I can't believe I wrote a 3,500 word
video about Miss Kobayashi's dragon maid
and never even mentioned the presence of
lesbians, I won't get too much into my
long-standing and deep-seated obsession
with yuri here as that's a video for
another time, but suffice it to say that
its presence in this show was more than
welcome and that I really appreciated
how forthright the series was about
including. Right in the first episode
Tohru explicitly states that she is
interested in Kobayashi not just
romantically but sexually, this is just
another of the things that I love about
manga artist Coolkyoushinja: he is
never one to shy away from the sexuality
of his characters, and in this case to
make sure that there's no questions
asked about what Tohru was hoping for in
this relationship.
Granted Kobayashi never actually
reciprocates to sexual attraction in the
course of the series and at one point
finally explains why she has difficulty
with even grasping it but because we
know right from the start that Tohru is
sexually attracted to Kobayashi it's
never a question of whether this story
is withholding this relationship just
because it's unwilling to follow through
on realizing its yuri undercurrent,
instead it's purely a matter of one of
the characters just not being up for it,
a lot of the experience of watching Maid
Dragon for me not unlike, "I Can't
Understand What My Husband Is Saying"
before it was just this non-stop chain
of things that I obsess over being
brought to the forefront almost at
random, as if just to say that "Yeah I
also think this thing is cool!" for,
example I can't believe that of all the
video games they could have shown the
characters playing they chose
motherfucking Dark Souls the game series
which occupies almost the entirety of my
favorite games list in which I could
talk about literally all year every year
I don't even know who is responsible for
this if Dark Souls wasn't in the
original manga then that just means that
the staff who adapted it was just as
much on my wavelength as the original
author, but it's not like every single
thing which is a big deal in Maid Dragon
is something that I also care, about for
instance I've never actually had much
interest in maids especially on an
aesthetic level but thankfully this show
is pretty critical of the idea of the
maid as an aesthetic trend anyways
regarding Tohru style as merely cosplay
and maid cafe "Wankery" as opposed to
the true fashion of a traditional
service woman, in concept I certainly
would not mind having a maid around but
it's not something that I think about or
have any passion towards in the way that
Kobayashi does, granted there are many
many things which I could rant about in
exactly the same way that she does like
Dark Souls for instance, I've also never
had a particular interest in dragons
aesthetically though it's what being a
dragon brings to the table in the series
where in my interests and the authors
begin to coincide this story takes the
approach of dragons being all powerful
end-game bosses,
any of which has the power to end the
world, transform at will, travel between realms,
restore objects to their former state
and basically do anything that the
story could possibly call for them to do
with only a handful of very specific
limitations depending on the character.
In this way dragons in this series are
presented somewhere between the way that
particularly powerful vampires are often
presented and just outright gods,
My favorite aspects of this are that the
dragons are immortal that they are
highly destructive that they could bring
about the end of the world and that they
have their own culture with its own
political factions and I'm going to try
and explain why each of those things as
cool as best I can.
First of all immortality is cool as shit
because an immortal life allows you to
accumulate such a massive number of
experiences, while maid dragon doesn't
dive too deeply into its Dragons past
there's this ever-present suggestion
that each of them has a long and complex
history and with it an enormous wealth
of knowledge about things which just
aren't relevant to the human world and
their current interactions but which can
occasionally be of use when dealing with
issues in the present, granted the series
plays these for laughs more than
anything and there's only a small
handful of elements in the characters
past which are important to
understanding the ways that they behave
now, but the fact that these rich
histories are even suggested, and that
we're allowed to imagine and speculate
about them is pretty cool in and of itself.
