Real World Cultural and Linguistic Influences in Delicious in Dungeon - Chapter 4 - room_surprise - ダンジョン飯 | Dungeon Meshi (2024)

Chapter Text

The Northern Continent is an extremely cold place with very few people living there. Over half the land is covered in perpetual snow. The majority of its inhabitants are tall-men and other short-lived races. It has been strongly influenced by dwarven culture.

Magic users are often persecuted unless they belong to a respected organization (such as the government or a school) and, likewise, gravekeepers (who are normally magic users) are looked down upon.

Based on what we’ve seen of tall-man culture in the Northern Continent, they appear to be a combination of various Germanic cultures, which they get from the Northern and Eastern Continent dwarves. There appears to be a Mediterranean influence in the southwestern part of the continent where Marcille is from, which seems to come from the Western elves.

Laios is the main character of Dungeon Meshi, a twenty-six year old dungeon explorer from the Northern Continent. His sister Falin being eaten by the red dragon is the inciting incident that starts the story of Dungeon Meshi.

Before Falin was eaten, Laios was an awkward loner that had trouble communicating with people. He was antisocial and quiet, gullible and easy to take advantage of, and frequently got scammed by other adventurers. He had no concrete life plan, and though Laios knows that continuously going into the dungeon isn’t a viable lifestyle, deep down, he hopes if he keeps going into dungeons, someday he will be turned into or eaten by a monster. Then Falin will be free to live her life and not be tied down to Laios. He feels guilty for “leaving” Falin when they were children, but it’s really Laios that needs Falin the most, rather than the other way around.

After Falin was eaten, Laios was no longer able to hide behind his sister, and so his real personality began to come to the forefront. He loves monsters, and has always fantasized about eating them even though they are considered unclean by many people and unacceptable to eat.

Laios repeatedly visualizes himself as a dog or wolf rather than a person, he feels closer to the family dogs than his own father, and one of his greatest skills is having an impeccable hunting dog impression.

LAIOS: AN OMINOUS NAME

Laios (Λάϊος) is an ancient Greek name. Sometimes it is translated as Laius, but these are both spellings of Λάϊος, which can also be transliterated as Láïos.

Laios comes from λαιϝός, from Proto-Indo-European lehiwos, and can mean left (the opposite of right), awkward, and it’s also the name of the blue rock thrush in Greek.

Laios is a character who has experienced extreme social ostracism multiple times in his life. He has an obsession with monsters, difficulty making friends, avoids physical contact, and has trouble understanding social nuance. A common interpretation from western readers is that he is autistic, though Kui has not told us definitively whether or not this is true.

Left has historically been considered a “bad” direction, in many cultures the left hand is used for cleaning yourself after defecation, while the right hand is used for eating, so across many languages left has the connotation of being “bad” or “wrong.” As a result, children who are left-handed used to be forced to become right-handed, though this form of discrimination has faded in the modern day.

Laios’s name meaning “left” hints at the fact that he is considered “wrong” by the people around him, and though he doesn’t appear to be left-handed in the manga, the historic way left-handed children were forced to become right-handed reminds me of the way that autistic children are sometimes forcefully “trained” to alter their behavior to appear more neurotypical, often leaving them badly traumatized as a result of this abusive treatment.

Laios meaning “awkward” doesn’t really need further explanation, Laios is indeed awkward.

In the real world, Laios is obviously not a name people give to their children, because it has many negative associations. It’s a name for vile characters in stories, not a real person. It would be like naming your child “Horrible Guy” or “Wrong Man.”

So I think logically we should assume that in the Dungeon Meshi universe, the name “Laios” doesn’t have these same negative connotations, since if it did, every character that meets Laios would think “Your parents must have really hated you to give you a name like that!”

Maybe in-universe, Laios means something similar to the real world meaning, but in a more positive way, such as “independent thinker”, “follows his heart even if it’s difficult”, or “forges his own path.” This is just speculation though.

FOREIGN CULTURE: AN ELVEN NAME?

If my theory that Greek is a Western elven culture in Dungeon Meshi is correct, that means Laios’ father gave him, and two of their dogs elven names. Elven names might be considered good luck, prestigious, or helpful if you ever have to do business with elves.

Though the Touden village’s culture appears to be a combination of Northern and Central European, we know that Laios’ father likes to read and seems to be aware of foreign mythology based on how he named their dogs, so it’s not impossible that he picked a foreign name he found in a book for his son.

Also, the Touden village isn’t that far from where Marcille is from, which appears to be a fantasy version of Italy/France… So the Touden village probably is aware of and has contact with Mediterranean-like tall-man cultures, which appear to have been influenced by the Western elves.

There are two famous Laios-es: a Cretan man who tried to steal from the gods, and the father of Oedipus.

STEALING FROM THE GODS, AND BEING TRANSFORMED INTO A BEAST AS PUNISHMENT

On the island of Crete, Zeus was born in a cave full of bees, which helped to nurse him. The cave became a sacred place that no god or mortal was allowed to trespass upon.

One day, four friends, Laios, Celeus, Cerberus, and Aegolius went into this cave, wearing bronze armor to protect them from the bee stings. They gathered up a great amount of honey, but before they could escape, they saw the bloodstained swaddling clothes of Zeus, hidden inside the cave.

Zeus was ready to strike them down with lightning for their impious actions, but because killing the men inside the sacred cave would be an even worse defilement than their trespassing, Zeus turned them into birds instead.

Laios became the blue rock thrush, Aegolius became an owl, Celeus became a woodpecker, and Cerberus became a kerberos, an unidentified type of bird. All of these birds are thought to be effective methods of divining the future, because they have seen the blood of Zeus.

This is interesting in several ways. The cave in the myth was in Crete, which is the place that the minotaur myth and the word “labyrinth” originates from, and the home of a mysterious ancient civilization that predates the mainland Mycenean Greeks. Labyrinth is the word Kui uses throughout Dungeon Meshi to refer to the dungeons in the original Japanese, and many elements of the Dungeon Meshi story are clearly inspired by the minotaur story. I’ll go into this in more detail in Chapter 12, Elven Culture.

The mythical Laios enters the cave with three companions, similar to how Laios returns to the dungeon to save Falin with three people: Marcille, Chilchuck and Senshi. They later gain Izutsumi, but at first it’s just the four of them. Perhaps Marcille is the screech owl, wise and with a shrill cry, Chilchuck is the woodpecker, an industrious and hard-working craftsman, and Senshi is the mysterious unknowable bird.

The mythical Laios entered a forbidden cave to try to steal sacred honey, and honey is one of the substances that ambrosia, the divine food of the Greek gods, is often compared to. Was this sacred honey ambrosia? Did Laios think if he ate the sacred honey, he would become immortal? It’s unclear to me what Laios and his friends hoped to gain by stealing the honey, but it must have been important enough to trespass in the cave.

Laios in Dungeon Meshi enters the dungeon, which is similar to a cave in many ways, and which the Ancients have tried to block off so people cannot enter and the demon cannot escape. Laios wants to bring his sister Falin back to life, something Marcille accomplishes with forbidden magic and her staff, Ambrosia.

In the English translation of the manga, when Laios and his party prepare themselves to fight Thistle, Laios says “I’m ready to steal and to be stolen.” This is a somewhat confusing line in English, but if Laios’ character is meant to parallel the ancient honey thief, talking about stealing while they prepare to challenge the Lord of the Dungeon (Thistle, imbued with god-like powers and infinite magical energy) makes a lot of sense!

At the end of the manga, Laios’ deepest desire is granted by the demon, a god-like being with infinite power: he becomes a powerful monster and sheds his humanity. However, Laios is overwhelmed with curiosity, and he wants to know what “desire” tastes like, since it’s the only thing the demon (a god!) craves and wants to eat. So Laios steals the demon’s desire, which Kui draws like a crystal, dripping with honey.

Laios devours it, and in retaliation, the demon curses Laios to never realize his heart’s true desire, and strips him of his monster form, forcing him to return to living as a human, an inverted version of how Zeus turned the mythical Laios into a bird, stripping him of his humanity.

ANIMAL: BLUE ROCK THRUSH

The blue rock thrush, called “Laios” by the ancient Greeks, is the bird that the mythical thief Laios was turned into. Its scientific name is Monticola solitarius, which roughly translates to “solitary mountain dweller.”

We know that there were mountains near the village where Laios and Falin grew up, maybe his name is a hint of what could have happened to him if he’d stayed near the village: being cast out and forced to live in the mountains alone. See Chapter 9, The Dwarves, for more information about Germanic cultures and their system of outlawry/exile. See Chapter 7, Miscellaneous Tall-men, for information about how this ties Laios’ name to Kabru’s.

MEN WHO FEAR BECOMING FATHERS

The other famous Laios was a mythical king of Thebes, and the father of Oedipus. Laios did some particularly vile kidnapping, rape, and violated the laws of hospitality. As a result, he and his entire bloodline was cursed by the gods.

Laios’ sins are primarily focused around the violation of social taboos, engaging in inappropriate relationships, and being unable to restrain himself from hurting others with his actions. He is also depicted as rude and violent.

Laios’ punishment was that his son would someday kill him and marry his wife. In order to avoid this, he pierced his newborn son’s ankles so he would not be able to crawl, and abandoned him in the countryside to die. The child was found by shepherds, who took him to the nearest king, who adopted the boy and named him Oedipus, for his swollen feet.

When Oedipus was told by an oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus, not knowing that he was adopted, immediately fled his home to avoid harming his beloved parents. While on the road, he encountered king Laios on a narrow road. Laios ordered Oedipus to move out of the way, and Oedipus hesitated too long, so the king nearly ran him over. Furious at Laios’ rudeness, Oedipus dragged him from his chariot and killed him.

Oedipus goes on to solve the riddle of the sphinx that is plaguing Thebes, and he is awarded the kingdom and the hand of his own mother as his wife. It is only many years later, trying to end a plague of infertility that has struck Thebes, that Oedipus realizes he has killed his own father, and married and had children with his mother. His mother kills herself, and Oedipus blinds himself before wandering off into the wilderness to die. They leave behind several extremely disturbed children who mostly go on to die in tragic ways.

The “Laios complex” in psychology is named after the character in the Oedipus myth, and it is described as when a father desires to kill his children, especially his sons, in order to leave behind no successors.

This is all fascinating, since Laios in Dungeon Meshi has a very bad relationship with his parents, especially his father, as well as issues with children and parenthood.

We know that one of Laios’ deepest psychological wounds, attacked by the nightmare clams, is his parents demanding he return home to the village and give them grandchildren. He also becomes so uncomfortable watching a loving parent-baby interaction in the living paintings, that he can’t even try to eat food, even though he’s very hungry.

Finally, in a “what if?” comic about reversing the character’s sexes, the idea that if Laios had been born a woman, he would have never left the village and have birthed children makes him upset, he says that the current timeline, despite everything, is “the best one.”

This is speculation, but all of this taken together suggests that Laios may actually feel disgust and revulsion towards the idea of siring or raising children. This could be because he doesn’t feel comfortable acting out the role of husband and father that he feels his village demands of him, or because he’s afraid of hurting his children the way he was hurt by his parents, or it may simply be a visceral discomfort at the idea of reproduction, something which some people experience… And could be seen as evidence that Laios might be asexual and/or aromantic.

Oedipus’ adventures after his father’s death also contain some interesting parallels to Laios and Falin’s story in Dungeon Meshi.

