Delicious in Dungeon, Vol. 01

This first volume is lighthearted and fun, and funnier than I expected. One particular joke made me laugh out loud even though I was alone.

The portrayal of the one (1) female character among the party of otherwise all men was frustrating; as the only woman, she is therefore the character who is melodramatically disgusted by eating monsters, who is insecure, who is always flagging behind the men and compelling the party to stop for a rest, etc. It's not great.

There is some hope that this might improve in future volumes, maybe, and at least her squeamishness also functions to make her the "relatable everyhuman" character for the reader, whose reactions are likely to be more like hers than like the other characters'.

In a vacuum, I do like her well enough. If the book had more than one female character, and said female characters had as much variety among them as the men, she could potentially be fine as a character. But she's the only one, and her portrayal is so different to the mens' in such a blatantly and stereotypically gendered way, so she just comes off as trope-tastic token girl #3000, at least in this first volume. And this is so heavy-handedly so that it's hard to see her as an individual underneath that.

Regardless, I was able to overlook that aspect to enjoy the manga overall, and I'm intrigued and hopeful about the subsequent volumes. This one is very much episodic - fight monster! Now eat monster! Yum! - which is enjoyable in its own right, but I hear tell that the series does develope some sort of cohesive story later on.

I recommend this for anyone who thinks the premise sounds fun, and especially for cooking and D&D nerds.

The dungeon is swarming with monsters. That means it has an ecosystem. Where there are carnivores, there are herbivores for them to eat! There are plants that herbivorous monsters eat and water, light, and dirt to nourish those plants! In other words: Humans can sustain themselves in the dungeon, too!

I continue to be in the mood for comic/manga-shaped stories that resemble D&D games, and it made me recall this series that has been on my TBR forever. I was a bit worried it would be kind of gross with all the monster cooking, but with very few exceptions, it's not. It's actually really fun and entertaining.

I did find that it read more like a LitRPG than a fantasy adventure, even though it's technically not one. But there was just so much focus on the mechanical side of things: the levels of the dungeon, the casual resurrections, the monster-fighting strategies and monster "stats." Between all that and the elaborate step-by-step recipes, I'd even say it felt like reading a fictionalized setting book. Especially since the characters were rather one-dimensional for the most part. It took over half of the book for them, starting with Marcille, to begin displaying more than a single trait/skill per character. 

Still, in spite of the above, reading this manga was a rather enjoyable experience, due to all the monster mythology and all the action scenes. I'm likely to continue the series the next time I'm in the mood for something like this.