its a shame how ryoko kui managed to make a series with such a realistic portrayal of sistemic and internalized racism only for people to have it fly over their heads and go 'x character is racist!! how dare you like them!!!' when like. literally every single character has said something racist. your blorbo is racist. my blorbo is racist.
marcille hates orcs. kabru has dehumanized kobolds. mithrun said a slur. laios and falin treat mountain people like savages. analyse these traits meaningfully or perish
Dungeon meshi is one of the only "realistic" fantasy IPs that earns the moniker because in addition to it's unrelenting dedication to the practicalities of dungeon exploration (both good and bad) it also shows people being people, flaws and all.
It actually engages with the prejudice that's baked into the fantasy genre in a way that's not just saying "racism bad" or using it as a throwaway attempt to be edgy/mature.
Our heroes and extended cast have absorbed the prejudices that are common in their world, the same way that we all end up with any other hangups and biases, and they overcome those prejudices the same way real people have to: by encountering truth that challenges their worldview and allowing themselves to change for the better.
Hey I’m back to just throw this out here because the way it’s done in Marcille’s case especially is super clever and interesting
Spoilers below
So Marcille is a half elf, and this is a spoiler which is actually specifically the interesting thing; on the surface, this should be pretty straight forward
It’s a stock fantasy thing, half elf means you get prejudice from both sides, grow up with people who don’t understand you, classic edgy character backstory
But because of the way half elves work in Dungeon Meshi, it really highlights where the stock models fall down
Half elves don’t age in a linear fashion; Marcille could talk almost immediately, but couldn’t walk for years, and took 20 years to lose all her baby teeth. She wasn’t on the same developmental level as anyone else her age anywhere in the world except maybe, potentially another half elf, and even that could not continue
And it’s actually important to the story later on; we learn Marcille’s closest playmates to her own age where short lived adults like her father, that she couldn’t hang out with children in towns because they were growing so drastically differently
She’s also going to live twice as long as the elves, which you’d think would shake their superiority of “we live the longest” a little, but it’s not based in logic so that’s fine
Marcille is 50; most half elves definitely don’t reach 1000 because of sickness or injury (now quick apply that to the rest of your friends cuz you literally might die tomorrow Marcille I have seen your self preservation skills)
But conceivably, by lifespan angst math, for 450 years Marcille will outlive every single person who isn’t also a half elf, in the entire world. No question, every baby born will die before her for the next 450 years, and then those elves are gonna be pushing it
That’s 23 generations of humans/tallmen (a generation being every 20 years; it’s about 40 generations of halffoots like Chilchuck)
Marcille is othered in a literal, physical sense which is completely undeniable in two ways; her extended lifespan and inconsistent physical growth, and her infertility, with every single elf she meets assuming she wants to use the dungeon’s power to become a full elf, or be able to have kids
And that’s the actual real interesting thing about Marcille and the racism in Dungeon Meshi; we don’t even know she’s a half elf until Thistle brings it up
Marcille never bothers to mention it, and no one else can tell apparently (even Pattadol didn’t notice, so it’s not that every single elf ever has immediately clocked her… although it is only Pattadol that didn’t notice)
Marcille never mentions a single desire to become a full anything, or to have children, and doesn’t consider it worth bringing up to her party
The two major claims that are immediately whipped out at her every time the party run into elves (Thistle and then the Canaries) have so little to do with anything Marcille actually cares about that they come right out of left field
(I could be wrong, but I don’t think the demon ever bothers offering to give Marcille the ability to have kids. I don’t think Marcille ever mentions it herself except to confirm to Laios and Chilchuck “yeah Thistle was right that I can’t”)
And Marcille rebukes both claims every single time (and shoulda one-shotted Thistle with that “ugh elves are so embarrassing” if he wasn’t even more of an angsty teen)
She not only doesn’t think an extended lifespan makes her better than anyone else, she fully calls it embarrassing that anyone would ever think it could, but the only people who can identify her as a half elf all have extremely limited ideas about what she might want based on that information alone, and it explicitly fucks them over every time
Because she promptly dismisses them and gets irritated and untrusting, which Goes Great
And this is interesting because we’ve seen some explicit examples of racism already with Namari’s backstory and the dwarves on the island, and with the Canaries both in abstract and in person when they come sailing in to scoop the big scary dungeon away from all these short-lived babies
We’ve seen a bias against elves, because elves are biased against everyone else and people did not take kindly to that
There’s clearly a bias against half elves at least from the elven side, although apparently it’s hard enough to tell that most people throughout the story just assume she’s an elf
But none of the bullshit she immediately gets from said elves surprises Marcille
She responds with familiarity and contempt; we the reader have just been given brand new information about her literal species, and instantly shown a bias we have never even seen a hint of, and it is old news to Marcille
Because… yeah. You don’t recognise micro aggressions until you’re told what to look out for, but it being new to you doesn’t make it new to people who’ve been living with it their whole lives
(Laios and co promptly are good noodles and agree it’s ridiculous and support their friend that yeah, it doesn’t matter that it never came up before because it doesn’t change anything about their friendship, because again they are good noodles)
We started out with a pretty diverse party already (one dwarf, one elf, one halffoot, one tallman - and having an elf is rare enough to be identifying) and then we learn that Marcille is actually a second secret even smaller minority with Extra Bigotry, and y’know the very best part?
It’s fucking irrelevant
How Marcille grew up out of step with everyone else only comes up because they’re trying to get a doppleganger to tell them what kind of food she liked as a kid
Her Terrible Tragic Past As A Half Elf Who No One Can Understand adds an extra degree of poignancy to her goals, but they made sense without it
We didn’t question Marcille wanting to extend everyones’ lives when she was just an elf who’d live 500 years, because it’s still so much longer than her friends
It’s a gut punch, and oh the scene where she explains her mom told her she runs at a different pace from everyone else and will watch a lot of people fucking die is a kicker
(There’s a reason she has no siblings I’m just saying)
The half elf reveal adds spice, and depth, and tragedy to the story we already knew about Marcille, but it isn’t the most important or the only important thing about her
She’s a magical prodigy who decided that the world would be a better place if everyone got the same amount of time to live in it, and then set about making it happen
Antagonists can try and reduce her to “just another half elf, bet you want half elf things like Not Being A Half Elf and Babies”, but what she actually wants and who she actually is is so much more complex than that
Being in such a drastic minority is part of Marcille’s story, and it shapes her, but it isn’t all she is and that’s deadass proven in the text because we are not told she is one until we’re reaching the climax
Ryoko Kui isn’t just addressing and including racism in her world in incredible and well thought out ways, she directly challenged it in the core cast and it’s just incredible
(Oh and also that late stage reveal where we learned Chilchuck started his union because PEOPLE WERE USING HALFFOOTS AS MONSTER BAIT and he just Never Bothered To Mention This??????)
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