Promising Manga/Anime Squanders Its Potential: What Went Wrong

Cineplay wrote a fluff-coated article about a Japanese Manga that seems to be about a gross subject of gobbling carnivores:

We live to eat; it sounds like a joke, but humans have an inseparable relationship with eating. In reality, if people do not eat, they die. To avoid death, one must eat. This simple proposition is transferred to the fantasy world in 〈Delicious in Dungeon〉, which is the comic I am introducing today. It is the debut work of the author Kuin Ryouko, who often shows crazy ideas in a calm art style, serialized from 2014 to 2023.

〈Delicious in Dungeon〉 centers around the story of Laios and his companions who re-enter the dungeon ‘Labyrinth’ to rescue Laios’s brother, who was eaten by a red dragon. Unlike other fantasies, their journey is quite realistic, as the question ‘What should we eat today?’ takes precedence over how to defeat enemies or escape traps. Since they need to find the red dragon before Laios’s brother is digested, they have no time to stop by the village to buy supplies, so they decide to continue their adventure by eating the monsters in the labyrinth. Yes, it is a story about ‘eating in a dungeon’ as the title suggests.

If the adventurers are eating the monsters themselves, that’s what I consider revolting here, sorry. What can be so “calm” about that? And do two wrongs make a right? Seriously, this is gross, made worse by that the story apparently goes for the “realistic” at the expense of good taste. It’s bad enough there doubtless manga in Japan with crude ideas. That this is considered okay even in Japan only takes the situation from worse to hopeless. Just like we could do without this kind of crudeness in USA comics, we also don’t need it coming from foreign comics either.

Originally published here