OEDIPUS AND THE SPHINX’S RIDDLE

Oedipus is the hero that solved the riddle of the sphinx, a monster that was eating anyone that tried to enter the city of Thebes. Laios in Dungeon Meshi also concludes his story by (sort of) outsmarting a monster that wants to devour people.

Dungeon Meshi’s Laios doesn’t solve a riddle posed by the Winged Lion, but he does answer a riddle-like question that no one else in the manga is able to solve: how do you defeat the demon, something that isn’t alive and can’t die? Laios realizes through his understanding of animals that something that isn’t alive shouldn’t experience hunger (desire), and he finds a way to change the Winged Lion so that it no longer experiences hunger. Though it isn’t a literal riddle, I think the similarity to solving an unsolvable puzzle should not be overlooked!

After Oedipus solves the riddle of the sphinx, he either kills the sphinx, she kills herself by jumping off a cliff, or she devours herself. I had trouble finding detailed citations for that last one, but I’ve seen it mentioned in multiple places, and because Falin does participate in metaphorically eating herself in the finale, I think it’s worth mentioning.

CHIMERA OR SPHINX?

Although Dungeon Meshi calls Falin a chimera, the design of Laios’ ultimate monster is actually much closer to a mythological chimera, which is described as a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid composed of different animal parts. Kui clearly knows this, since in the complete world guide she identifies both Falin and Laios’ monster forms as being chimeras.

Chimera

The Greek chimera has the head of a lion and a goat, and a tail that ends with a snake’s head.Laio’s original drawing has a head that looks like a fusion of a goat, antelope and rhinoceros, a bird head, and a snake tail. It’s only after seeing a scylla (monster with multiple wolf heads) that he adds a wolf head to his monster design, turning it into a three-headed chimera.

(The most famous three-headed monster is Cerberus, the dog that guards the Greek underworld, which is also a sibling of the chimera.)

Sphinx

The Greek sphinx has the body of a lion, head (and sometimes torso) of a beautiful woman, and wings of a bird. That sounds a lot more like Kui’s design for monster Falin!

Though the body of the Falin chimera may technically be the red dragon’s body rather than a lion’s, it lacks a lot of the traditional dragon signifiers, like fins, wings, or a reptilian body posture with legs that stick out to the side. In fact, the red dragon’s body looks much more like a dinosaur or a lion than a reptile in my opinion, since the legs go straight down beneath the body.

Kui may even be hinting at this mismatch in the monster tidbit comic in volume 10, when she has Laios question chimera Falin’s design. Though the exact wording differs depending on the translation, he says that Falin’s chimera design is “excessive” because scales and feathers together are overkill.

Nobody else in the story ever questions where the feathers and wings came from, even though these aren’t traits the red dragon had. If Thistle added an additional monster to the chimera you’d think it would be mentioned when the cast tries to figure out how to remove the dragon from Falin to save her, or that the additional mystery monster would appear in the purgatory/afterlife area where Falin’s soul interacts with the dragon. But it’s just Falin and the dragon there, so I don’t think there’s any additional monster.

Thistle just wanted his dragon to grow feathers and wings, and so it did. Maybe it was to help keep Falin warm. Thistle is the lord of the dungeon after all, and he has access to infinite magic and can make anything he wants happen, nearly effortlessly.

Maybe Kui wanted her to look more sphinx-like, so she added feathered wings, and then decided to extend the feathers to cover Falin’s human parts for aesthetic design reasons. Considering how much Kui clearly knows about monsters, I don’t think making Falin’s monster form look so much like a sphinx was an accident.

Maybe Kui wanted a more feminine design for Falin’s monster form, and decided to use the term chimera anyway, since it’s so commonly used to describe any hybrid animal in the fantasy genre. Maybe she worried that calling Falin a sphinx might have been confusing, since a sphinx is specifically a monster known for its human level intelligence and ability to be reasoned with.

I think it’s worth noting that sphinxes are often described as mysterious, and Kui ranks “mystery” as one of Falin’s strongest traits in the World Guide!

LOCAL & FOREIGN CULTURE: BURIAL

In one of the post-canon comics, Laios requests that when he dies, his body should be cut into pieces and scattered around the country for the monsters to eat. He compares it to tree burials and bird burials specifically.

What Laios is describing is a type of air burial, which is a funeral practice where a human corpse is left exposed to the air, elements, and scavenging animals in order to dispose of it. It is most common in parts of the world where the ground is too hard to dig graves and fueling a fire for cremation is too expensive.

We know that in the Touden village, people were buried in the ground, so the air burial Laios describes is not something he is personally familiar with. He probably heard stories, or read about it in a book.

BIRD BURIAL

A bird burial most likely refers to a Sky burial (བྱ་གཏོར་, Literally "bird-scattered"), a funeral practice native to Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan, Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan, and parts of North India.

In a sky burial, a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements and eaten by scavenging animals, especially carrion birds like vultures and corvids. "Sky burial" is a Western term; it is not used by Tibetans, who call it "giving alms to the birds" or "to carry to the mountain." The latter term describes the vultures defecating on the mountains after eating.

Generally speaking, these cultures believe in the transmigration of spirits. That means that there is no need to preserve the body, as it is now an empty vessel. Birds may eat it or nature may cause it to decompose. The function of the sky burial is simply to dispose of the remains in as generous a way as possible.

A similar cultural practice comes from the Zoroastrians of Ancient Iran. A dakhma (دخمه), also known as a Tower of Silence, is a circular, raised structure used for the exposure of human corpses to the elements and birds for decomposition, in order to avoid contamination of the soil and other natural elements by the decomposing dead bodies. Carrion birds, usually vultures and other scavengers, consume the flesh. Skeletal remains are gathered into a central pit where further weathering and continued breakdown occurs.

The doctrinal rationale for exposure is to avoid contact with earth, water, or fire, all three of which are considered sacred in the Zoroastrian religion. Zoroastrian tradition considers human cadavers and animal corpses (in addition to cut hair and nail pairings) to be nasu, i.e. unclean, polluting.

TREE BURIAL

A tree burial is when a human corpse is either placed on a scaffold, platform, or tree, or the corpse is placed inside of a hollow piece of tree trunk and hung from a tree. This practice is found among some Native American groups (Sioux, Ute, and Navajo) and several indigenous Caucasian groups (Georgians, Abkhazians and Adyghe). It is theorized that the Caucasians may have adopted this form of burial from their contact with West Asian cultures to the south of them, specifically the Iranians.

Since there isn’t any indication that Native American cultures exist in the Northern Continent in Dungeon Meshi (they appear to be located in the Western Continent), I’ll focus on the Caucasian groups.

The Caucasus region is south of Russia and north of Turkey and Iran, along the Caucasus mountain range, and is home to many indigenous groups. This area was the continental European crossroads between Europe and Asia, so it would make sense if cultures inspired by the Caucasus peoples existed in Dungeon Meshi in the northeastern side of the Northern Continent, where the tundra meets the influences of the Eastern Archipelago, and the elven enclave that exists on the northeastern corner of the Eastern Continent.

The East Asian influence of the Eastern Archipelago could be one source of the tree burial custom, or it could originate with the elves, since Iranian culture is one of the groups that Kui repeatedly associates with the Western elves. This could suggest that the Eastern Continent elven enclave shares a culture with the Western elves, despite the distance between them!

Since air burials like this are normally practiced in regions with hard soil and few trees, it would make sense for people living in the northeastern part of the Northern Continent to perform them.

TRANSLATION ERROR

A fan-translation of this comic, which is currently the only translation available, mistakenly said “tree burial and horse burial”, which is incorrect. The Japanese characters for bird and horse are very similar, so it’s an easy mistake to make! However, although horse burials are a real custom from Ancient Germanic and Scandinavian cultures (which are the cultures that the Touden village are primarily inspired by), they are not air burials, and do not involve the body being scattered and eaten by scavengers the way tree and bird burials do.

HORSE BURIAL

Horse burial is the practice of burying a horse as part of the ritual of human burial, and is found among many different cultures worldwide. The act indicates the high value placed on horses in these cultures, and is part of a wider tradition of horse sacrifice. Human burials that contain non-horse livestock are rare.

FOREIGN CULTURE: KENSUKE

Early on in the manga, Laios scavenges a sword from the colony of Living Armor mollusks. The sword has one of the mollusks inside of it, and Laios gets very attached, and even names it Kensuke.

Kensuke (ケン助) is a Japanese boy’s name. We don’t have the kanji for this name but the most likely intended meaning is “sword boy” or “sword helper” because “ken” (剣) is the Japanese word for sword, and “suke” (介 / 助 / 輔) is a masculine name-ending that means “helper.”

Names ending in -suke were common among the samurai, especially for samurai of slightly lower rank, since they were “helpers” to their lords, so I think it’s very likely that Laios heard this name from his Japanese samurai friend Toshiro, liked it, and then gave it to his pet monster, since Laios clearly loves Japanese culture and is very interested in it.

When the manga was originally coming out, Laios naming his sword-monster Kensuke was confusing for some readers, since we didn’t yet know that Laios was a Japanese culture fan or that he was friends with a Japanese person who could have taught him about the language.

It seemed like a strange out of place name: why would a vaguely northern European man like Laios know Japanese names, and why would he give one to a sword? Some translators even considered “renaming” Kensuke to something more logical like Swordbert or Swordy to fit with what they thought Kui’s intention was: “Laios gives his sword-monster a funny name that means sword”, but now we know it’s much more likely that Kui’s intention was “Laios gives his sword a funny name that means sword that he learned from his Japanese friend.” So the name Kensuke actually makes perfect sense.

SUBTEXT: HOBBY VS. FETISH

The Japanese word 趣味 (shumi), has multiple meanings, such as “hobby”, “interests/tastes”, and “sexual taste, vice, or fetish.” What meaning is intended must be intuited by the context surrounding the word.

Shumi is used throughout Dungeon Meshi to describe various people’s interests. Laios’ love of monsters and Milsiril’s obsession with adopting children from the short-lived races are both translated as “hobbies”, while Namari’s interest in race-specific weapons and gear is called a “fetish.”

Though I think that Milsiril’s child-adopting is correctly identified as a hobby rather than a fetish, the fact that Namari’s interest is correctly identified as a fetish (she is sexually enticed by the sight or idea of people wearing race-specific equipment) and Laios’ interest in monsters isn’t, seems wrong to me.

Both Namari and Laios blush while talking about their respective interests, and get embarrassed and/or excited about the subject. In the post-canon comics, Laios blushes, hides his face, and has to be prodded to confess to Yaad, Kabru and Marcille that he wants to have his body eaten by monsters when he dies.

Laios is also met with scorn, disgust and disapproval from the people around him when he gets too enthusiastic about monsters. At the end of the manga, Kabru gives him a disgusted look and warns him to “not talk about his hobbies” while addressing the participants of the feast.

I personally don’t think it makes sense for everyone in the manga to react so negatively to Laios’ interest in monsters unless the implication is that there is something that people find especially off putting, unsavory, and creepy about his behavior… Which only makes sense if Laios’ interest in monsters obviously crosses the line from innocent into the “fetish” category, and all the characters around him can tell.

Characters frequently notice when Laios’ talking about monsters goes from casual to passionate: he talks louder, faster, his pupils dilate, he blushes, and he forgets what he’s doing, where he is, and what the appropriate behavior for his situation is. In short, he gets very excited, and that makes other characters uncomfortable.

MODERN WORLD REFERENCE: FURRY

The furry fandom is a subculture interested in anthropomorphic animal characters. Some examples of anthropomorphic attributes include exhibiting human intelligence and facial expressions, speaking, walking on two legs, and wearing clothes. Warrior Cats, The Lion King, and Sonic the Hedgehog all have huge furry fandoms, to give a few examples.

