#and no no i’m not hallucinating the source material is just that potent and thematically rich and fascinating

[fumifooms]

Marcille’s dungeon lord outfit is about being stuck in an inbetween

Kui combined a dress from her mother with a hat for children. It’s adulthood vs childhood. The dress is tallman fashion while the earmuffs are elven. It’s about emotions and maturity. Stability and instability. Growing & potential vs having grown & knowing yourself. It’s about her cultures and expectations and how can she possibly keep up with all of them, like the genius child she was portrayed as? It’s duality it’s conflict it’s being pulled in opposite directions. It’s about identity.

Marcille wants to have all the answers and wants them all already, she already acts like she has everything figured out more often than not, when it comes to ways to harvest mandrakes or her image of Falin and Chilchuck and orcs or her rigid sense of ethics, but the story does show that she had growing to do, plus her main goal beyond keeping her friends safe and near her is that pursuit of knowledge for what she doesn’t yet have answers for— rewriting the laws of life and death. But, as we’ve all been told before, death is simply a part of life and we have to make our peace with that one way or another. Like Marcille says in the last chapter, this was in large part the lesson and arc she’s had to go through. A lesson that Marcille’s mother has learned herself, one that she has accepted and tried to pass on to her daughter, which didn’t work and kickstarted Marcille’s pursuit of extending lifespans. Marcille has to settle with uncertainty, with knowing life can end at any moment and knowing this is who she is even if the world has no answers for her as to what that means, she has to come to terms with ambiguity and inbetweens.

Marcille’s relationship with her mother is very interesting because it’s shown all in small moments and implications, but we do see that Marcille’s mom is arguably her biggest role model.

She’s the one who shows up in Marcille’s nightmare about monster food early on, she is who told Marcille she’ll have to bear loss througout her life due to her lifespan, Marcille wears a choker like she does, it’s debatable that Marcille mimics her demeanor to seem more elven and dignified, in Marcille’s true nightmare she hides behind a portrait of her, she was the only living elven role model Marcille had around. Mother, who didn’t let grief over her husband rule the rest of her life, having even remarried, mother, who’s a court mage, mother, who pursued a life she wanted even if it cost her. And we do know being an elf is important to Marcille! She seeks to conform to elven beauty standards rigidly, both in gender presentation and things like facial hair, and she’s masked as one since she was enrolled in the magic academy, as far as we know her first time away from home and her first big period of social contact since she isolated herself with chickens and books when she was younger, because she had no peers. Books like the daltian clan, with an aestheticized all elven cast with the one exception of the half-elf character she deeply related to.

Marcille’s bangs are also half down and half cut. Before she had to cut some hair to make familiars, long bangs were what Marcille wore for years, meanwhile in all of Marcille’s childhood flashbacks including at the magic academy her bangs were always cut short. As we know, hair is important to elves. Her hair is elfness. Her hair is elegance. Her hair is her age. Her bangs are uneven now. It’s part of accepting her precarious weird spot in an inbetween, half up half down haircut. Acceptance on her own aging, that there’s no empiric answer for what Marcille’s equivalent age is in elf or tallman or other, maybe just a ballpark if even that. Answers which are what she’s most desperate to know. What do you mean that student over there has got an astronomic result on her dungeoneum and what do you mean she doesn’t really care for how you did it? Falin who’s thus showing her another way to be, with less self-made pressure, that you can just go with the flow- that you can just… Be.

Her hair being all down and messy as a dungeon lord is part of making the characters and audience understand that Marcille is out of it, but… Like her barefootness there’s some flexibility it implies, for Marcille who’s so rigid on appearance. Accepting her hair to be messy, a sort of shedding of who she is even as she’s overdressed and trying so hard to look like something she doesn’t feel as.

That’s why her outfit makes her feel courageous. Because it makes her feel different from who she is otherwise, because it grants her a look she feels naked without, even with barefeet and messy hair. It’s externalizing how she’s been trying to hold it all together and all her confliction and her feelings, offering some catharsis, no more hiding herself, she’s a half-elf trying to do dark magic. Clean Marcille, clean clean Marcille— Overthinking the dressing, the superficial the aesthetic, without looking enough at the body it’s covering up, the laws of the world the ecosystem of the dungeon the opinions of her friends’— what’s standing right in front of her face, the underlying thing holding up the rest of what she’s trying to change, what’s truly important. She’s back to being like with meeting Falin, overfocusing on the details and the nitpicks and the theorics while oblivious to the slimes and the bats and the balance of mana in that small cave dungeon. She has the dress and the hat but as a whole she doesn’t look like a slay queen or a princess or a cool sorceress or even like her mother, she just looks like a mess. 

Ultimately after calming down, she takes the earmuffs off. She lays down her childhood trauma and leaves behind its grip on her and moves forward in the dress, with maturity and emotional intelligence and logic to deal with her current situation instead of coping mechanisms and desperate grasps for control. And then when the dungeon lord becomes Laios her dress poofs, she’s in her very plain pajamas, plain Marcille, and it’s that Marcille who goes forward to help Laios save the world and defeat the demon. Hence why post-canon she starts dressing in similar dresses to her mother as well, and starts wearing more black. Black here is a color associated with her mother. She keeps her own touch and color here and there, like her red choker instead of a black one, but it’s a stark and sudden difference. She’s matured.

Her dungeon lord outfit is a coming of age outfit in a very literal way. A bridge between childhood and adulthood. We see her struggle metaphorically between the past and the future, moving on or holding onto trauma. The dress, from her mother, with cleavage and low cut sleeves and a lace gap going down to her stomach and a very short risqué skirt cut, represents maturity but it was very purposefully contrasted with the earmuffs, a childish piece of accessory associated with youth. This shows her mental state, battling with her emotions, wildly fluctuating between her academic put-together powerful self and the childish emotional outbursts the pressure is causing. Time moves on too fast but she’s not growing up fast enough to keep up or make the academic breakthroughs she wants— time is always running out and she’s both too young or too old she’s pulled in both directions and she can never be up to standards. It represents her struggle with her lifespan, her struggle to fit in, to know who she should be and what she should be doing.

Her friends aren’t afraid to say it like it is and bring back her feet to the ground instead of up in the clouds of fantasy and power, from where she was, her feet back on the dirt of where they are right now instead of the theorics of "when" and "then" and "forever". She’s weird, she’s unique, in some ways she doesn’t fit in with any group anywhere, and that’s ok and she’s accepted that it doesn’t mean she can’t feel belonging and joy as herself with her flawed friends in a flawed world. After all they did stick with her even after seeing her whole tantrum and embarrassing breakdown makeover. Personally I do say, slay queen.

You’re still here? If you’d like a full look at Marcille’s dunlord outfit, I made an entirely too long analysis of it here, this is just an excerpt of the most canon section.