What are you doing now, Water God? — The Water Dragon's Bride Volumes 1-5 by Rei Toma

[spindizzy]

A modern-day girl gets whisked away to a strange land where she is sacrificed to a water dragon god!

In the blink of an eye, a modern-day girl named Asahi is whisked away from her warm and happy home and stranded in a strange and mysterious world where she is sacrificed to a water dragon god! What plans are in store for her, and what will happen when she comes face to face with this god?

A young boy named Subaru comes to Asahi’s aid, but despite his help, Asahi must endure a test of survival! Will she be able to make it out alive, or will she end up being sacrificed?

Rei Toma's The Water Dragon's Bride crossed my twitter feeds a fair bit last year, and it turns out that it's for good reason! Our Heroine, Asahi, is a normal little girl living in the modern world, until she's dragged into a fantasy world where people worship a humanoid water dragons as a god, up to and including ritually sacrificing a maiden every year to be his "bride." You see where this is going.

My feelings were more intense than I was expecting, which I put down entirely to Asahi. Her narration is dual-voiced; there's the immediate narration of her as a small child, alone in a strange world where people want her dead, and the narration of adult Asahi, looking back. There's the immediacy of her pain and confusion as a child, and the conflicted emotions of her older self, which works great for the tension by making sure that any moment that looks too close to being safe and happy feels ominous instead. And I'm not gonna lie to you, Asahi goes through a lot. The Water Dragon's Bride has some humour in it, especially visual gags and characters ragging on the titular Water Dragon, but the first two volumes are full of misery and betrayal to make sure that Asahi's faith in people is eroded!

Speaking of the Water Dragon, I'm torn between congratulating the creator on depicting an awful character with skill, and just turning this paragraph into I hate him I hate him I hate him a hundred times. He is presented as bored and fickle, who not only doesn't care enough about the humans who worship him to act on their behalf, but doesn't care enough to make them stop killing people in his name! The strongest emotions he displays are utter glee at his own power and willingness to destroy things! He is awful and completely detached from the basic ideas of life (he has to be reminded by a secondary character that humans need to eat after watching Asahi starve for three days), and I am impressed at how much the narrative made me hate him even as it showed how he was very slowly and incomprehensibly starting to change. I'm not going to lie, the main reason that this paragraph isn't just I hate him I hate him I hate him a hundred times is that "Being with phenomenal cosmic power and one (1) human that they will use that power for" is one of the tropes that I'm a sucker for, especially when that being is as confused about what's going on as the one (1) human, as is the case here. So I hate the Water Dragon and the way he takes more and more from Asahi, but I can't actually look away! Especially because I've read enough shoujo manga that I can't trust all of this *gestures at series* precludes him being a love-interest in the future.

... Although I want it noted for the record that every other dragon/god introduced appears to have a basic understanding of humanity and living beings, even if they don't care any more than the Water Dragon does.

I think what gets me about this is that every character's feelings about Asahi are twisted up in something else. She has only one friend, Subaru, whose relationship with her is complicated by his guilt that his mother has repeatedly tried to have Asahi killed, and his overwhelming desire to protect Asahi and atone for his village's murderous history. The Water Dragon sees her as an entertainment, an object that he owns and can do with as he pleases. The general population see her either as an object they can use to control a god, or as something to be feared and protected in equal measure. The ruler of the country – or at the very least his advisers – see her as a source of power. She has her home, her trust, her recurring hopes of going home, even her voice taken away from her, and she is explicitly aware that she is an object to the people around her, one that could be gotten rid of at any time! And she still looks at the world she's ended up in and goes "No. Everyone here needs to do better." Her realisation that it doesn't matter what her worth actually is as long as people perceive her to have value is simultaneously sad and validating, because she leverages the small amount of power she has to try to change things.

When I started tweeting about The Water Dragon's Bride, I summed it up as "Yona of the Dawn meets Eight Days of Luke, possibly via Red River," which is possibly oversimplifying things because this doesn't (yet) have as much of the on-screen growth of Yona or the genuine affection of Eight Days of Luke, and any action scenes in The Water Dragon's Bride look static and blocky and awkward. But, The Water Dragon's Bride was very effective at getting me emotionally invested in Asahi, whether she's an adorable child in horrible circumstances, or a teenager trying to find the best thing to do, and I desperately hope that this series gets to be about her changing the world.

[Caution warning: human sacrifice, child abuse and neglect, attempted murder, imagery of suicide, torture, floods]

Comments

[lokifan]

I mean, my username is because of Eight Days of Luke... and yet the dragon sounds like SUCH A SHIT. *debates with self over whether would enjoy this*