Kairos: Tome 3 by Ulysse Malassagne – Book Review by Fred Patten
by Pup Matthias
Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.
Kairos. Tome 3, by Ulysse Malassagne.
Roubaix, France, Ankama Éditions, January 2015, hardcover €11.90 (64 pages), Kindle $7.99.
Thanks once more to Lex Nakashima for getting this from Amazon.fr and sharing it with me. This is in French, but it’s mostly cartoon artwork. Since there’s no sign of an English-language edition, here is the French original.
And so the saga is over.
To recap, Niils loves the mysterious Anaëlle. During a camping trip in the French countryside, she is kidnapped by dragon knights and taken through a dimensional portal. Niils follows them into the anthropomorphic dragons’ world. In t.2, it turns out that Anaëlle is the dragon kingdom’s princess; she escaped into our human world and took on a human form to escape a forced marriage to her own father; she was tracked down and seized by the dragon knights to fulfill her destiny; Niils goes after her and finds that the dragon commoners are ready to revolt against their royal family; and he leads a revolution even while he is turning into a dragon himself.
In this conclusion – well, see for yourself. It’s mostly art. Since I assume that in this case spoilers are wanted, the key events are that Princess Anaëlle agrees to wed her father. “Since tradition is so important to you, I’ll marry you. I’ll assume my powers and take the crown… But know this… With me, our dynasty ends. I’ll never have children, yours or anyone else’s. I’ll reign long enough to reestablish justice among the dragons, and the tyrannical monarchy of our family will die with me.”
As for Niils, she rejects him. “Your body is becoming a dragon [in this dimension], but your heart will remain a human’s. You’ll die if you stay here.” Also, she refuses any smothering love from anyone. She ran away from the dragon world to escape it from her royal parents, and Niils’ on Earth was becoming just as bad. “I only thought of you…,” Niils says. “Everything I did was for you!” “No, everything that you did was for YOU! I never asked you to become my devoted knight. You’ve always made me the center of your universe. As if you can only exist by rotating around me. It’s time for you to accept that you have a life besides being half of our couple. […] Return to your world and live your life.”
I have been impressed with Kairos ever since Malassagne made his own animated trailer for it at his La Cachette animation studio and posted it on YouTube. Now all three hardbound albums are out. What will Malassagne do next? He has already begun Jade, which isn’t anthropomorphic but is very good. Check it out.