I'm loving Dungeon Meshi's mix of quasi-probable magical biological realism and "It's magic fuck you."
Red dragons swallow their prey whole and use the undigestible remains as fuel for their fire breath, which is lit by creating a spark with their tongue. Living armors are colonies of mollusks who expand and contract to mimic muscle movement. Actually "man-eating" plants is a misnomer, they catch small animals with a filament that retracts when touched and they use their decomposing prey as compost.
These mushrooms can turn you into a gnome. It's magic fuck you.
While Ryoko Kui doesn't explain how the mushroom magic works, I love that she does still explain the ecological niche of those mushrooms. When a creature gets covered in spores and is transformed magically, it gets cast out by others of its kind and driven away. Then, when it dies, the spores sprout into a new mushroom circle. This doesn't explain the magic, but it does explain why mushrooms with that magic effect would have evolutionary success.
I love that even when the mechanism for something is just "it's magic", she still puts so much thought into the world around the magic and how it fits into the broader picture. Absolutely one of the reasons her worldbuilding is so generally stellar.














