#Ryōko Kui

[shimutsuki]

[salamifuposey]

sorry have a uhhh

chubby laios i guess

[bizarrobrain]

[creativenicocorner]

I don't have the words to acutely explain this desire.

But I would love to watch Laios Touden and Carrot Ironfoundersson interact.

There's something about them... you know?

LIKE????

Okay goofs aside, beyond Laios having carrots in his armor.

There's something about the pair of them. Their steadfastness, the earnestness, the 'is actually cleverer than they seem', the carrying acute amount of knowledge about what interests them (Laios: monsters. Carrot: rules and ordinances of Ankh-Morpork and Dwarf bread) the KINDNESS. OUGH

I could mention a very specific something else, but I don't want to spoil anime only watchers and those who have yet to read any Discworld book featuring Carrot (the watch series). If you know you know ;) 👑

I can't be alone in thinking this!! In seeing this!!

[olruggioofthetorch]

Sometimes I read these posts about autism in dungeon meshi and I need to ask some of you if you think Japanese people can't be autistic or know about autism.

[manga-and-stuff]

Source: Delicious in Dungeon Danjon Meshi ダンジョン飯

by Ryōko Kui

[kcrossvine-art]

Hi fellow adventurers!! A few weeks ago i caught wind of "Delicious in Dungeon". I'm not really an anime person, but I am a TTRPG, CRPG, and cooking person- . And holy shit. It is so good i  convinced my partner to binge read the whole thing. I'm caught up on dungeon meshi, the anime, and just yesterday i also finished dungeon meshi, the manga.

Its rare to come across a serialized story that is so thematically cohesive and knows its characters so well. All of the bonus content like the artbooks and monster tidbits are just the icing on top.

So, inspired by Ryōko Kui's writing and illustration I'm going to attempt to create a recipe for every single Delicious in Dungeon recipe!-

Today that means Huge Scorpion and Walking Mushroom hotpot is on the menu!

(As always you can find the cooking instructions and full ingredient list under the break-)

MY NAMES CROSS NOW LETS COOK LIKE ANIMALS

SO, “what goes in to a Huge Scorpion and Walking Mushroom hotpot?” YOU MIGHT ASKThis is one of the pricier dishes until we get to the kelpies and dragons of the menu-

Rock lobster tail

Porcini mushrooms

Shiitake mushrooms

Snow fungus

Small potatos

Fensi (glass noodles)

Water

OPTIONAL: your choice of dipping sauces

There was a crossover/promotional event in Shibuya which featured various realworld dishes from the series. They had one for Huge Scorpion and Walking Mushroom, but they used prawns.  while those cook better in a hotpot, they also didn't look enough like the scorpion for me, they also used udon noodles for the slime and a seaweed/kale(?) mixture for the algae. If you're looking for substitutes due to price or availability i would start with those ingredients.

AND, “what does a Huge Scorpion and Walking Mushroom hotpot taste like?” YOU MIGHT ASKI hope Senshi would forgive me for technically cooking the lobster outside the pot, once he tastes it.

Okay im always partial to veggies but wowowowowowowoowowowow the snow fungus and the mushrooms tasted soooooooooooo good in the lobster stock

A nice delicate layering of different flavors

Try to get a bite with the lobster meat and shiitake together, dip in butter then chili- trust me

Its up to you what texture you prefer if you want to put the noodles in at the end or put them in halfway through the meal. Either way dont go for eating those first as theyre very filling

I think this would pair well with a citrus drink, something light and clarifying

This would also pair well with being extremely high and hungry (if you feel safe cooking while inebriated lol) very calorically dense

For the trial run I did one lobster tail in the pot with everything else, and one lobster tail off to the side to be picked apart. The former is more in spirit with a hotpot, but it got rubbery as the meal went on and lost its nice taste. The latter may be a bit more work but all you have to do still is boil it and set it aside. I found it held up much better. It was also easier to get inside the shell.

. If you have hardshell maine lobster available, i think it would be superior to rock lobster (keep in mind crustaceans will get rubbery if cooked too long in the pot) . Green onions and/or lotus root would make excellent additions

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From getting the ingredients out to sitting down and eating, id say it took maybe 30 minutes max? It'd vary on how fast you can prep vegetables and get the various implements heated.

