The Dragon Pilot Manga
A short tale of rivalry and acceptance
I previously talked about the Dragon Pilot anime, and now I want to talk about its obscure semi-canon manga spin-off. Wikipedia calls it an adaptation, however I feel that label is misleading because the manga doesn’t actually adapt most of the story and only covers the first half of the anime. Instead of following Hisone, the main character of the anime, the manga actually mostly takes place from the point of view of Hisone’s rival and later friend, Nao Kaizaki, and follows how and why she trained to become a D-Pilot, as well as offering more insight into her background.
Now I call this manga semi-canon for a reason. The manga was written by Shinji Higuchi, Mari Okada, and Akiko Waba, the lead director for the anime, the lead writer for the anime, and a writer on several episodes respectively. Seeing how much of the same lead crew worked on this, it’d be hard to not call it canon but it does also contradict key events. This is also where I’ll put a spoiler warning. The manga is only five chapters long so it’s a pretty short read but it’s also only officially available in Japanese, so if you want to read it in English, you’ll need to find an online fan translation. But I’ll be covering the important events anyway.
SPOILERS START HERE
The first event is how Hisone and Masotan meet. In the anime, Hisone is directed to a hangar (which Masotan is sleeping in) by a kind old lady; but in the manga Hisone is giving a tour of the base to a couple of reporters, before having a partial nervous breakdown and running into Masotan’s hangar by accident. The second event is when the three other D-Pilots and their dragons meet with the other characters for the first time and go on a group training session together. Although it could have just been considered a narrative time jump, the authors added in the line that Hisone hadn’t actually flown with Masotan except for that first accidental flight when they first met. However in the anime we see Hisone have a couple of training sessions before meeting the other D-Pilots, creating another contradiction.
Despite these inconsistencies however, it’s entirely possible to simply accept everything else as canon, with these two discrepancies simply being alternate tellings of the same story since they are ultimately the same events just happening in not particularly significantly different contexts. By far the most important thing this manga adds to the story of Dragon Pilot is extra character development for Nao Kaizaki who acts as a strong foil in terms of both story and character for the main character of the anime, Hisone.
It’s told in both the anime and manga that Kaizaki’s mother was a D-Pilot, and that Kaizaki is a naturally gifted individual who wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps. However, she was rejected by Masotan and started a rivalry with Hisone, who trained to become a D-Pilot but was instead chosen to become one by Masotan. Although the anime still displays this foil very well early on, we only really see Hisone’s perspective, but the manga takes things from Kaizaki’s perspective, starting even earlier timeline-wise than the anime. Kaizaki actually sees Masotan at an arcade claw machine (trying to get a stuffed cat) before officially meeting her at the Air Force base. After being rejected by Masotan, the goal Kaizaki had been training her whole life for (also similar to Hisone’s other rival in the anime Natsume Misumi), we see Kaizaki grapple with what she perceives to be an internal failing, lying to her friends about successfully becoming a pilot both because she can’t she can’t reveal that dragons exist, and because she can’t bring herself to admit that she failed. But when she sees Hisone at the claw machine she overhears Hisone say “If I just run… What would have been the point of trying so hard up till now!?” and hearing these words encourages Kaizaki to return to the base to continue to work as best she can, even if she couldn’t get exactly what she was hoping for. Kaizaki later passes on this same lesson to Elle Hoshino a little bit ahead of where she officially learns it in the anime.
The manga ends on a light hearted note with Kaizaki finding out that it was Hisone who said those fateful words that encouraged her to stay at the air base, bringing the story full circle. Overall it’s a sweet and short turn around of the early half of the anime that allows for some nice character growth by seeing the story play out through the eyes of another character.