Flawseer's Mailbox

If Burn or Blister are still alive at the time of Blaze's ascension, Glacier would be racing against a ticking clock if she hopes to hold on to those advantages. Both of these would move to challenge Blaze as soon as possible, Burn flattening her immediately and Blister taking slightly longer, perhaps 10 minutes. It would be in Glacier's best interest to have these two assassinated in advance to avoid that.

This is a bit apropos of nothing, but if you examined this whole struggle for the throne through the lens of a video game narrative, I believe Blaze ascending would be the neutral ending, Blister ascending would be the bad ending, and Burn ascending would be the Game Over state.

But I think the real consequence of all this would be that, about a year later, Onyx' plan to challenge the Queen would actually have a shot at success, ultimately putting her on the throne. Depending on how far integrated the Sand Kingdom has become with the Ice Kingdom in the meantime, this may result in a secession war between both kingdoms.

Anemone is barely two years old (maybe not even), while Onyx is somewhere in her twenties. I think people (including the author) sometimes forget just how young Anemone actually is.

If there is any rivalry, it would be a precocious one purely from Anemone's side. I would assume Onyx has enough mental fortitude to not seriously buy into the teasings of a little half-pint ten times less her age.

Realistically though, they are not competing for the same position, so I assume Anemone would pretty much not care about Onyx at all. It is more likely she would develop something like that with Auklet, who is closer to her in age and has the same birth right as her.

Questions asked by @mr-cartoons

I think this is partially correct. Albatross was not driven to madness by Animus magic, rather he had his sense of self eroded by constant psychological torment and abuse from his sister Lagoon.

I do think Albatross was insane though. You just don't set out to make a decision you believe to be rational and arrive at "kill my sister, my entire family, and a whole lot of innocent bystanders" if you are sane. The blame for it can be pretty squarely placed at Lagoon's feet, but he was not sound of mind at the time of the massacre. I also don't think it was planned (far) in advance.

What I think happened is that Lagoon's continual harassment and guilt-slinging left Albatross in a state of turmoil through his entire life. He hated her but he also hated himself because he had a lifetime of internalizing his sister's accusations. I think she deliberately framed her incessant criticism not as "I think you're unacceptable", but "the world thinks you're unacceptable". This, in addition to giving him low self-esteem, also made him paranoid and hyper-sensitive to any form of judgment.

When Albatross started bonding with Fathom, I believe that was genuine at first. Albatross seems very earnest in his actions (it is mentioned in the main story that he was passionately charitable) and comes across to me as somewhat socially inept, so I don't know if he has the chops to fake this kind of positive endearment.

At some point later, after their bond had progressed enough, Albatross decided to share his secret project of the Summer Palace with Fathom. I assume this took some trust to do. Fathom makes an innocent mistake here and, upon seeing the construction, asks his grandfather "What's wrong with it?" This judgment immediately makes Albatross take a defensive posture, and I think it's something he remembered.

Lagoon had likely caught on that her brother was developing something positive in his life and sought to poison it as usual. So she started her habitual tirade of "you are inadequate", "your teeth are weird and you look like a freak", "everyone is ashamed to know you", but this time framed it as "I heard rumors that Fathom was saying this about you to his parents". It seemed unbelievable at first, but Albatross put this together with Fathom's earlier slight and started turning against him.

So after that, Albatross' behavior towards his grandson grew colder. Fathom tried to participate in the Summer Palace project but Albatross was defensive and shut every suggestion down. Things like "you don't know what you're talking about, you dumb pup" and "I'm not going to let a little whelp replace me" likely ran through his mind.

Then, after one day of verbal abuse too many, he snapped. He turned murderous and started killing everyone he perceived as having wronged him, which due to his sister's manipulations, was pretty much everyone. The Seawings, who weren't privy to what Lagoon was doing to Albatross behind closed doors, officially blamed this "sudden" shift in behavior on Animus-induced madness. The rest is ancient history.

The character goal for Sunny's book is ostensibly to overcome this coddling and earn the others' respect. The execution is... a little shaky. Sunny returns from being kidnapped and the others are suddenly willing to listen to her ideas, after never having done so before. That is very heart-warming, but it leaves me wondering what happened to cause this. Sunny doesn't really do anything to prove her mettle to them (other than returning from a kidnapping plot they weren't really aware was happening), they just decide to be nicer to her.

Also, I love Sunny, but her plan to deal with the rival queens is... kind of bad? If you look at it for a while, you realize that, had Sunny's plan of the peace summit progressed without scavenger intervention, it would have resulted in Blister on the throne. It only doesn't end that way because Flower/Rose somehow miraculously intuits what needs to be done (find the Eye of Onyx) and does it for them. That is despite them not being able to communicate with Flower/Rose or even attempting to. It just happens.

