New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a newly-available-in-English manga.

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Yes, we’re doing this now. In addition to my first impressions articles about new anime, I will also be occasionally dropping articles about new manga serials, since keeping up with brand-new manga is actually a thing one can reasonably do nowadays. (This was not so when I was younger, but that’s a conversation for another day.)

Ruri Dragon, the proper serial debut from the mangaka Shindou Masaoki, marks the first of these. It’s a manga with a dead-simple premise that I’m more than a little shocked I haven’t seen done before; high school girl is a dragon. Specifically, she’s a dragon-person. Think Tohru from Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid minus the tail (so far) and you’ve got a decent broad idea of where we’re going here.

In addition to that manga, the series opens with a sequence that actually reminds me a little of The Demon Girl Next Door (Machikado Mazoku to most of its readers). Previously-ordinary high school girl wakes up one morning to find out that she’s sprouted horns from her head. A surprisingly snarky sense of humor ensues, which immediately endeared me to Ruri, and which I think will serve it well over the long run. (And it makes the titular Ruri herself feel authentically “teenager-y.”)

Almost immediately, we get a good sense of both the titular Ruri’s personality and that of her mother. The latter in particular has an interesting devil-may-care attitude that could easily be mined for comedy, drama, or both. The woman didn’t even tell her own daughter that her father’s a ryu! That’s a pretty wild thing to just not tell your kid! To her credit, though, Ruri demonstrates an admirable ability to roll with it all, and mostly seems to find the subject awkward, at least initially.

She even insists on going to school, despite her mother offering to let her stay home. (Direct quote from the English translation; “They’re just horns. Not a huge deal.”)

Over the course of her day, we meet her friend Yuka and see how Ruri tries to adapt her daily routine to this unexpected intrusion. Right away, people—starting with Yuka herself—don’t entirely buy the whole “half-dragon on her dad’s side” story. The reactions of those around Ruri, which range from skepticism to finding her horns freaky-cool to her teacher initially assuming they were some kind of fashion statement, certainly seem like the groundwork for some kind of subtext, but it’s too early to make hard calls on this sort of thing. (Although there’s almost certainly a puberty metaphor running through here, as we’ll get to momentarily.)

In particular, the class boys take an immediate interest in her newfound noggin-knobs. Which is enough to make me ponder a similarity between the horns and a certain other part of the body that grows in pairs and gets AFAB girls unwanted reactions in high school, but perhaps I’m leaning too Freudian here. (Also; a serious shout out to translator Caleb Cook for the page on the right here, where he decided to translate something as “gurl.” Love it.)

Even the girls want a piece of Ruri.

^{And on that day, Background Student A discovered something new about herself.}

This all culminates in a scene where basically Ruri’s entire class is congregating around her to take a picture. It’s pretty cute, though in her position I’d be extremely uncomfortable, myself. (And she doesn’t entirely seem comfortable either, to be honest, given that she mentions to Yuka a few pages later that she’s not really “into chatting.”)

^{“Hey girl, you a demihuman?” may go down as one of the all-time great pieces of translation work for Shonen Jump.}

She eventually mentions surprise that she only has horns, and not any other “dragon-y” features. Ruri, it would seem, has a talent for jinxing herself, because barely a page later, she sneezes in class and lets out a truly impressive gout of fire, singing the hair off of one of the boys who was harassing her earlier. (That’s called karma, children.)

But things are not all fun and games. In a surprising turn of pseudo-realism, Ruri being able to breathe fire doesn’t automatically mean that her throat insulates her from her own flames, so the immediate fallout of that sneeze is a sudden and shocking amount of blood loss, which promptly causes her to conk out on the classroom floor.

Thankfully, her injuries aren’t life-threatening, and when her mother arrives to the school nurse’s office a few pages later she sees Ruri swapping usernames with the nurse in some mobage, in a sweet and humanizing minor detail.

It’s her conversation with her mom after she leaves that’s the most revealing though, and it’s here where I feel Ruri Dragon displays most of its potential.

Ruri is pretty obviously confused and at least a little hurt that her mom never told her about any of this. She directly says as much.

And it’s worth noting how her mother seems to unintentionally reinforce that loneliness, talking primarily about her own feelings, how “freaked out” she was, making excuses for herself while also trying to reassure Ruri that she’s an expert on dragons now, having apparently met up with Ruri’s father while Ruri was at school. (This raises even more questions; you’ve had contact with this guy the whole time and you still didn’t tell her about any of this? Maybe dragons do things differently, but in a vacuum, Ruri’s mother comes off pretty bad here.)

But if any of this is followed up on in a serious way remains to be seen. Perhaps more important than any of this is Yuka, who sends Ruri a group selfie that Ruri was squeezed into sometime during the school day. Upon receiving it, Ruri laughs, remarking that the picture has nothing to do with her horns at all. So, while the final shots of this first chapter are Ruri and her mother preparing to have a talk about her draconic heritage, it is the image of the photo that sticks with me most strongly as the chapter closes. After all, at her core and horns or not, Ruri is just a girl.

The Takeaway: With its future direction a total question mark, down to basic facts like even its genre still up in the air, Ruri Dragon is a total wildcard. But! The first chapter is roaring with potential; excellent art and writing abound, and the series has a fun, droll sense of humor. For these reasons, it’s worth keeping an eye on. The second chapter serializes on June 19th, 2022. If you’d like to keep up to date with the manga, I recommend doing so via MangaPlus, where it is available legally, for free, in English.

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