Great art often asks difficult questions - questions that speak to the human condition, that embody what we are and who we strive to be. “Why are we here?” is a classic art entreaty; “is true understanding of another possible?” is one of my personal favorites. Dragonar Academy centers its discourse on a similar question, one that has troubled great minds for countless generations. Staking its claim in the proud soil of artistic tradition, Dragonar Academy raises its head to the heavens and bellows “why can't people have sex with dragons?”

Sex is on Dragonar Academy's mind in a very general sense, if the show's packaging didn't clue you in. The bluray menu literally has tentacles creeping across it, and the back cover proudly snarks “she's far from tame,” a play on words hinting at the twin difficulties of taming a dragon and understanding a maiden's heart. You might wonder how tentacles would end up playing into a show that's theoretically about dragons; that too is a difficult question posed by Dragonar Academy, one answered again and again and again, with confidence and relish. Few questions are left unanswered by Dragonar Academy, as the show takes pain to unravel riddles ranging from “what would this female character look like naked” to “what would this other female character look like naked.”

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Dragonar Academy stars Ash Blake, a boy who wants to become a dragon-riding Dragonar, but whose “parr” (basically just a word for “bonded dragon,” one of many nonsense words introduced throughout) has yet to manifest. Fortunately, this is a light novel adaptation, and so Ash's handicap isn't actually a handicap - to make up for his own dragon-lack, he has the unique ability to tame and even telepathically communicate with everyone else's dragons. And when his dragon finally does show up, she takes the form of a tsundere pink-haired girl named Eco.

Dragonar Academy's plot plays out in the straightest light novel adaptation way possible. Ash eventually gathers a harem of girls that range from the haughty princess to the big-sister student council president to the kuudere elf girl, all of whom end up naked and all of whom get saved by Ash at various points. Ash develops bonds with all of these girls as an evil plot by a masked man burbles in the distance, leading to a series of Team Rocket-style encounters where Ash fights zombie dragons and then the masked man promises to get him next time. Each of these battles is a mirror of the ones that came before, and each of them adhere to the most tired of power fantasy beats imaginable. Eco pretty much only exists to get captured and groped by tentacles - despite theoretically being a dragon, her only power is magically creating armor for Ash, and so battles tend to resolve with Ash in armor saving his dragon-lady from a tentacled zombie-dragon's clutches. It's tired and banal the first time, and doesn't really improve by the fourth.

The more dramatic sequences are broken up by “classic” anime beats like the beach episode and Ash and Eco going shopping together. There are attempts at humor, but nothing actually funny - all the jokes here fall into the “silly faces, loud overreactions, and the main character getting punched” school of lazy anime humor. These sequences are theoretically the moments that are supposed to endear you to these characters, but they don't really raise them above genre archetypes; at the very end of the show, when Ash is solemnly declaring how much he knows about Eco, all he can come up with is “she likes to sleep in and eat crepes.” When the writing isn't being trite, it's being aggressively inept; one arc around the middle actually revolves around the haughty princess's sister staging a hostage situation in order to teach her a lesson about honor, a development that makes no sense on either an in-world or character level. The haughty princess is actually one of the lucky ones - for other characters, it sometimes feels like the show forgot to give them an arc altogether. The characters are far too flimsy to make any of the emotional beats work, the narrative will never surprise you, and the humor is comatose; on essentially every writing level, Dragonar Academy might as well not exist.

So if Dragonar Academy is a total failure as a story, perhaps it succeeds as a vehicle for dragon fights and/or porn? Well, the situation there isn't much better. You'd think a show with “dragonar” in the title would at least have some cool dragon battles, but unfortunately, Dragonar Academy doesn't actually have much animation in it. It's difficult to convey the give-and-take of giant bodies in combat when your show is more or less confined to still frames, so instead of actually grappling, all the dragons in this show just fire lasers at each other. More expense is spared in making sure the zombie-dragon tentacles look appropriately slimy than in animating basically anything else - at one unintentionally funny point, a character saying “I've never seen anyone dance so beautifully” leads into a series of blurred still shots intended to convey the appearance of dancing, tragically underlining the show's production woes.

So does it succeed purely as a vehicle for fanservice, then? Well it certainly has plenty of fanservice. Dragonar Academy is not a pretty show, and its character designs reflect that - they're sharp and generic and awkwardly exaggerated, with the two styles of female characters falling into “absurd balloon boobs” and “tiny waif.” These characters regularly get their clothes either shorn off by admirably precise sword strokes or shredded by relentlessly inquisitive tentacles, and the show doesn't skimp on showing actual nipples. Basically all of the fanservice here is of the shame/assault variety - it's nearly all unwilling and accompanied by cries of “no, don't!”, so let that guide your kink-radar.

Dragonar Academy's music sounds like the kind of music you'd expect in a show about tentacle dragon sex. It's mostly generic techno, with some wacky horns and drums for the pratfall sequences, and basically no complex melodies. Like every other aesthetic element of the production, it falls in around the lowest tiers of serviceable.

The dub is quite reasonable, though it's hampered by an awkwardly wordy and often stilted script. Lines like “I can see it. Because of the curse… the one that I bear” are pretty common, and Eco's voice actress occasionally over-enunciating her lines doesn't help matters. The show comes packaged with both DVD and bluray discs, which contain the usual promos, clean opening/ending songs, and two commentary tracks featuring the dub directors and the actors for Ash, Eco, Lucca, and Rebecca. I appreciated the cast pointing out how Eco's consistent nudity makes for a nice natural point about how shame in nakedness is a social construct… but that point seemed maybe a little misplaced in the context of a show where half the titillation comes from deliberately making its characters feel shamed. But the cast certainly understands how ridiculous this show is.

Overall, I can't say I'd recommend Dragonar Academy to anyone. The writing and aesthetic execution are so resoundingly terrible that even as a vehicle for tentacle porn, it feels like you could do far better than this. There's nothing here that goes beyond R-rated, and it's spread out between such lengthy scenes of such bad light novel storytelling that it feels like your kinks deserve better. Perhaps questions about dragon sex are best left unanswered after all.