Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? III

Episode 5

All of our nightmares are different. They can be linked to events in our past, random phobias we have, or sometimes be absolutely terrifying in the moment but turn out to be kind of dumb upon awakening. But no matter what causes a nightmare, the fact is that they are terrible – our own personalized fears created in the night by a sleeping mind. That's what makes the fact of Ikelos, the Greek god of nightmares, such an effective villain for this arc: it plays upon the idea of both personal and culturally-shared night terrors while still managing to keep each group's fears distinct within the storyline.

Ikelos Familia may not have, strictly speaking, started the chain of events that's currently ongoing in DanMachi, but it definitely isn't above building on it and using it to its own advantage. Although that previous statement is only true in some of the cases we're seeing unfold here; Aisha, who is now part of Hermes Familia, remarks oh-so-casually to Lyu at the end of this week's episode that Ikelos Familia was very likely part of Evilus, the aptly-named collection of familias that was behind the slaughter of Astraea Familia, of which Lyu is the sole surviving member. (Mythological fun fact: Astraea is the Greek star maiden goddess of innocence, which does make her nearly the opposite of Ikelos in some senses. Lyu's innocence has certainly been ripped away with the loss of her familia.) Ikelos Familia is also behind the trapping and selling (which we could read as enslavement) of the Xenos, so even if they didn't start the surge of distrust against them, they're certainly actively working to ensure that Adventurers and Xenos don't get too cozy. And it's definitely their attack on Ranieh and the others – and their capture of Wiene – that's pushed Gros over the edge so that he no longer sees coexisting with humans as a viable option.

Last week I quoted Shylock's act 3, scene 1 speech from The Merchant of Venice, but this week we're seeing much more of what made him make the speech in the first place: the distrust of those who are Other. Both sides are guilty of this, although I have to say that the blame falls harder on the Adventurer side. All they can see are their differences – the Xenos don't look human to the Adventurers, so they're not treated as such, but rather as dangerous abominations because by wearing armor and using weapons, they pervert the notions of both humans and monsters, falling in some uncomfortable place in the middle where no one wants to walk. It's much more of a “Kill the Beast” moment – there's a line in that song that says, “We don't like what we don't understand/In fact it scares us,” and that's very much what's going on here. But what that doesn't take into account is the fact that Gros and some of the other Xenos have heard that one too many times and have now decided that maybe they should just stop trying to get along with the humans, and that's what leads them to destroy Livira, the town on the eighteenth floor. The deaths of Ranieh's party was one cut too many.

It's not hard to see why they'd think that, even though they didn't have to watch the slaughter. The entire scene is just skin-crawlingly awful, toned down from the source novel or not. The way that Dix's group laughs and grins as they cut down the Xenos, the men's request to “have some fun” with Ranieh before she's killed is hard to watch – and it's hard to blame her for taking her own life in such a way that they won't even get a magic stone out of the deal, because that's the only power she has left. She can't take them out with her, but she can make sure that she goes on her own terms. It is, in fact, a nightmare made real for her.

As of right now, only Ouranos and Hestia Familia can really guess what's behind the destruction of the dungeon town, although Hermes clearly has a clue. That means that the most powerful familias, like Loki's, don't know about the Xenos, and Aiz's words to Bell may indicate that they wouldn't care even if they did know. At the end of the day, the real danger isn't from those who are visibly Other, but from the people Bell and his familia know and interact with every day. Ikelos Familia may be the more obvious monsters, but any situation can become a nightmare under the wrong circumstances, and humans oftentimes are much more monstrous than anything with fangs.

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Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? III is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and HIDIVE.