The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Good Bye, Dragon Life

Dolan was once the strongest dragon until humans killed him. Now, Dolan has been reborn into a human villager who is devoted to working in the fields and hunting animals for food. It is a simpler life that fills his heart with joy. One day, he meets a lamia named Celina while investigating the swamp. Celina is searching for a mate but is not good at seducing humans. Although one is a human and the other is a monster, they slowly begin to connect to one another. However, they run into various enemies...

Good Bye, Dragon Life is based on the light novel series by Hiroaki Nagashima with illustrations by Kisuke Ichimaru. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Let's start out with the good things about Good Bye, Dragon Life. I like that it treats its premise with complete seriousness. Dolan is an ancient dragon reborn as a human. In his first life, he was killed simply because he was a dragon—though he had never harmed humans and even aided them. Reborn as a human, he has the chance to live a life far different from his first: one of peace and obscurity.

Moreover, I enjoy that there's no “dumb comedy”—and by that I mean no pratfalls or accidental pervert shenanigans. Heck, there's very little fanservice in general (outside of Celina's general character design). And then there's the music. It's frankly fantastic. It sounds like something out of a top-tier JRPG—both perfect for the setting and way above the quality of what most fantasy anime put out.

But for all that, the issue remains: this first episode is boring. As a dragon, Dolan is aloof to a high degree. While he values his new family, he acts more like an elderly grandfather than the man he appears to be. While this fits his character, it means that he can't see when people are flirting with him. It also means he has none of the drive of the young—no need to want to go out and have adventures. He'd be more than happy never leaving his small village. In other words, he's a passive protagonist.

While many protagonists start out this way, this first episode presents nothing like a “call to adventure,” nothing that messes up Dolan's normal life and sends him out into the greater world. This leaves me with one burning question: What's the point? Why should I care about Dolan? He is detached from the world around him and will only experience conflict if said conflict comes to him directly. But who knows, I've never been one for “slow life” fantasy stories, so maybe this anime will scratch that itch for those who do. But as for me, I think I'll pass on this one.

It bodes poorly when I'm talking about a show and the highest praise I can think of is for all the things it doesn't do. Good Bye, Dragon Life doesn't quantify the world through things like levels and stats. It doesn't open with the protagonist, Dolan, walking into an adventurers' guild. It doesn't have a female receptionist cheerily describe the basic structure of the world to someone who ostensibly grew up there. There's nothing mean-spirited or cynical baked into the world-building. The characters do not give off a strange glow to hide poor compositing or an inability to shade with a consistent light source.

But then, when it comes time to think about the things it does do, I come up almost blank. It's a perfectly generic world with no real distinguishing features. An ancient dragon was slain, then reincarnated into the body of a human named Dolan. Dolan lives in a peaceful village where the denizens live in peace and cooperate to survive harsh winters and sweltering summers. He's an adult on his own, but visits his family often and doesn't feel ready to marry. Even when he strikes out to find out why the lizard people have disappeared from the swamp, the village fortune teller only foretells “minor misfortune.” It's just kind of there.

It doesn't get any more engaging when Dolan heads to the swamp. There, he meets Celina, a lamia perfectly molded to the “ditzy anime girl” archetype. And why, she just happens to be looking for a husband whose dick won't melt off if he sticks it in her venomous snake hoo-ha! Not that Dolan seems particularly interested in her ample snake bosom, but even if he isn't, a sizable proportion of the audience will be. They might not even notice that the animators have a hard time making her pupils point in the same direction or that she consistently has a glazed stare instead of looking at Dolan with any kind of life or expression.

It's… fine. A twenty-minute shrug in anime form.

In fantasy anime like Goodbye, Dragon Life, I am a fan of when we get reincarnated heroes who actually started life as weird monsters before they became humans. It's a more interesting perspective, so far as I'm concerned, and it shares the benefit that some villainess anime possess where we get to appreciate the growth of a character that is trying to improve on their former life in means more nuanced than simply making all of the haters who used to give them wedgies look like total chodes, or whatever is going on in Generic Isekai-Mush Receptacle #75642. Dolan seems like a nice enough guy, now that he's been freed from his dragon rage and all, and I hope he gets to enjoy his new life as a mostly regular dude.

I enjoyed watching the chronicles of his reborn adventures more than I expected, that's for sure. It might be because the setting and characters of this show feel ever so slightly more fleshed out than a lot of the competition. Where too many shows are content to recycle the most generic and forgettable slop imaginable, Goodbye, Dragon Life's world building is at least on par with an above-average RPG Maker game that was produced by real fans of the genre.

Celina the Lamia is more likeable than the average Ditzy Blonde Waifu, I think, because her goofy monster culture is a part of her characterization and motivation. It's hard out there for a snake-lady when your whole species has to go on whole treks across the land just to find a guy who can withstand your bone-meltingly poisonous bodily fluids long enough to propagate some offspring. Will Dolan's reserved charms be enough to win Celina's heart? Yeah, obviously, what kind of show do you think we're watching, here? The real question is, will Dolan's conveniently magical blood be enough to guard his squishy insides against the viscous toxins of her monstrous loins? The jury is still out on that one, but I'm rooting for you, buddy!

Anyway, this was a decent little time, no more, and no less. So far as low-key fantasy anime go, you could do far worse. Goodbye, Dragon Life is not the kind of anime that will win any awards or change any lives but it will satisfy genre fans without alienating casual viewers that are simply looking for an easy way to kill some time after a long day of hunting down Earth golems and hitting on freaky serpent chicks.