Hotpots are not something i do very often as i'm usually just feeding myself. I think thats why a hotpot makes perfect sense to start the series off. If you want to set the tone of "take care of yourself, eat food with others, and use what you have" (generally speaking) there is nothing more simplistic, flexible, and defeats-the-purpose-if-you-eat-it-alone than a hotpot. Gather around and let your friends bring ingredients to the pot if you want to fill your heart up extra full <3

I'm doing something different here because unlike previous recipes where i used a bunch of different sources and made my own recipe out of hodge-podging it, or just used another persons recipe entirely if they did it really well, i made this more whole-cloth based off of what i had available, what I could discover through research, and my existing knowledge. Instead of the recipe being 50/50 original, this one is more 20/80. So. I'll pass the final verdict off to you guys :D 

What would you rate this recipe out of 10? (with 1 being food that makes one physically sick and 10 being food that gives one a lust for life again.) Did you love it, did you hate it? What're your thoughts on what I could do different, and what would you have done instead?

🐁 ORIGINAL RESIPPY TEXT BELOW 🐁

Ingredients:

2 Rock lobster tails

3 Porcini mushrooms

2 Shiitake mushrooms

Snow fungus (a good handful, should rehydrate in the hotpot)

2 Small waxy potatos

Fensi (glass noodles)

Water/lobster stock

Method:

Lightly rinse all of your vegetables beforehand and let them dry.

Vertically slice the porcini mushrooms. Cut off and dice the stems of the shiitake mushrooms. You can slice the tops if youd like.

Peel and cube the potatoes, roughly an inch each.

For the lobster tails; Boil a pot of salted water. Keep the shell on. Weigh the largest tail and add 1 minute of cooking time for every ounce of weight.

When done, strain the lobster from the water. Pour the water into your hotpot as the base. Serve the lobster on the side so people can pick the meat out to dip into the hotpot.

Bring the hotpot to a simmer. Add the potato cubes, snow fungus, mushrooms, and noodles.

OPTIONAL: this wasnt in the show, but its fun having sauces on the side :) i had oyster sauce, dry seasoned chili dip, melted butter, and soy sauce available

[no-face-no-shame]

Interesting that this drawing was chosen as a cover for such important chapter. It could've been any of the main cast characters, but it's Mithrun. There is a special kind of gentleness with which Ryōko Kui treats him

[munchbuddi]

I do not understand the arguing about dungeon meshi shipping. shipping wars in the year of our lord 2024?????

bro, we are all playing with dolls in Ryōko Kui's cool ass sandbox! I'm not gonna go around policing the way people like to play in the sandbox. I might PRIVATELY think they are a lil silly or question if we both read the same manga, but that's SUCH a non-issue, it playtime, we are all playing around, it's FINE.

[yaoicel]

ダンジョン飯 / Dungeon Meshi / Delicious in Dungeon, Kui Ryōko

[mindlessmedic]

Thistle outfits ✨️

Based on these sketches by Ryōko Kui!

[lcs-scar]

OMG WHAT IS THIS EXTRA COMIC OF HOLM'S SISTER !!!!!

The meme thing I made is based after this comic!!

I think this is the only instance of seeing her apart from the sibling chart Ryōko Kui did, and there is mention of Kabru & her relationship in the Adventurer's Bible.

[bizarrobrain]

[strawberricakeandpie]

I can’t believe Ryōko Kui accidentally created a character that is such a (in my opinion) good representation of the autistic experience with Laios. Like I could go on about how he fits the diagnostic criteria for autism, but also how his experience interacting with others feels so similar to my own. Genuinely, Laios’s autistic traits appear so similar to mine and it makes me so happy.

TL;DR, Laios is so autism and I love him dearly.

[canmom]

Comics mini-Comints: Dungeon Meshi

reread dungeon meshi through to the end. still such a great manga. here are immediate thoughts - if I end up having time and energy I hope I can write something that goes deeper!

ironically i was only a few chapters from the end when I stopped keeping up, but I was struggling to remember all the characters and context, so reading it through in one go was definitely an ideal way to achieve maximum impact there.

