First, if you’re wondering, the Netflix show follows this EXACTLY, so if you’re into that, good news for you. If you like reading the book to get a deeper experience, sucks for you, loser.
Here’s what I love about this book: So much fantasy fiction is so similar. You got your dwarves, your elves, your orcs, and that’s about the extent of the creativity there. It sucks. When I’m feeling cynical, all fantasy feels like fanfic of other fantasy, bad fanfic that doesn’t do anything interesting with the characters, it’s just like, “What if these same characters had another adventure that was less interesting and exciting than their last adventure, and the characters were robbed of their previous depth and had to learn the same exact lessons again?”
I mean, if your book is about an Ian McKellen looking wizard in a dungeon, fuck off with that shit.
Delicious in Dungeon brings a new element to the table: Food.
The premise here is that dungeon exploration is challenging because it’s hard to pack in enough food to sustain adventuring, so bro gets an idea: What if we eat stuff we find in the dungeon?
I mean, what’s the difference between eating a walking mushroom and one that doesn’t walk? Or, what’s the difference between eating a walking mushroom and a pig, in terms of ethics?
As a side note, this character is actually kind of obsessed with eating stuff in the dungeon, he’s a real psychopath, and I’m all for it.
The setup bring out a combo of a dungeon crawling adventure and a cooking show, which is pretty fun, and I think the real appeal is that you get to view dungeon crawling fantasy through a different lens. When you’re looking at the dungeon as a food source, it brings a lot of new ideas and elements to the stories, creatures, and typical things that go on in these dungeons. As an example: We encounter a room with a flamethrower trap, and one dude is like, “Hey, if there’s fire, there has to be some kind of fuel. Chances are it’s oil, and if there’s oil, we might be able to cook with it.”
It peels back the layers of the dungeon, like an onion, a dungion. See how clever that is? It’s about food, and I compared a dungeon to a food? I’m practically Ryoko Kui here. Or Arcimboldo. Or…who was that guy who carved vegetables and made them into faces and shit? Saxton Freymann. In my first apartment, I had FRAMED Saxton Freymann vegetable pictures in my kitchen. How’s THAT for classy AF?