English Dub Review: Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid “Tohru’s Real World Lessons! (She Thinks She Understands It Already.)”

Your project pipeline be dragon, bro.

Spoilers Below

It’s been two months since Tohru’s come to live with Kobayashi. The green dragon has gotten pretty good at being a maid. She can get through an entire morning without getting yelled out by Kobayashi and can make it through an entire day without incident… Scratch that. Birds messing up the wash warrant dragon fire, somehow. Her work complete, Tohru decides to scratch something off her bucket list: Visiting her mistress at work!

This office environment has been a mystery up until now, but we finally get to see what Kobayashi does! A software engineer, the nerdy little lady compiles code with the best of them, and it seems her coworkers all praise her skill! Deadlines are tight around this office, and it seems the project schedules have been punishing. Kobayashi’s buddy Takiya is having a hard time staying above water with it, and another teammate coming down sick piles more work on her. Despite this, she still takes moments out to help others in figuring out their problems.

Courtesy: Funimation

Tohru gets to see the office environment for the first time, hidden behind her perception filtering magic. She can see how the workers act with each other, how they draw together to solve problems and relieve stress. She still thinks that dragons are stronger. Then, she is introduced to Kobayashi’s boss and he is a piece of work. Apparently, he’s been pawning his work off on her, alongside a heaping spoonful of yell and cuss. Sufficiently invisible, Tohru takes every opportunity to punish him for his treatment of her mistress, leaving the office staff to wonder if this is what karma looked like.

The next day, doing her grocery shopping, Tohru runs into Fafnir just standing in the sidewalk. He’s holding up his hands oddly and staring into space. Come to find out, he’s decided to live in the human world. While Kobayashi goes off to work, Tohru decides to help him figure out the housing situation. He can’t live with them, and staying in the mountains is a sure way to get social media abuzz with rumors of a massive dragon. She takes him to see a real estate agent, and finds that money is quite the problem. A lung-sized lump of gold does not a yen make, despite its intrinsic value. His dragon hoard won’t pay his rent. Tohru comes up with a brilliant idea: Fafnir could live with Takiya! Once the idea has been presented, though, both boys seem amenable to the idea. As soon as the game controller goes into Fafnir’s hands, though, it all becomes clear. His hands and eyes are in the same pose she found him in. He’s consigned himself to the human realms in order to play video games. In the meantime, Kobayashi discovers that her really bad boss has been canned. Apparently, an anonymous recording of his treatment of her found its way to the upper management. It’s nice having a dragon for a guardian angel. Perhaps that’s why her coworkers have noticed how happy and open she’s been lately. She can’t even remember life without Tohru.

This episode was very heavily about Tohru’s reasons for staying in the human world. She’s been holding her dragon city back, and it’s a bit confusing to the other dragons. Her conversations with Fafnir yield some of the best animation I’ve seen in the series outside of the combat, and it’s done with real love and care. The voice acting is good and seeing a few more characters show off that this is due to the direction as well as the actors. Altogether, this show is one that I’m getting to be eager to watch each week, just for its upbeat-but-simple-sweet nature. I give it eight Fafnirs Gaming out of ten.

8.0/10