Delicious in Dungeon: Marcille's Controversial Magical Abilities, Explained

Highlights

Delicious in Dungeon offers a unique blend of fantasy, adventure, and cooking in an exciting anime experience.
Marcille’s use of forbidden magic adds controversy and gripping stakes to the group’s quest to save Falin.
The anime showcases a deep friendship between Marcille and Falin, with Marcille’s magic skills playing a crucial role in their journey.

It has been a while since we have seen a cooking anime, and Delicious in Dungeon supplies this demand. The anime is a scrumptious blend of fantasy, adventure and wild cooking. We follow a team of adventurers who explore a dungeon, killing monsters in the process. However, this rag tag team go the extra mile by cooking and eating the monsters they kill. On a full belly of three balanced (yet unconventional) meals a day, this group continue their quests in the dungeon.

Everyone in the group has their own role to play, each equipped with their own skills and abilities. Marcille, the group’s mage, posseses a hybrid magical skillset. However, she has kept a secret from the rest of her group: her specialization in forbidden magic. She uses this magic at a crucial moment in the anime, which can also be deemed controversial.

Delicious in Dungeon: How to Eat a Living Armor

The crew makes their way deeper into the dungeon and finds an unlikely edible monster to chow down on.

What is Delicious in Dungeon About?

Delicious in Dungeon follows a group of explorers going through a dungeon. The group originally consisted of Laios Touden (a human man and a knight), Chilchuck Tims (a half-foot and locksmith), Namari (a dwarf and fighter), Falin Touden (a human mage) and Marcille Donato (a half-elf half-human mage).

One fateful day, the group ran into a Red Dragon, a giant beast that was hard to kill. This monster ate Falin, Laios’ sister and Marcille’s best friend. Since then, the group has been hell-bent on finding the dragon again and rescuing Falin. As time went on, Namari left the group and Senshi (a dwarf who has been living in the dungeon) joined the party. Senshi is crucial to this little group, for he knows how to prepare delicious meals from dead monsters. With the new team, the gang travel through the dungeon in search of the Red Dragon, while also sampling the many monsters they faced along the way.

Who is Marcille Donato?

Marcille’s childhood

Marcille was born on the Northern Continent to a human father and an elf mother. Due to her mixed-race nature, she did not grow up like typical human or elf children. Children like her develop at varying rates. Some are children well into their thirties, like the long-life elf race; while others grow at human rates and then remain middle-aged. Marcille’s growth was erratic. It took twenty years for all her adult teeth to grow, but she learned how to speak very early, and it took years for her to be able to walk.

Her erratic growth meant that she could not attend school for quite some time, meaning that she was left to her own devices a lot of the time. The company she was surrounded with was “short-lived adults, chickens and books”.

The birth of Marcille’s biggest fear

One day, Marcille’s father got sick and bedridden. Willing to take care of him, young Marcille made him probably the only thing she knew how to make: pasta, and salt for garnish. Despite the plain childish meal, her father consumed it all to make his daughter happy. Her mother, a cheerful elf, became emotional for the first time when he coukd no longer eat her pork roast due to his illness. It was his favorite dish.

Due to him having Marcille later in his life, he died while she was still young. Her mother said to her during their mourning that she “run[s] faster than everyone else”, therefore she had to “watch lots of people go away”. This was possibly the start to her deepest fear, which Laios saw in her dream: that everyone she loved would die before her. Her father dying before her was so traumatizing that she cannot bear to go through it again with more people she cared about. It is no surprise that her deep desire to prevent this from happening caused her to save Falin, her best friend, from the Red Dragon – even if it meant using compromising magic.

Marcille’s and Falin

Marcille studied magic alongside Falin. She had quite a famous reputation at school as well, becoming a teacher’s assistant on her fifth day of enrollment. Her talent and skills were so prominent that rumors went around that she was promised to be a court magician. As a student, she was researching how to build safe dungeons. Her theory was that a safe dungeon would consist of only useful monsters. That way, dungeons would be most beneficial to the masses.

She met Falin during a spirit experiment class. Falin was an outcast, introverted and messy student – the polar opposite of the star pupil that was Marcille. When the students were measuring their results of the experiment, Falin surprisingly yielded astronomical results. Shocked, Marcille asked her where on earth she conducted her experiment in an environment with lots of spirits. The answer was right up her alley, for it was in a dungeon itself.

Falin tooks Marcille to her secret spot in the dungeon that housed a lot of spirits. Marcille’s brain was running wild with the possibilities of harnassing mana from the dungeon in this environment. This experience brought the girls closer together. Falin introduced Marcille to a whole new world outside what she studied in her books. This was a friendship of the mind and heart.

Marcille’s Magic

Marcille is a hybrid magician. She has used a variety of spells throughout the dungeon, such as protection, explosions and many more. Healing magic is also in her repertoire, although she is not the most skilled at it. Marcille’s real demonstration of abilities, however, is utilized when the group finally defeat the Red Dragon that digested Falin.

After finding and killing it, the gang sadly find Falin to be already digested, with nothing but a skeleton to be found in its digestive system. Contemplating what to do, Marcille had an idea. Laios wanted to bring the remains to the Resurrection Office, but Marcille notes that due to the decomposed nature of Falin’s body, it is dangerous to move her because the link to her soul is very fragile now. Resurrection fails when the body is not fully repaired or the soul has disappeared entirely. The only solution is to resurrect her right there in the dungeon, except that there is no access to the required ingredients to do so. Marcille proposes that they use the dragon’s corpse as a replacement, much to everyone’s horror. It is here that Marcille breaks some dark news: her magical specialty is researching ancient magic that is currently forbidden.

Even though there is no inherent good or evil in magic, according to Marcille, she agrees that using forbidden magic is not a respectable way to go about saving Falin. She gives Laios the final call on whether to revive her this way or not. He gives her the green light to go through with it, being met with protest from Senshi and Chilchuck. Not only is the magic forbidden, but using a dragon instead of normal animals like pigs in ordinary circumstances is unheard of.

They begin the process by assembling Falin’s skeleton, which is difficult due to the dog bones that the dragon also digested. After carefully sorting and assembling the human bones, Marcille performs the spell. It took a massive amount of energy on her part, but the spell worked and Falin was revived.

The plot in Delicious in Dungeon seems harmless at first: a group of adventurers exploring a dungeon and eating delicious meals as they go. However, the anime does an amazing job of inviting gripping stakes when in unexpected places. The plot, like the many soups and broths cooked by Senshi, thickens deliciously throughout the anime; Marcille’s controversial magic use being one of them.