I don’t think I can watch this show. I lost my cat last year, and it still stings whenever I see posts on Reddit of people mourning their cats. Unfortunately, there are a whole lot of dead cats in this one episode. Also a dead dragon. Even if these animals can talk — and are arguably smarter than us — I can’t help but see them as pets. As a result, I can’t really stand the sadness. Not right now, not at this point in my life. But sure, I got through the first episode, so let’s briefly go over it.
Deep in a forest, a dragon returns to its nest and safely stashes its egg. Unfortunately, when it goes to hunt, it immediately gets speared right through the head. Huh, so hunters can headshot a dragon flying through the air? Still, that’s animal death number one.
Eventually, a mother from a species of spell-slinging, talking cats finds the cave where the egg was stashed. She proceeds to have her kitten there. Naturally, the egg would hatch at just the most opportune time, and the dragon would become part of the family. Cue a bunch of cute moments as the mother cat raises its young. But then one day, the mother cat starts disappearing — summoned by humans, apparently. She’s never seen again. Technically not animal death number 2, but it might as well be one.
The dragon’s cat siblings would eventually grow up and depart the nest. But one by one, whenever they needed to safely birth their kittens, they would return to pay the dragon a visit. And so the dragon became an uncle of sorts to litters and litters of cats. Everything was fine until the dragon spied something horrific on one of its flights. Yeah, animal death number 3, 4, 5, 6– …ah, who even knows at this point?
At first, it looked like history would repeat itself when the dragon attacked the nearby kingdom. Would it then suffer the same fate as its mother if and when the humans fight back? Well, the dragon eventually made a little girl cry, so a kitten tries to comfort and defend her — a kitten that smells like a sibling. Seeing this, the dragon left with just a warning. We then see another spell-slinging cat befriend the human prince, desire to teach the kid magic, and thus broker peace between the dragon and humanity. The dragon even takes on a cat-dragon hybrid form in order to mingle with humans. We are then told that generations and generations of the royal family would befriend and learn from spell-slinging cats. The episode ends with a shot of the dragon and its giant cat family. Everything is just so hopeful, but will it really stay that way?
Either way, if this felt like an OVA, then you’re not wrong. By the end of the episode, I was left scratching my head, asking myself, “Wait, this is an anime series? That was a self-contained story!” Well, I think it’s going to be an anthology, so we’ll get a different cat and dragon related story each week. Will we see this particular dragon again? Maybe. But like I said up top, I doubt my heart can take an entire season of this. There will be other hunters. There will always be those who want to make a quick buck and start skinning cats again. People forget their history lessons all the time. Point is, I don’t really wanna sit around and potentially watch cats die. And it would suck to see the dragon die too.
“But there will be heartwarming moments to make up for all the tragic ones!”
It’s like… that soot metaphor from The Ramparts of Ice. Feelgood moments don’t seem to linger like their counterparts. On the other hand, even if you try to wipe away the sad moments, they tend to leave behind a stain or worse. And over time, it just builds and builds. We can try crying in order to hit the emotional reset button, but it doesn’t always work. That’s life. That’s how a single negative remark can ruin your day even though others paid you plenty of compliments. A single rotten apple spoils the bunch; it doesn’t matter how many fresh apples you add to the mix. Even now, the image from the episode that lingers in my mind is the hunters skinning the cats or the mother being ripped away from her young, and not any of the happy, hopeful stuff at the end.
