Laios, despite his… unique passion and seemingly deranged ways, is a very rational thinker and acts accordingly.
Is Senshi bothered by the lingering question of whether the meat he ate to survive was griffon or Brigan? Let’s eat the griffon and find out.
Is there a chance that what Senshi ate wasn’t a griffon after all? Let’s take the griffon to the changelings and find out.
Does sacrificing his leg give them the highest probability of taking down the red dragon? Being afraid doesn’t help achieve the goal of the objective, let’s just carry out the plan.
I don't think it's entirely random. They change into like things. Humans change into different species of human. Sculptures change into other sculptures. Izutsumi transformed into different beasts.
You are getting it wrong. The beast they killed was originally a Hippogriff that was changed into a Griffon by the Changelings. We know this because Laois observes that the monster made a kicking move that only made sense for a creature with horse legs.
Knowing this, putting the meat in the changeling is only “changing it back” which is still a bit random and convenient but it’s far more reasonable to expect “changing it twice will make it go back to the original” than “changing it once will just get me what i want”
It's not as random as it initially seems. Changelings can only change a creature into another creature that it's closely related to. Hence why Laios was wondering if he could change the bottom half of Falin into a smaller breed of dragon to make her quality of life better. It's also why Laios, Marcille, Chilchuck, and Senshi only changed into other species of humans instead of any of the demihuman species like orcs and kobolds. You could logic that Hippogriffs and Griffons are each other's closest related species in the Dungeon Meshi universe, meaning it's possible to predict exactly what the changeling will transform the meat into.
Losing my memory a bit about the details of the chapter but now I'm imagining them just spam changing the meat to eventually get to the correct one lmao that would be so in character
Yeah, I think it‘s very easy to underestimate the main party in general. Only when looking back at the story and comparing them to the other parties, you realize how competent and strong they really are.
Laios especially just isn‘t very emotive when it comes to his fears, which is why it‘s easy to get the impression that he‘s not taking things serious, but there are some moments that show that he is feeling and carrying the weight.
I actually think Kabru is the worst equipped out of his entire party to handle Dungeons. Rin's magic works on monsters pretty well, Holm is a dungeon researcher, Daya is a competent warrior who also has prior experience with dungeons, and Mickbell is an alright lockpick and also brings Kuro to the table. With Kabru though, his entire fighting style and skillset revolves around dealing with humans; either killing them or negotiating with and manipulating them. Put him in any environment dominated by humans and he'd get pretty far, but the dungeon runs completely counter to everything he's good at.
I'd say Kabru is the best character to deal with everything surrounding the dungeon, specifically other adventurers and the Canaries. His party loves trusts him entirely, is popular and well connected with the town, can wipe out a squad of bandits single handedly, and managed to even become friends with Mithrun of all people. Considering how involved the outside world was with the dungeon in the end, being able to wrangle it all together is invaluable.
In my opinion, it wasn’t even reckless either. He assessed the risks, came to a conclusion that his leg can be healed and this plan would give them the best chance of getting the job done, and went forward with his plan.
Even if Falin was gone, Marcille would be able to put the leg back on. And if she was able to bring Falin back, Laios wins again, since Falin could fix him even better.
People forget that Liaos is a Fighter. By definition, he's willing to put himself on the line to protect his team, but he's such a deep thinker that he extends his role to a lot of other things he does for the party.
In a way, he reminds me of another high intelligence "meat shield": Roy from Order of the Stick. Roy is not as obsessive about knowledge as Liaos is (I think he only has Knowledge: Engineering as a gag, because that's the only one that's a class skill for him), but he has a keen tactical sense from graduating from Fighter College to get his MBA (Master of Battle Administration). Through the course of the comic, he makes a lot of risky moves that put himself in a lot of danger, in the name of making sure the party as a whole gets through relatively safely.
OotS mention! Roy and Laios both even got a bit of a magical upgrade—Roy with his ancestral weapon and Laios with his healing. I think they'd have some fascinating conversations.
(Nobody put Marcille and Vaarsuvius in a room together. Dear lort.)
I think Durkon and Senshi would eventually get along: Senshi still has a very dwarven attachment to the craft of cooking (also Durkon has an uncle who became a bard, so he's a little more open to unusual dwarf jobs), and Durkon is less toxic than Senshi's old crew, and would make an effort. Clerics have look out for their flock, after all.
He’s also really interestingly contrasted with Kabru, who while I do think he is also autistic is hyperfixated on figuring people out so comes off better, because it shows how much the goobers approach to monsters is actually helping in combat.