One of the major conflicts in maid
dragon comes from the fact that
Kobayashi's life will ultimately be a
blip in the incredibly long life of an
immortal dragon and the series explores
this issue in some pretty interesting ways,
my favorite of these moments comes
when Tohru asks one of the attendees at
"comme-kay" what makes this event so special
and he responds that it's something
which will only ever have happened in
this place and at this time, it's an
event whose value is intrinsically tied
to its transience and this revelation
has a huge impact on Tohru in that it
directly correlates to the time which
she can spend with kobayashi, it's such
an interesting take on the idea of an
immortal's relationship with a mortal
that I'm surprised I can't remember
having seen this kind of comparison been
made before, secondly the Dragons all
being so ludicrously powerful allows for
the series to showcase some over-the-top
and badass action sequences or even for
a lot of spectacle in the more heartwarming
Home Life scenes I'm always of the
mindset that if you're going to have a
show full of super-powered characters
then you might as well go all out with it
and have them constantly notching up
to 11 just for the fun and spectacle of it
and this show seems to agree, but even
cooler than mere destruction is this
constant suggestion that these dragons
can and indeed are often tempted to just
end the entire human world as we know it
there's almost an element of
Lovecraftian horror here as the only
thing keeping say, Fafnir from ending all
of human life is that he's gotten way
too addicted to MMORPGs it's not as
though the series is necessarily trying
to keep us on edge since as viewers we
can be pretty sure that the world is not
going to end in the middle of our
light-hearted slice of life comedy
series but that this constant pressure
is always at the back of my mind anyways
who's to say that the world isn't just
going to randomly end tomorrow what if
the Yellowstone supervolcano just
decides it's finally time to erupt and
buries half of my country and ash what
if someone says Cthulhu's real name and
kills the universe we just got to kind
of roll with it and hope that it doesn't
happen which is how Kobayashi goes about
dealing with the various dragons in her life,
but perhaps my favorite thing about
the dragons in this story is the sense
of epic tragedy that comes from learning
about their histories and culture,
dragons are after all incredibly violent
by Nature and thanks to their
mythological backgrounds most of them
have suffered some kinds of curses or
punishments or been exposed to prolonged
periods of suffering as a result of some
biblical scale events from their past
and yet something which the series does
amazingly is to take these massive and
otherworldly problems in to ground them
in such a simple easily empathetic
package that we can connect with the
best example of this comes in the first
episode when Tohru was having a
nightmare about a time when she was
attacked by an army of Knights a battle
between ironclad warriors and a mighty
dragon sounds like something out of a
video game or a fairy tale so generic
that we'd hardly take it seriously
but put into this context it's actually
sorta emotionally gripping, because
it's a source of something akin to
post-traumatic stress for Tohru when she
describes the dream to kobayashi
kobayashi takes it not at face value for
the content of the story but at the
emotional level of a bad dream which is
haunting her friend and comforts her as
such, in this moment we are given to
empathize with a wholly different kind
of creature and its problems which go
beyond the scope of anything which we
will ever experience by understanding
how the emotional effects of those
problems relate to the ones that we do
experience on a day-to-day basis this
kind of lenss is later applied to our
understanding of dragon culture and to
how dragons view their relationships
with humans the way that Tohru
speculates on how her parents would
react to her being with Kobayashi is
pretty obviously an analogue to racism
or classism or any other classic form of
bigotry, the dragon simply perceive
themselves as so fundamentally different
from humans that they can't possibly
relate to them, ironically proving just
how similar to humans they really are
given how much of humanity feels that
way about other humans, it is not at all
surprising that in reality humans and
Dragons can get along just fine if they
set aside their differences, hilariously
enough the Dragons even have their own
two partisan political system with one
faction dedicated to chaos and the other
to order I love this distinction simply
because the idea of a political faction
literally being in favor of chaos is
where we make the leap and values from
human to dragon even if those values are
basically understood in the same terms
by both species, speaking less in broad
terms and more about Tohru specifically
what I felt really brought her character
to life was the way that she has a kind
of wisdom about her which is unique to
her experience as a dragon and how in
spite of so much of the shows comedy
being about her fish-out-of-water
experiences in the human world Tohru is
anything but stupid she may favour brute
force as a means to get what she wants
but this doesn't mean that she's
incapable of critical thinking or even a
straight up book smarts if given the
means to understand something Tohru is
quick on the uptake and can even be a
source of solid life advice, while she is
ignorant of many aspects of the human
world in its culture her dragon wisdom
is of plenty of value both to other
dragons and to humans as well from time to time.
