What happens when you turn a member of a moe support cast into a protagonist in her own right? Zero no Tsukaima Gaiden — Tabitha no Bouken answers this question, or at least meets it head-on with guns blazing and missiles barraging, by giving its parent series’ resident silent moekko Tabitha Orleans a chance to take center stage. I wonder if this is really necessary, but I like Tabitha, as far as moeblobs go, so…well, let’s at least see how it begins.
…Well then. Business as usual in Halkeginia. And I so enjoyed the first season of the anime, too.
You may wonder if this disrobing scene, to which the only color page of the chapter is devoted, becomes relevant later on. The answer is, of course, no.
But I digress, as usual. What drew me to the manga in the first place was its promoting a character known for long stretches of silence into a central role — or, rather, it was curiosity; “How does that work?” I wondered. And, come to find out, the first chapter doesn’t seem to be about Tabitha much at all. A solid half of it, or maybe more, deals with some village and its conflict with magical bird-people (lest we forget it’s Zero no Tsukaima…). The other half seems to be carried by Tabitha’s pet dragon, who talks like a genki girl on the most expensive drugs you can imagine. I recall Sylpheed actually turning into a cracked-out genki girl in the third season of the anime, but adding the girlish dialogue to the dragon form of the thing leads to a feeling of grating disjointedness.
For what it’s worth, I think ZnT Gaiden is at least cursorily interesting in that it fills out the Zero no Tsikaima setting with little details that wouldn’t have been present otherwise, such as the aforementioned village and magic bird-people. If the first chapter is any indication, it’s almost reminiscent of Sorcerer Hunters in its focus on the common folk. Perhaps Tabitha’s silence makes her an ideal point-of-view character for that sort of thing, a conduit for other people’s voices. It makes me wonder what a Kanon digression starring Mai might look like, or even a Clannad digression starring Nagisa — these characters don’t seem in any way predisposed to be protagonists, if a character can be said to be predisposed to be anything.
