Winterings

Winter is someone who hesitates before sinking his claws into something as small as prey, who feels compassion for creatures despite every dragon around him telling him that they're nothing. He is someone who was taught to care for no one, but he can't help but care for his siblings endlessly, and later, his friends.

Winter is clever, he isn't the best at fighting but he is crafty and he uses anything at his disposal to do Anything. Someone like Icicle would just yell at the winglet to move when the Scavenger's blazing fireball rushed their way, but Winter immediately threw himself toward it and used his ice breath to lessen the damage and warn his friends, which, by the way, him managing to hit a speeding projectile and having the reaction speed and aim to do so???? SO COOL.

He is just someone who is struggling to survive in a world where he needs to be strong, but being strong is impossible for him, and instead uses his smarts to try and survive, all with a dream of someday thriving in this world. (Notice how this sentence can be used for both Qibli and Winter?)

-

People love characterizing Qibli as being completely different from Winter, when their whole thing is that they're VERY similar, but with rather opposite circumstances and backstories.

When they were in the scorpion den, Qibli didn't even have to tell Winter to do anything! Winter immediately began acting like a snooty, dumb, overconfident prince in order to get the attention off of him, he mostly stayed quiet while Qibli talked - Qibli literally notes this!!!

And the only example of him not doing that is him speaking up after Vulture talked about eating scavengers because again, he is someone who questions authority, he is someone who fights for what he thinks is right, he's just a survivor and his survival strategy is to Be Smart and Follow Orders!!!

Winter knew that Cobra was a threat despite the reader not even knowing, he didn't need to be told to restrain Cobra, he just knew! Because he's smart!!! Winter is observant just like Qibli, both of them are incredibly clever, just in different, but familiar, ways because they learned to survive in different, but familiar, ways!

And!!! For examples that he's gentle, when he hurt Qibli he literally sat outside in the Burning Sun, as an Icewing, waiting for Qibli to wake up. Alone! He was so worried and sad that he kept with Qibli and stayed by his side despite being a fish out of water, and not being built for this climate at all.

Him in the Diamond Trial is such a perfect example of how he questions authority. The moment he sees a way to break the rules without any consequences he jumps on it. He knows he isn't meant for the Ice Kingdom, it hurts, but staying will kill him. Literally. He then proceeds to manage to sneak him and Foeslayer out of the Heavily Fortified Ice Kingdom.

A lot of things about skywing society have changed recently. Aerie, once a term that was used to describe smaller family groups, can now be used to describe large tracts of land governed by a lead family of nobles, appointed to lead subsections of the Queens domain. The Cliff Skywings (ones from the northish mountain-forested regions) are the ones the other dragons are most familiar with and are currently the dominant group, with a Cliff skywing being the current queen, uniting disparate aeries under her newly formed military with the proposed goal of gaining more land and resources from their neighbors, drawing on the average Skywings’ desperation for better living conditions and security against famine and disease. Cliffs have a much more rigid gender divide (which they see as a reflection of their bodies’ Event-given “purposes”, the female lays eggs and more or less just leaves, leaving care of them with the males other than delivering kills), which has been reinforced further by legislation by the Queen (for example, adding “marriage” as a thing to officially lock down partners of a female rather than have it be a less formal arrangement/the males switch between partners and there wasn’t a lot of female supervision on eggs as long as new workers for the family were being made. The marriage thing was proposed to make it easier for females to ensure their eggs weren’t just being discarded/replaced with another females/their sire running off and not supporting the group, and to help make record-keeping and direct inheritance/successor stuff easier since again it makes sure that males aren’t running off with the eggs to do whatever (But the main motivation is that it helps keep property and wealth tied to the female, since she now has exclusivity with a specific pool of males to work with and can pass things directly to successors that for sure came from them. It also limits social mobility for males, keeping them reliant and in service to a female. This also allows the nobility to have a large group of suitors bound to them under threat of punishment and homelessness to raise more successors and workers for them). I’m still kinda working on this system some things may not work. It’s kind of a combo of birds of prey where females and males are different sizes for less hunting competition between each other (different prey size needs) and for the female to be able to defend the nest, except the male is the one in the nest raising eggs (having duller coloration to blend in). M are smaller because there’s usually a couple of them there in the nesting area, they work together and don’t need size because the female is providing food and defense). Plains and boreal are more monomorphic, sharing care more equally. Idk idk

Here’s a map of super generalized populations for those with very distinct groups based on appearance/environmental specialization btw. I wanted to figure out where im talking about here (does Not reflect past or present borders and is very messy I’ll need to work on it, this is just kinda where they tend to live). The text got smudged but it’s meant to say that open water seawings migrate around the continent. Technically should’ve added Icewings too since their polar guys look different but theyre found in just a very narrow strip at the very top left of land there.

For instance, you are seemingly correct about fruit being massive. Kinkajou feeds Winter's starving scavenger Bandit with a single blueberry. Pineapple makes mention of bananas growing in large bunches that need to be sawed free with multiple Rainwings. Sunny finds one carrot and shows it to Clay and talks about it like it's significant. The entire resolution of arc 2 relies on a strawberry which is large enough that an enormous dragon like Darkstalker can meaningfully interact with it.