But as much fun as it is to watch Toru and Kana and even Fafnir the
dragons are not exactly the most
interesting characters in this show, that
honor would go to the one who might
dedicated an entire video to earlier but
another guy who shouldn't be slept on is
Makoto Takia, Kobayashi's work buddy and
an incredibly good-natured hardcore
otaku who ends up letting Fafnir move
into his apartment and becomes his best
friend so naturally that it's like it
had always been that way
Takia to me represents all of the best
aspects of otaku culture and reminds me
of no shortage of experiences that I've
had with my fellow otaku in the past
what's great about otaku is that what
matters to us more than anything else is
our sense of shared passion, perhaps
because we have something that the
people in our everyday
don't understand we cherish the
opportunity to surround ourselves with
people who get where we're coming from
and will readily share with them and
find reasons to be around them at
whatever cost I think there's something
in the way that an otaku like takia just
isn't particularly interested in or at
least not in a position to entertain a
normal sexual relationship that leaves
this aspect of his life open to having a
friend with a shared passion there like
the idea of moving someone into your
house because you want their
companionship is not at all strange but
most people would imagine a spouse in
this role as opposed to a gaming buddy
yet that kind of relationship makes just
as much sense because you're still
getting to share a passionate activity
with someone who's into it, the imagery
of Fafnir and takia having computers set
up in the same room where they play MMOs
together is extremely familiar to me,
my friends have done setups like this over
countless weekends in my house whenever
we got addicted to some new game and my
brothers and I would have room set up
like this for weeks sometimes where we
all moved our computers into the den so
that we wouldn't have to use voice chat
across the house, I've had an otaku
friend put me up for a month at his
house in the Philippines where we spent
all our time analyzing anime together
and bringing over other otaku for lucky star drinking parties,
I've shared no shortage of
hotels with borderline
strangers for conventions and invited
other bloggers to stay at my house for
conventions near me as well, obviously I
don't think that this kind of kindness
is somehow inherent to otaku or anything,
as Fafnir puts it in a later episode
this world is full of hits and misses
when it comes to people and Takiya
happens to be a hit, but he's a hit in a
way that I totally get in which I feel
like I've experienced in my own life,
even just recently when I hung out in
Atlanta with fellow anime youtuber Ninouh
and his friend who was a former
commenter on my old anime blog and we
all drove around bumming cigarettes and
food off of one another I got some of
that feeling and being reminded of it in
this show made me feel all warm and
fuzzy inside, running out the rest of my
notes I have to at least mention how
much I love watching Kana eat all kinds
of random objects not only because it's
adorable and hilarious but because I am
very passionate about eating, and
anything that focuses on characters
eating is always a win in my book, I
don't think I have to explain why eating
is cool and good but eating random shit
is especially cool and good because it
shows that kana has a truly expanded
palette, I also just generally enjoy the
way that this show is so willing to roll
right into high-minded conversations
without making a big deal out of it.
These characters are mostly
adults with pretty worldly perspectives
and it's not unusual for them to go from
everyday life stuff like what's for
dinner to analyzing their places in the
world or just solving some kind of
domestic issue in a clever grown-up way,
and all of these things seem normal
happening in the same scene we don't
have to change the music and go into an
extended monologue for a character to
present a more complex idea there's a
level of faith in one another's
intelligence that they'll just get it,
and that about covers my notes on the
themes and characters in this show but I
still have like three pages of just
gushing about how amazing the
presentation is so I'm afraid that we'll
be breaking that off into a third video
but before I go here's some food for
thought does Kanna understand that
Saikawa is in love with her and if so
does she like Saikawa back or is she
just taking advantage of Saikawa's
crush on her in order to have her around,
let me know what you think in the
comments below because I'm undecided and
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frequent upload thanks again for
watching and I'll see you in the next one.