WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid S Episode 6, "Uncanny Relationships (One Side Is a Dragon)," now streaming on Crunchyroll.
At its best, Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is a hilarious and heartwarming story of wacky misfits finding family among each other. At its worst, it's a showcase of creepy age-inappropriate behavior and fan service pandering to a very specific niche of otaku. Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid S Episode 6 doesn't fix the show's problematic aspects, but it does help to explain how both the good and bad parts of the series stem from the same source.
The revealing explanation occurs in the second of the episode's three segments, focusing on the least sexualized of the show's "uncanny relationships" - Fafnir and his human otaku roommate/best friend/possible boyfriend Takiya. As the couple negotiates whether they need a magical "binding" for their relationship, Fafnir reveals some important details about how dragon culture and physiology differ from humans'.
According to Fafnir, dragons have no concept of being an "adult" or "child." Some might technically be younger than others, but neither mental nor physical maturity is something dragons would measure on their own -- brute strength levels are their only concern. Dragons also don't have a concept of family within their culture, with parents abandoning the young. Everything the dragons have been doing while living in the human world has been an attempt to copy humanity and fit in. Fafnir pretends to find this desire silly and be above it, but it's clear he genuinely enjoys life with Takiya and his video games.
This single conversation nails both what's sweet about Dragon Maid and what's uncomfortable about it. The Fafnir/Takiya segment follows up the season's first segment focused on Lucoa and Shouta, the show's most uncomfortable relationship, so the discomfort isn't going away any time soon. However, it makes sense that Lucoa's unintentionally inappropriate behavior toward her child summoner is an attempt to find familial belonging as an ageless being without any experience of "family" or any human norms. Tohru and Kobayashi's "found family" is a sweeter, less creepy presentation of the same concept.
Writing an in-universe explanation for problematic material doesn't negate the problems with it, as anyone who's rolled their eyes at some creepy fan service show excusing the sexualization of a prepubescent girl by saying "she's actually 10,000 years old." However, the particular explanation of the dragons' psychology does help explain the emotional drive that makes the show overall so charming -- even when some of its content pushes the limits of good taste.
New episodes of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid S stream Wednesdays on Crunchyroll.