Wings of Fire vs Tooth and Claw

 I have had dark thoughts of late, and I’ve been pushing them aside for the most part, but this week they’ve started catching up with me more.

The second part of the Witcher III Review will exist… one day. I have a lot on my plate right now.

Also I’m watching Dances with Wolves on Netflix? There will be a post about that on Movie Munchies.

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Wings of Fire vs Tooth and Claw

What is it like to write a book about dragons from the point of view of dragons? You know, considering how massive the fantasy genre has become, I don’t come across it as often as I would have thought. Mind you, there are plenty of authors who write sections of books from the viewpoints of dragons. But the entire novel? I don’t see it a lot. Sometimes people get around this by putting the dragon in human form for a large chunk of the book.

But not always! I had this thought on Thursday evening that I have read two works in which the dragons are explicitly not human in shape, and I haven’t compared them in my head. The obvious answer is that one is a long-running series aimed at children and the other is a one-off aimed at adults, but I still should have done this.

So.

Wings of Fire is a series of books by Tui Sutherland, one of the writers in the Warriors Cats book collective (or whatever that group was called) that went off on her own to write books about dragons. The books tell the story of a group of dragonets (young dragons), each from a different tribe (element and habitat or whatever) that have to work together to stop the civil war among dragons that’s engulfing their continent. Despite being for children, there is quite a lot of violence, which makes sense considering they’re dragons and it’s a war going on, but still.

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton is a book about a family of dragons following the death of their patriarch. The purpose of the novel, as stated by Walton, was to write a Victorian drama of the type she was fond of growing up, but one where it made sense for the strict gender roles to be the way they were. So biologically the female dragons are subservient. Also dragons have to eat each other to get bigger. The two major conflicts are about the daughters needing to get married, and the son-in-law eating more of his deceased father-in-law than was proper for the time.

Okay, so--part of the problem I see with both of these series, though to different degrees, is how much they anthropomorphize the dragons. Obviously we need our protagonists to talk and have some sort of society, but they both take it really far and make it weird? By a longshot, this is more a problem in Tooth and Claw, which mentions a lot of things that don’t make any goshdarn sense for dragons to have: carriages, and trains, and human-specific clothing and such. Exactly how these work with creatures that are explicitly not human-shaped is never adequately explained. They’re there because it’s like a Victorian story. And admittedly, that’s the point, but it makes it hard to be immersed in the book when this apparent contradiction is staring you in the face the entire time.

Wings of Fire also has this problem, though scaled (no pune intended) back. Dragons use spears and scrolls and live in castles and it’s very weird. One would think that their hands/paws wouldn’t be that prehensile. There are a lot of things that show that they’re not human though--the word ‘talon’ is substituted for ‘hand’ (although a talon is a claw, the correct word should be ‘paw’ or something) and the tribes being biologically different is a huge plot point. 

Like yes, Tooth and Claw brings up wings and breathing fire, but other than those the dragons seem to live like people. The dragons of Wings of Fire still live in caves, still hunt wild animals, and don’t wear clothing other than things like necklaces, earrings, and adornments that actually make sense for a dragon to be wearing.

An immediate difference is also the role of female dragons. In Tooth and Claw female dragons are explicitly, biologically, physically submissive to males. This is part of the point of the book, to make a story where there is a reason the women act the way they do in Victorian novels. It’s also kind of stupid. Whereas in Wings of Fire, female dragons, and only female dragons, can be monarchs of a tribe. Any time a male dragon suggests being in charge as more than a behind-the-scenes type, the reaction from other dragons ranges from disbelief to scorn. 

And it strikes me as a bit odd, the notion of framing female dragons as submissive model Victorian-era “Angels of the Household” types. No, bump that--it’s downright WEIRD and WRONG and the more I think about it I’m absolutely baffled that Walton chose dragons--DRAGONS--of all creatures to try to make this point. The notion that dragons are ever depicted as helpless damsels feels close to heresy. They can be desperate or defenseless given the right character arc, but that they’re naturally this way? No, screw that.

I can’t say that I liked that.

Nor all the cannibalism? Tooth and Claw makes it so that dragons must eat other dragons to get stronger. This usually means that dragons eat their own dead (which isn’t too out there I suppose), and that elite dragon families eat any offspring that are considered too weak. This felt more like a dragon thing than [waves above] all THAT, admittedly. 

Wings of Fire doesn’t have any of that (that I recall), but there is a lot of dragon-on-dragon violence. Loads and loads of it.

But I think another way in which Wings of Fire comes out ahead is its depiction of humans. In Tooth and Claw humans are another nation with which dragons used to be at war with, and now they “enjoy” a nervous peace. A human doesn’t appear until the end, as an ambassador at a large party, and many of the dragons treat him with derision. In Wings of Fire humans are referred to as “scavengers” and they… don’t get along with dragons, unsurprisingly. We don’t get a lot of what their world is like, but dragons tend to see them as (at best) clever animals. Some dragons even keep them as pets. And that’s horrifying, but the dragons can’t understand their speech or actions, nor their habit of running and squealing at the sight of dragons.

A quick way to see if a dragon is meant to be sympathetic is how they treat humans. One dragon is introduced biting a human head off, and morally she’s one of the worst characters to appear on the pages of the books. There’s something about how characters treat others who are less powerful than themselves in there somewhere.

But this is part of what makes me like Wings of Fire more-- because the dragons and humans are explicitly different creatures who don’t work on the same rules. It’s not perfect, but the author actually puts effort into making the dragons actually different than people, and showcases that by displaying that humans exist in the setting, but don’t really fit very well in the world of dragons. They very rarely have any effect on the overall Plot. And because of that the story felt much more like it wasn’t about humans--rather than Tooth and Claw, which was very much about humans, just with some quick switches to make the story plausible.

Though, like I said, Wings of Fire is far from perfect in that regard. But it feels much more like it’s trying, and it’s more difficult to forget that it’s protagonists are dragons and not humans. Which should be a larger priority when writing nonhuman characters. And because of that, it works a lot better for me.

Also it’s less straight-up weird.

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