Headscratchers / Delicious in Dungeon

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Food Poisoning

• In the first chapter/episode, Marcille objects to eating monsters and mentions criminals who do so and end up contracting food poisoning. This never ends up being a problem for the Touden party - yes, Senshi joins up with them and he knows his way around the flora and fauna, but he's only familiar with the first four floors, and even within that range they end up eating multiple creatures he's never tasted. Marcille consistently objects that something might be poisonous and is always brushed off; some of the things they try aren't tasty, like living armor helmets which are moldy and kraken which are too bitter, but these are rare. In Real Life, the flesh of land-dwelling vertebrate animals is almost always edible but otherwise there are a lot of plants and animals that can only be consumed after extensively being treated, or not at all. Laios looks to his book a lot but it turns out to be largely fabricated. Why are dryads, succubus larvae and milk, tentacles, nightmares etc all not just eatable but tasty?
  • To a degree, the dungeon is influenced by desire, something Mithrun points out to Kabru - it will provide safe places to rest, and clean water, for people looking for them. Mithrun cautions Kabru not to want more. Maybe, since the monsters are created by the same force that makes and changes the dungeon, the belief that monsters are good food influences their bodies, and Senshi's cooking expertise - and the party's belief in his cooking expertise - can just make up for most offputting flavors. When Laios makes a meal for Thistle, it's the only time in which everything just tastes bad.
    • Marcille eats plenty of monster foods that she likes the taste of, but she's also the one party member most likely to be ambivalent about a dish and outright dislikes some of them, like the pearl centipede that she finds appallingly gooey. If Your Mind Makes It Real re: monsters being delicious and edible, her reluctance, which is more pronounced than the rest of the party's, might result in her portions literally tasting worse.

Monsters and Wargs

• In the village within the dungeon, monsters peacefully act like livestock for the villagers. They've been forbidden from hurting the villagers. Izutsumi is affected by this as a beastkin, becoming docile and kittenish and barely speaking. There are also some wargs about, as friendly to the villagers as they are to orcs. After defeating the demon, Laios is cursed to have monsters fear him and give him a very wide berth - but Izutsumi isn't affected, and there are wargs around getting hand-fed scraps in the preparation for the feast.
  • Perhaps wargs aren't "monsters" as in mana-based creatures, but "animals". The Golden Kingdom villagers have some contact with orcs and give them some of their vegetables. Wargs are supposedly fairly intelligent. Maybe some of the orc's companion wargs decided to live in the village and be fed rather than hunting, and as animals they're not actually affected by either effect on monsters.
  • There's also a distinct difference between truly domesticated and wild animals. With Izutsumi being affected by the Golden Kingdom's magic along with the monsters, it can be assumed that what's happening is less that the monsters were tamed and more that they were enchanted to make them behave as such. As the Orcs display no such magical abilities and the wargs are still loyal to them that they can be used like hunting animals, it's possible that the wargs we see as their companions are the results of generations of domestication efforts. So by this point, this pack of wargs are more or less on par with a group of domesticated dogs, rather than wild monsters. And while Laios would probably love them, he thinks the weirder the monster the better. So to him something that acts like a dog, which he's grown up with, wouldn't be perceived by him as a monster. And thus be exempt from the curse.
    • Wargs aren't domesticated though. Laios says in a Monster Tidbit that they "choose" to be partners with orcs. He also says wargs are his favorite monster, so even if they're pretty normal he'd be quite happy to be around them.

Doppleganger Lovers

• It's shown that when demons want to "create" a person as part of a wish by a Dungeon Master, they'll generally employ a doppleganger, which is an octopus with extremely good visual imitation capabilities. An omake even shows them able to fool the sense of touch to some extent through very clever manipulation of their tentacles. That's fine for if contact with the "person" created is meant to be limited to something like handshakes, but Mithrun is seen having sex with the "lover" created for him by the Goat Demon...