Laios’ intense desire to become a monster, the way he repeatedly fantasizes about being a dog or wolf, his fascination with all animals (but especially monsters), his skill at drawing animals (and lack of skill in drawing people), his interest in becoming a beast-man, and his desire to visit a kobold country, all paint a very vivid picture of his internal life and interests.

Western fans often identify Laios as a “furry,” or a “monster f*cker” mostly as a joke, however I think this is a very accurate description of him, and should be taken as seriously as interpreting him as asexual or autistic, which are other labels fandom commonly applies to him.

The topic of animal/monster fetishism is not well-understood by the general population, and tends to make people uncomfortable because they assume it involves bestial*ty. This is not true. A fetish of this nature can (and most often does) exist entirely inside a person’s mind, in the realm of fantasy. Laios is someone who is willing to kill animals, but I don’t think he would be happy to abuse them or cause them unnecessary suffering.

More importantly, a fetishistic interest in animals and monsters is not uncommon historically or in the modern day. Humans have been admiring, dressing up as and pretending to be animals for rituals (including fertility rituals) since the dawn of civilization, and continue to do so in the modern era every time someone dresses up in a “sexy cat” costume for Halloween, or wears a multi-thousand dollar fursuit to a furry convention.

There are many instances throughout history of people wearing pelts, masks and tails in order to “become” animals, poetry and art of people fantasizing about either becoming a beast/monster (modern werewolf erotica), or having a beast/monster ravish them (the many, many times artists choose to depict Zeus turning into an animal to have sex with mortal women), or coming of age rites that involve animal sacrifice and the adoption of an animal-like persona as part of the process of becoming an adult.

The stigmatization of this behavior, where “sexy cat costume” is normal and “fursuit” is weird, most likely originates from the disappearance of religious and social context for it. In the past, the admiration, imitation and idealization of animals by humans was part of many cultures, but the modern dominance of religions that forbid the worship of anything other than one, immaterial god has left no room for such things, and so society can only view it as the deranged behavior of abnormal people, who have something “wrong” with them.

In other words, I don’t think describing Laios as a “furry” is ahistorical or impossible for the ancient world that Laios lives in, though obviously the term “furry” wouldn’t exist, the behavior most likely would.

JAPANESE FURRY FANDOM: KEMONO VS. KEMONOMIMI

Ryoko Kui self-identified as a furry on her blog a long time ago, saying that she “was a furry in high school.” The information can be found by digging around via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

The term Kui used was kemonā (ケモナー) or kemono (ケモノ), which is the Japanese terminology for a furry fan. Even if Kui no longer considers herself a kemonā, she clearly has knowledge of the subculture, which is on display in the what-if comic where Lycion and Laios meet, and Laios awkwardly says that Lycion isn’t a real furry, because turning into a beast-man didn’t change him into a wolf on the inside.

“Isn’t that just like wearing a pair of animal ears on a headband and saying you’re a beast-man?” Laios asks, to which Lycion derisively tells Laios that he is just a “beast-man wannabe” or “poseur.”

This is a direct reference to one of the major conflicts in the Japanese Kemono fandom: are characters who are mostly human, but have animal ears and tails really kemono, or do they not count?

The general consensus in the fandom is that ears and tail alone are insufficient, these characters are called kemonomimi, literally “beast ears”, like the headband Laios references. Most “cat-girl” characters fall into this category.

A real kemono character includes a muzzle instead of a normal human face and/or an animal-like appearance on the body surface, such as fur, scales, or feathers. According to researcher Inokuchi Tomohiro, this is due to the recognition that "disconnection from humans" is a crucial factor that distinguishes between kemono and non-kemono. He then defines kemono as "an animal that is depicted as a non-human being, but with the potential for mutual understanding/communication with humans.”

This is identical to the beliefs held by most Furry fans outside of Japan, which is why Furry and Kemonā are considered interchangeable terms.

By this definition, Izutsumi in Dungeon Meshi is a kemono (furry) and not a kemonomimi (cat-girl), since her body is covered in fur, and she doesn’t have human breasts, but a more beast-like torso. The Winged Lion, the Goat, Kuro the kobold, and possibly the orcs are all kemono (anthropomorphic animal) characters as well.

MODERN WORLD REFERENCE: THERIAN

Though the terminology is very modern, and wouldn’t exist in the Dungeon Meshi setting, it’s possible that Laios might identify as a type of Otherkin known as a Therian. Otherkin and Therians are sometimes part of the Furry fandom, but the two subcultures do not overlap completely.

Otherkin are a subculture of people who identify as nonhuman. Some otherkin believe their identity derives from spiritual phenomena (such as possessing a nonhuman soul, reincarnation, or the will of God), ancestry, symbolism, or metaphor. Others attribute it to unusual psychology or neurodivergence and do not hold spiritual beliefs on the subject.

Therian refers to people who identify specifically as a real animal of the natural world. The species of animal a therian identifies as is called a theriotype. Therians mainly attribute their experiences of therianthropy to either spirituality or psychology, and often use the term "species dysphoria" to describe their feelings of disconnect from their human bodies and their underlying desire to live as their theriotype. The identity "trans species" is used by some.

Obviously Otherkin and Therian are both modern names for this phenomenon, but the concept of people strongly identifying with and being fascinated by animals is as old as humankind itself, as I’ve said before, so it isn’t impossible that Laios may feel this way.

Falin is Laios’ younger sister. She’s a quiet, withdrawn girl with a mysterious personality who dies at the beginning of the story, and the characters spend the rest of the manga trying to revive and save her. She’s a healer that always puts herself last, even after animals and ghosts.

However, her weapon of choice is a metal mace, which is a violent bludgeoning weapon, and when pushed, she doesn't care how many people she hurts, if she’s able to protect Laios and Marcille.

Falin is as excited about eating monsters as Laios is, but we don’t know if she also dreams of becoming a monster herself. She loves insects, has poor personal hygiene habits, and likes to wear baggy, unisex clothing. She’s uncomfortable in anything too revealing or overtly feminine.

TRANSLATION ISSUES: FALIN OR FARIN?

Falin is our first victim of the R/L translation issue, since in katakana it was written “Farin” (ファリン), and Western fans weren’t sure how to translate that, since “Farin” isn’t a commonly known European name. As a result fans translated her name as “Farlyn” originally, and then the official Yen Press translation used Falin, and eventually Kui told us that Falin was the correct name.

Falin is a word in Icelandic meaning “hidden”, which is appropriate since she’s missing for most of the manga, and after the end of the manga she leaves the kingdom to travel the world by herself, so she’s continuing to hide!

Falin is also an Irish name, a spelling variant of Fallon or Fallyn. In Ireland, Fallon is exclusively a family name rather than a given name.

Falin is derived from the Gaelic surname Ó Fallamhain, which means descendant of Fallamhan/the leader or grandchild of a king. It can also mean “a governor”, or “supremacy.” Since Falin is the child of a village chief, a name like this makes sense.

Some sources (baby name sites, which I do not fully trust) claim Falin is a version of the name Faline, which is a version of Feline and comes from Latin Felinus, meaning “catlike.” Catlike seems like a good descriptor of Falin’s time as a chimera… And she does end up with cat-like slit pupils at the end of the manga.

Now that the English dub of the anime by Bang Zoom Entertainment has aired, I think it’s very interesting that the characters pronounce her name “Fallon”! I wonder if that was something Ryoko Kui instructed them to do, since most English speakers wouldn’t default to that pronunciation unless they recognize that it’s a real name, and know the name’s Gaelic roots… I think it’s unlikely though, probably the dubbing company just got lucky, and said the name correctly by accident.

BUT WHAT IF HER NAME WAS ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO BE FARIN?

Farin means “flour” in some languages, and it comes from Latin farrīna. Dungeon Meshi is in fact a manga about food and cooking, and a comedy. Falin, like flour, gets incorporated as a base ingredient into something else. The fact that you cannot truly un-combine things that have been mixed together like eggs, or flour, or souls, is a major plot point of the manga. It’s possible that Kui was aware of this double-meaning and it was one of the reasons she picked the name Falin.

Touden (also spelled tudden) is a word in Saterland Frisian meaning “thorn” or “tower.” The Frisian languages are a closely related group of West Germanic languages, spoken by people who live on the southern edge of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. This is not a part of Scandinavia, but right next to it.

Touden has two possible etymologies:

• From Old Frisian thorn, from Proto-West Germanic þorn, from Proto-Germanic þurnuz. Thorns are hard, sharp extensions on a plant whose purpose is physically defending plants against being eaten or touched.
• From earlier torn, from Old Frisian turn, ultimately from Latin turrem, turris, meaning tower. Towers are architectural structures that are taller than the surrounding area, primarily used for defense, since it’s difficult for outsiders to attack a tower, and easy for the people inside the tower to defend it.

Laios and Falin’s stories, like the stories of many characters in Dungeon Meshi, are about isolation and ostracization from society. Their family name meaning tower suggests that they are hiding away from other people, and the name meaning thorn suggests they have metaphorical thorns (their strange interests, their behavior) which keep other people from liking them.

Either way, because Touden is their family name, it also suggests that this is something they share with each other, and that has been inherited. This idea is reinforced when Kui shows us that the Touden father is also antisocial and has bad communication skills.

LAIOS AND FALIN’S THORNS

At the beginning of the manga, Falin is seen as sweet, kind, self-sacrificing and a little bit eccentric because she likes bugs and doesn’t mind being dirty. Laios is seen as a quiet loner who is bad at talking to people, but with no personality or interest in anything in particular, and who is bad at reading social signals. Nobody has any idea what Laios likes, but that’s because Laios keeps it secret. Nobody knows what Falin likes because Falin doesn’t know either, she’s never allowed herself to like things out of fear that she might like the wrong thing and be rejected for it.

When Falin dies, Laios gradually stops hiding who he is, since Falin is no longer there to restrain him and help him socialize successfully. Initially this damages the status quo between Laios and all of his friends, but eventually they come to accept and tolerate Laios’ interests and his true personality.

Falin seems to have less trouble making friends than Laios, most likely because of the social expectations placed on girls to be quiet and obedient. She has learned to deny herself in order to be more palatable to others, she has taken the sharp points off of her thorns. This makes her beloved by many characters in the story, but none of them truly know Falin because there is nothing to know except self-sacrifice and a desire to please others.

Laios has not learned how to do this, and so he struggles much more than Falin does to be accepted by society, being rejected over and over again because he isn’t able to hide who he is.

At the end of the story, Falin is literally consumed by the rest of the cast (and herself) as part of the ritual to bring her back to life. This is the final obliteration of Falin’s old self, the safe, easy to consume Falin with no thorns, that would give up her life and flesh to other people just so that she will be desired.

Then, in the post-manga materials, Falin says she doesn’t know who she is or what she likes, because she’s spent her whole life taking care of others and molding herself to like the things that they like. And so Falin needs to start a new life, to try and learn who she is.

At the same time, most people still see Laios as strange and doubt his ability to be a good king. However, Laios is able to defeat the demon because he is strange, because he doesn’t have the same sort of desires as “normal” people, this allows him to escape being eaten by the demon, because his metaphorical thorns protect him.

Laios becomes a beloved and respected hero to many, no matter how strange they think he is.

Ultimately some of the repeated themes of Dungeon Meshi are that not only is it okay to be strange, but that being strange may be a hidden strength, and also that it’s better to be honest and express your true self, no matter what the consequences are, since self denial only leads to not knowing who you are and living a hollow, empty life.