And it's not just the produce either. Animals seem to be super-sized as well. Rainwings keep sloths as pets and they seem to be of a comfortably handle-able size. Winter sees one and thinks "this will be a decent meal" instead of "how can I get full on the equivalent of a single french fry?".

There is a magic hole in the Ice Kingdom you can pull seals from to feed yourself, which makes sense if you assume a seal is about meal-sized compared to a dragon (think of like a nice hamburger), but becomes strange if they retain their size compared to humans. I mean, it still works since the supply is infinite, so you can just pull out 50 of them. But at that point why not pick something of a more comfortable snack size, like a walrus or a small whale?

Moonwatcher catches a goat at one point and it's big enough to feed her and Qibli. The ancient Nightwings knew how to make cheese and thus presumably had cows or another milk animal large enough to milk. Riptide manages to knock himself out by swimming into a whale (could have been a really large whale like a blue whale, but still). Clay releases a flock of chicken and they don't seem to be bug-sized to him. A centipede/bug thing crawls onto Winter's face and is large enough to be noticed. And there are snakes massive enough that their bite can break dragon skin.

To stay sane among all of this chaos, I personally imagine that all fruit, plants, and animals in the setting are sized vaguely relative to the dragons, and then the scavengers are caught in a weird Gulliver's Travels scenario where they are unusually small compared to everything else.

Excerpt from WoF Graphic Novel. Incidentally makes a decent emote.

Anyway, you're right. I have not read Dragonslayer. But if I ever do, it better be about humans having to raise bugs as livestock and fending off man-sized chicken and rabbits while their hunting party returns from the woods with a single papaya that then feeds the entire village. Otherwise I'm going to be severely disappointed. I want them to see a melon and they're just awestruck because they've never seen so much food before. I want there to be joyous weeping in the scavenger streets at the melon feast. Then Coconut comes by and eats it before they can, and he becomes the devil-analogue in their new religion created in the following depression.

The size of scavengers, fruits, and other animals is somewhat inconsistent throughout WoF. Dragons often describe fruits and animals as a size proportionate to them as if they were humans in our world (for example, that a goat or a cow would make a good meal for a dragon). During Moon Rising, it's stated that the blueberry Kinkajou gives Bandit is about the size of his head (I think that's the comparison they used). But in Dragonslayer, Ivy mentions there being a bowl of apples (again, I think that's the fruit they mentioned) on her dining room table... so if an apple was the size of a human head, like a blueberry, it doesn't make sense to have a bowl of them on your table.

My solution: it's my personal headcanon that dragons and humans have domesticated different lineages of plants/animals. This makes more sense with plants I think; but basically, I believe that the wild fruits possibly started out as normal-sized to a human, but as dragons populated the continent they began to (accidentally, probably) selectively breed them to be bigger and more filling to them. These larger plants eventually spread all over and conquered their smaller wild versions... except for those cultivated by humans, which remained smaller and manageable as opposed to the massive, hard-to-take care of plants that could feed a dragon. It was also probably better for the humans' survival if their plants were too small to attract a hungry foraging dragon. I headcanon that the natural smaller versions of these plants do still exist in the Pyrrhian wild, but are too small for dragons to take notice of as a food source.

Animals are a bit trickier. I can kind of use the same logic, that animals raised by dragons are bigger by necessity, but all the wild ones are, too, and on second thought, do we actually hear of humans raising livestock? I think all animals in the WoF world being at least slightly bigger than they would be in our world makes a bit more sense, especially when you consider cats. Dragons have been said to have pet cats. A character in Dragonslayer (I don't know what counts as a spoiler in this case so I'm playing it safe) also has a pet cat and it's described to be pretty much as big as him. Animals can probably tread the line, because to me it always felt like the animals dragons hunted were a bit smaller to them than they'd be to us, like the goat in Moon Rising. A dragon is also probably less picky about the state of the food it eats, since many eat meat raw and its kind of implied that cooking beyond setting it on fire is less of a big deal to the common dragon (excluding royalty) in canon. So it might eat the whole of an animal, while an avarage human wouldn't get quite the same value out of it due to just different physiology or culture. This is more a grey area in my explanation I guess.

If you're going for true realism (which we kind of can't because... dragons...), then the fauna of Pyrrhia kind of has to be bigger in order to support thousands of dragons with food to spare. This is finally where I hit the "fantasy" excuse, I guess, since a realistic food chain would be a nightmare to construct when you throw in massive dragons with various habitats and food requirements.

Final explanation: plants are victims of selective breeding by both humans and dragons, animals kind of sit between being a bit smaller to dragons and a bit bigger to humans, and nothing really makes sense.

I don't think there's one right explanation for this "issue", and I'm not trying to override Flawseer's perfectly valid explanation, I just think it's kind of a fascinating problem to ponder.

(OR you could just explain all of it with animus magic. Maybe one of the very first animus dragons saw a human eating a pear, got terribly jealous, and enchanted the entire flora of the world to be suitable to dragons so that they could enjoy it, too. Or they got tired of their camels being sad and small and having to eat five hundred of them to feel full so they enchanted everything to be bigger, yay for them!)