Drifting Dragons #1
空挺ドラゴンズ 1 [Kuutei Dragons 1] by Taku Kuwabara
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I struggled with rating this. For me it was more like a two but it's a me thing and I try to rate on the quality of the story. Also part of my issue was I very obviously didn't read the blurb very carefully. I bought this at Books-a-million and apparently my brain shortcircuited when I saw steampunk + dragons + Netflix adaptation or I would have read the blurb better because everything I didn't like was right there in it.
Mika is a draker and our main point of view character (him and Takita, a young recruit). Well let's just leave it with what's actually in the blurb. Dragon's are the whales of the sky and they provide food/leather/building materials etc. Don't get me wrong. I grew up in farm country. I'm very aware of what happens with cows, pigs and so on. That said I don't want to read about watching them being hunted, slaughtered, butchered and consumed.
And that's ninety percent of what this is. It's like Moby Dick without the white whale (yet). I have no desire to read (or watch an anime) about whaling (substitute dragons for whale) and the weirdest part of this was there's a hint that dragons might be sentient (which makes it worse) and that the towns want all the dragon-products but are absolutely awful to the drakers.
There are five chapters in this. Four of them are about Mika and company killing and eating dragons and the last one is about them fighting off airship pirates (I could hear Abney Park in my head reading this one). That chapter was fun because it gave Mika something more than his insatiable desire for dragon meat.
The storyline, is however, well done (hence the third star) and the art is very good. But this just isn't the story for me. I came away very disappointed (and had I read the blurb I could have avoided that so that's all one me).
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