach, which will make the resurrection very difficult because it follows a lot of rules that I made the mods read but edited out of this write-up, and you're welcome. The second problem is that by leaving all their supplies and packs deep in the dungeon, they don't have the money to outfit themselves for another trip into the dungeon - specifically, they're out of food, which was a main contributing factor to them losing the last time. It's very Renowned Explorers that way (which I wrote as Renowned Adventurers in my app and am now retroactively ashamed of myself).

(The third problem is that two of their party members peace out on going back down into the dungeon, especially with nothing, leaving only three members remaining: Laios, Marcille, the elven mage with a secret interest in black/forbidden magic and Falin's best friend, and Chilchuck, a ~~halfling, wait that might be copyrighted~~ Half-foot rogue who specializes in locks and traps, and who was paid in advance for this stupid fucking adventure and therefore cannot bail on the other two who are truly passionate about rescuing Falin.)

You too can learn to make quiche out of man-eating plants!

Eventually, the three of them come to an agreement: they will descend into the dungeon and they will just scavenge for food as they go, specifically: eating monsters. This is proposed by Laios because they need to get to Falin as quickly as they can and they don't have time to look for treasure just to buy supplies before descending properly. Also, as they discover later, he is also a monster fanboy who dreams about eating all the monsters and seeing what they taste like. But that's totally unrelated to his idea, promise!!!!!

They descend into the first floor of the dungeon, and manage to catch a giant scorpion and a walking mushroom and plan to turn it into hot pot, but...uh. They realize they have no idea how to..y'know, do that. Enter Senshi, a dwarf who has been living in the dungeon for a decade now and, wouldn't you know it, has a passion for cooking and eating monsters, in a nutritious, delicious, and fully sustainable way! They invite Senshi to come with them and, upon hearing that they're gonna go kill a red dragon, agrees to go because he hasn't had a chance to cook and eat one of those yet and FUCK YEAH GOALS!

Cooking this helmet makes sense in context, honest.

The series starts out light-hearted, very monster of the week as they hunt, kill, prepare, and eat different monsters while descending into the dungeon. However, it quickly turns more serious as they introduce politics, inter-racial tension, rivals and foils for the group, backstories and snapshots of the characters' lives, ethics and morality discussions, and what is an acceptable price to pay to save one person when the price is paid with the lives of others.

It's a surprisingly deep and moving series about a found family that eats monsters and it has no right to be this good (the chapter about Senshi's backstory made me cry, especially when I linked it to behaviors he demonstrated from even the earliest episodes), but here we fucking are.

Yes, I'm a sucker for found family shows, haters don't @ me

Senshi is a stereotypical dwarf, at least as far as appearance goes. He's 4'7, and very muscular and stocky, wearing what I presume is scalemail armor, the top half is hidden by his beard, leaving us only with the bottom half, which is something like an armored kilt. (Fun fact! The only upskirt shots we've seen in the anime so far are his! Equality!) He's 112, but has a dwarven lifespan, so he can expect to live to around 200ish, as dwarves and elves are from the long-lived races. That puts him somewhere around his mid-50s-ish in human years. His beard and hair are very long and luxurious, rippling down to his waist, and his mustache is very full, resting over the edge of his helmet, which he wears most of the time he's awake.

Look at this magnificent beard. Y'all could never

In the party, Senshi is basically the team mom. He sees it as his job to make sure that everybody is healthy and fed, frequently calling for meal breaks, and feels intense shame he cannot feed or provide for the party, particularly the ones he sees as "children." He is also quietly frustrated when he sees people eating terribly. So far it hasn't been anything like shaming people for eating "bad" food (ie desserts or the like, there's no body shaming), but just when they aren't eating properly for nutrition.

JUST LET HIM FEED YOU HEALTHY MEALS, PLS! WHICH HE IS MORE THAN HAPPY TO EXPERTLY PROVIDE!

Look at this hot pot!

Generally, he is very even-tempered and stoic, always happy to teach folks what he knows. Sure, he make grump and sulk sometimes, especially when he sees people using magic on things that could be done by hand with just a little more effort, but what makes him genuinely angry is people wasting food. He is also very strident about preserving the dungeon's ecosystem, chiding people when they seem to be taking too much or acting in such a way that it will cause deprivation and harm, not just to other adventurers but the monsters as well. He's huge into personal responsibility and sustainability; he lives on the third floor of the dungeon and he makes a point to clean the bathrooms found there (and dispatch the occasional zombie), using the nightsoil from the bathrooms as fertilizer for the gardens. Reciprocity and leaving things better than you find them/giving back when and where you can are big motivators for him. He's also creative and clever in his solutions for things. His gardens are actually three big earth golems that he has figured out how to manage and so uses them to grow vegetables, and has figured out a way to protect people from ghosts using some creatively interpreted religious knowledge that [i]also[/i] leads to some delicious sorbet afterwards! Yay!

He ain't afraid of no ghosts

He also has a big "everything is a teachable moment" vibes. At one point in the manga, he chides anoher character for her shitty table manners and stuff - but then he also slowly teaches her how to use forks and spoons when it's clear she's not used to them and explains why we wait for everyone to be ready to eat. Even when upset and angry, but he sees poor behavior as an opportunity to teach a better way.

Well, he tries. But look at these absolute idiots.

Senshi is also very monofocused. Another dwarf gets very angry at him because his weapons and helmet are all in terrible condition. He doesn't pay attention to caring for them because he doesn't consider them important. He received an heirloom adamantine shield and turned it into a cooking pot. He had a cooking knife forged out of mythril. He's willing to take great care and reverence when it's something he cares about, but otherwise, he's not particularly interested. There's an episode where he frustrates Chilchuck because he just blithely steps on the traps and things Chilchuck warns them about because he's just not paying attention. (He's thinking about how to use the boiling oil to deep-fry dinner.)

Oh, and of course, don't mess with his ~~children~~ party members, y'all. Just don't.

As a note to magic users: as mentioned above, he also doesn't like magic. He sees it as "cheating," making things too easy, and thinks that overuse/over-reliance will lead to someone's downfall. If you only ever light fires with magic, what are you gonna do when it's cold and you're out of magic? Freeze? He specifically dislikes resurrections, he feels that the dead should stay dead and that it's unnatural for them to come back, though he doesn't speak up much about this in regards to Falin. He also believes that magic is bad for the dungeon ecosystem. When Marcille uses magic to essentially shoot fish in a barrel, he scolds her for killing too many of the fish, which will cause other monsters to have less to eat later. He seems to see magic as fairly exploitative. But so long as you're not using magic on him or in some way that will unbalance the ecosystem, he'll just quietly judge, rather than pick a fight about it. If you've developed a rapport, he may try to suggest you do it without magic, but hey, he's not the boss of you.

Senshi will be coming to the island at some handwavy and unspecified point pre-canon; he'll open a random door in the dungeon and step onto Fandom. He'll be living in Apartment 6 in MCA, in an apartment that's far too big for just one person! Who needs that many rooms? It just seems wasteful, y'all. He's used to living in a one room shack, barely better than a lean-to, that he built himself.

MORE GIFS!

Honestly, the perfect man.

Liliana, Arden, and Navaan's information remains the same, even if I really should rewrite Liliana's. OH WELL.

And then there's me! I...feel like y'all know me well enough that I don't need to put anything here. So I'll close with a gif because it's my infopost and