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Dragon Maid Video Script and Audio
🕑 Added 2021-07-10 16:04:54 +0000 UTCHey, everyone.
At the beginning of this video I'd like to disclaim: This is my opinion. If you like Dragon Maid I don't think you're the vile spawn of Satan, if you enjoy this anime without thinking about the implications of some of the story elements, that's fine. This is a critique born of my own viewpoint and opinions, of a fan and a viewer like you. I'm going to be criticizing Dragon Maid pretty harshly so if you don't want that, do yourself a favor and leave now. Also general content warning for pedophilia.
In 2014 a manga artist named Coolkyousinnjya released the first chapter of a manga titled "Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid" in a publication of anime for young men called "Monthly Action," published by Futabasha. The first chapter was a mostly-innocuous story about a dragon named Tohru who happens to be a maid to a woman named Kobayashi.
The story begins with an explanation of dragons and more narrowly, Tohru, the specimen in question. Kobayashi and Torhu have an argument about riding Tohru to work and in the end they decide that Tohru is better off guarding Kobayashi's home, which she does against two burglars. The chapter ends with Tohru bragging about what a good job she'd done and confessing her love for Kobayashi, something Kobayashi shyly rebukes.
The premise of the original manga was a story structure that had been gaining popularity in manga, anime, and light novels in the early 2010s, the idea of taking a traditionally fantasy creature or being and placing them in a mundane situation. A reverse isekai with a humorous take- There are countless examples. The Devil is a Part-Timer, Gabriel DropOut, Saint Young Men, google the term if you want to find bucketloads more. But Dragon Maid had three unique features that made it more popular than any of its contemporaries.
The first unique feature was the fact that Tohru was explicitly a lesbian who desired a same-sex relationship with Kobayashi and it wasn't played for laughs, even though Kobayashi does invoke the famous "but I'm a girl" line. In a media environment like Manga, light novels, and anime, where same-sex couples are almost as rare as they are played for laughs, this was a refreshing, welcome thing.
The other two features, of course, were Tohru's tits.
PART 1: History
Like I said before, Dragon Maid was published in a so-called seinen publication, a publication for young men. In 2017 when it came time to adapt Coolkyousinnjya's manga into an anime, the tits were on full display. Tohru's other friends, all of whom seem to have massive tits as well, with the exception of the butler and the child, are also given the same eye-candy treatment.
Now. I like tits as much as the next person. Tits are great, and someone drawing art of tits is totally fine and cool. In fact I'd go so far to say that drawings of boobs is good, actually. However- Like any brassiere sommalier, we must consider the CONTEXT of the boobs- What SURROUNDS the boobs?
When I got into Dragon Maid it was 2017. I was balls-deep in a period of my life where I'd re-discovered my love of anime that had died back in 2012 when I saw Sword Art Online. I'd found the sign-in info for my anime planet account and I was ready to go, to search that old frontier of squealing multicolor-haired women, massive eyes, and fetish fuel.
One of my favorite Anime studios is Kyoto Animations, a studio responsible for timeless classics like K-On, Nichijou, Free, the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiya, and my personal favorite anime, Beyond the Boundary. I wondered what ole KyoAni had been up to, and in doing some research, I found the trailer for a sick new anime called "Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid."
Upon seeing the promo material (read: tits) I was hooked. As I said before, I was excited at the prospect of lesbians on-screen animated by one of my favorite studios. "Lesbian Dragon Show" became shorthand for the anime on Tumblr. I also liked the tits, naturally, so I began watching Crunchyroll's simulcasts of the new episodes. I even made a fan-blog with screenshots of the show where I'd post in-character as Tohru that got about 50 thousand follows. It was fun.
But as the anime went on... Something happened. See, I wasn't familiar with the manga at this point. I knew there WAS one, but I hadn't yet read it and as such I didn't know what lay in store. As time went on, my enthusiasm waned. I wasn't watching an anime where a lesbian couple adopt a dragon daughter. I was watching an anime where I was expected to become emotionally invested in the relationship between the ancient Aztec God Quetzalcoatl with huge tits and a ten year old boy. I was watching fetish fuel.
Again- Fetish fuel isn't bad in a vacuum! If you want to have a show featuring weird stuff that's fine. But the fetishes in question were like... Well.
PART 2: Pedophilia
I really don't want to do this to you guys. I respect your intelligences and I appreciate your viewership. So please accept my humble apology while I explain why pedophilia is bad.
Pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder defined as attraction to prepubescent children. This should not be confused with child sexual abuse, which is the active abuse of children, but the two things are bad for the same reasons.
Prepubescent children can't engage in sex for two main reasons. One, their bodies, by definition of being prepubescent, are not ready to engage in sexual acts. Two, they, being children, cannot consent in the same way adults can. It's impossible to understand what is being consented to when most if not all adults are in a position of power over you as a child.