Eating (desiring, loving, caring) is the privilege of the living. Don’t abandon your desires because you’re afraid of what people will think of you.

TOU-DEN AS TWO SYLLABLES

• TOU
  English surname recorded in the Domesday Book (a survey done by William the Conqueror in 1086) as the name of a landholder.
• DEN
  Den is an early Anglo-Saxon place-name that means “valley”, and also appears in the Doomsday book as a name.

It’s possible Kui just smashed together two names she found in the Domesday book to make Tou-den. The Touden village appears to be near some mountains, so it could be a valley!

THORDEN?

The English fan-translation Thorden is a real Scandinavian name meaning “Thor’s bang” or “thunder”, more commonly spelled Torden. English fans used Thorden since Laios and Falin appear to come from a Scandinavian-inspired culture to the North, so a name with Thor in it seemed appropriate.

Eventually the Adventurer's Bible came out and Kui clarified that the correct spelling was Touden… And after studying the word’s meaning I think it’s more appropriate to their characters than Thorden. The only thing the name Thorden tells us about the character is that they come from a culture near the North Sea, and Touden tells us that too. Thor, and thunder, really don’t have much to do with Laios or Falin’s characters.

BONUS:Touden (東電) is also the abbreviated form of Tokyo Denryoku, “Tokyo Electric Power Company” (東京電力). This is hysterically funny since Thor is the god of lightning and thunder, and obviously an electric company produces electricity…

LOCAL CUISINE: LAIOS & FALIN’S HONEY BREAD

In the Daydream Hour book, there is a comic about various characters sharing sweet foods from their home regions. Falin and Laios present something they call “honey bread”, which they say is a “hard, sweet bread” made of flour, sugar, salt, water and honey. It looks like a tan-colored round cookie with a circle of honey in the center, and appears to have a crunchy texture. Because the comic is drawn in a chibi/cute style, it’s hard to say if the honey bread are the correct scale, or if they are comically oversized. So they could be normal cookies, or they could be pastries the size of a person’s entire hand.

The “honey bread” resembles several sweets:

• Hallongrotta (literally “raspberry cave”) are a common Swedish shortbread cookie. They are circular cookies that have an indentation in the center that is usually filled with raspberry jam. So a version of this made with honey would be called a honunggrotta! These look almost identical to the thing Laios and Falin are eating, if we assume they are cookies and not large pastries.
• Linzer cookies are an Austrian shortbread cookie sandwich with jam in the center, and a hole (or holes) cut out of the top layer, to reveal the jam layer beneath. This looks less like the thing Kui has drawn, because of the two layers of shortbread cookie.
• A Danish pastry (wienerbrød) is a multilayered, laminated sweet puff pastry that usually has a pool of jam or cheese in the center. If the “honey bread” is in fact bread, and larger than a cookie, it might be a danish. However, danishes are normally soft, not hard.
• Yakgwa (약과), is a type of deep-fried, wheat-based Korean confection made with honey, rice wine, sesame oil, and ginger juice. Although these cookies are Korean and not European, and they don’t appear to have a puddle of honey in the middle like Kui’s drawing, the shape of some of the modern ones looks a lot like Kui’s drawing, and they are made with honey.

LOCAL CULTURE: THE TOUDEN FAMILY DOGS

The Touden family owned several dogs: Dustrag (雑巾), Boff (ボフ), Muimui (ムイムイ), Nussa (ヌッサ), Fucci/Fucchi (フッチ), and Anotolid/Anoutolid (アノートリド). Dustrag, Boff and Fucci/Fucchi were named by Laios, Muimui was named by Falin, and Anotolid and Nussa were named by their father.

Dustrag, Boff, and Muimui are all probably just animal names, Dustrag describes how the dog looks like a dust rag, Boff is an onomatopoeia of a dog barking, and Muimui may be a nonsense name, though it could possibly mean “very very” if it comes from Spanish muy/mui, which comes from Latin multus (“much, many”).

Fucci/Fucchi is an Italian man’s name, oftentimes a shorter version of names like Fuccio, Fantuccio or Feduccio. The Touden village isn’t too far away from the area where Marcille is from, so as I’ve said before, they probably have contact with Mediterranean cultures, and therefore a name from that region wouldn’t be too unusual.

The name Fucci also comes from the Latin fūcus (“lichen, rouge, red dye”), which comes from Ancient Greek phûkos (φῦκος), meaning seaweed.

Fūcus more specifically refers to the red dye created from the seaweed, or any product made with that dye, such as rouge. Because of this, it came to mean “red paint” and was a general word for any sort of makeup, as well as to be disguised (with makeup), painted or colored.

Fucci the dog is white and black (or some other dark color like brown or red) and his coat appears to be mottled or spotted in certain areas, which could be why he has a name that means “painted”!

FOREIGN CULTURE: ANOUTOLID AND NUSSA

Anoutolid and Nussa are names that come from mythology within the world of Dungeon Meshi. Marcille says Nussa was a great archer that shot arrows at the moon as a joke, and was imprisoned in the sky until Anoutolid shot down the stars to return Nussa to Earth.

According to my research, both names most likely originate in Ancient Greek, which I believe is a western elvish language. Anoutolid and Nussa are drawn as elves when Marcille tells the story, which also makes me think that the story is an elven one. It is possible that Kui drew them as elves because Marcille (an elf) is telling the story, and so she imagines them as elves, but I don’t think Kui is trying to obfuscate things that intensely in these short side comics. It’s probably an elven myth, but there’s room for ambiguity.

Laios thinks the names sound weird, and he has never heard the myth before. Although the comic says this is because Laios’ father never told him the story, if Nussa and Anoutolid are a myth native to the Northern Continent, Laios logically would have heard of them at some point from someone else, and he wouldn’t think the names sound weird.

If they are local mythic figures, the names should be linguistically similar to other names people have in the Eastern Hemisphere, and therefore not “sound weird” to Laios. They sound weird because they are probably Greek, and the people around Laios mostly have Germanic names.

NUSSA

Νύσσα (nússa) is an Ancient Greek word for the turning post in a racecourse. The entomology of the word is possibly related to νύσσω (nússō, “to thrust, pierce”) as νύκ-ια (núk-ia, “the thrusting one”).

The Ancient Greeks believed that the celestial bodies raced or drove through the sky in a circle around a nussa (turning post), like chariots on a race track.

This name would make sense since Nussa shot the moon with an arrow, so they were punished for “thrusting” something that didn’t belong into the heavens. Nussa was imprisoned in the sky, surrounded by stars, which means the stars would have rotated around them until Anatoulid shot the stars down and freed Nussa.

Nusa is also Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, and means island, and is used in multiple modern Polynesian languages today. This word is written as “nussa” only in connection with an Indonesian children’s TV show from 2018 (which predates the World Guide comic) called Nussa, where the character’s name is derived from nusa.

Nussa meaning island also makes a lot of sense with the myth. Don’t stars in the sky resemble a cluster of islands in the ocean? If Nussa is trapped in the sky, aren’t they like an island?

Greek is one of the languages Kui associates with the elves, so I think the Greek name origin is more likely, but the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian origin isn’t impossible.

ANOTOLID

アノートリド (Anōtorido) seems to be Anotolid, which is a variant way of spelling “Anatolid”, which means a person or thing from Anatolia, the English-language name for Ancient Turkey.

Anatolia derives from Ancient Greek ἀνατολή (anatolḗ, “sunrise, place from where the sun rises, the east”), from ἀνατέλλω (anatéllō, “I rise”), from ἀνά (aná, “up”) + τέλλω (téllō, “I perform, accomplish, rise”), because Anatolia was east of Greece.

Anoutolid meaning “from the east” could either just mean that Anoutolid the mythic figure is from Dungeon Meshi’s version of Anatolia, from “the East”, or it could be a reference to the way that Anoutolid’s arrows “rose up” to shoot the stars.

This could mean that Dungeon Meshi’s version of Anatolia is on the eastern side of one of the elven continents in the Western hemisphere (so ancient elves considered it “the east”, before they made contact with the Eastern hemisphere), or that Dungeon Meshi’s Anatolia is somewhere in the Eastern hemisphere, where elves once lived, such as the Golden Kingdom or the unnamed elven population center on the far north-eastern side of the Eastern Continent. Dungeon Meshi’s Anatolia could even be in the Eastern Archipelago. Lots of fascinating possibilities!

Marcille is the only magic user in the party after Falin dies. She and Falin have known each other for twelve years, and attended the same magic school. At the start of the manga Marcille is extremely fussy and girly, and regularly has temper tantrums when she has to do something she doesn’t want to do, like eat monsters.

Over the course of the story she matures and becomes more pragmatic and practical. By the end of the manga she has become less focused on herself and more focused on others, and has learned to accept that death and pain are unavoidable parts of life.

FRENCH-ITALIAN CULTURE AND MARCILLE

Marcille is a French, female version of the Latin name "Marcellus," which is a diminutive of "Marcus", a Roman name derived from Mars, the Roman god of war.

In-universe we don’t know what Mars means: it could mean iron, or it could be the specific Roman god of war, a generic god of war, or the act of war. Mars could also be a place, thing or descriptive word. Then Marcille’s name would mean “little one of Mars”, whatever Mars means inside the world of Dungeon Meshi.

Meta-textually, the name Marcille means little warrior, young warrior, warlike, dedicated to war, or even “little one of iron” or “girl of iron.” It’s a very suitable name for the character.

LOCAL CUISINE: ROAST PORK AND NOODLES

The roast pork that was Marcille’s father’s favorite food is something called porchetta, and it is a savory, fatty, and moist boneless pork roast from Italy and the French region of Nice. Porchetta is an important, government-recognized element of Italian food culture.

The pasta young Marcille makes for her sick father is most likely spaghetti, which is a staple food of traditional Italian cuisine. It is a long, thin, solid, cylindrical pasta typically made from durum-wheat semolina. Circa 1845, Italians used the word sparghetti to denote the recently invented pasta shape. So it's a bit futuristic for Dungeon Meshi, but it's not the only anachronism in the manga.

MARS

In the real world, Mars is either the Roman god of war, the planet named after the god, or a way to refer to iron in chemistry and alchemy. Mars comes from Old Latin Māvors, from Proto-Italic Māwortis, or from Proto-Italic Māmart.

Since Latin is a language Kui seems to associate with the elves, the Mars part of Marcille’s name is probably from an elvish culture. Since French is a language that descends from Latin in the real world, we can theorize that things which are French in Dungeon Meshi are descended from the Latin-based elvish, the same way that Romance languages in the real world are descended from Latin.

I think we are meant to assume “Marcille Donato” is an elvish name at first, because we are led to believe that Marcille is a full elf.

However, we are eventually exposed to a great many elven names which show us that Greek and Latin names are common among the elves, but French and Italian names are not. Then we eventually learn that Marcille is a half-elf, and so the name “Marcille Donato” is probably a tall-man name, since her father was a tall-man.

This is potentially further reinforced by the fact that Rin (covered later in this chapter) is opposite of Marcille in many ways, which Kui uses to foreshadow and inform us about Marcille… And there is evidence that Rin’s name is elvish (Arabic), despite originally seeming like a tall-man name (Japanese).

So Marcille might be a half-elf with a tall-man name, and Rin might be a tall-man with an elven name.

IRON

Iron has been used for millennia, and its use is foundational for many parts of human civilization. Iron is known for corroding and turning red as it ages, and is commonly used for making weapons, which are undoubtedly some of the reasons the metal is associated with the god Mars. Iron is sometimes used metaphorically to refer to warfare in general.

