yeah this has been a long time coming—honestly i can't believe it's taken me so long to write another analysis on him lol.

flame is a character that wof fans are far too quick to write off. they see the arrogance, the bitterness, the lashing out, and they stop looking there—never questioning why he acts the way he does. but when you start to peel back those layers, when you start to actually pay attention to what the books show us about him, it becomes painfully clear that flame is not just some cruel, irredeemable antagonist. he’s a kid who has spent his entire life feeling like he’s nothing. and everything he does, all of his anger, his cruelty, his desperation to be taken seriously, comes from that.

he spent his childhood constantly on the move with the talons of peace, never having a real home, never forming any meaningful connections beyond his mother. avalanche, the only dragon who truly loved him, gave up everything to keep him out of the skywing army, but that didn’t spare him from being used and discarded by morrowseer, from being thrown into the prophecy. and for a brief, fleeting moment, i'm sure he had hope—hope that maybe, just maybe, he was meant for something greater, that he was destined to end a war. but then he found out that he wasn’t. he was never a hero, never meant to be anything but a second choice. a backup. disposable.

and then, the skywing outpost massacre.

he gets to meet other skywings for what is likely the first time in his life. and he wants them to see him as one of them—he tries to play the part, acting confident, trying to impress them. he wants to belong. but before he even gets the chance, he’s dragged away and forced to watch them burn alive. right in front of him.

and he’s clearly shaken afterward, so much so that he goes to deathbringer in the prison, asking how to kill another dragon fast—without thinking about it, without remorse. because he thinks that’s what it means to be strong, to be a skywing. because he thinks maybe, if he learns to do that, he’ll be able to forget what he saw. and because deep down, he believes that if he doesn’t learn, if he doesn’t harden himself, he’s worthless. he’s weak. (and we even see early in book 4 that he really isn't this bloodthirsty, skilled, edgy killer—morrowseer literally has to tell him how to use his fire correctly, and starflight is easily able to outpace him.)

this “kill or be nothing” mentality is something that i think is deeply ingrained in skywing culture. their entire society is built around strength, aggression, and war. i mean, under scarlet's reign, they literally had a gladiator arena where war prisoners were forced to fight to the death for amusement. they worship power and despise weakness. flame didn’t grow up in this environment, but he no doubt heard about it through his mother. he knows what it means to be a skywing, or at least, what the world tells him it means. and no matter what he does, he always feels like he isn’t enough. (we even see this is book six: carnelian is quick to dismiss him as nothing more than a weak member of the talons of peace, barely a skywing at all.)

not even a day after the outpost massacre, he’s forced to fight the other false dragonets—the only other dragons he's ever known. he’s permanently scarred, something he sees as a mark of weakness, of shame. and he has to watch viper, one of the only dragons he’s ever known, die in front of him, boiled alive in lava. another wound. another loss. and he carries it all, bottling it up, with nowhere to put it but in self-loathing.

his scar is a permanent, ugly thing. it's his constant reminder that he was weak when it mattered most. we see other dragons (namely qibli) view their scars as proof of survival, something to be proud of. but when he looks at his reflection, all he sees is failure. he should have been stronger. he should have been faster. he should have been better. he even goes as far as to think that bigtail and carnelian were lucky that they'd been killed in the history cave bombing, or else they'd be "scarred shambling monsters" like he was.

his self-image issues are one of the most defining parts of his character. he genuinely believes that he is unlovable, that his own mother—the only dragon who's ever cared about him—must hate his scar just as much as he does. despite all the love she has for him, despite all the sacrifices she made to keep him safe, he can’t bring himself to believe in it. because who could love a monster like him?

that’s why darkstalker’s offer to heal him is such an important moment. the scar represents everything to him—the pain, the humiliation, the feeling of being weak and broken and beyond saving. and yet, when given the chance to erase it, he doesn't believe darkstalker. not because he doesn’t want to be healed, but because he doesn’t think he deserves it. nobody has ever given him anything out of kindness before. nobody has ever offered him something without wanting something in return. he doesn’t trust it. he doesn’t trust himself to have it. because the scar is proof of what he is, and he has spent so long believing that what he is is unworthy.

flame doesn’t think he deserves kindness. not in a way that makes him sad, not in a way that makes him pity himself. it’s just a fact, something that’s always been true. he’s hurt others, so it must be better this way. he knows where he stands when he’s alone. no one can betray him if he never lets them close. if they knew him, really knew him, they’d regret it. they’d turn away, just like everyone else has. it’s better to push them away before they get the chance.

when fatespeaker and starflight offer to get him off of the nightwing volcano island, he doesn't believe them. he doesn't understand why a fabled dragonet of destiny, a hero, would save him. he doesn't think that he deserves to be saved, and he doesn't agree to follow them when fatespeaker says that she's doing it because he's her friend. in fact, he only goes along after starflight says that they can use his scar as a tool to get them off the island.

all of this makes him shut himself off from other dragons, afraid that if they look too closely, they’ll see him the same way he sees himself—weak, broken, not enough. and this becomes bitterness, anger at the world, at himself. it eats away at him, gnaws at the edges of everything he is until there’s nothing left but self-loathing. we get a raw glimpse of this in book 6 when moon reads his mind—when we see how deeply he believes he doesn’t even deserve his mother’s love because of his scars, how convinced he is that no one takes him seriously, how certain he is that he has no friends, no allies, no one at all.

and the thing is, he never gets a real recovery arc. he never gets to heal, not really. flame is a character defined by his trauma, by his anger and his grief and his loneliness, and tui never truly explores what it would mean for him to move past it. the dreamvisitor subplot? dropped. his potential mind-reading sensitivity? unexplored. the parallel between him and stonemover—both dragons who see themselves as irredeemable, who think they deserve their suffering—left unexamined.

(which, speaking of stonemover, i wholeheartedly believe that darkstalker enchanted flame to attempt to murder him. think about it: flame is shown earlier to have wished to have bombed the history cave himself and essentially shout it from the rooftops, so that he could be taken seriously for once. so why would he silently try to kill some old man and slink away unnoticed? it's entirely in darkstalker's character to do this, too; he has no issue enchanting others to make his story flow the way he wants it to. "saving" stonemover from flame allows him to present himself as a hero, lets moon and her friends believe that he really can be trusted, and gives him an opportunity to sneak in any extra enchantments on stonemover.)

and not to mention the parallels between flame and glory—struggling with self-image issues, projecting their self-hatred onto everyone else world; and yet, glory finds solace and comfort in the support of other dragons because she actually had friends, which led her to accept herself, while flame's lack of such support caused him to spiral further into self-loathing—and yet, tui never has the two counterparts interact in the whole series.

i also wish tui touched on how the history cave bombing must have impacted flame. the moment the explosion went off, the fire, the panic—it certainly must have reopened a fresh wound, one that hadn't even begun to heal. because he’s been there before. he’s seen this before. back at the skywing outpost, when he watched members of his own tribe burn alive right in front of him. dragons screaming, fire swallowing everything, the smell of smoke and scorched flesh choking the air. and now it’s right in front of him again.

and people still call him evil. they see the anger, the bitterness, the pain, and they refuse to look past it. but flame is not a villain. he is a product of everything that was done to him, of everything he was forced to endure. his story is one of loss and self-hatred, of a desperate, misguided attempt to make himself worth something in a world that has never valued him. and it makes him one of the most tragically compelling characters in the entire series.

bonus: this really maniacal picture of flame that i think is really funny

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