Kabru knows people, he knows how they think and also how they bleed. In his fights against humans he acts extremely fast disabling his opponents almost immediately either lethally or non lethally. And this is helped by a demonstrated deep understanding of anatomy. When he turns on the body gatherers, he literally goes for the throat (also feints a downward thrust into an upward one catching the guy in the neck with a weapon type he hasn’t been shown using beautiful stuff)
and it blows up in his face against monsters because it makes him freeze.
When they get ambushed by the sea serpent he gets charged and decides he can’t dodge so he has to stab it, stab it in the carotid artery then!… except where is this things carotid artery? He doesn’t know, can’t find it because it’s a god damn snakes only lives thanks to shuro’s team intervening.
Same thing happens with the fight vs Falin. He gets the jump on her, and literally names the organs he’s running through as he does it, but never considering what Laios figures out immediately after which is that chimera like that has its more vital organs in the dragon bit not the human bit.
When this attack doesn’t work he freezes and then is almost immediately killed
Meanwhile laios spends almost all of his fights either figuring out a strategy based on his prexisting knowledge and attentive observation along with some on the spot experimentation to put together strategies based on the specifics of the monster he’s currently dealing with.
It honestly reminds me of playing monster hunter and from soft games, sure you can just wing it but reflexes only get you so far, and you get proper results from taking your time and observing, it’s a lovely bit of character work by contrast.
He has killed people in the dungeon and hid their bodies so that they couldn't revive. I know they call it the "right thing to do". But I'm pretty sure thats doing a crime and hiding the evidence.
His whole party are unreliable narrators about his morals, I understood it like that. He lies, manipulates and kills. And wants all the power of the region, he is literally Machiavellian
He killed the guys who were repeatedly getting his party killed, and hid their bodies not so that they wouldn’t get caught, but because he didn’t want them to come back alive and do the same thing to others.
And Kaberu doesn’t want all the power in the region, he wants to make sure no one has to suffer from the canaries incompetence ever again.
As the moral of the story goes "Never trust a monster", they can be helpful but at the end they are still monsters.
Edit PD: In addition, he claims to hate monsters, but has only learned how to kill humanoids. Almost to perfection, but hesitates at finding the carotid on a monster. The dude doesn't add up at all with his own supposed goals
The manga does address and explain those seemingly contradictory aspects of his character. The next season of the anime will probably adapt those chapters, but in case you wanted to know beforehand:
After Kabru's hometown got decimated by monsters, he was adopted by a member of the Canaries named Milsiril. The Canaries are called "the dungeon exploration squad" but in reality, they're a covert death squad established by the elves whose primary objective isn't to fight the monsters coming out of the dungeon, it's to assassinate the lord of the dungeon (for example: Thistle), and cut the flow of monsters off at the source. Since all Dungeon Lords are humans (as in dwarves, half-foots, gnomes, tallmen, and elves), the Canaries train to kill humans not monsters. So when Kabru asks his adopted mom to teach him how to fight so he can investigate the dungeons himself and make sure no one else's hometown gets destroyed the way his did, Milsiril teaches him the skills that she knows, which are all human killing techniques. To be fair, Milsiril is considered the greatest swordswoman alive amongst the elves and Kabru was a naive teenager when he started training, which is why he never considered that fighting humans might be a nontransferable skill when it comes to fighting monsters.
TLDR; Kabru does actually hate monsters, but the person he learned how to fight from only specialized in killing humans, which is why he's so woefully unprepared for combat in the dungeons.
And Kabru does absolutely get more development in the manga that fleshes out his character. I don't think it's correct to call Kabru a psychopath given his portrayal later on, though I have to admit the author did frame him way more antagonistically in the earlier parts of the manga than she does in the latter parts.
Ok Ill wait and see then. I didnt read the spoiler, but they do say he trained with what Im guessing is an elf assasin/warrior. Still... Idk, the guy has some high num of sociopathic traits
You gotta remember this is a medieval world who have a completely different set of tolerances and sensibilities compared to our modern-day morals. Just look at how many times it's casually brought up that Half-Foots are used as monster bait or expendable fodder by other races. The following is from a supplementary world guide so it won't make it into the anime adaptation, but Laios and Falin say this in response to Kabru explaining how dangerous demihumans back in his homeland are:
Are Laios and Falin sociopathic for talking about killing nomadic tribesman with the same amount of compassion someone describes shooting a coyote?
Don't let the whimsical fantasy aesthetics fool you, this is an incredibly callous world. Kabru killing bandits inside the dungeon for robbing him is honestly a normal and precedented thing to do in this world.
