The Drohl

Our monster this entry appears immediately after the Lunatick in the first game's bestiary, and it's one I was able to obtain through the breeding system fairly early in the two Monsters games I've now played. A thing of abject beauty, the Drohl looks as if someone draped several layers of bologna over a lightbulb and then dipped the tip of it in chocolate fudge, resulting in something like a melting pile of lips and gums with a rounded brown helmet. Toriyama then saw fit to give his marvelous creation a set of gaping human-like red lips, with jagged upper teeth, situated down at the bottom of its body right above its pink flipper-like feet and between its pink flipper-like arms. It also has two round nostrils in the flesh-filled crevice that runs halfway up the "helmet," while the helmet itself has four short, blunt spikes and two snaily stalks ending in bright white little eyeballs.

It's majestic. It's magnificent. It's breathtaking. It's impossible to postpone any further how much it looks like genitalia, meshing elements at once so yonic and so phallic that it had to have crossed the guy's mind, but that's okay. Lots of things in nature remind us of The Junk, and that's perhaps especially true in the many slimy folds and protrusions of mollusks, which Toriyama had a pretty blatant hyperfixation over. The number of slugs, snails, bivalves and cephalopods in his work is actually pretty massive, and even if you're only familiar with the Dragonball universe, the "Name" in the "Namekians" of planet "Namek" is Japan's term for slimy Gastropoda. Mr. Piccolo is a Slug Man from Planet Slug.

...But what precisely IS a "Drohl," besides the first of many, many, many mollusks in the Dragon Quest franchise? Spelled "Droll" in Japan, its name is seemingly a combination of "troll" and the English "drool," though "droll" is also a word that means something is sort of humorously odd and quirky. Much like the trolls in countless other fantasy settings, Drohls are a subterranean race that seems a little low in brainpower but high in violence; crude troglodytic beasts that just want to skulk in the dark and gnaw some bones. It's really not the kind of persona you expect from a flabby wad of rubbery goo and stubby boneless limbs, but I can certainly see a "me want MEAT" in that blank stare. Whether Toriyama was told to interpret "drooling troll" as "waddling gumdrop snail" is not public knowledge that I'm aware of, but it feels very much like it was his idea, like the birth of the Slime; that he sent back a completely unexpected doodle of this adorably uncomfortable whatchamawozzle and the rest of the team rightfully fell in love at first sight.

It also wasn't until their first 3-d appearances that we finally saw the helmet was a full blown coiled shell. I actually wasn't on board with this at first, because I liked them as a taxonomically ambiguous mollusk-esque monster, but I've come to accept that the Drohl is not-so-ambiguously a snail monster, even if I'm not sure that was Toriyama's idea or added after the fact when they needed to fill out the 3-d model.

Unfortunately, precious little else is known about the Drohl, even described in-game as a "mysterious" species. In some titles it's considered one of the "bug" family, in others a devil, and much more commonly a "zombie," though if I forgot to say this earlier, the "zombie" family in Dragon Quest's English localizations is simply the "bakemono" family in Japan, a category including ghosts and yokai. And speaking of yokai, the Drohl also bears some rough resemblance to one of my personal favorites, the Nuppefuhofu:

I don't think the resemblance is quite strong enough to be an overt reference, but it's strong enough to set off the same part of my brain that somehow finds something adorable in a creature that looks like a deflating ass. I suppose it's just how hard they blend the comical, the pitiful and the grotesque into something that looks uncomfortable to even exist. Like the Guild Steersman from the David Lynch Dune, or one of those dogs that looks like it doesn't have a skeleton. Bloodhounds! Droopy flap creatures are just such funny little guys!

The one and only hint at the ecology or biology of the Drohl is in its naming system. What we've been looking at so far isn't just the Drohl; it's referred to in most appearances as the Drohl DRONE. In bees, the "drones" are the males who exist only to die horribly after fertilizing a queen, but it's so commonly misunderstood to refer to the worker caste that we use it in popular culture to refer both to the low-rank hordes in our sci-fi alien hives and to real people trapped in the cubicle hell of big capitalism; the "corporate" drones. This tells us that Drohls might possibly be social enough to have a caste system, either assigned or biological, and it's probably biological, because the classic pink and brown Drohl is always the "Drone," but from its very debut, there's been a "Drollmagi", translated as "Droll Mage" or even "Droll Diabolist." Distinguished by pale brown and yellow flesh with a vivid green shell, it's a somewhat stronger Droll with more access to sorcery, as the name implies, and we can probably assume they're the elite defenders of the Drohl "colony."

The lore of the Drohl pretty much ends there, sort of, except for one monster that only ever appeared in the game Caravan Heart:

This is "Drollrium," possibly derived from the word "delirium?" It's a pink-fringed, green and yellow giant slug that tapers up into a muscular humanoid torso, its simple neckless head bearing a grumpy froglike face before it forks into two long antennae, and it has a white cloak that also follows the shape of a snail shell on its back. It has so little in common with the Drohl, you'd never guess they were related, and that's because...they aren't. They aren't!? Its Japanese profiles, at least those I can find online, state that it is commonly mistaken for some variant on the Drohl just because of its name, and they don't elaborate any further than that, so what could have been our one glimpse into Droll society turns out to be a red herring.

That's a real shame, in particular because the implied existence of caste-based Drohl "colonies" dictates that there be a "queen" Drohl, which would have to be an awesome sight to behold. Unfortunately, now that Toriyama returned to his home planet, we will never get to see whatever it is he thinks squirts out little sticky baby Drohl, and if anybody else tries to come up with it, it's just never going to feel as authentic.