DRAGONAR ACADEMY, based on the light novel by Shiki Mizuchi with art by Ran. First published in 2011 and first published in North America in 2014.
PLOT:
At Ansarivian Dragonar Academy, magically gifted young people are taught how to summon and tame powerful dragons. Ash Blake is the only exception, a first-year student who is seen as a troublemaker because his own dragon has yet to appear. On the verge of death, his dragon finally emerges...in the form of a very naked young girl with the power and horns of a dragon, The dragon-girl, soon dubbed "Eco," is stubborn and autocratic, but their fledgling relationship is put to the test when Eco is kidnapped by nefarious forces determined to discover the secret of her unique form.
STORY:
In some ways, Dragonar Academy is not all that different than any other light novel adaptation you'll find out there in manga. It's as formulaic as any of its isekai brethren, it's just that it's a lot more obvious that it's build on the skeleton of a harem manga. There are some advantages and disadvantages to this approach. One of the upsides is that means that the writer is less focused on explaining the lore of his world in minute detail. While there's plenty of nonsense fantasy jargon and names to go around, Mizuchi doesn't waste time explaining them beyond what is necessary and that keeps things moving forward at a steady pace.
Instead the focus is on establishing our cast of characters. Normally that would be a good thing, except that Ash's growing harem is made up of purely stock character types. We've got a haughty tsundere, a sexy sadist teacher, the pervy best friend, and then there's Eco. This sort of tyrannical yet naive loli character was all the rage five years ago, and she only grows more exhausting with each page she appears on. At least Ash takes her abuse in stride, but that's because in typical harem fashion he has all the will and personality of a wet paper towel. It's hard to care about characters who are not just literally two-dimensional, but figuratively as well. It just goes to show that the more things change, the more some things stay the same.
PLOT:
The plot (what little there is) didn't impress me much, but where Dragonar Academy truly lost me was with how Ran draws the girls that inhabit in. Fanservice is the focus above all things, so virtually every girl is drawn with her enormous chest thrust into frame, stockings gartered directly to dresses, ninja girls wearing battle thong bikinis, and curious wrinkles in the crotch of every girls' uniform that seem to exist only to evoke the image of panties. Oh, and it goes without saying that panty shots are as frequent as they are pointless. Regardless of what role these ladies may play in the story, the visuals make their purpose clear: they are nothing but objects to be ogled, distinguished only by the character types tacked upon them.
This is especially egregious where Eco is concerned. The story finds too many opportunities to get her nude, and it's especially shameless about shoving her barely developed breasts and prepubescent body into the reader's eyes. The only thing that keeps this from being pornographic is the total lack of detail on her crotch, but regardless it makes the book deeply uncomfortable to read. That effort could have been put into so many places, from making the paneling in (what barely pass for) action sequences coherent to making the non-loli dragons not look so disturbingly fleshy. Instead it's spent pandering to perverts too cheap and too dishonest to just buy themselves some fucking hentai.
RATING:
Dragonar Academy is just another artifact of bad anime trends of past. It has no value beyond spank bank material, and what it considers sexy is eye-rolling at best and disgusting at worst. Leave this one in the trashcan of manga history with the rest of its peers.
This series was published by Seven Seas. This series is complete with 13 volumes available. All 13 were published and are currently in print.
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