Now, the DEPICTION of pedophilia and child sexual abuse as a fetish is... Less bad, I guess? Because instead of actually abusing a child you're inventing a child to abuse. This is still pretty bad because promotion of this behavior is understandably taboo in society because... Hurting kids is bad.
What does this have to do with Dragon Maid? Well, sadly, quite a lot.
Anime has a bit of a problem with underaged characters. There's a japanese word for this- Lolicon. Don't google it. The uncritical sexualization of underaged fictional persons goes on quite frequently, which is a topic for another time- Though I will say usually these cases are limited to one character, maybe two. Dragon Maid has four.
Let's take this case-by-case.
CASE 1: Kanna
Kanna is a lolicon character who is introduced early on in the series. She's possibly the most innocuous example of Dragon Maid's fuckery because she's not... Super sexualized? Mostly she's treated like a surrogate or adopted daughter of Tohru and Kobayashi. Even still, there are moments in the anime that sexualize her.
There's even a phrase that can be found surrounding this character for fans of the show that don't like when Kanna is depicted sexually- "Don't lewd the dragon loli." Most of Kanna's sexualization has what I'll call "loli deniability" where it's not technically explicit enough to make a comment on. Some people who do often get accused of being pedophiles themselves for noticing it. Calling someone a pedophile for being worried about depictions of pedophilia is textbook bad-faith reading though, so let's just ignore this.
Before we get into that, though, let's talk about the elephant in the room. Kanna is said to be seven thousand years old, which is often used as a way to excuse the lolicon aspects of many characters in media. As I've discussed, the actual age of characters has nothing to do with pedophilia. Kanna is pre-pubescent in all her depictions, both in physique and demeanor, so sexualization of her is pedophilic in nature. Even if being 7000 did somehow absolve this, there are aspects to her character that would still be an issue.
Namely, her relation to her school-friend Saikawa. Riko and Kanna become quick pals after Riko is initially jealous of Kanna's popularity. After this, Riko clearly has a crush on Kanna. Elementary-aged kids having crushes isn't bad on its own, but there are several scenes between them that cross the line. We as viewers clearly supposed to be invested in these two as a couple in an explicit sense. There's even a scene where Kanna pins Riko to the floor in a fashion that mirrors the "pinned to the floor" trope in many other animes. I'm not going to be totally bad-faith and say this is sexualization per se, but this is a situation where we're asked to become invested in a romance between elementary schoolers.
Let's not move on from Kanna yet, though, because there is a particular... Scene that features her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48LimWBjius
In the short "Love Potion" which is available on Youtube, Kanna discovers some chocolate that Tohru intended as a gift to Kobayashi. This chocolate ends up being full of liquor or aphrodisiac or something that causes both Kanna and Kobayashi to act... Bad.
If you don't get creeped out at an adult woman saying "this is weirdly arousing" about a prepubescent girl wearing thigh-highs and a miniskirt crawling on her- You're probably not getting into heaven.
Kobayashi doesn't actually end up doing anything to Kanna, but I don't think Dragon Maid gets credit for teasing lolicon instead of delivering on it.
Still- It would be in bad faith to say these examples are anything but fanservice teasing or that they somehow promote pedophilia. After all- Kobayashi does realize that it's bad to "lay her hands on an innocent young girl," and I doubt many audiences came away with the feeling that child sexual abuse is okay.
But don't worry! We're not done yet.
CASE 2: Lucoa
This is Quetzalcoatl, nickname "Lucoa" based on how Quetzalcoatl is pronounced in japanese. She's famous across the internet for looking like a Sims character created and dressed by a 15 year old boy.
On the Maid Dragon wiki, Lucoa is defined like this:
"She is a former dragon goddess and an old friend of Tohru who was exiled from her seat of goddess after consuming some cursed liquor that led her to enter into a scandalous affair."
What WAS that scandalous affair? They're pretty vague about it. Specifically, Lucoa got drunk and fucked her sister.
This mirrors Aztec mythology, where the mythological Quetzalcoatl is from, where ole Quetzal sleeps with his sister after getting drunk. However, unlike Lucoa, the mythological Quetzalcoatl locks himself inside a box and sets it on fire from shame. Lucoa never expresses remorse and never enters a flame cube.
So Lucoa, for lack of a better way to word this- Is a dragon sex offender. It gets worse, however!
This is Shouta Magatsuchi. Like Kanna and Riko, he is an elementary schooler, aged according to the wiki at 10-11. His name is a subtle reference to Shota, the male variant of Loli, which means being interested in young men, sexually.
Lucoa and Shouta have a... Dynamic. Talking about this is pretty tough, actually. Lucoa is into Shouta, explicitly. It's never stated outright whether this is sexual or not, but... Come on. She sneaks into his bedroom, sneaks into his bed, and smothers him with her tits all the time. To make matters worse, Shouta at the beginning of their interactions refuses Lucoa outright, showing embarrassment and even fear when she makes advances at him.