However iron can also be used to make many other tools, such as plows, horseshoes, needles, cooking knives, cooking pots and more. This dual purpose of iron is similar to the lecture Marcille gives before Falin’s resurrection, about how magic is only a tool, and can be used both to hurt and heal people.

Iron’s importance in the ancient world means that it was often featured in mythology and folklore. “Cold iron” has historically been believed to repel, contain, or harm ghosts, fairies, witches, and other malevolent supernatural creatures. Nailing an iron horseshoe to a door was said to repel evil spirits or bring good luck. An iron fence around a cemetery was supposed to contain the souls of the dead. Burying an iron knife under the entrance to one's home was alleged to keep witches from entering.

Marcille, someone who relies so heavily on magic, and who wants to solve all of the problems in her life (and the world) by using magic, is ironically named after a thing that is famously known for repelling magic.

Maybe Kui means to suggest that despite Marcille’s belief that anything can be fixed with magic, magic cannot fix Marcille's (or the world’s) problems.

THE GOD OF WAR

To the Romans, the god Mars represented military power as a way to secure peace, and he was seen as the mythological father of the Roman people. Mars was also associated with conquest, masculine virility, and bloodlust. It’s possible that Mars originated as a god of the wilderness, and his occasionally savage, bloody nature may be connected to the idea that he comes from a place outside of civilization, beyond the boundaries made by humans, such as compassion, justice, law and order.

Marcille is a very passionate person, and she expresses her emotions loudly and clearly to everyone around her. When faced with danger, she is quick to respond with violent explosions and fire, even if sometimes a gentler approach might work better. She is assertive and controlling. Marcille wants to “conquer” the dungeon in the sense that she wants to understand all of its secrets, because she believes that doing this will allow her to make the world a better, safer, more equal place, where people live long, happy lives. She is willing to use violence and force to achieve peace, in accordance with the Roman ideal.

Marcille is also willing to go outside of the bounds of civilization in order to accomplish her goals, similar to Mars (war) and its existence in the realm of chaos, outside the boundaries of human laws.

One of the most stunning images in the manga is Marcille just before she resurrects Falin: her hair falling loose, hands and bare feet covered in blood, just like Mars after a battle. The battle with the dragon is over, and now Marcille will make use of that horrible violence and bloodshed to try and bring Falin back to life. This image is echoed at the end of the manga when Marcille stands surrounded by huge piles of raw, red meat, which she is helping to prepare in the hopes that they can once again save Falin.

MARS USING FORCE TO HEAL

Mars was often invoked as a healer by the Ancient Celts. The inscriptions indicate that Mars's ability to defeat the enemy on the battlefield was transferred to the sick person's struggle against illness; healing was expressed in terms of warding off and rescue.

This unconventional approach to the god Mars using his violent strength to “fight” illness and death reminds me of the difference between elvish and gnomish magic, and how Marcille doesn’t heal people the way most mages do.

When Marcille heals people she doesn’t numb the pain, because she thinks meddling with people’s ability to sense pain is dangerous. This is interesting, since Marcille’s general motivation is about avoiding the pain of losing loved ones… Yet she insists on making the people she heals feel pain because it’s “good for them.” Perhaps this shows that deep down Marcille knows that she cannot avoid pain, and that she needs to accept the natural order of death and life, and the pain that loss causes?

MARS AND SCYLLA MARCILLE

The succubus mosquito trying to seduce Laios appears to him as a monster version of Marcille, a scylla with multiple wolf heads. We know that Laios likes canines and he also likes multi-headed monsters, but why did Ryoko Kui choose this unusual monster for Marcille?

The word scylla comes from Ancient Greek skúlla (Σκύλλα) which probably comes from skúllō (σκύλλω) which means to pluck, or tear.

In Greek mythology, Scylla was once a beautiful nymph, but the jealous sorceress Circe used a potion to transform her into a monster with six canine heads bursting out of her legs, or replacing her lower body entirely.

After her transformation, Scylla went to live on one side of a narrow channel of water, opposite her counterpart Charybdis. The two sides of the strait are within an arrow's range of each other—so close that sailors attempting to avoid Charybdis would pass dangerously close to Scylla and vice versa. The idiom "between Scylla and Charybdis" has come to mean being forced to choose between two similarly dangerous situations.

This idiom certainly applies to Laios in that scene! First he’s tempted by an illusion of Marcille (he worries if anyone else from his party sees, they will think it means Laios has secret lustful feelings for Marcille, and is therefore untrustworthy), and then by a monster version of Marcille that promises to turn Laios into a monster if he lets her bite him (this might actually kill him when the succubus feeds on him, and then there might be nobody left to save the rest of his party).

Really, he should try to avoid both of these things. Unfortunately, as the winged lion says, Laios is an idiot and he almost lets monster Marcille bite him.

But the important thing is the Marcille scylla is made up specifically of wolves, and wolves are very important animals to Mars, Marcille’s namesake!

ANIMAL: WOLF

In some versions of the founding of Rome, the god Mars himself was the father of Romulus and Remus, who were abandoned by their mother, and then rescued and suckled by a she-wolf, one of Mars’ sacred animals.

The wolf was an important symbol of vigor, strength and fertility to the ancestors of the Romans, and so by being suckled by the wolf, Romulus and Remus absorbed the wolf’s good traits. Romulus went on to found Roman civilization, and he passed the virtues he’d gained from his wolf mother down to the Roman people.

The wolf appears frequently in Roman art and literature as the symbol of Mars, such as Mars traveling with a pack of wolves surrounding him.

So Marcille’s monster form specifically being made up of wolves fits perfectly with her name.

THE BIRTH OF MARS: MARCILLE, HER MOTHER, AND ELVEN IDENTITY

Mars is usually considered to be the ordinary son of Jupiter and Juno, the king and queen of the gods, however in Ovid's version of Mars' origin, he was the son of Juno alone.

When Jupiter gave birth to the goddess Minerva directly from his mind, he circumvented the natural order of things by having a child without a woman. Juno sought the advice of the goddess Flora on how to do the same. Flora obtained a magic flower and used it to impregnate Juno, who withdrew to Thrace where she gave birth to Mars.

We know that Marcille has two parents, but a lot of emphasis is placed on her elven mother for most of the manga, since we and the characters in the story are led to believe that Marcille is a full-blooded elf. Obviously some of this is because Kui is keeping Marcille’s father a secret from us, in order to make the eventual reveal that she is a half-elf a surprise.

However, Kui goes out of her way to never really mention Marcille’s father early on, even though there were plenty of ways she could have shown him, and told us how close he and Marcille were, without giving away that he was a tall-man. He is just conspicuously absent from the narrative, compared to how we’re shown Marcille’s mother in chapter 3, and Marcille talks about her being a court mage in chapter 17. Marcille’s father is hugely important to Marcille’s story, but Kui keeps him hidden. In the nightmare chapter of the manga (this was changed in the anime), we don’t get to see him at all, we just know that the monster ate him.

So it’s interesting that there is this specific myth about Mars being birthed by his mother alone, since Marcille’s mother is often treated as her only parent for most of the manga… Since she’s the elven parent, and Marcille’s elven status is one of her most important identifying features… Something that is only questioned once other elves enter the story.

ELVEN SUPERIORITY

Elves in Dungeon Meshi clearly have power and prestige over the other races, so people assuming that Marcille is an elf is very beneficial to her, while being identified as a half-elf lowers her status.

We know that elves in Dungeon Meshi think that an elf that leaves elven society to live among the short-lived races is doing so because they weren’t “good enough” to succeed in elven society, and that the fact that they are an elf will allow them to easily succeed among the short-lived races. This is what Mithrun and his squad assume happened with Marcille’s mother.

This is similar to the real-world phenomenon where people who struggle to succeed in developed countries or big cities relocate to somewhere less affluent, where there is less competition for jobs and lower hiring standards, in the hopes that this will allow them to have a better life.

A specific example of this from history are the Londoners of the 1980s and 90s who immigrated to British Hong Kong in the hopes that succeeding in Hong Kong as a white European would be easier than doing the same in London. This was done often enough that a derogatory acronym was invented to describe these people, FILTH, which meant Failed In London, Try Hong Kong.

Marcille is supposedly “not ashamed” of her half-elf status, however she hides it in her day-to-day life via omission and careful self-censoring, allowing people to believe that she is a full elf. The World Guide says that Marcille doesn’t tell people the truth because it would be “a hassle” or “too difficult” to explain, but the way this is phrased makes me think Kui is telling us this is only an excuse.

Saying something is “too difficult” is a polite Japanese way of saying “no” or refusing to do it, so the implication is that Marcille simply doesn’t want to disclose her multi-racial status to anyone.

It would be “a hassle” to explain because if people know she’s a half-elf, Marcille will have to defend herself and her family against all the assumptions she knows people will make: That her mother is a sub-standard, low-class elf scamming the short-lived races for her own benefit, that her father was a pathetic idiot that was seduced, and that Marcille is a foolish, immoral and incompetent half-breed who is jealous of real elves and desperately wants to be accepted by them, and is bitter about her inability to have children.

She’ll have to explain that she isn’t like that, and probably not even be believed, so it’s better not to let anyone know that she’s a half-elf at all.

PASSING AS AN ELF

“Passing” is the ability of a person to be regarded as a member of an identity group or category, such as racial identity, ethnicity, caste, social class, sexual orientation, gender, religion, age and/or disability status, that is often (but not always) different from their own. Passing may be used to increase social acceptance to cope with stigma by removing stigma from the presented self and could result in other social benefits as well. Thus, passing may serve as a form of self-preservation or self-protection if expressing one's true or prior identity may be dangerous.

Passing may require acceptance into a community and may lead to temporary or permanent leave from another community to which an individual previously belonged. Thus, passing can result in separation from one's original self, family, friends, or previous living experiences.

Successful passing may contribute to economic security, safety, and stigma avoidance, but it may take an emotional toll as a result of denial of one's previous identity and may lead to depression or self-loathing. When an individual deliberately attempts to "pass" as a member of an identity group, they may actively engage in performance of behaviors that they believe to be associated with membership of that group. Passing practices may also include information management of the passer in attempting to control or conceal any stigmatizing information that may reveal disparity from their presumed identity.

Marcille’s status as a half-elf elevates her in non-elven society, since elves are assumed to be powerful, and most people can’t tell the difference between a half-elf and a full-blooded elf. Marcille can pass as an elf in non-elven society, and it benefits her to do so. Non-elves see her as more competent and assume she has greater magical talent because they think she’s an elf.

This is sharply contrasted with the immediate and cruel discrimination she faces as soon as she meets full-blooded elves, who quickly recognize her as a half-elf and talk down to her because of it, assuming that she is naive, simple-minded, driven by base desires, and morally bankrupt.

Marcille cannot pass as a full-blooded elf when she is with other elves, and that disadvantages her as much as passing as an elf gives her an advantage among other races. This experience mirrors the experiences of real-world multi-racial people, who often find that what race others identify them as changes depending on where they are, what they are doing, and who they are with.

ELVES AND FEMININITY

Elves in Dungeon Meshi are androgynous, but their androgyny skews towards what we consider feminine in the real world.

Marcille is shown to be very feminine, to have a preference for feminine things and women in general, and she becomes very upset when people suggest she might have masculine traits such as facial hair. She’s deeply jealous that Falin’s skin is more perfect than her own, because elves are supposed to have perfect skin and Falin is a tall-man who doesn’t even take care of herself properly.

