Delicious in Dungeon aired its finale this past week, so I wanted to summarize some thoughts on it. I went back over the episode discussion threads and the comments I made for each episode. There are a couple generalizations I can make based on my impressions (in a spoiler-free way):

• Animation: Studio Trigger really delivers some fantastic animation. I mentioned the animation in almost every discussion thread. They seamlessly change up style to emphasize what is happening at any given point. Sometimes they lean into the silly/absurd, and other times it gets very serious and dark. Looking forward to seeing how the second season turns out.
• Characters: The other thing that I talked about almost every week is what I will broadly classify as the characters. When the show started it really felt like a group of misfits that each are exceptionally weird in their own ways. However, as the series goes, we find out that these characters actually have a lot of depth to them. They also have a lot of chemistry with one another (how else could you have so many different ships going on simultaneously).
• Creative Fantasy: It is clear that the author has put in a lot of work to try to figure out how a fantasy world with magic and dungeons might actually function. Where things can be explained without just hand-waving it away with magic, they do so. In the process, they arrive at some very creative takes on normally magical monsters. As somebody that consumes a lot of fantasy, this was very much appreciated. Some episodes feature this more than others.
• Tone: Episode 1 started off as a tale of two types of story. On the one hand, we have a super serious, life or death, rescue mission. On the other hand, this is a silly, laid-back cooking adventure. As the show progressed, the tone would shift back and forth on a spectrum between these two extremes. The way that the show would adjust everything from the animation, OST, voice acting to match the tone of a given scene was super well done and a sign of fantastic directing. I wanted to especially highlight how much I appreciated episode 11 in this regard.

You might notice that I haven’t really talked about the story much at all. Beyond not wanting to spoil people that haven’t watched it yet, I also feel like the season ended right in the middle of the story, so I am hesitant to make conclusions about it yet. I can say that I have very much enjoyed it so far, and that the wait for season 2 will feel really long.

Meta comment:

I am doing some updates to the bot. I just implemented a language option to help our colleagues from the Myanmar community in !aum@ani.social that are planning to run their own version of the bot. I am guessing that I will need to do some further updates here as I probably baked English into the bot in a lot of places they would like to change it. Let me know @w_tree@ani.social!

The next thing I have started working on is a way to create an organized list of all the shows that the bot is currently monitoring even if it isn’t making posts for them. This was a requested feature to provide a reference for people that might not know if a show is requestable from the bot or not. My current plan is to have this be a page on the wiki that is updated automatically and include a link to that page in the sidebar as well as in the post of recent threads. I think with some clever scripting I can make the wiki be auto-updated…but it is as yet unproven.

The milestone after that is to further tweak the way that shows/episodes are sorted in the pinned summary post of recent discussion threads. I had been kind of banging my head against a wall for a way to sort things nicer, but I had some ideas after taking a fresh look at the code after a break, so I hope that it won’t be too difficult.

As a sidenote, I set up a kanban organizer for myself to help keep track of all the lemmy/bot stuff I have going on (Vikunja specifically). So far, I have really liked it and expanded to use it for other things. The experimental Android app has worked flawlessly as well.

Tagging @zabadoh@ani.social since I had talked with you about some of this in past threads.

Weekly ranking roundup:

1. Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Konosuba
2. Anime Trending - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Girls Band Cry
3. Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Mushoku Tensei

Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.

Girls Band Cry is able to prove that last week wasn’t a fluke by staying atop the chart for AT. Also, it seems as though the season finale bump wasn’t enough to propel Delicious in Dungeon over Mushoku Tensei in the reddit chart. Ultimately, the winners on all three charts remain unchanged from last week.

Started watching lvl 2 super cheat powers. Pretty fun, though I can’t unhear Kiana from Honkai Impact when I hear Rys.

This week’s episode of Shuumatsu Train appears to be a recap episode, 11.5

Hopefully this means that the animators are preparing something special for us in the final episodes.

Just completed Dungeon Meshi.

I certainly wasn’t expecting such fantastic world-building for a cooking show. In fact, it’s my first one, since cooking shows usually don’t interest me, just like sports / music series.

The main cast of characters are likable too.

Overall, a solid 9/10 for now. Just like Heavenly Delusion, I’ve got to see more of it before settling on a final score. Glad to know that a season 2 has been announced.