So here is my pretentious rambling that I can only do with the power of hindsight several years after the fact, so don't put much stock in it.

But if I could rework this ending, I would set the whole thing up as an arc-wide mystery. I would seed clues into each of the books that hint at the Eye of Onyx being the solution to the war problem and have the DoD actively make note of that. And then in her book Sunny discovers the final clue and brings it back with her, realizing that the artifact must still be somewhere in the stronghold and that Flower/Rose is the key finding it. Suddenly the peace summit being at Burn's castle becomes a calculated tactical decision instead of it just being kind of a cool and climactic venue, and Flower/Rose's involvement is set up instead of coming somewhat out of nowhere. They actually talk (sort of) to her and because of that she leads them to the Eye.

So Blister self-destructs. Sunny gets to say "Screw you Morrowseer. You told me I was dirt so I wrote the evil out of your prophecy and made it into hope", and the others would go "Holy crap, Sunny's plan just ended the war" and re-evaluate their opinion of her. She says she wants to open a joint-tribe school so dragons can live together instead of killing each other all the time. The others say "Sounds good to me" and Sunny feels good because for once, nobody objects or calls her dumb.

Now, Tsunami, that is a more intriguing question.

Would the kind of stagnant, rudimentarily characterized version of Tsunami from Arc 2 ever challenge Coral? Probably not. I think she is happy being rude to people and antagonizing Peril for some trivial slip up in the past while completely forgetting the fact that she saved Clay's life.

But Tsunami in full command of her faculties and motivations? Absolutely. It is almost a certainty.

Coral in the present is volatile, homicidally vengeful, and possessive. She has sadistically killed countless servants in acts of misplaced retribution, regularly lets her soldiers die through acts of negligence, and--most relevant to Tsunami's case--has psychologically hurt her own children through negligence, mistreatment, and in some cases active threats to their safety. Anemone's entire turn towards malevolent nihilism in Arc 2 can be attributed to her constantly being kept on a leash, in combination with being forced into an arranged marriage with someone likely ten to twenty times her age (whom she then had to kill). And Coral hasn't learned anything from it, because she now keeps her youngest child on that same leash.

In an ideal scenario, it would be possible to remove Coral from the throne bloodlessly, so Anemone and Auklet don't have to lose their mother. But unfortunately, Coral is not the reasoning type, so a solution like that is essentially impossible. It has to happen through violence, because Coral will insist on making it that way.

I think when it came down to it, Tsunami would kill Coral. Not for power, but to save her siblings and extract them from their current unhealthy living situation. Specifically, if Anemone ever decided to confide in Tsunami about the psychological scars she has from killing Whirlpool at age 1, I believe Tsunami would kill Coral just to protect Anemone from having to do it and reliving that moment (in spite of her own trauma with killing Gill).

I can't really see Tsunami staying Queen since adhering to royal etiquette isn't really in her nature, but she would likely hold onto the title until Anemone or Auklet are old and confident enough to take over, upon which she would abdicate and return to Jade Mountain.

My concern is with... Sora being part of all of this. Sora is an exceptionally difficult character to write for; you have to strike a VERY precarious balance with her. On one side of the scale, she is a tragic figure as a child of war who had her innocence cruelly stolen from her. On the other side, she is a murderer who set a bomb in a civilian area, killed two innocent people and maimed a third.

I don't know if Wings of Fire has the right tools to properly and tastefully tell the story of a complex character like this. It's a midgrade fantasy series that has a tendency to gloss over the effects of trauma and doesn't dwell on personal pain or deeply conflicting situations. As a fan you can easily extrapolate these themes if you read between the lines. But the text itself tends to keep all of it implicit. It sets the foundation, HINTS at something deeper, and then quickly moves on.

My worry is that, because of the breakneck speed at which the narrative often blows through these sensitive matters, Sora's culpability in the deaths she has caused will end up being downplayed.

See, Sora has had a difficult life. She suffered, and is generally sympathetic in that suffering. So in that light it's easy to see her involvement in the history cave explosion as a spur of the moment stress reaction that she can't really be blamed for.

"She didn't mean for this to happen, it was all just too much for her in that moment, and she made a bad split-second decision."

I used to think like that as well. But then I thought about it further, and... No. It doesn't hold up. This was not an in-the-moment mental break due to post-traumatic stress. Her act was premeditated.

See, the issue is that Sora set a bomb. So the question that needs to be answered is: Where did she get that? Did she just... have it on her from the start? Just brought it to school with her? Claimed it's her security bomb, like a blanket, and told Clay not to worry about it?

