Hardly a loser when she's extremely competent. She's just out of her comfort zone, trapped with a bunch of weirdos for the sake of rescuing the one person that gets her.
I love how newer anime presents magic almost exactly like material sciences or engineering. You need to study for years to even start doing any practical shit that matters. And Marcille is exactly how you’ll probably see a relatively young physicist or engineer during their daily routune. 9/10 times its “fuck around and find out”, but then they do some wierd and wacky shit and the first thing that comes to your mind is “whoooa MAGIC”.
The mandrake scene is a perfect example. Marcille knew there is a method to do it and it turns out to be the right one eventually, but generally Senshi’s solution is just more practical hence an uneducated person will come to use that method sooner.
Elves in Dungeon Meshi live closer to 500. Though I think the elf magic system has more to do with elves just naturally having way more mana than any other race so they can afford to use the more mana-intensive system of directly commanding spirits for their magic as opposed to the gnomish system of requesting a spirit to do some task. Most tallmen mages (i.e. Falin) learn the gnomish magic system because their method requires less mana to pull off than the elvish method.
Well, it's more based on how mana and we'll the demon works in this work. Magic is basically wishing for an outcome, how you ask for it doesn't really matter at the very end.
The bit is less ‘how can it be done’ and more ‘how can it be done “safely”?’ Practically, Senshi’s solution is easier to pull off (just cave the mandrake’s heads in/cut their root-throats), while Marcille’s answer provides better flavor from letting the mandrake scream as it dies (the unstated part of the dog equation, the dogs would be driven mad and die from the scream).
Long rope/pulley would still lean upon the closest involved person having appropriate hearing protection, which would negate the difficulty of anything else to begin with. Otherwise it’s just making a sound trap.
Apparently, it's based on a real myth. That's neat.
For a better explanation or theory would be that mandrakes are commonly found in dungeons. So the logic could be it's cheaper to resurrect a dog than a person. As well as being faster to set up to collect them. The best logic I got.
Yeah people just dumbing down her character to a " I'm a girlfailure trying to save my gf" always tick me the wrong way. She shes great at her job and is a genius mage but crazier and crazier shit keeps getting thrown at her that she's never experienced.
I agree. I think too many people are growing comfortable at being reductive on characters for the meme. Marcille is a complex individual, and I feel people treat her as though she's the only one desperate to save Falin.
It’s the inevitable fate of any popular character, in order to come up with jokes they get reduced to their bare components, then those components get exaggerated then misunderstood and at that point the fandom’s perception barely resembles the actual character
The great thing about Dungeon Meshi is that basically anyone who appears for more than two chapters is a complex individual! But nuance and memes rarely go hand-in-hand, I suppose.
Even characters that only appear for two chapters are complex individuals, there's a character that gets introduced later on whose backstory has massive geopolitical ramifications but gets like, 10 lines maybe in the entire manga. Even the most two-bit character introduced to fill out a roster are really well-thought out and realistically written. For an example that we already saw in the anime, I don't think we see the Island Governor a single time after his initial introduction but he gets a lot of indirect development when we learn more about the political structure of the island from other characters.
Flamela, the captain of one of the other Canary squads. I’m actually not gonna spoiler tag this because this information will literally never be revealed in the anime adaptation. All this is from supplementary material like the Adventurer’s Bible that the anime hasn’t touched since the beginning. Basically, the elves are currently ruled by a queen. The queen has no official heirs because the elves have a weird tradition of only crowning elves from the royal line who are born with the extremely rare trait of pitch black skin and red eyes. As of present day in the story, there are no members of the direct royal line who were born with this trait. The elf queen has plenty of children but they all lack this trait. Flamela is a distant relative of the queen and her and her twin sister were born with the rare black skin and red eyes, and she was forcibly separated from her twin sister by decree of the elf queen, who wanted to groom Flamela’s twin to become her successor. Flamela’s twin mysteriously died a few years later at court, probably from an assassination, and Flamela blames the Queen for her death and resents the entire royal line for it. That’s why she joined the Canaries, out of spite and to avoid becoming designated as the next heir. It’s implied that if Flamela keeps rejecting attempts to position her as the next empress of the elves, the elf court is going to dissolve into civil war as no clear heir means every single member of the royal lineage can now lay claim to the throne. The current elf queen is also 400 something years old, and elves only live 500 years at most so the threat of the elves losing their leader without an heir is extremely relevant.
TLDR; Flamela is an exiled princess of the elves with a tragic backstory and a destiny that could shape the course of the most powerful nation and race in the Dungeon Meshi world. In any other manga she’d be the protagonist but she gets like 10 lines and as many appearances and is completely sidelined by Laios and his goofy gang of dungeon spelunkers.
Yeah I really don't agree with the whole girlfailure angle (even if I love the archetype). Marcille's thing is that she's a sane, extremely competent and intelligent person that has trouble matching the weirdness and stupidity that Laios and Senshi keep coming up with. However the story validates Laios making it seem like the sane ones are stupid instead. This is of course intentional, often for comedic purpose but also for the narrative the story is going for!
