[Image taken from CrunchyRoll]
Is it just me or is the geometry necessary to pull of that tail kind of… impossible.
Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid is a cheerful little anime about… Miss Kobayashi… having… a… dragon… maid. In other words, exactly what it says on the tin. Miss Kobayashi gets plastered one night and meets a dragon in the suburbs. Why no one else saw this dragon is completely beyond me. So in her drunken stupor (I can’t believe they make us wait for the last anime for the backdrop to this anime either) she says that the dragon, named Tohru, can live with her as a maid. For some reason or another Miss Tohru says yes. And the rest of the anime is pretty much cute girls doing cute things.
Miss Kobayashi is a pretty blank slate. Her only distinctive character trait seems to be her love of maids. Which only seems to exist as kind of motivation to kickstart the series. Nothing really wrong with it, but it’s not really discussed much. I think that the anime is really about Tohru, which… we may have expected since she’s featured exclusively on the cover I posted above… huh.
Tohru is a cheerful gal and she seems to genuinely love Kobayashi (for good, spoiler reasons). She’s always trying to get Kobayashi to eat her tail for some reason… I wonder if it’s a gag that’s better explained in the manga. It just became a running joke and it’s not terribly funny. I believe Tohru is used to sort of describe what it’s like adjusting to a new life and whether or not she can accept the consequences that come with it. It’s not a terrible message to work with, but if that’s the topic then this anime fails spectacularly. Such a struggle is only really brought up between the moments, and doesn’t appear to be the focus of the anime.
You may be familiar with this little thing:
This is Kanna Kamui. She has become something of a meme for some reason or another. She’s actually incredibly adorable. Seeing a starving individual, without even asking Kobayashi, she goes to fetch them some food. She also has one of the sweetest voices I’ve heard in quite some time. I feel like she exists to be memed though. Not sure if that’s because I saw the memes before the anime; but watching it, I couldn’t help but recognize why the memes came into being. Kanna is just too meme-able.
There are some things that play against it. Three of the five dragons are pretty useless to the story. Fafnir, Lucoa, and Elma. My suspicion is that they were supposed to represent separate parts of Tohru in her decision of whether or not to stay in her new world. Fafnir would have represented Tohru’s doubt. Fafnir reminds Tohru of the limited lifespan that humans have, and that one day Miss Kobayashi will die… what then? Lucoa is a bit more moderate, and her actions seemed to be designed to help Tohru realize what she has in her new world. But I don’t think she really wanted Tohru to remain, as Lucoa seemed to enjoy stirring up trouble. Lucoa is the throwaway huge breasted character, so she isn’t terribly important. Elma came in rather late (episode 8 or 9 I think) and had such little screentime, I don’t think there’s much to say about her. But because Elma is successfully adapting to Tohru’s new world, my guess would be that she’s to represent what Tohru could become, a normal human.
I really do think that the description cute girls doing cute things is really all we can work with. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with that at all! I loved it! I was smiling for almost the entirety of the anime and I may now have diabeetus thanks to how sweet some of the characters were. Overall, I highly recommend it. It’s not difficult to watch, there’s no clock running, it’s just… fun. I do hope that there’s a season 2. Thanks for reading.
Artemis Hunt
Home of the Huntress 