Or did she get it later, after she decided she was going to kill Icicle? In which case, where did she get it from? It's made from a cactus that grows in the wild, but like, am I to assume the DoD didn't do a sweep of the school grounds to remove any bombs that may be growing in the area? Webs was a soldier in the war, and so was Reed. Did neither of them tell the DoD to watch for this kind of thing? That would make the DoD dangerously incompetent.

So in my mind, there are only two ways this could have played out. Either Sora smuggled a live explosive into the school, which is a highly dubious decision that I think Reed would have intercepted. Or more likely she, after making the decision on-site, secretly went to the Sand or Sky Kingdom to get a bomb for her plan.

In any case, this was a plan that required at least a day of setup. "It was a temporary lapse of judgment" only holds up in that initial moment Sora heard Icicle's sleep mumblings and decided on a revenge kill. Once that moment had passed, once she was en-route to the bomb pickup and the initial adrenaline had worn off, she had time and opportunity to calm down and reconsider. To realize that her plan of setting a bomb in a school would needlessly endanger people who were not her target. But she didn't. Eliminating whom she assumed to be her sister's killer was more important to her than protecting innocent lives. That willing concession makes it premeditated, rather than accidental.

You can write a fascinating, powerful story with a character like this. A tragic victim of war who becomes so consumed by her grief that she ends up perpetuating the cycle that destroyed her life. I just don't know if Wings of Fire is the right vehicle for it. You need a lot of tact and nuance to explore this delicate situation, which I'm not sure WoF's current modus operandi can provide.

So yeah, my thoughts on the new novel: Umber good. New setting, all for it. Sora... I hope they don't do "The cave explosion was 100% Icicle's fault, Sora was innocent and didn't do anything wrong, and now that she's away from Pyrrhia she is magically healed from her PTSD and never has to answer for killing Carnelian and Bigtail and maiming Tamarin, the end."

Let's end this with less doom-saying and something slightly more constructive: If I had to decide on a story direction for Sora... I think I would make her learn that she was actually wrong about Icicle being the one who killed Crane, that she confirmation-biased herself into that conclusion and now has to grapple with the reality of having killed two innocents for essentially nothing. Maybe she meets another Icewing and realizes that she sees her sister's killer in every female Icewing's face. Maybe that Icewing is also a traumatized war survivor.

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Did you know that Sunny has a crippling addiction to yogurt? She seems nice, but that's only when she's placated. You ever wonder why Glory never shows up at Jade Mountain? That queen thing is just an excuse, it's actually because she ate Sunny's yogurt one time and Sunny has banished her from the mountain for it.

Starflight has a secret passion for wearing blue jeans. However, he wears them like this:

Everyone makes fun of him for it, but Fatespeaker kind of likes it.

Kinkajou got held back in her second year because of a horrendously botched math exam. It turns out the solution to 70% of the questions coincidentally happened to be 49, a number which she has an intense phobia of for unknown reasons.

Winter has a hauntingly beautiful singing voice. He would never admit to it and will furiously decline when he is requested to sing, but it can sometimes be heard while he is bathing.

One day, while on lookout duty, Nautilus tried to ask Avalanche out on a date. It was the only time in her life that she ever laughed out loud.

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Ah, there! I am finally free of the responsibility. Thank you for helping me escape these crushing expectations and letting me embrace my inner idiot.

There is a chance that Carnelian and Bigtail actually barely survived the history cave explosion, but died when Peril tried to pull them out of the fire (Tamarin made it because she was grabbed by Clay).

Flawseer's Inception

To begin, something I have to mention: I've previously said a few times that I am fond of Flame. At an unspecified point in the past I was discussing him with some other folks and someone made a joke about him, prompting me to reply "You can't talk about my son like that." That left an impression. Ever since I said that it became sort of a running joke that Flame is my son.

So when it came time to find a character to be the face of this blog, I made Flawseer, and to lean into that joke I wrote him to be Flame's estranged father. That's the character's backstory, he is Flame's lost Nightwing dad. The story is about the two of them meeting at Jade Mountain and the friction that comes with that.

In story context he is called Flawseer because his mother was an exiled Nightwing named Faultless who at one point felt like she had lost control of her life and decided to name her kid that as self-mockery. Out of context the name is a bit of a self-own, because I have a tendency to see (sometimes irrationally) errors and blemishes in everything I create. Originally the name was "Flawseeker" to make this even more overt, but I liked the name I eventually chose over it better.