Saying this isn't shotacon or at the very least shotacon fan service is just disingenuous. It's textbook. The subtext is clear. I've seen people try to deny this by saying insane things like "he's just a big sister" or "things are different in japan," as though shotacon isn't a Japanese term. It's not a Japanese concept, pederastry was practiced in cultures as ancient as Greece, but it's certainly not something that Japanaese people have "different cultural takes" on.
CASE 3: Ilulu
The final case is the least explicit. I don't have much to say about this. In a show already filling a dozen cup sizes with big-titted characters, Ilulu is only special in that her size is disproportionate to her tits, unlike Tohru, Lucoa, and Elma. The word "shortstack" is often brought up, but many have interpreted Ilulu's size to be more pedo shit. I don't know. Anime portrays young characters' faces similarly to older ones' so who knows if Ilulu is supposed to be kid-coded. She's more mature than Kanna and her age is never stated. I don't know. Make of that what you will. Even so- The fact that it's hard to tell if it's loli or not is already pretty bad.
Frankly, I think Ilulu is... Fine. I don't personally have a problem with her, she looks as mature as Tohru is, she just happens to be short. Being attracted to short women with huge gazongas doens't make you a pedo, but at the same time, I can't in good faith say that the people who think she is lolicon are wrong due to the series she exists as a part of.
PART 3: Social Media
There's been a lot of argument about the series's problematic elements on social media, primarily Twitter, with a lot of misrepresentation on both sides of these issues.
This video at the end of the day is a critique, but it's a critique I'm making not to make some moralistic point about why Dragon Maid is actually evil and will make people who watch anime into pedophiles, it's to lament how an anime with a lot of promise and potential got bogged down with some genuinely reprehensible elements.
First of all, I want to address the social media reception to this series.
On the one hand, I do think there is a tendency to over-exaggerate the impact of elements of this show online. The critique "Ilulu can be interpreted as a lolicon character" gets transformed into "you're a pedo if you watch Dragon Maid," and that's an argument made in bad faith. There's a tendency for fans of the show to get genuinely confused when they see Ilulu, who, to them is a sexy of-age character getting moral backlash.
https://maid-dragon.fandom.com/wiki/Ilulu
In the discussion section of Ilulu's Dragon Maid wiki page, this cognitive dissonance is on full display. People who likely never had these lolicon connections occur to them discuss Ilulu as though twitter is simply critiquing her bust size and sexualization. "Why do people call her loli?" one user wonders. "Isn't she 19?" another says.
But to totally ignore the critique that Ilulu appeals to pedophiles is in just as bad faith. To willfully ignore the fact that some people do see her as a loli just because you think she's hot is burying your head in the sand. Loli is defined differently by different people and more importantly, actual pedophiles probably don't give a shit about her real age.
Really, this dichotomy is false. Both groups are reacting to a disgust with pedophiles and loli fans. On the one hand, the people who believe Ilulu is of age are disgusted with the proposition that she isn't 19 whereas people who critique Ilulu for being a loli are disgusted by people who don't see the issue. It's a fake argument. They both hate pedos, they're just on different sides of liking a character.
But ignoring the issue allows genuine, actual pedophiles to become comfortable in a space. The people who genuinely honestly believe Ilulu is a hot oppai loli sneak in and argue on the same side as the people who are feigning ignorance. If you want proof, just do a google image search. Or- Don't! You might get put on a government list.
What I'm saying, more broadly, is that burying your head in the sand about these issues and angrily denying any critique is to both obsfuscate actual criminals and to take critiques in bad faith.
There are problems with Dragon Maid. This much is undeniable. You can't erase that no matter how much you crusade on twitter and perform incredulity online. "Golly gee I just don't see why people get so mad! It's just big boobs! What's wrong with big boobs?" as though the issue is with bust sizes and not with universally reprihensible acts.
Or, put more simply. To ignore critique is to agree with pedophiles. And you're not a pedophile. You like a cute show with an earnest, kind outlok on life.
PART 4: The Good
A lot of what is good about Dragon Maid can be defined by the term "family." When we, as Americans, say "family," we likely think of the nuclear family model, IE parents and children living in one household together.
Dragon Maid depicts a modern family, but it also represents what family meant before the nuclear model was prioritized. The child, Kanna, is shown having a strong bond with not just her surrogate parents, Kobayashi and Tohru, but with her friends and other adults in her life. She's raised with a healthy, large group of people, from teachers to friends to anyone who cares for her. This is genuinely a beautiful dynamic. Similarly, Kobayashi and Tohru are tasked with the care of Kanna, but they respect her autonomy as a person without mandating her obedience or condescending to her. It's a setup of mutual trust.
