i think you already know if you want - you might even say need - to read this book based on the two brief posts I made about it earlier tonight, but this book was very heartwarming and very good and I made multiple dives across my table to pull up nitori (+saori)'s writings about onimai
I Guess This Dragon Who Lost Her Egg to Disaster Is My Mom Now, first and foremost, is a TSF (transsexual fantasy) book that places the center of the bullseye, at the author's explicit mention, closer to "the euphoria of being cute" than "the euphoria of being a girl".
(no, I didn't know that at all going into the book! yes, I did immediately flip back to the cover, look at the title, and say "haha egg")
the distance between these is - to my feelings - probably very different depending on each individual's experiences, but the notes this book rings are loud and clear and should hit home for people with a variety of experiences.
[EDIT: coming back to this post for a fourth edit to mention that, if you didn't click my other link about this book, that Dragon Lost Egg is about a guy who gets shanked by his own party and wakes up with a cute look, a dragon for a mom, and an inability to remember her old name, but a knowledge that her new name feels right]
this is due to what I feel is a very big strength of this book, in using the dragongirlification of the main character as a center pillar to build both a moving story about cross-culture, parent-child relationships and a satisfyingly redemptive story about the invisible labor of unglamorous jobs
Lushera and her dragon mom share neither a language nor culture, which forces them to shove their immense feelings of gratitude, anxiety, guilt, and care through small-bandwidth packets of broken sentences and gestures and sacrifices, something that left me continually flashing back to a game I played this weekend which is explicitly about an immigrant family and their natural-born child communicating with food through a disconnect in culture
likewise, this book also gave me hints of when I'd be standing on my chair reading Sexiled and whooping at its cathartic revenge upon sexist pricks that were clearly modeled after the 2018 Tokyo Medical University Scandal
said catharticism in Dragonegg Lost's - in addition from the image-validating notes it hits - comes from a labor angle of all places, very clearly praising and redeeming the work of those who do all the unglamorous, invisible work to keep the gears of braggart, low-paying, credit-stealing assholes running smoothly, while dealing clear shame and punishment upon the latter
and together, these three themes mix together surprisingly well into a warm, validating cup of tea of a read, spiced up a little bit by a light kick of geographical politics (a.k.a "what if Mutually Assured Destruction was Mutually Assured Dragon"). it's not heavy! it's not intricate! but it feels fantastically good. you know if you want this book. listen to yourself.