Story

The story follows Flawseer, an adult Nightwing/Sandwing hybrid living near the small village of Stork's Landing at the Sky and Sea Kingdom border. He is an author of middling repute and somewhat reclusive, but as a Nightwing also sometimes gets hassled by the village folk into giving them prophecies. Since, like many Nightwings, he lacks actual divination powers, these prophecies are all fake, just vague enough to still be generally applicable. He gets paid with food and money for this.

About eight years before the end of the war, he meets a Skywing soldier named Avalanche after the outpost she was stationed at gets raided by Seawings. They spend some time together while she recovers until she returns to the Sky Kingdom.

Many years pass and the war eventually ends. Turns out the Dragonets of Destiny put a stop to it, and they also released a public statement that Nightwing powers are not real. The dragons of Stork's Landing take these news very well. They promptly march to Flawseer's cave to... "talk" to him about it, some even bringing sharp implements for punctuation. Very respectful when approaching a writer.

Flawseer is encouraged to flee south and hides out on one of the small islands near the southern coast by the rainforest. He meets another Nightwing who informs him that the tribe now lives in the rainforest. Flawseer has no interest in moving in with them because he dislikes the rainforest climate. He also learns that the "Nightwing Queen" is a Dragonet of Destiny, prompting a disturbing mental image of Queen Battlewinner hanging out with a group of young dragonets, "hello fellow kids" style.

The founding of the Jade Mountain Academy is then brought up, and Flawseer endeavors to go there and meet the dragons who uprooted his life. He comes in to complain but is taken aback by Sunny being a hybrid kind of like himself and gets won over by her vision of a place where the division between tribes is meaningless. He decides to integrate and offers his service as a teacher of literacy (in the canon story this is Starflight, but here they move him over to math). They don't really have a place for him, so they make him share an office and sleeping cave with Webs. This is about two months before the start of Arc 2 and the arrival of Moonwatcher at the academy.

Arc 2 begins proper and the students start to filter in. Among them is Flame, a Skywing with curiously dark dorsal scales who Flawseer notes looks somewhat similar to Avalanche. He is able to confirm the identity of the Skywing's mother soon after and realizes Flame is his son. He is over the moons for this and jovially (and somewhat tactlessly) invites him to talk.

Flame meanwhile completely hates this. He is suddenly confronted with the idea of being half Nightwing--which makes his trauma resurface--and he is also not happy about being faced with this sudden surprise dad and put off by his casual approach. A very volatile argument breaks out between them and Flame tells Flawseer to get bent and stay out of his life.

The rejection sends Flawseer reeling and he is clueless how to deal with this situation. He sinks into a bit of an emotional funk. At the same time, while teaching his literacy class at the academy, he notices Turtle's budding talent as a writer and they bond. While Flawseer's relationship with Flame remains terse and distant, he gets along much better with the more even-tempered Seawing. He is eager and willing to give parental guidance, but also begins to worry whether he might subconsciously be trying to replace his unapproachable son with one that is more docile and easy to handle.

Turtle also struggles with this development. His experiences with his own absentee parents see him drawn to this potential paternal figure who actually seems to appreciate him. At the same time his imposter syndrome is making him wonder if he deserves this kind of attention. He worries Flawseer will lose interest in him if he doesn't write, which he can't do due to his trauma-induced writer's block. It makes him feel anxious and insecure, like this source of positivity will not last.

The rest of the story, which runs parallel to everything that happens in Arc 2, deals with Flawseer's attempts to navigate all of these feelings. He tries to uncover more about Flame's past and trauma, figures out what can be done to mend the hostile relationship in a more graceful way, and learns what it means to be a good and thoughtful father to those who need him.

In addition to all the other complicated problems occurring at the academy at the time. Something about a Doorstalker guy? What's that?

In the end, Flame and Flawseer do reconcile and begin a more healthy and stable parental relationship. Flame decides to stay at Jade Mountain after Arc 2, instead of leaving like in the canon story. He mellows out in the following years and uses the educational opportunities at the academy to become a healer. Flawseer also decides to adopt Turtle, who overcomes his self-loathing as he does in the canon story. He eventually declines his birthright of some shitty middle rank in the Seawing military in favor of becoming JMA's new teacher of literacy.

In closing

There are some details I glossed over. I wanted to hold them back in case I ever do decide to try writing a summary reconstruction of book 10. And also because this post is long and self-indulgent enough already.

Here's a little known fact about Orca: She was actually not always an animus. This isn't something she told a lot of people, but she became magic later in life by doing 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, and 100 squats, followed by a 10 km swim every day for 3 years.

She had to start wearing a wig to stop her mother from asking questions about it. It was REALLY annoying to do it underwater.