#she was lied to and abused and forced to stay with queen scarlet and kill others for her entertainment | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

summerf0x · 1 month

Text

I think it’s weird how the monarchy is never really punished in Wings Of Fire.

The go-to solution is always just “replace the old evil queen with a new, not evil queen!” The sandwing sisters? Replace them with Thorn. Scarlet? Replace her with Ruby. The rainwing queens and Battlewinner? Replace them with Glory. Aside from a couple comments about how the rainwing’s contests being a nonviolent way to determine the queen while also giving everyone regardless of status a chance to rule, there isn’t much criticism of the monarchy when the New Better Queen rolls in.

The first arc is practically a powerpoint presentation on how bad it is; the three sandwing sisters tear apart the continent because Blister and Blaze couldn’t win in a duel so they drag everyone else into their mess. The correct thing here is getting Thorn to become the queen, who stops the war and does literally nothing about the Scorpion Den despite living there for mostly all her life.

Queen Scarlet openly supports and profits from this system. She runs a gladiatorial arena filled with P.O.Ws and makes them fight each other for the amusement of her court and Burn. The solution to these events which presumably would leave a lasting scar on the skywing kingdom is just get Ruby to replace her. Ruby chooses to stay out of the war, turn the arena into a hospital, and work on expanding relations with the other kingdoms. This is fine in theory, but it does nothing to stop a new queen from doing the exact same things that Scarlet did. Hell, in her brief coup Scarlet does this:

Queen Coral, while not a major supporter of the war, still allies with Blister and kills or dismisses multiple of her own subjects intentionally as a punishment for those who fail her (Webs’s wife, Snail, Herring’s brother, Tortoise). Tsunami’s gradual disillusionment with the royal lifestyle reaches its peak when her mother orders her to get thrown in jail, but the buildup to that is Whirlpool’s existence and Tortoise getting her teeth ripped out in front of her. We never loop back to this, just get a couple comments about how she’s better now that Blister’s gone. As much of a throwaway line as it was, Coral still enforced classism and neglected her other children, but as far as the series is concerned, she’s a new person.

The Rainwing court suffers from and entirely different problem (Kestril’s abuse towards Glory is because she’s a “lazy rainwing” and this turns out to be true? how is that the direction you go in?) but still falls in the same pitfalls as the others. Glory becomes the queen and she is clearly more fit for this job than those awful, vain, common rainwings from before. It also turns out that she’s Grandeur’s relative, who was still around when there was an actual rainwing royal family, so she’s even more fit for the job!

The nightwings are more similar to the other monarchies. Instead of looking at how their isolation caused them to develop a system circled around lies and their own supremacy and how it could be dismantled, the two guys at fault (Battlewinner and Morrowseer) get exploded and now Glory’s their queen, who despite being six (or however old that is in human years), has enough sense to rule over two entirely different groups of dragons that she has rarely interacted with aside from a few days.

The icewings are given the most criticism in-universe because they’ve got a monarchy and class devision! Winter sees how the icewings in the upper circles only treat their children as extensions of themselves in order to further their own goals and how those in the lower circles are forced to live without luxuries he gets just because of where they were born. The solution to this is to make the new queen have magic empathy visions and just destroy the class devision wall and racism crown. Sure, some older dragons give mean looks, but everyone else claps!

Mudwings. Uh. I really wish I could say something here but Tui hasn’t given us much to go off of. Moorhen is just being bullied by Burn into joining her side?

I’m not really going into the arc 3 queens because I honestly forgot what happened with a lot of them, but Wasp’s defeat is salt in the wound. You have a whole oppressed group of people with fire powers and two of our main characters who directly oppose Wasp are part of that group, and the way she gets taken down is… venom-blasted by a rainwing who has no significant connections to her and then locked up in a throwaway line.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m looking too deep into a kids book about dragons, but I feel like there’s something better that could have been done.

#wof #wings of fire #wof analysis

11 notes · View notes