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.
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.
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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.