Maddies Manga

If you’re looking for a fresh fantasy series with magical creatures, and complex relationships, this is a series that needs to be on your radar.

Author

This series is written by Asato Shima. X

Genre & Tropes

Fantasy, found family, slice of life.

Info about this series (ongoing)

There are 2 volumes in the series. It was just announced that VIZ will be picking up the English licence.

TL;DR rating

This is such a good series, I don’t even know what to say. If you’re looking for a fantasy series that focuses more on friendship than romance, you should check this one out.

You can check out this series for yourself below.

What happens in volume 1?

In a town where dragons are worshipped as gods by humans, where does that leave the dragon-people that live and study amongst said humans?

In Shiokaze to Ryuu no Sumika, in one coastal town in Japan, it’s rather common to run into dragon-people. This comes as a bit of a shock to our protagonist, whose circumstances bring her to move in with her uncle one day. After the passing of her father, she leaves her old town behind, and moves to an unfamiliar town with an unfamiliar uncle, only knowing that he has a boarder the same age as her. He fails to mention that the boarder is a dragon-person, and she gets quite a large shock when met with his tail during her move-in.

The dragon-person, Tenshin, comes off as a rather tsundere character at first, really not wanting to have anything to do with our protagonist. A string of events eventually forces them to bond, with Mizuka’s uncle becoming lost at sea, and Tenshin being the only one who could potentially save him. Thankfully her uncle was never in real danger, and Tenshin is able to rescue him with no difficulties.

Now that their relationship has changed for the better, we get to learn more about the various dragon-people, and how they’re treated by the townspeople. Tenshin is ridiculously popular – both with normal humans, and with dragon-people. Some of his human classmates have been collecting his scales as they fall off, to which Mizuka immediately points out being borderline stalker activity. The dragon-people, who tend to only interact with other dragon people, see Tenshin as the strongest out of them all, and pick a fight with Mizuka for becoming close to him.

We also learn that all of the dragon-people are raised together at a shrine, and besides Tenshin, they all live together as teenagers as well. Tenshin’s leaving the temple seems to have caused some tension within the fraction, however he really doesn’t seem to care all that much.

What I liked most about this volume

❤️ I LOVE a good slow burn, and this series is certainly giving! This volume introduced us to the various character dynamics that we will be seeing in the coming volumes. I’m excited to see how they grow and change!

🧡 Tenshin slowly growing to trust Mizuka – I enjoyed watching their relationship start awkwardly sour, and slowly but surely get better. It felt much more realistic than had they been really close right from the start.

💛 The mystery – I am curious to learn more about Tenshin! I have so many questions about him – his tail moves on its own? how? ; If he can turn his hand into a claw, and pull out his wings, can he fully transform into a dragon? Are there limits? ; Is he actually the strongest out of all the dragon-people?

💚 The art is really very pretty, I’ll never get tired of looking at it.

💙 Tenshin’s sarcastic personality. Once he finally came out of his shell, I grew to love his personality so much! He’s such a uniquely funny character!