WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid S Episode 5, "Together With You (Well, If We Get Along)," now streaming on Crunchyroll.
Five episodes into the second season of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, the new character of Ilulu remains a subject of controversy. While all the dragons in the series are thousands of years old, there have been a ton of mixed signals about what equivalent human age Ilulu is meant to be interpreted as. While stated multiple times to be an adult around Tohru's age, her design and characterization send mixed signals in multiple directions that have managed to creep viewers out.
Ilulu is slightly taller than the show's child characters but significantly shorter than the other adults. She could easily be mistaken for a child if not for her disproportionately gigantic "fire sacs." While fans describing short canonically adult characters as being "child-like" can enter problematic discourse territory, Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid S hasn't been helping matters by having Ilulu always hanging out with actual children, even going so far as to frame her interactions with Riko as parallel to Kanna's.
Episode 5's second half focuses on Ilulu and provides some psychological justification for why she's always hanging out with young kids. As someone who essentially had her childhood happiness stolen from her, she now wants nothing more than to make children happy. She finds a more age-appropriate outlet for this mission by getting a part-time job in a candy shop. For all the iffiness around her presentation, Ilulu has been a pretty well-written character, and this character development for her is nice.
Even this episode of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid S more firmly situates Ilulu as an adult, however, it ends up being creepy for another reason. When applying for the candy store job, she lies about her age and claims to be 16 ("That's what we're telling people," she says turning towards the screen and almost breaking the fourth wall). Her co-worker, an actual 16-year-old boy named Taketo Aida, is immediately taken with her in classic fan service anime, nosebleeding fashion. This might be one thing if the sexualized affection was one-sided, but Ilulu goes on to state that she likes Take "second to Kobayashi."
There's some ambiguity as to whether Ilulu is distinguishing between liking someone as a friend and liking someone sexually, but given that her interest in Kobayashi is explicitly sexual, it's all too easy to interpret predatory vibes from her relationship with Take. Ilulu might not actually be a sexualized teenager, like some viewers feared from looking at her design, but the fact she might very well be an adult creeping on a teenager continues to make her story unfortunately problematic.
New episodes of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid S stream Wednesdays on Crunchyroll.