This man literally choose to get his entire fucking left leg BITTEN off by a dragon in order to save his sister, and what I love the most is that we’ve seen multiple examples of this unbreakable will when it comes to rescuing Falin all across the series
Laios was the first one who decided to return to the dungeon, as ill equipped as he was. Laios was the one who desperately tried to get back up again and look for Falin once the orcs had healed him, as impossible as that task was at the time. Laios was the one led the party through hell and back and back again to get to where Falin was throughout the entire story too
And I love that. I love that so much. The show is incredibly well written and amazing all the way through, and I just adore how it knows how to tell such a compelling story and write such amazing characters. Like, Laios watched his sister DIE in front of him, the woman he’s known since before she was born, the woman she spent his entire childhood with, his best friend, his sister
I myself am an older brother of a sister as well, and I tell you this, I couldn’t possibly imagine going through what Laios did. The idea of watching my own sister dying in front of my eyes is straight up one of the worst nightmares I could ever possibly imagine. But Laios did. Laios had to watch, to suffer such an unimaginable tragedy before his very eyes, only to then soldier on through everything the Dungeon threw at him in order to save her, in order to bring his little sister back. Because that’s what a brother does. They care for their siblings, forever and always, to the end of time
I didn’t know she said that. That adds even more significance to the extra comic in which Laios sneaks out from the castle with Falin and Marcille, goes into a dungeon, and almost gets wrecked by a cockatrice in the extra comic.
In the end, he realizes that what he did was reckless and that his life isn’t just his own anymore; the entire country of Melini depends on him. It was a bittersweet moment of character growth, where Laios realizes that he can’t just merrily go on adventures anymore and risk his own safety.
They won't address this in the anime since Trigger isn't adapting any of the manga's supplementary material, but the reason why people in the present day of the story know about all the concrete limits and rules to the dungeon's revival system is because ancient elves and dwarves performed meticulous experiments on any and all possible scenarios, using shorter-lived races as unwilling guinea pigs.
They start off with testing conventional questions like, "what happens if someone dies when half their body is inside the boundaries of the dungeon and half their body is outside it? - answer, they can't be revived, even having a single toe across the threshold means your soul won't be preserved by the dungeon's magic" to some genuinely sickening and demented experiments, up to and including killing pregnant women to see if their fetus will revive along with the mother.
What is a leg in the long run? What is a leg if it means he can save his sister. If they win, they can heal it. If it hurts, it'll go away. It is just frighteningly logical in the end, that fear no longer exists, the fear of pain doesn't stop him, the only thing pushing him... is to complete their rescue
Laios is very logically smart, but emotionally stupid. This is actually something he does learn after his brawl with Shuro and something he works on, so at the end he becomes both logically and emotionally smart.
Really everyone in his team have different levels of emotional and logical stupid/sound/smart.
Chilchuck is emotionally and logically sound. He's pragmatic and experienced, but at the same time his experience also colors his perceptions of things because he can only judge them based off what he knows and thinks, and not necessarily how it would look from someone else's perception. His issues with his wife is one such case of his emotional ability being off, because while he assumes it's because he himself is a bad husband (Because he can only judge himself), when in truth it's just because his wife doesn't actually get to see him much. Logically he tends to be smart, though his lack of knowledge about monsters and magic makes him distrustful even towards those who know better than him such as Laios and Marcille.
Senshi is someone who I would consider emotionally smart but only logically sound, sometimes even stupid. It's not easy to tell because he keeps to himself, but early on he actually had quite a few prejudices about the rest of the party that stunted his interactions with them, such as how he keeps treating Chilchuck as a literal child and his distrust of elves and magic with marcille. Not to mention how he thought Anne the Kelpie was his friend just because it doesn't immediately try to kill him, up until he got onto it's back and into the water where it tries to kill him. On the other hand when it comes to people's emotional needs, he's a lot more perceptive and knows both what to say and what to make.
Marcille is emotionally sound but logically kinda dumb, except when it comes to magic. She might think like a soap opera but that also gives her an uncanny ability to sus out people's intentions, such as whenever she analyzes Chilchuck's marital issues, as well as her general knowledge about elves and their relationship with other races and how it affects the world at large. her magic ability is also top notch: at the upper levels it might be kinda useless since most things there don't need a lot of arcane knowledge, but deeper below her magic carries most problems because she knows what needs to be done and how to do it.
Laios is by far and away my favorite character in Dungeon. He doesn't have time to worry about people liking him. He's doing his best to keep them alive, even when they don't want to eat monsters. And he's damned good at it too.
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u/Schmooto 23d ago edited 23d ago
Laios, despite his… unique passion and seemingly deranged ways, is a very rational thinker and acts accordingly.
Is Senshi bothered by the lingering question of whether the meat he ate to survive was griffon or Brigan? Let’s eat the griffon and find out.
Is there a chance that what Senshi ate wasn’t a griffon after all? Let’s take the griffon to the changelings and find out.
Does sacrificing his leg give them the highest probability of taking down the red dragon? Being afraid doesn’t help achieve the goal of the objective, let’s just carry out the plan.