If you’re someone who doesn’t follow my main socials of Tumblr and Bluesky, you may be wondering why I’m pairing these two episodes together. Considering that my previous Saturday involved me juggling three different simulcasts, two of which I did writeups for, I figured that the most justifiable thing for me to do without overworking myself was just delay my watching of Episode 1 by a week and pairing it with my Episode 2 writeup. Doesn’t help that I had this series down as starting in July instead of June.
Anyway, let’s see what this series has in store for us.
Episode 1: “The Cat and the Dragon”
The episode begins with us jumping straight into the action, showing us a dragon attacking a human nation. During this run of the events, we only get to hear what the humans are saying. There’s also narration that says that the dragon left a warning, but we do not get to hear the warning before we go to the next part of this episode.
We do get a rewind to find out the history of this dragon. He had been the sole egg of a dragon mom who died after going out for a hunting session. A pregnant cat (whose species is canonically known as Cait Sith, but since the narration refers to them as cats more often, that’s what we’re going to do) just so happens to choose that cave to nurse her upcoming kits. While she gave birth to her kits before the dragon hatched, from what I can tell from the visuals, the power of love caused the dragon to hatch, and the momma cat takes the baby dragon in.
The baby dragon gets raised as a cat, and though there are some challenges he has when he tries to learn things as a cat. As they grow, however, the momma cat gets summoned by a human, leaving the three kittens and the dragon don’t have a mother, though at least they’re big enough to be able to take care of themselves.
While the other cats go out on their own, the dragon stays at the cave. While there are cats that come to the cave to nurse their kits, the dragon stays there to protect them and teach them how to hunt and magic. As the dragon grows, he learns that he is not a cat due to conversing with spirits. During one of his hunting trips, however, he finds that a lot of cats have been killed by humans.
Not only were they killed, they were killed for their fur, not to be used as food.
This pisses the dragon off, leading into the attack on the kingdom. This is where we learn the warning that the dragon gave: thou must only kill the cats for their food. If the cats get killed for their fur again, the dragon will attack again.
After that attack, though, we get to see a prince struggling to use magic. He keeps trying (and failing) to set a leaf on fire. A cat joins in watching him, however, and after the cat gets love from the prince, the prince manages to set the leaf on fire, with the cat celebrating. It even keeps returning to hang out with the prince, and the prince even learns how to talk with the cat.
This leads into the dragon making another visit to the place, which the cat talks with him, stating that it wants to stay to teach the prince magic. One of the members of the guard knows enough of the language to be able to translate a bit, though we do have more where we actually get to see the animals talk. The dragon doesn’t have any qualms with this, but he wishes to talk to the king, transforming into a cat with wings to talk to him.
With the talks, the king and the dragon determine that the teaching can proceed, with the prince teaching the magic he learns to the kingdom due to it being a different kind of magic from human magic, and the cats come and go from the kingdom as they please to hang out with the humans and keep them company. During this talk, he also wishes to be called the Cat Dragon instead of the Imperial Dragon as the king was referring to him as.
This episode seems to be an episode that sets everything up for the upcoming episodes, and I feel like it leaves a solid baseline. I genuinely hope that we get to see more of the dragon in his cat form, as I think it’s adorable. I enjoyed it, and it makes me excited to watch the second episode.
Due to my decision to postpone my viewing of episode 1, however, I don’t have to wait a week just to watch episode 2! Meaning now we get…
Episode 2: “The Mother Cat and the Girl”
This episode picks up where the plot thread of the momma cat getting summoned leaves off, as she gets summoned to be the familiar of a student at a magic school. While the student doesn’t have much confidence in herself, the momma cat treats the student as if she’s her biological child. From here, the two get into a solid schedule:
- Prior to breakfast, doing training by shooting electric spell into the wall because magic power is stamina.
- Breakfast.
- Classes.
- Lunch in there presumably.
- Afternoon training for the kids, which the momma cat uses to have her own meal, by eating the jewels off of mice like creatures called carbuncles.
- Pre-dinner training with the girl and the momma cat.
- Dinner.
- Other stuff that eventually leads to bed.
During one of the days, monsters break into the school, which the students manage to take down, only for a higher demon to rise. It seems there’s going to be some big battle…only for it to turn out that the demon that was coming up was also someone raised by the momma cat, and he was just checking in on her to make sure that she’s safe.
However, this leads into a dungeon getting opened in the school for the students to try and conquer, which they do. Yippee! 😀 Momma cat also visits the higher demon in his land, which I thought was sweet. During this, the momma cat also had her tail split, because of all those carbuncle gems she was eating.
After the graduation of the girl who got the momma cat as her familiar, however, she later comes back to serve as a teacher for the school she graduated from, and teaches a new generation of students, as well as manages to get the ability to have students get on-the-job training for the guild while they’re in school, which I thought was nice.
Anyway, the next class of students graduates, and the momma cat talks about chance encounters…but in her own words, that’s another story for another time.
With these two episodes, I think I can understand why this anime is called The Cat and the Dragon. It seems that the perspective is split between the Cat Dragon and the momma cat, so unless my observation turns out to be flat out wrong, I think we’ll focus on the Cat Dragon in the odd numbered episodes and we’ll focus on the momma cat in the even numbered episodes. I am prepared to get proven wrong, though, as there’s no guarantee that it’ll stick to a nice pattern like this.
However, I’m enjoying the series so far. It’s very cute, and I think this is a series that I could easily see myself sitting down and watching after a long day just to have something meant to chill out to. I like how I don’t have to completely shut my brain off just to enjoy it, as I feel like this series is showing an excellent view of Nature vs Nurture, mainly on the Nurture side, with how the Cat Dragon and the Higher Demon were treated in these first two episodes. I hope they keep this up in the remaining episodes and really drive home how people get shaped by their environment most of the time.
I have high hopes for this series, and I really hope it doesn’t disappoint.
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