#Marcille in the sense of her outer world that surrounds her

[immediatebreakfast]

(foaming) childhood friends to holiest lovers

Question: is this about Marcille and Falin dungeon meshi, or Mina and Jonathan Dracula?

Answer: IT'S BOTH!

In the Gothic, love and romance is a driving force moved by suffering. This suffering by virtue influences the notions of love in the way of intense emotions that fundamentally change, and evolve characters in a gothic story. Most of the time circumstances outside of the characters' hands drive this suffering into told, or untold emotions which are pushed towards the very edge of thematic sanity.

Mina is [redacted], then is cast outside of god's light even if she was just a victim of a more powerful being, Falin gets eaten by the Red Dragon even if she saved Laios in the process. Both women seem to be thematically "punished" to set a possible point of No Return in the narrative now that they are active driving forces for the other characters, specifically, their beloveds.

What makes a gothic love holy? What makes it the Holiest? Is it feelings? Actions? Or maybe it is the dramatic drive to see how the human mind responds to the suffering of someone that you hold dear inside your heart. Wouldn't you move heaven and hell to save her? Wouldn't you offer your neck to her if her final fate was to turn into a monster? Would you grab her hand and go into the dark with her as you reject the very real god, or would you spit on the laws of natural death and drag her back to the living.

It's such a good choice to make because it takes such a simple concept like devotion, and turns it around by making one of the two promise/commit an act that is afront to the laws of existance in a lot of ways... for love. Simple, unaltered, powerful, burning, destructive love. Jonathan swears to Mina that he will sacrifice himself to her, and condemn his soul to hell if she turns into a vampire since his very being is hers alone; Marcille stabs her staff drenched in dragon blood into the ground, and sings a forbidden chant to revive Falin from her bones. Jonathan blantantly refuses god's light, and declares Mina the Holiest of them all amid their suffering; Marcille tenderly washes the dragon blood off Falin's body as she stands utterly unperturbed by her actions because Falin means the world to her.

Both of them see the fate of their beloved written on the wall, and say no, she will not die. It doesn't matter what, or who I have to defy so I can save her, I will do it.

Yet, at the same time, it's almost like they are choosing the option that would cast the most heaviest guilt upon Mina, and Falin. How would Mina feel if she found out that Jonathan thinks of his life so low? Would Falin be content to see Marcille be branded as a wanted criminal because of her use of black magic? However... they are childhood friends, they know each other... They probably know.

The melodramatic and the Gothic are certainly inscribed as latent possibilities in sentimentalism: in contradistinction to sentimentalism they require, perhaps, an insistence on the threat to virtue posed by a strongly personified villain, or principle of villainy, and a heightening of the obfuscation of virtue by various narrative devices, namely peripety and deceit. David J. Denby, (1994). Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France.

It's sad that Dungeon Meshi doesn't really focus on Falin's feelings after the shock of Marcille reviving from her very bones settles in her driven narrative, and it is speculative to tell that in Dracula Mina is aware of Jonathan's devotion to her, but simply chooses to not mention it in case of her religious, and mental breakdown gets worse. But deep down they do know, if they didn't then... Their love wouldn't be as strong, as gothic.

Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it holy? To love like this.