This is all on top of the fact that Kobayashi and Tohru are heavily lesbian-coded. I say... Coded because Kobayashi isn't confirmed to be gay? Frankly this is a big example of queerbaiting, which I'll talk about later, but that queerbating doesn't erase the fact that they're two moms raising a kid.
They're not even the only LGBT coded couple in the show. Fafnir and Takiya also co-habitate and share a lot of things.
Also Lucoa is into yuri!
...
Every character in the show is shown to have some loose familial connection to the other, they've all settled down in their city and are making their way in life through cooperation. There's something very quietly beautiful about that, especially when Tohru's father arrives to demand that Tohru return to her old world with him and Tohru refuses because of how passionately she's grown to love her friend group. It's a found family that surpasses her abusive dad.
Another aspect that I enjoy about this anime is its emphasis on a realistic daily life of adults. So few ordinary life animes center around adult characters and seeing adults with jobs and responsibilities is a VERY welcome change from the high school setting that has become nearly synonymous with anime in general. You can tell this is written from the experience of a working-class individual who knows the ins and outs of surviving a modern era.
There is a queerbaiting aspect to all this, which I mentioned earlier. I won't say that Fafnir and Takiya are queerbaited because they're depicted more as bros even though people ship them, but with Kobayashi and Tohru, this is some pretty clear baiting.
I'm not going to get too deep into this because if I defined queerbaiting as exhaustively as I did pedophilia, this video would be too long, but queerbaiting is when two characters are often seen engaging in romantic activities but are never confirmed to be gay. This plausible deniability has many different purposes, such as dodging media censors in the best-case and deliberately stringing along queer people in the worst-case. In Dragon Maid's case I think it's a little of both.
On the one hand, I think the author genuinely wanted to depict a romance between these two. This is clear from how Kobayashi never really denies her affection in a way that doesn't bring her honesty into question. A lot of red-faced blushing and insisting she's not interested a little TOO hard. That and Tohru is just. A lesbian. Explicitly. She's Kobayashi-sexual. She's romantically interested in Kobes from the beginning of the manga.
On the other hand... Yuri. It's no secret that Coolkyousinnja also draws porn and it's unlikely that a seinen manga has a very... Charitable take on a lesbian relationship. In fact, when Kobayashi and Tohru DO have tense scenes, it's played for a fetish.
That doesn't mean that because it was written uncharitably that it's bad though. My personal opinion is that this dude wrote a charitable take on a lesbian household totally by accident, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy that. Death of the Author, yadda yadda.
You could also make the argument that Kobayashi is asexual. I've seen this take online, and while it is made questionable by how her asexuality is constantly challenged by Tohru, it is an arguable take and it would be cool to have some ace rep in a notoriously queerphobic media environment.
But wait- I LIKE Dragon Maid? There are good and bad things about it? I spent a lot of time dissecting themes of pedophilia and now I'm singing its praises??
PART 5: Why Bother?
The question becomes, in that case- Why critique Dragon Maid at all? Why critique anything? Do I hate Dragon Maid? Do the twitter people want to cancel it?
Outside of the specific things I've outlined- Dragon Maid is good. I'd go so far as to say it's like. 90% good. There are so many good things about this show. It's charming, it's cute, it's funny, and it's got some seriously huge tits in it. So if I like it, why am I bitching about it??
I can't retroactively delete Dragon Maid, even if I wanted to. It exists in the world and it can't be taken back. Critique doesn't exist to take away from Dragon Maid but to improve upon it. To find its best parts and address the bad so future anime can be better and so that the viewers of this video can have a better, more diverse sense of an anime they probably also like.
Even if you didn't personally feel uncomfortable with Lucoa sneaking into Shouta's bed, even if you don't get squicked out by Kanna crawling on a drunk Kobayashi, even if you don't think there's a single thing wrong with this anime, that doesn't mean those issues don't exist, it just means you didn't see them. A piece of art exists in the eyes of everyone watching it, and you're not the only person watching it. In the same vein, if you're some Twitter purity crusader, you should be able to see why the show is appealing, too. You should see the worth in preserving some of the things about this show that are worth preserving.
What I'm saying is we need to engage with these works not as either "good or bad" like so much of this debate boils down to, but we should discuss them as "what did we think of this?" We're not the judges of morality, we're not the jury who collectively decides goodness and badness, we're human people who all have a subjective interpretation of a piece of art.
Let's not forget though- A piece of art that features like. Light Child Sexual Abuse. And was written by a guy who makes child porn.
This part isn't a joke, if you look up his porn and saved any of it, you'd be guilty of an actual real crime.
Actually you know what? I take it back. Dragon Maid sucks. We can totally judge it morally. If you excuse pedophilia in this show you're as bad as they are. Get mad in the comments. Goodbye.