Marcille also seems to have strong opinions about how men and women should look and dress (she doesn’t like it when Falin has short hair or wears androgynous clothes, or when Laios has long hair), and gets extremely excited when Falin does things that are considered traditionally feminine, even though those things sometimes seem to make Falin uncomfortable.

This behavior seems like it could be overcompensation, and that Marcille is insecure about her femininity, possibly because to Marcille, femininity is linked to presenting successfully as an elf. Does she feel a need to perform femininity at a higher standard than the tall-men women around her, in order to pass as an elf?

MARS AND MASCULINITY: MARCILLE AND HER FATHER

Mars is the god of violence and bloodshed, and there is so much blood around Marcille, both her own and others… She spills her own blood when casting some of her spells, and she gets covered in dragon’s blood before resurrecting Falin. Marcille is also quick to resort to violence when threatened, without waiting to see if violence is really the best solution. She’s loud and opinionated and expresses herself clearly.

On the other hand, there are parts of Mars that are diametrically opposed to Marcille: Mars’ color is red, Marcille’s color is blue, Mars is male and Marcille is female, and according to the world guide, Marcille and all other half-elves are infertile. Mars is Marcille’s name-sake, and he is the god of masculine fertility.

Perhaps this is meant to highlight the mis-match between Mars and Marcille. The woman named after a male fertility god is infertile… Is this just irony, or is Kui saying something more, perhaps about Marcille’s gender presentation, or her denial of the tall-man half of her identity?

I think it’s likely Marcille is insecure about her femininity (and her half-elf status) and so is overcompensating by behaving in a hyper-feminine way. She is aware of her more masculine, violent and aggressive personality traits, and she may be attempting to disguise or repress them in order to pass as an elf.

Since Marcille is female and Mars represents masculine virility, is Marcille’s hyper-feminine behavior at the start of the manga part of her conflict? Is learning to accept her occasionally masculine nature a key part of her story arc? Would embracing the masculine parts of her nature be the same as embracing that she is half tall-man?

Would embracing all of this mean acknowledging her father, Donato, who hurt her so badly by dying and leaving her behind?

Marcille loves her father dearly but rarely speaks of him, and having him back is one of her deepest desires, even though she tries to deny it and rejects the demon’s attempts to give her a copy of her father.

If it weren’t for her father, Marcille would just be an ordinary elf. He is the reason that she is a half-elf, and why she can never be accepted by other elves, and why she will outlive everyone around her… Her biggest fear and strongest motivating factor. The reality that Donato was a tall-man is the cause of all of Marcille’s greatest hurts and problems in life. So just like she rejects the inevitability of Falin (and her other friends) growing up, growing old and dying, she rejects the reality that she’s half tall-man.

By rejecting all of masculinity, clinging to femininity and being an elf, Marcille is trying to reject aging, death, and loss. She is trying to reject anything that makes her more like her father, a tall-man who died.

MODERN WORLD REFERENCE: BEING “HALF A PERSON” IN JAPAN

Marcille’s story as a multi-racial character holds special significance because of the way Japanese society treats people of mixed race, or even mono-racial people who fail to fit into expected standards of physical appearance.

The unrealistic idea that Japan is a completely ethnically pure and culturally uniform country is deeply ingrained in Japanese society as something that has always been true and should remain true in the future. Losing this supposed hom*ogeneity is a source of considerable social anxiety in Japan.

Hafu (ハーフ, "half") is an English loanword used in Japan to refer to a person of half Japanese and half non-Japanese ancestry, and it literally means “half.” Japanese people who have one non-Japanese parent are called hafu, and they face prejudice and discrimination, and are often treated like foreigners even if they were born in Japan, hold Japanese citizenship, speak perfect Japanese, and participate in Japanese traditional customs. As soon as they are identified as hafu, they are no longer “really Japanese” to many Japanese people.

In order to live successfully in Japan, mixed-race Japanese people are often required to either accept being discriminated against in this way, or they must reject any other ethnicity they belong to and attempt to pass as fully Japanese by lying and omitting information in order to avoid discrimination.

Usage of the word hafu is considered offensive by some people of mixed ancestry, since it implies that they are only “half” of a person, or that they are lesser than people who are full-blooded Japanese.

JAPANESE BLACK HAIR VS. ELVEN BLONDE HAIR

One of the physical features the Japanese consider the most important to demonstrating that someone belongs to Japanese society is having dark black, perfectly straight hair. Even people who are completely Japanese are sometimes systemically pressured or harassed at school or work to dye their hair black if it is deemed too light, and to chemically straighten their hair if it is too curly

Hairstyles that deviate too far from the “natural” look of the hair are also frowned upon and seen as rebellious. There is a narrow idea of what hairstyles are acceptable looking, with the goal of creating physical uniformity that follows contemporary Japanese aesthetic standards.

The elves in Dungeon Meshi all have light colored hair, and it is implied that it is very important to them, a source of power and pride. Hair that deviates from “simple” and “natural” styles are clearly avoided; we never see any elves with bows, complex braids, or ponytails. Elves with unkempt hair are either counter-culture rebels or seen as mentally or physically sick.

Marcille repeatedly talks about how important her hair is to her during the part of the story where everyone thinks she is a full elf, and one of her major character traits is that she is constantly changing her hair into various elaborate styles involving bows and braids, to the point that her friends have trouble remembering how she normally wears her hair.

These styles are completely different from any of the elves we see later, and it’s unclear if Marcille doesn’t know that elves don’t wear their hair like she does, or if she is doing it purposefully to be contrary to their culture. Either way, it’s a trait that helps draw a clear distinction between her and the full elves.

At the end of the manga, Marcille loses her desire to maintain her hair, and begins to wear it in more simple and unkempt styles, or has friends or servants helping her with it. This change may be meant to indicate that she is giving up trying to pass as an elf, or to fit in with their society.

RED VS. BLUE AND SWITCHING TO BLACK

Red is the color of Mars, and of rusted iron, blood and war. Blue is commonly considered the “opposite” of red, so it is a color of cleanliness, peace and virtue.

Marcille’s blue dress contrasts against both her name and her intense personality, and it is stained red with blood when she is working to resurrect Falin. This is perhaps a sign that her inner nature, her Mars-ian qualities, are showing through to the surface.

At the end of the manga, Marcille stops wearing blue exclusively, and instead seems to wear darker colors (possibly black), suggesting that something about her has changed. She first wears black when the demon dresses her, but continues to sometimes do so in the epilogue and some of the post-canon materials.

Marcile also loses her desire to take care of her hair, something which has until that point been extremely important to her. This combination of no longer wearing blue exclusively and ignoring her hair may represent a first step towards becoming less concerned about her presentation to the rest of the world, and passing as an elf.

It’s strongly implied that elves are very focused on appearances, feminine beauty and perfection, so this change in Marcille may indicate she is learning to accept that she is not just an elf, but also a tall-man, and that she doesn’t need to hide it.

Donato is an Italian name derived from Latin “donatus” meaning “to give” (same root as the English word “donate”). This was a popular name in medieval times either because the birth of a child was seen as a gift from God or else because the child was going to be dedicated to God by sending them away to a monastery.

So Marcille Donato is “Little Warrior, Gift from/to God”, and suggests something like French or Italian ethnicity.

DONATO THE PLACE

The doppelganger copy of Marcille’s father calls himself Donato, which either means he’s referring to himself by his family name, or that Donato is his first name and Marcille took it as her family name. I think it’s most likely his family name, but an argument could be made for either.

People are often named after the place they are from, so it’s possible that if Donato is their family name, then Marcille’s father or his ancestors are from a place called Donato. That could mean Marcille was born and raised in Donato, though it’s also possible that her father or his family left Donato behind in the past, and lived somewhere else when Marcille was born.

In the real world, Donato is a municipality in the Province of Biella in the Northern Italian region of Piedmont. Donato is an ancient settlement from the Roman era, and had a strategic position for communications between Biella, the Canavese and the Aosta Valley. In 1706 the town was almost completely destroyed by French troops during the siege of Turin, during the War of the Spanish Succession.

The coat of arms of the municipality of Donato comes from the De Rege family, the last feudal lords of Donato. This coat of arms features a silver (or white) blue checkered shield with a red rose in the center. This is probably just a coincidence, but blue, white and red are Marcille’s colors, so it would be interesting if Kui picked them on purpose to match the Donato coat of arms!

LOCAL CULTURE: MARCILLE’S DRESS

The skirt portion of Marcille’s standard blue dress has two box pleats on the front. Box pleats were one of the most popular types of pleats for Italian Renaissance and 16th century clothing.

The only other person we’ve seen with this specific style is a man in the Living Paintings chapter, so a resident of the Golden Country over a thousand years ago. This suggests that this is an old and unisex style that can be used on men’s tunics and women’s dresses, and has been used for a very long time without significant change.

This fits Marcille's character, since she seems to be a bit conservative and modest in how she dresses, and it could also have been an early clue to the fact that she’s older than she looks, wearing clothing that is a bit out of date compared to the fashion of the people around her!

FOREIGN CULTURE: THE WORLD TREE AND AMBROSIA

Marcille’s staff is made from the roots of a second-generation clone of the “world tree,” something which Kui has given us no further explanation of.

WORLD TREE

The world tree is a common mythological concept present in many different religions, of a supernatural tree which supports the cosmos, thereby connecting the heavens, the terrestrial world, and, through its roots, the underworld. Specific world trees include Ağaç Ana in Turkic mythology, Modun in Mongol mythology, Yggdrasil in Norse mythology, Irminsul in Germanic mythology, the oak in Slavic, Finnish and Baltic mythology, Jianmu (建木) in Chinese mythology, and Ashvattha (अश्वत्थ) in Hindu mythology.

We see twisted trees that look like Marcille’s staff a few times in the manga, and it is very likely these are meant to be the World Tree, or one of its clones. The fact that there is a “second generation” World Tree in Dungeon Meshi (and that Marcille can get clippings of it) tells us that these are real plants that are being cultivated by someone, or that grow wild. They are probably magical, but they are tangible and alive, not metaphorical.

The fact that Marcille has clippings from the roots of it further implies that she either had clippings brought to her, she made a pilgrimage to personally visit a specific, important tree, or that the location of the cloned tree Marcille used is somewhere not too far from her home. I think it’s most likely the latter, it seems like one of these trees is near the graveyard where Marcille’s father is buried, so that is probably the tree that Ambrosia was grown from.

Based on the artwork and the description, although trees of many species take on a twisting appearance when they get very old, I think Kui is depicting a type of fig tree, most likely a Ficus religiosa, also called the sacred fig. See chapter 12 (Elven Culture) for more about Dungeon Meshi’s world tree and its connection to the sacred fig.

AMBROSIA

Ambrosia (ἀμβροσία) is a liquid food consumed by the Greek gods in order to maintain their immortality. The word itself comes from the Greek ἄμβροτος (ámbrotos, “immortal”) + -ῐ́ᾱ (-íā, abstract noun suffix). The word’s poetic meaning is immortal, divine, or something which belongs to the gods… Such as immortality, since dying is something which only happens to mortals.

The consumption of ambrosia was normally restricted to divine beings, and sometimes the consumption of ambrosia was the final step of a mortal ascending to godhood.

Ambrosia was also used for more than just eating, though the exact usage is unclear, the goddess Hera “cleansed all defilement from her flesh” with ambrosia, and Athena restored a sleeping Penelope’s youth by using ambrosia on her somehow. Ambrosia is fragrant, and was sometimes used in myths as a perfume to dispel horrible scents.

