‘Delicious in Dungeon’ Is the Gayest Ungay Show I Have Ever Seen
Image; Studio Trigger
If you haven’t seen the fantasy dungeon crawler and cooking show Delicious in Dungeon (2024-present) or Danjon Meshi, based on Ryoko Kui’s manga of the same name, I highly recommend it.
Adapted by Studio Trigger, the fantastic minds behind Little Witch Academia (2017) and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022), the story follows a group of adventurers descending to the lowest levels of a dungeon to rescue a fallen party member in the thrall of a mad mage. The show has a fascinating mystery for those who like such intrigue, and it also has good writing and incredible humor.
Anything that brings emotional weight to whether a meal uses Griffin or Hippogriff meat is solid writing in my book.
The energy is also very queer. There is a tenderness to how these characters interact that is so unlike a lot of action and adventure media, and that frankly speaks to how a lot of heterosexual characters lack the emotional connection and empathy so crucial to much of queer media.
The gay women
For me, this show just instantly gave off queer energy. I would see a frame of characters Marcille Donato (Emily Rudd/Sayaka Senbongi) and Falin Touden (Lisa Reimold/Saori Hayami) blushing in a bathtub or an introductory scene of all our leads cuddling next to one another and immediately “get” queer vibes.
Image; Studio Trigger
I am not the only one who thinks this way. The queer fandom surrounding this show is honestly intense, and a quick internet search will reveal tons of queer fan art, merch, memes, and fan videos. As The Geeky Waffle writer Hope Mullinax wrote over discovering one favorite scene in the Marcille-Falon fandom:
“As a queer woman myself, I found it relatable to a character I didn’t even know. It was that one moment that made me go, ‘Okay, I’m going to watch this show.’”
One thing you will notice is how unexploitative Delicious in Dungeon feels. The female characters are depicted to be more than just objects for a male power fantasy. Returning to the bath scene we mentioned earlier, what is so refreshing is the lack of exploitation. As Jade King writes in their article for The Gamer:
“The bath scene is a common occurrence in anime and manga, often used to band all the female characters together in a steamy room filled with convenient angles designed to show off boobs and butts. It has been a staple for decades, so when Dungeon Meshi puts two of its most beloved characters in a room together, your average joe could be blamed for expecting the same to happen here. But it doesn’t, instead subverting our expectations by putting a deliberate focus on the words and body language of Marcille and Falin as they celebrate a chance to spend more of their lives together, relieved they’ve both survived.”
In essence, the narrative treats its women characters as people, not objects to be ogled over.
The portrayal of women in Delicious in Dungeon contrasts with a lot of anime, particularly Shonen (e.g., Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, etc.) or the even more mature Seinen anime (e.g., Ghost in the Shell, Parasyte, etc.), where a lot of the women in them are framed exploitatively. Women characters will have frequent boob and ass shots, and pervert characters like Sanji from One Piece will be around to harass one or all of them.
Even in Shoujo anime, which is theoretically geared toward young girls, issues of representation are not uncommon. The writer Kadesh Lauridsen had this to say about the femme classic Sailor Moon (1995–2000), which is often heralded for its positive representation:
“While the female representation in Sailor Moon reaches beyond expectations by empowering feminine traits instead of belittling them, this representation is immediately taken away once you realize that the young female protagonists are being exploited sexually. This demonstrates that even when a show has an extremely powerful example of female representation it still has some underlying tones of satisfying its limited male audience.”
For a lot of anime, there is a constant balancing act between empowering female characters and also satisfying the men in the room.
The men
Anime men are often stereotyped as tough. Shonen anime has many oblivious airheads ready to willpower through a situation with eternal optimism (think Monkey D. Luffy from One Piece). Seinen characters often hold a “realistic” pessimism or misanthropy that is portrayed as reserved or cool. Isekai characters (e.g., a genre for characters who are transported to another world) are frequently overpowered to the point of Godhood (see Overlord).
In the words of Myan Mercado in a CBR article on anime stereotypes:
“It’s a rule of thumb that the hero will be the strongest or smartest character in their anime and defeat any antagonist that directly challenges them. They might struggle at first or they might not make the best choices, but they’re the protagonist for a reason. Victory is essentially guaranteed thanks to the ridiculous power scaling trope.”
Of course, these are merely trends, not absolute facts.
This is also not an anime-specific problem. While the tropes surrounding masculinity and femininity in media will vary by medium and culture, it is not uncommon in America for many male protagonists to be overly confident and skilled: that is the template for most action thrillers. James Bond, Jason Bourne, and more are often depicted as reserved and “cool.”
The men in Delicious in Dungeon do not meet this standard mold for action and adventure heroes. The fighter character Laios (Damien Haas/Kentarō Kumagai), arguably the lead, is the opposite of “cool.” His special interest in “cooking monsters” has him so oblivious to situations that he can unknowingly self-sabotage his goals.
There is one painful scene in the episode Harpy/Chimera where Laios learns that someone he thought was his friend has hated him the entirety of their friendship because of the warrior’s inability to pick up on “obvious” social cues.
Laios is not oblivious to the point of being toxic, however. He learns to apologize when he does something wrong and to communicate his feelings, which feels novel for a lot of anime. He is not the only one, either. From the dwarf Senshi (SungWon Cho/Hiroshi Naka) coming to respect the rogue Chilchuck’s (Casey Mongillo/Asuna Tomari) skillsets to the mage Marcille Donato learning to accept that her booksmarts aren’t everything, many episode arcs are about these characters realizing that some assumption they had about their companions is wrong and then apologizing for it.
And that’s what makes this show refreshing. It’s not a role reversal in which the men in the show are subordinate to its female characters, but a world where all genders are treated with a basic level of empathy—a bar that sadly is so far removed from how gender norms are typically depicted in media.
Hence its allegedly queer vibe.
A hungry conclusion
Delicious in Dungeon has the sensibility of a queer show without any openly queer romantic, sexual, or asexual text to support that assumption. While that might change if the text becomes less ambiguous, right now, I think this vibe speaks more to the norms of heterosexual and cisgender characters in film and television being usually so unappealing that some queer people lump the opposite of that binary in with queerness.
Yet queer people do not have a monopoly on emotional intelligence, and Delicious in Dungeon is not the only media that has broken ground on having emotionally well-rounded anime characters. I am a personal fan of Seirei no Moribito (2007) — the story of a woman bodyguard in feudal Japan protecting a prince — but a lot of women writers have been adding to the genre in noteworthy ways for years.
Unless Studio Trigger makes any last-minute surprises in its later seasons (much to Marcille and Falin stan’s glee), it will most likely remain textually “unqueer,” and that’s okay. I am thrilled, more and more, that we are getting examples of men and women being portrayed in emotionally complex ways that are not exploitative or unkind.
It makes such stories utterly delicious in my book.