The Dragon's School is on Top of the Mountain - Vol. 1 Ch. 8 - The Dragon's School is on Top of the Mountain

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The glass guy appears again in the "Group Interview" omake .

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really? just make a dragon zoo.

you don't see any practical use for tigers these days. and they're still alive and well in zoos.

or make a dragon racing. sam like horse, no use, but still popular.

or bred them for the skin. aligator did it. why can't you?
 
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@Mogima, I completely agree, how dragon racing has not completely superseded horse racing in that world boggles my mind. I mean why watch a boring horse race, when you can have a course that spans land, air, and sea (assuming you can teach dragons to dive)
 
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@balenol
I think racing is really the only option for sports. The physical requirements for regulated flight-based racing seem like they would be nearly insurmountable, but maybe if it were a serious destination (like only having one major racing venue in the country) it might work. It seemed like the larger terrestrial dragons would be too bulky and not actually terribly fast.
 
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This one is done by the dungeon meishi mangaka! Id recognize her style anywhere!
 
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Very interesting read.

You can apply this same argument for most species on earth, actually only very few are of human “use” and we have time and time again let die all those non charismatic species that can’t adapt to the world we ourselves have changed.
Even in that alternate universe I doubt every one in every country would think that dragons are useless and unnecessary more than say, tigers or polar bears. They would just be endangered or extinct in the wild, maybe their genomes would get sampled because the evolution of the third pair of limbs for one reason or another.
No one is trying to make use of giant salamanders or river ray, no one pretends whiptails or caecilians are good or charismatic pets, yet people do study them. We have studied fossil for hundreds of years and there’s literally no reason why to, dinosaurs or giant marine reptiles or eocene megafauna are all dead for good and tells us nothing about how to make more money, yet still we care about them, I care about them, those baffling ediacaran and cambrian fauna that has no living descendants, which we can’t even tell if they were actually animals or plants or vertebrates or whatnot, all those halucigenias, opabinias and tully monsters.

I think dragons would be safe, if they were real, because we can care about things that we shouldn’t have to. If they can make us wonder and ask ourselves questions, inspire us or amuse us, they are good enough to keep around, even in a world that we ourselves made inhospitable for them. All in all, we owe them that much, just like we owe all those insect and amphibians that go extinct every year in our world. We owe them a place that we took from them, with our microplastics and our climate change, but in the end, no species lasts for ever and neither will we. We keep zoos and museums exactly because they can inspire us, and to remind us what we’ve lost, and what we will lose...
 
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This was definitely an interesting read. It becomes a bit more uncomfortable as well if you replace "Dragon" with "Neet" :). Definitely gets into fundamental debates about things like utilitarianism or what really is the nature of "use" and "value". Is it really "useful" for any of us to even be here reading manga at all? Series like this might really make us think a bit, but would some omniscient being really conclude that was the "best" possible use of our time vs some other activity? It's more than questionable whether such a hyper optimized ultra utilitarian managed world even be one we'd want to live in taking it to its logical conclusion, and worse there is a certain degree of arrogance in just assuming highly complex products of eons of evolution would be valued the same way decades or centuries for now as we do in the present. Is it really all ours to squander?

So yeah great story, Kui really thinking about environmentalism and philosophies of value from a different angle. Can see the influence on Dungeon Meshi.
 
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The fact that there aren't plenty of dragon clubs, where you could ride dragons, is less believable than the existence of the dragon themselves: as we have plenty of horse girls, that world would be full of dragon boys...
 
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That is, probably, the least likable chapter in this series. The whole concept of "usefulness" is very egocentric. We live in an extremely complex ecosystem where there're absolutely no useless living beings. We are all part of an endless producer-consumer cycle, and ironically only Homo Sapience as a species can be considered the most useless in Earth's ecosystem. So, if dragons were ever present on Earth as a product of evolution rather than magic, they would have been irreplaceable or at least played their part at a given period of Earth's evolution.
 

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