As I mentioned in Laios’ section earlier in this chapter, the thing the mythical Laios may have been trying to steal from the sacred cave may have been ambrosia. In Dungeon Meshi, Marcille takes Ambrosia with her into the cave (the labyrinth) to try and revive Falin.

All of this makes the name Ambrosia for Marcille’s staff extremely appropriate, since the ultimate goal of Marcille’s pursuit of magical knowledge is to prevent death and prolong life as much as possible. The fact that it is an Ancient Greek word also makes sense, since Greek appears to be an elven language.

FOREIGN CULTURE: MARCILLE’S MAGIC

Marcille’s magic book has a six-pointed star on it. Though this star is most famously known as the “Star of David”, a more neutral name for it is a hexagram, and it predates Judaism, and is actually a symbol that has been used by multiple unconnected religious and cultural contexts throughout the world, including Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Scholars theorize part of the symbol’s global ubiquity is that it’s easy to draw and a simple, appealing design, so many cultures have independently invented it. None of this is to say that Judaism can’t exist in the Dungeon Meshi world, only that the appearance of hexagrams should not be taken as undeniable proof of it.

Based on this, it’s possible that the hexagram is a symbol that predates the different magic systems in Dungeon Meshi, and so all of the different cultures use it, and all claim to have invented it…

However, Marcille and Flamela are the only people who we’ve seen use a hexagram (let me know if I’ve missed any!). There is a hexagram on Marcille’s spell book, the barrier spell she casts in her magic school flashback includes a hexagram, and when Flamela imagines a group of people casting a barrier spell, it’s drawn as a hexagram. Marcille seems to mostly utilize elvish magic, and Flamela probably uses exclusively elvish magic, therefore the hexagram is probably meant to be a part of an elven magic system.

If this is true, the hexagram having a Middle Eastern or Indian origin would fit with the patterns Kui has established for the cultural makeup of the elves. See Chapter 12, Elven Culture, for more information on this.

Rin is the tall-man spell caster in Kabru’s party. Her parents came from the Eastern Archipelago, but she was born in the Northern Continent. She’s in love with Kabru but he doesn’t return those feelings. Rin is very jealous of anyone Kabru pays attention to, and worries that Kabru will someday over-estimate his own ability to manipulate and charm people and get himself into trouble, so she nags him.

Rin’s nickname is a common Japanese girl’s name, and is often translated into other languages as “Lin” or “Lynn” because of the way R’s and L’s can be used interchangeably in Japanese. Rinsha is Kui’s intended spelling.

RIN AS A NARRATIVE TOOL TO TELL US ABOUT MARCILLE

Rin is a very minor character in the manga, and her main function in the story is to serve as a parallel to Marcille in Kabru’s party. She and Marcille mirror each other in many ways, ranging from their names, their character designs, their backstories, their personalities, and the narrative beats they go through during the manga.

• Marcille is a magic school graduate who had a happy childhood, and she expresses her emotions loudly and clearly. Her colors are blue, white and blonde, and she wears her long hair in complex and varied styles. She completely covers her body with modest clothing, from her ankles to her neck. She generally doesn’t cover her hair (although her outfit has a hood), and her hands are bare. She uses a living wooden staff with an organic shape. Marcille starts the story indifferent and even hostile towards Laios, her party leader, but by the end of the manga Marcille becomes very close, good friends with him, and understands him in a way few do.
• Rin is a self-taught mage and a traumatized orphan. She’s cold and reserved, and tries hard to conceal her emotions. Her colors are red and black, and she always wears her hair parted in the middle and straight down. She wears a short, revealing skirt that shows off her bare legs, but in her first appearance she wears a hood to cover her hair. She always wears gloves in the dungeon. Her staff is made of inert metal and has an artificial geometric shape at the top. Rin is explicitly in love with Kabru, her party leader, at the start of the manga, but he does not return her feelings, and despite all of Rin’s efforts, Kabru doesn’t actually open up to her or share himself with her.

Rinsha (رينشا) is an Arabic name that means guardian of paradise, or angel. This might be a reference to how Rin tries to protect Kabru like she’s a lightning-bolt flinging guardian angel, since lightning (Rin’s specialty) is popularly seen as the power of all the mightiest gods, who strikes down non-believers with it. Rin also wants to support Kabru’s ambition of conquering the dungeon, learning forbidden elven knowledge, and eventually enabling tall-men to co-exist with the long-lived races on a more equal level.

Rinsha’s meaning also parallels Marcille’s name, since Rinsha means guardian of paradise (typically a dangerous creature that serves the gods, like an angel with a flaming sword guarding Eden, or the Greek dragon Ladon guarding the apples of immortality), and Marcille’s name means a servant or devotee of Mars, a god who protects the home by waging war. Both are servants of a god whose primary purpose is to protect something precious through the use of violence.

Rinsha could also be split up into Rin (Japanese name meaning bell-like, dignified, or frigid, among other things) and Sha (Korean name meaning “girl”), so it could mean “bell-like girl”, “dignified girl” or “frigid girl” which all suit her, and could imply a mixed Japanese-Korean cultural heritage...

However, I think the Arabic form of Rinsha is more likely what Kui was thinking of, since it’s a complete extant name and Kui wrote Rinsha as a single word, not Rin Sha or Rin-Sha. The Arabic name parallels Marcille’s, and also describes Rin’s character more vividly than the Japanese-Korean fusion name, and I believe that Rin’s last name, Fana, is also Arabic, so her personal name being Arabic would make the personal and family names come from matching linguistic sources.

In Arabic, fana (فناء) literally means annihilation, extinction, or perishment.

Sufism, a branch of Islamic mysticism focused on purification and the denial of one’s own desires, uses “fana” to describe the “annihilation” of the self in service of God, to “die before one dies” or remove one’s ego in order to become an instrument of God’s plan. Fana is sometimes used as a girl’s name, in which case it usually means “she loves God so much, she loses herself.”

In the context of Islam, which is a monotheistic religion, “fana” is referring to Allah, however I believe even though Kui is probably using the word in the Sufi context, she is referring to the general concept of a god, religion or a mission in life, not the Islamic God specifically, since Islam and Christianity do not appear to exist in the Dungeon Meshi world.

Since most of Rin’s life revolves around following and helping Kabru (who she’s in love with), Kabru and his goals are the “god” that Rin is serving. Rin is devoted to Kabru’s mission to the point of risking her own life, reputation and future by going into the dungeon again and again, for no reward except knowing that they are doing the right thing.

Since Fana is Rin’s family name, not her personal name, it could also refer to the fact that her parents put the magic system they used (one could compare it to a religion) before their lives. They were unwilling to give up the way they did magic in order to avoid persecution and lynching. They are martyrs.

This meaning of Fana also matches Marcille’s last name, Donato. Donato is a name which means the person is being “given” to a god as a gift (sent to work for a religious group), or that the person is so wonderful that they are a gift a god gave to the world. Meanwhile Fana means someone who is so devoted to their god that they have abandoned all selfish personal desires, they have given themselves to their god out of an abundance of love and faith. Both names mean someone who belongs to god in some way.

Fana is also a name used in Africa which means wealth, honor, one who provides light or shining, and the name of a neighborhood in the city of Bergen, Norway.

While both of these are possible meanings (Rin does cast light spells for her party, and she was born in the Northern Continent, which probably contains a culture or location similar to Bergen), I think the Arabic name is the most likely intended meaning.

It fits Rin’s character so well, and matches the ethnicity of Rin’s first name and the meaning of Marcille’s last name… And as stated in Marcille’s section above, both Rin and Marcille’s names may be intended to fake readers out, by presenting a name that appears to be one ethnicity at first, and then later proves to be the opposite one.

RIN THE NICKNAME

Rin is a popular unisex Japanese name, with a lot of meanings that match up with what we know of her character: To confront. To look down from a high place. To mourn. Cold. Stately and dignified presence. Ethics, morals and principles. Things being done correctly. Strong and fierce, courageous. Warrior. Following in the footsteps of a predecessor.

Rin often confronts Kabru about his behavior, questioning his plans or his motives. She looks down on other adventurers, seeing herself, Kabru and the rest of their party as being above them. Rin also has a cold, aloof persona where she never smiles, even when she’s happy. She’s also following in her parent’s footsteps, since she’s making her living by doing magic just like they did.

O-RIN: THE IMPORTANCE OF RIN’S ETHNICITY

Kui highlights the topic of Rin’s ethnicity three times in the main story. It’s possible that this was just done so Kui could tell readers more about the Eastern Archipelago and Rin, however I think Kui’s main objective was to foreshadow Marcille’s mixed-race status by making characters and readers question Rin’s racial status as a non-Japanese Asian person.

Kui has characters refer to her mostly as Rin, but also has Kabru use her full name, Rinsha, in one of Rin’s only major scenes. This ensures that readers know her full name isn’t Rin, even without reading any of the extra materials. Japanese readers would recognize that Rin is a Japanese name, and that Rinsha is not, so this would make Japanese readers think that she must not be Japanese… And if she isn’t Japanese, what ethnicity is she?

In Rin’s next major scene, Mickbell asks if Rin knows anything about Toshiro (a character that readers only know as a generic Japanese samurai at this point), because Mickbell assumes Rin might know anyone who comes from the Eastern Archipelago.

Rin corrects Mickbell, and tells him that although her parents came from the Eastern Archipelago, she wasn’t born there, and that not all people from the archipelago know each other. She also reveals that each island in the archipelago speaks a different language, and that she doesn’t recognize the name “Shuro”, so it doesn’t come from her ancestral island. So readers know at this point that Rin is definitively not Japanese.

The next time Rin appears in the story, Maizuru, who is culturally Japanese, calls her “O-Rin”, and then rudely refers to all the other characters that she’s ordering around with descriptive nicknames, or by their race.

O (Japanese Honorific)

O (お) is an exalted prefix in Japanese that shows respect for the person or object to whom it is applied. It is often added to names, titles or objects, such as o-tousan instead of tousan, o-furo instead of furo, or O-Rin instead of Rin. This carries the same weight as calling her “Lady Rin”, while referring to everyone else as “hey you!” This implies that Maizuru considers Rin and Rin alone, to be worthy of respect.

Most likely Maizuru specifically thinks Rin is culturally Japanese, since she calls her Rin, not Rinsha. Maizuru refers to Falin as “that Northern girl”, rather than by her name. If she respected Falin on the same level as Rin, she would have called her O-Falin. If she knew Rin’s name was really Rinsha, she might not have given her a respectful prefix!

This parallels a later scene where Marcille, a half-elf, meets and is scrutinized by Mithrun and his squad. They treat Marcille respectfully at first, while disrespecting the rest of the party and Kabru because none of them are elves. Mithrun tricks Marcille into revealing her ignorance of elven customs, identifies her as a half-elf, and he and the other elves begin to talk down to Marcille, questioning her intelligence, her competence, and her morals based on her half-elf status.

We don’t know if something similar eventually happened between Maizuru and Rin, where Maizuru realized that Rin isn’t actually Japanese, but it makes me very curious to know how Maizuru addressed other members of the party while they were traveling together, especially Kabru, since he is the party leader, but is not East Asian or Japanese. Perhaps she called him Kabru-san (polite, but less polite than O-Kabru would be), “Western boy”, “blue-eyed boy” or “swordsman”!

WHY RINSHA FANA MIGHT BE AN ELVISH NAME

Since Rin’s entire name is likely Arabic, and Arabic is one of the languages Kui associates with the Western elves (See Chapter 12 for more info on this), that could mean that in-universe, Rinsha Fana is an elvish name. But how did a girl whose family comes from the Eastern Archipelago, where elves have little influence, get an elvish name?