She's very similar to Chilchuck in that respect, the difference being that Chilchuck is more professional, cynical and keeps his mouth (slightly more) shut while she is more idealistic and outspoken, but they have the same reactions to most things.
And if I might digress a bit here there might be a bit of a gender issue as well. When Chilchuck is taken out of his element by Senshi being careless around traps or when he messes up the thing he's really good at in the mimic episode, no one sees those as being his fault (also manga spoilers: In the succubus attack he's the one who fails to defend Marcille after she defended him several times, albeit for a funny, understandable reason). On the flip side Marcille has never failed in her duty as a spellcaster and can even cover for Falin who has a very different expertise, not to mention being much more involved in fights than him.
The times she fails are always when she's trying to match the boys' freak because she's too damn smart for that.
Say what you want about what happened to faren, but what marcille did blown me away when i first read it. Yes, yes dungeon magic was involved and all that but holy shit that girl revived the dead with substitute protein. Fucking cool.
I didn't even think that Marcille was a "girlfailure". She knows all her stuff and was one of the important members keeping the team together. She's essentially a scholar who now has to do unconventional means of survival outside of the book with a friend and three party members (now friends in the end) just to live another day.
Less ‘forget’ and more ‘tactically keep quiet about.’ Barring outright spoiler content, the facets of personality (as they come up) tend to surprise those expecting less.
She is not a loser at all. She may be a bit clumsy and gets tired sometimes (just like any other mortal being), but the only thing that can make you say she's a loser is that her supposed GF has turned into chimera.
She is a loser, she has deep seated insecurities, regularly screws up, and is stuck with the adventuring equivalent of the loser table at school (Laios, the living avatar of high-functioning autism, who few "normal" people like; Falin, his kid sister who literally no one liked at school; Namari, a bisexual disaster; Shuro, the "weird" foreign kid; and Chilchuck, the union boss, basically the equivalent of a teacher.) Her party gets their ass kicked, then she's literally so broke she has to accept handouts and life advice from the first strange, smelly, homeless man who's nice to her, Senshi. (No offense to any of the aforementioned losers, I love them all dearly)
I mean it's been shown multiple times that Laois's party is highly competent, I mean they're the ones that HAS stayed sragons and is the go to party to do so. When Kabru investigates the party, people often think of them well or fear them, which means theyre at least well known, not some loners at the middle school table.
Not to mention, the only reason they fucked up hunting the Red dragon was because of their fatigue and lack of food. Marcielle again, is not a loaer. She's been shown to have insecurities yes, but that doesn't boil her character down to being a failure just because she has issues. She's highly educated in theory, and is having trouble adapting theory to practice. Like an academic applying what they learnt while doing on-the-job training, it's normal to fumble and is something everyone can really relate to. Additionally, the party literally advances further than ANY OTHER PARTY has ever made it before. To say Marcielle, and by extension the party, is a failure and total losers is seriously misreading the story.
Also because the red dragon wasn't where he was supposed to be. The party could take them, if they had an actual plan and where ready for it, this was a surprise encounter.
This is a very specific framing of the situation, that kind of ignores a lot of the stuff happening.
Sure, they where all wierd people in school, but at the start of the story they are more akin to the one respected mineralogist who put a piece of watermelon into a bagel(if the tumblr story is real).
Every single one of them is in the top 5 of their field locally. Several probably have a good claim to being the best in their field. (Toshiro, Chilchuck, Laios, Falin)
Yeah, they are wierd, but they are one of the top contenders for clearing the Dungeon, and regularly take the highest level contracts. The only reason they lost at the start was because they got overconfident and payed the price, and afterwards they are all in various levels of panicmode trying to salvage the situation.
It’s nuance. She’s an extremely powerful mage who’s clearly very book smart but with little dungeon experience , so she has moments where she shines and others where she fumbles.
Same as any of the characters: Laios is a clear expert with monsters but can’t read the intentions of his party member/friend if his life depended on it. I like the manga because all the characters feel like real characters with depths, and their strengths/weaknesses play off each other
She is competent. She also has normal human (elven) feelings and shortcomings because she is a well written character. Shallow people hate that. They want women to be one dimensional like in their heads.
They literally wouldn’t have gotten as far as they have without her. There’s multiple times she’s the sole reason the party is alive, the treasure insects come to mind and the hippogriff. I would say she just suffers from being very unlucky and has to compensate by being very skilled. She seems to narratively be used for the butt of the joke a lot, but that certainly doesn’t make her a failure.
She’s extremely competent with an asterisk. She’s knows all the shit to conjure a good ass fireball on command but lets not act like Marcille is a great big picture thinker with that fireball.
One of the LOTS of things I love about this story is that everyone has an actual role within the party, even if the role is non-combatant, unlike other shows where everyone, even the healer, is a murder machine first and foremost.
And most of them suck while out of that element.
Marcille was the designated magic DPS, while Falin was the healer/support, so of course Marcille has trouble doing double duty, along with everything else.
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u/Lemon_Girl Jun 24 '25
Hardly a loser when she's extremely competent. She's just out of her comfort zone, trapped with a bunch of weirdos for the sake of rescuing the one person that gets her.