Delicious in Dungeon: Utilizing Ridiculousness

Grab your frog suits and your undead dancing rabbits, we're getting silly.

Preface.

I’ve been “done” (until the final volume) with Delicious in Dungeon for a few weeks now and still I find myself pining to return to it. It had such a knack for its own devices, and even in other series—series I’m enjoying, mind you—I want to see more Delicious in Dungeon elements.

Also, I just miss Laios.

But more than anything, I miss the sheer seamlessness with which Delicious in Dungeon navigated its ridiculousness. It has this incredible ability to get straight-up silly with no prior warning, and then back to serious before you know what’s happening.

I’m getting ahead of myself though.

Preface over!

Humor is a substantial tool to have in your storytelling tool belt, but it’s also one of the hardest and most dangerous to wield. Seeing as how humor is subjective, your fart joke may work with some readers and turn others off entirely. But being able to pair the right type of humor with the proportions of your story opens up so much more room for other emotions.

I always point to the effectiveness of merging humor and horror. Perhaps not opposite ends of the spectrum, but certainly close to it. When you get readers/viewers to laugh, they let their guard down. They feel safe, happy, secure, they’re having a grand old time. What better time to absolutely terrify them, or hit them with such a profoundly devastating moment? It’s like raising the cliff to lengthen their fall. Which sounds wildly dangerous, but for the purposes of storytelling, it’s a weapon you should be reaching for. Why push your reader off a cute little knoll when you can instead shove them off a canyon wall?

That said, humor is one thing, but ridiculousness is another thing entirely. Ridiculousness is the furthest end of the humor spectrum. If humor is a difficult tool to wield, ridiculousness is doubly so. Also, forewarning, I’m about to use the word ridiculousness a lot. Forgive me.

Enter Delicious in Dungeon. The majority of this narrative is not ridiculous. It is a serious adventure manga woven with humor, with characters who have depth, realness and complicated relationships. They have conflicted motivation, dubious pasts and shady futures. But when it goes ridiculous, it goes with confidence and effectiveness.

Not just that, but it seems Delicious in Dungeon makes a point to segue from major dramatic tension into ridiculousness with very little, if any, lead time. Consider the rabbits example. For context (and Monty Python fans will love this), our adventurers go to face deadly rabbits, who use bladed feet to kill all who enter their territory. And by kill, I mean kick their heads off. These rabbits eviscerate all of Laios’s crew except Marcille within a single page, with Marcille only surviving because she is wearing a neck guard, kindly given to her by Laios.

Before we can even process the threat, the consequences, the anything, Marcille has the rabbits and her companions risen from the dead as zombies, dancing on the page. We’ve just been slapped by an opponent capable of incredible power, and mere panels later, it’s an undead dance party.

It’s the best example of taking advantage of a readers natural emotions. Delicious in Dungeon doesn’t give readers time to settle into any negative emotion, because we’re thrown into sheer ridiculousness. It’s the best kind of whiplash. Maybe the only good kind, actually, I can’t think of another good kind of whiplash.

Another example: the frog suits situation. The adventurers have just reached an impossible situation, they couldn’t get past a stairwell of deadly vines and tentacles, they lost their weapons, Chilchuck was half eaten by a giant frog, and there was no solution. Nothing could help them, cue the despondency, everyone is going to die.

But the next thing you know they’re all dressed as frogs, making headway through the vines because frog skin is immune to the toxins of the tentacles.

Having moments of ridiculousness that really deliver expands the boundaries of what your story is capable of. But ridiculousness is hard to utilize and harder to master, not to mention it can go horribly wrong if not done properly.

A mainstream example. Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore. Not the best movie, I’ll admit, but the moments of ridiculousness are masterful and feel like an honest-to-goodness breath of fresh air. Amidst the muddled and confusing plot, we get a wonderful moment when Newt Scamander and his brother Theseus are dancing with a herd of tiny manticores. It is peak ridiculousness, and it is the most satisfying scene of the entire movie solely because it stands out completely.

Ridiculousness is a parameter most stories won’t reach towards. They’ll reach for profound, devastating, uplifting, but the extreme of ridiculousness is, like most humor, too subjective and the payoff can miss too easily. I mean, Adam Sandler is a living font of ridiculousness and you either love him or hate him.

And if you want a cautionary tale of how ridiculousness can go wrong, look no further than Jar Jar Binks. Now, I’m a semi-facetious superfan of Binks, but pretty much everyone agrees that he was a horrible misstep for the Star Wars universe. He was meant to be the comedic relief, and he is pure annoying, pure unnecessary. Not to mention way too overused. And that’s the thing with ridiculousness. The more you use it, the less effective it becomes. You have to space it out right, or it’ll get old really quick. And you also have to go with confidence when using it. You can’t just inch your way into being unhinged.

A manga example: Mashle. I love Mashle. I can’t get enough deadpan Mash. But this series had a tough task. They had to space out ridiculousness knowing that it was going to be the primary driving factor. And still yet, it does miss from time to time, but it’s become such a staple that the occasional miss can be glossed over knowing that it’s going to land again soon.

Delicious in Dungeon is paced with its ridiculousness. It’s not all silly all the time or these moments of deep silliness wouldn’t work the way they do. It’s all about pacing. Silliness, or humor in general, creates so much added room for emotional resonance that, again, many stories won’t even try, or they’ll dip their toe for a smile and not try any more.

Think about Scream. Humor and horror balanced to create a really effective story where just about anything could happen. Which makes the moments of humor or horror that much more effective because the audience doesn’t know what to expect.

Another thing with humor, and with ridiculousness for that matter, is trusting it to do its part, and not feeling the need to point to it. What’s worse than a story essentially asking, “didn’t you get the joke?” It’s the opposite of funny.

One last example from Delicious in Dungeon to close out that last point: The changeling mushrooms. Twice (thus far) the party has fallen into a circle of mushrooms that changes their race. It shuffles them at random, human to giant, elf to dwarf, etc.

Rather than linger in the moment, making sure we all know how funny this is, the humor is situational. They carry on as best they can, occasionally running into issues along the way. In that sense, Delicious in Dungeon uses humor the same way Tsugumi Project uses theme: it never has to stand on its own. I think we’re onto something here.

Hey, creative writers: What’s the most extreme your story gets? Doesn’t have to be ridiculous, it can be devastating, terrifying, action-packed. How often do you get to that extreme? Once is a good number, but could you tickle that extreme a few more times. Even if you don’t keep it, try doing it, pick a situation and reach for that extreme, just to see how it works.

Hey, fans of Delicious in Dungeon: Who should be the dungeon master?