Rin’s parents were originally from the Eastern Archipelago, but they left for unspecified reasons and moved to the Northern Continent. Though the World Guide calls them “wanderers”, moving between countries was extremely difficult in the Medieval-Renaissance time period that Dungeon Meshi is vaguely set in, so I find it hard to believe that Rin’s family made such a huge move simply on a whim. People don’t migrate across entire continents for no reason.

There was probably something that made them want to leave the archipelago, but what? Kui doesn’t tell us many details, but what information we do have becomes very suggestive once we take the history of Japan into account.

After leaving the archipelago, Rin’s family lived in the Northern Continent, and when Rin was eleven years old local people (probably tall-men) killed her parents for being magic-users, something we know happens frequently in the Northern Continent. The Canaries showed up shortly afterwards because they had reports that Rin’s parents were practicing Ancient magic, and they took Rin away with them to the elven lands as “evidence” since she was the only thing left behind. Rin was treated like an animal by her elven caretakers, which gave her an intense dislike of elves.

Rin’s character and story features several elements that would probably catch the attention of Japanese readers: an East Asian person with a foreign religious name that comes from a family that left Asia under mysterious circ*mstances, and Rin’s family being lynched and killed for their magical (religious) practices. The fact that the lynching didn’t happen in East Asia doesn’t really matter, the ideas placed next to each other are suggestive.

I think this story is most likely meant to evoke the historic persecution of Christians in Japan in the 17th century. The Japanese government of the time, the Tokugawa shogunate, officially persecuted, tortured, and executed somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 Japanese Christians and foreign Christian missionaries. This forced Christians in Japan to either go into hiding, flee the country, or renounce their faith in order to survive.

The Tokugawa shogunate saw Christianity as a threat to their control over Japan: Japanese people who had converted to Christianity were traitors, and missionaries were foreign enemies trying to undermine Japanese society. Conversion to Christianity, the dominant religion of Europe, was seen as the first step of European nations trying to colonize Japan.

ELVEN MISSIONARIES IN THE EASTERN ARCHIPELAGO?

There are groups of elves in Dungeon Meshi who behave similarly to missionaries in the real world. There may or may not have been a religious component, but these elves felt it was their moral duty to spread elven culture and knowledge to the short-lived races, and improve their standard of living.

The Eastern Archipelago has historically been controlled by the ogre race, and that plus the archipelago’s isolation, has kept the long-lived races from colonizing the region. However, the ogres have been dying out and no longer control the area, and the tall-men are fighting viciously among themselves over the land. This has plunged the region into something similar to the real world Sengoku era, which matches the material culture Kui shows us.

The nations of the Eastern Archipelago most likely consider the long-lived races a threat to their sovereignty, and they are probably making an effort to keep long-lived races and their culture out of the region, to prevent themselves from being conquered and colonized.

We know that there have been treaties signed between the races to keep the long-lived races out of the area.

SAKOKU (CLOSED COUNTRY POLICY)

Sakoku (鎖国 Literally "locked country") is the isolationist foreign policy that began at the end of the Sengoku era, instituted by the Tokugawa shogunate. Under this policy, relations and trade between Japan and other countries were severely limited, and nearly all foreign nationals were banned from entering Japan, while common Japanese people were kept from leaving the country.

The shogunate imposed and enforced the sakoku policy in order to remove colonial and religious influence from European countries, which were perceived as posing a threat to the stability of the shogunate and to peace in Japan.

It’s thought that the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38 was the primary trigger for imposing Sakoku policy. The Shimabara Rebellion was an uprising of 40,000 mostly Christian peasants. In the aftermath, the shogunate accused missionaries of instigating the rebellion, expelled them from the country, and strictly banned the religion on penalty of death. The remaining Japanese Christians formed underground communities and came to be called Kakure Kirish*tan (Hidden Christians).

All contact with the outside world became strictly regulated by the shogunate. Dutch traders were permitted to continue commerce in Japan only by agreeing not to engage in missionary activities.

The Western elves are the only group that have a coordinated military empire that has international reach, and they have missionaries that try to spread their culture, so the elves are probably seen as the greatest threat by the nations of the Archipelago.

WHY DID RIN’S FAMILY LEAVE THE ARCHIPELAGO?

Using elven names, or using elven style magic, or belonging to an elven religion would make Rin’s family a target for persecution in the Eastern Archipelago.

Since Rin’s family name, Fana, appears to be elvish, and means “destruction of the self in order to serve god”, and Rin’s parents also gave Rin what appears to be an elvish name (Rinsha) while living in the Northern Continent, we can deduce that elven culture is so important to them that they refuse to assimilate or convert.

It is unlikely that the lynching that burned their home down and killed them is the only time they were threatened for their magical practices, such intense violence usually builds over time.

It’s worth noting that Rinsha is a name that can pass as Japanese, since it can be shortened to Rin. This is a common practice among multi-racial families, giving their children names that can fit into either society that the child might need to interact with.

Could it be that in Dungeon Meshi, Rin is both a Japanese name and a dwarvish name, since the dwarves have some Japanese names? A dwarvish name would allow Rin to pass for a local in the Northern Continent, since dwarvish culture is dominant there. More on this in Chapter 6, The Eastern Archipelago, and Chapter 9, Dwarves.

WHY WERE RIN’S PARENTS KILLED IN THE NORTHERN CONTINENT?

We don’t know exactly what type of magic Rin uses, or what type of magic her parents used, but we have a few data points we can work with:

• The magic in the Eastern Archipelago is based on the gnomish magic system.
• If Rin’s family left the archipelago because of the magic they used, then that magic couldn’t be gnomish. That means Rin’s family must have used elvish magic.
• Gnomish magic is the normal magic style in the Northern and Eastern Continents too. Elvish magic and elves are rare, exotic and foreign to the local populations.
• Tall-men in the Northern Continent persecute and ostracize magic users unless they belong to an organization that legitimizes them (royal court, school, temple).
• Rin’s family lived in the Northern Continent, but because they are foreigners and they don’t use a gnomish magic style, they weren’t able to join any organization that would protect them from the locals.

From this, we can conclude that the locals, unfamiliar with elvish magic, think that Rin’s parents are using forbidden ancient magic, so they kill them.

If this is true, Rin’s intense dislike of the elves makes perfect sense. Obviously she resents the elves for treating her badly as a child, but she also might hold a grudge against elven missionaries and elven culture in general.

Rin may feel that the elves that taught her family are the true root cause of all the bad things that have happened to her in life, and that if her ancestors hadn’t gotten involved in elven culture, her parents might still be alive, they might have never even left the archipelago at all!

FOREIGN CULTURE: RIN’S MAGIC STAFF

We don’t know anything about Rin’s magic staff, but it appears to have a head piece made of metal in a shape similar to the headdress of the Ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor, or an ankh.

THE ANKH

This Ancient Egyptian symbol means life in Hieroglyphics, and looks like a cross with a hollow circle or teardrop-shaped loop on top of the crossbar. The ankh often appears in Egyptian art as a physical object representing either life or related substances such as air or water. Commonly depicted in the hands of ancient Egyptian deities, sometimes being given by them to the pharaoh, it represents the gods’ power to sustain life and to revive human souls in the afterlife.

Rin’s staff-topper somewhat resembles this symbol, however the crossbar of her staff is very clearly horn-shaped, which is not normally a feature of ankhs. An ankh could be an appropriate staff-topper for Rin, since she is one of her party’s mages and she theoretically can heal and revive people… However, we’ve never actually seen Rin heal or revive anyone, and it seems like her magic is focused on combat, so I think the horned sun disk is a more fitting symbol for her.

THE HORNED SUN DISK

Hathor was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles. She was a sky goddess, the symbolic mother and protector of the pharaohs, the feminine form of Ra, a goddess of vengeance and punishment, but also a caring nurturer involved in dance, music, love, sex, and maternal care. Hathor crossed boundaries between worlds, helping deceased souls in the transition to the afterlife.

Hathor was often depicted as a cow, symbolizing her maternal and celestial aspect, but her most common form was a woman wearing a headdress made of cow horns, holding the sun disk between them, most often while she breastfed an infant that represented the pharaoh.

This horns-and-sun symbol is very similar to the top of Rin’s staff, and if this is what Kui was referencing, it would fit in perfectly with Rin’s Arabic name and her family’s possible connection to elven magic and culture.

Although I haven’t found any explicit examples of ancient Egyptian culture among the Western elves, Hathor’s cultural reach went far beyond Egypt, and she was worshiped throughout parts of the Middle East and North Africa, two regions that seem to have inspired parts of Western elvish culture in Dungeon Meshi.

Additionally, the goddess Hathor was sometimes called “the mistress of the west” because the entrance to the Egyptian underworld was believed to be in the west, where the sun sets, and Hathor was an important guide and protector for the souls of the deceased.

Rin was taken away to the west when her family died, and raised by the elves until her eventual return to the eastern hemisphere where she begins exploring the dungeon with Kabru. This is thematically very similar to Hathor’s daily journey that takes her from east to west, and then in the night she transverses the underworld (the dungeon) and reemerges at dawn in the east.

Hathor was also connected with trade and foreign lands, and she was believed to protect ships the same way she protected the sun barge in the sky. Rin is a foreigner both in the east and the west, and she is the member of Kabru’s party that has the most strength to protect him, using the power of lightning (a weapon of the gods) to ensure his safe passage through the dungeon (underworld).

Hathor was also a goddess of love and sex, and Rin is one of the few characters in Dungeon Meshi that regularly wears a “sexy” outfit, featuring a short skirt with a slit up the center. It’s possible that she’s wearing such an impractical outfit in the dungeon to try and get Kabru’s attention, though she also might just like wearing that sort of thing.

Finally, Hathor was a goddess closely associated with the pharaohs of Egypt. She was seen symbolically as both mother and spouse, nurturer and protector. Rin is romantically interested in Kabru, but he sees her as a sister, and isn’t attracted to her. However, their bond is deep and they care for each other. Rin worries about Kabru constantly, and Kabru comforts Rin after she’s killed by Falin.

Though Rin is critical of his behavior, she’s also a strong supporter of Kabru’s mission to conquer the dungeon on the behalf of tall-men, and like the rest of Kabru’s party, she probably believes only Kabru is suited to rule the dungeon. Like Hathor protecting the pharaohs, Rin wants to make Kabru a king.

Doni (ドニ) is a tall-man adventurer from the Northern Continent.

Doni is a variant spelling of the name Donny, which comes from Donald, which comes from the Scottish Gaelic name Dòmhnall meaning "ruler of the world", composed of the Old Irish elements domun "world" and fal "rule".

This is a relatively common name for a boy, so it’s not unusual for Doni to have it, though it is pretty funny since he’s not an important character in Dungeon Meshi. Maybe Fionil was right to believe in him, and someday he’ll rule the world…

However Doni could also come from Latin, dōnum meaning gift, or offering, sacrifice. Dōnī is the genitive form of this word, meaning possession or origin, so either “from the sacrifice/gift” or “belonging to the sacrifice/gift.” Maybe this is a reference to how he almost died in the beginning of the manga to a simple, low-level monster, in order to let Kui show us how much stronger Laios and his party are than new adventurers like Doni and Fionil? Doni was a “sacrifice” to allow Kui to tell her story. Or perhaps it’s a reference to how Doni and Fionil are some of the people that speak up in Laios’ favor at the end of the manga.