ryoko kui does a very elegant job of handling a transition from 'silly antics' to 'big dramatic fantasy' while still keeping the central thematic throughline - eating and being eaten, belonging to an ecosystem, the significance of sacrificing others to achieve your own desires. a lot of setups pay off in a way that feels meticulously planned - and of course the crux of the final showdown revolves around characters attempting to eat each other, of course the big payoff is a huge feast that symbolically unites all the conflicting factions. it is maybe a bit too neat and happy for my taste, but it's undeniably tightly executed - it never loses sight of what it's about. especially compared to something like Frieren, it's an incredibly coherent serialisation, up there with e.g. Fullmetal Alchemist.

kui's art style deserves all kinds of praise - it feels effortlessly simple, but it clearly communicates all sorts of different shapes and body types and it's really fun to see her play around with remixing the different visual elements when she switches the races around. in general Laius's autistic monster loving ways clearly reflect kui's own deeply felt appreciation for all the ways people and animals live (accentuated further by all the extra sketches the scanlators tuck in). in a way you could kinda call it like Parts Unknown the fantasy manga.

the stakes of the final conflict are interesting - there is much to be said about the framing of 'desire' and its fulfilment, of this occult idea of 'the infinite'. lots you could put in relation to other manga, and also buddhism. (in particular I really want to develop a comparison to Made In Abyss, there are so many parallels, it just might be too spicy for tumblr lmao).

one thing I really like about it is how much its fantasy dungeon-exploring setting owes to D&D and other TTRPGs, rather than videogames. monster ecology has been a fascination of that game since the early days of Dragon magazine, and Kui sharply zeroes in on some of the intrinsic conflicts baked in to that fantasy milieu, notably the lifespan thing, while smartly avoiding the traps of 'evil races'. there's some really fun nods to the weirder monster manual entries. and in a story with so many characters and factions, it does a genuinely incredible job of furnishing everyone with understandable, reasonable motivations, conflicts drawn from their context just like the monsters are explained by their ecology.

and one thing that I particularly appreciate is like... how much it is able to simultaneously understand and sympathise with a character and also show us how and why they'd rub others the wrong way. it's impossible not to like our main group, they're all such charming dorks and the manga leads you along with all the crazy rpg party shit they do, but at the same time you definitely find yourself thinking 'guy's got a point' in the kabru chapters lmao. I'm projecting hard bc i don't really know a thing about ryōko kui but laius def feels like the sort of depiction of having an autism that you can only do if you've lived it.

but yeah, it's a fuzzy ending where it all turns out well. but what's the deeper thrust of it all? there's a funny moment where marcille is like 'maybe in the end our journey is about learning to accept death' and the grouchy old gnome guy completely laughs this off as naive, because death doesn't mean anything. and indeed their big plan pays off, and falin does indeed come back just fine. but still, through all of this it asks you to bite the bullet that being a living creature means eating to survive, at the cost of other creatures, with the other side being that one day you too will be eaten. in contrast to this honest way of being is the beguiling fantasy of infinity, where all your desires are immediately fulfilled - this is shown as a dangerous path of corruption that produces madness and manipulability. having limits and rubbing up against the wishes of others, or 'doing things you don't want to do' as izutsumi's arc puts it, becomes necessary for having some kind of definition as a subject. the thing that makes the demon concrete as an entity is a desire, or appetite, that can't immediately be fulfilled.

of course we can connect this to the idea of narrative conflict. a standard advice for putting together a plot is to ask what each character wants and why they can't get it. wanting something implies movement. and indeed over the course of this story, we see that while having too many desires fulfilled too readily leads to incoherence and callousness, equally a character who is left catatonic as their desires have been eaten by the demon must be reawakened to activity by finding a new desire.

it's kinda Buddhist innit. neither the opulence of the palace nor asceticism. desires are what tie you to the world. but mixed with ecology: what a creature does to find the energy to live is what defines its lifestyle, its form.

this is probably where I'd start talking about entropy gradients and shit if i wasn't typing this on a phone at 1:30am lmao.

but yeah - it's a powerful move to go from 'D&D monster recipe show sendup' to 'living with the inherently violent nature of being an organism fated to live in a finite sum game' and yet Dungeon Meshi makes it feel natural and convincing, while remaining tremendously charming and funny throughout. ryōko kui is definitely some kind of genius, and I can't wait to see what her next act is gonna be. it's all definitely making me appreciate the act of eating a lot more.

next story on my plate is probably The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, which sounds like it will present a very gnarly thematic contrast.

[manga-and-stuff]

Source: Delicious in Dungeon Danjon Meshi ダンジョン飯

by Ryōko Kui