A- Neatly organise your dragon knowledge into easy to understand cards with pleasant drawings depicting the appearance of each dragon
B- BASHJSUSHWSHJVXS NARHJAHSGSJS EAHARAHJJJJD REIAHS DDRAGON DEHDHUHEHDB ADRJJJFJD ARGHGHGHGHG MUST TOUCH WILD ANIMAL SEIJDHIUWEHD MUST PET IT. MUST PET IT. ARAGAHKF RIEIWEEEUDJDSN HAARFFF FARAFAFQJJ W I KNOW EVEYTHING ABOUT DRSGONS ITS IN MY BARIN SOMEWHERE DHWEBIUIUB DRAGON DRAGONS NEW SPECIES OF DRAGON GET IN MY BRAIN SHHXVSHXHBA
Decided to rewatch "Dragons: Race to the Edge", and this image has been haunting my mind ever since Hiccup refered to the dragon riders as "gang" for the first time.
Now shall it live in your heads rent free for the rest of eternity.
Night furies are actually perfectly evolved for hunting and killing other dragons and the only reason they aren't a dragon-hunting species like the death song or deathgrippers are is because DreamWorks couldn't have their adorable main character dragon be a "cannibal"
(below I'm gonna try to summarize what we've figured out in a convo with friends on discord)
(also tw animal death via predator)
First of all yes I'm aware that pretty much every decision made about their design was with consideration of the effect it would make on human audiences but hear me out
Night furies are most iconically known as dive-bombers. They are built for speed, high maneuverability, night-time camouflage and for striking targets from above. If we remove human settlements out of the equation (which would not have existed long enough to actually influence night fury evolution, come on), what does that leave us with?
They aren't built for catching fish for sure, they aren't very hydrodynamic and their head is round, wide, and their teeth are dull. Honestly, the monstrous nightmare is much better suited for catching fish, with its long neck, almost pelican-like jaw and rhamphorhynchus teeth
Compare to
Yeah the jaws look kinda like a porpoise of some sort but for that the whole body would have to be a lot more aquatic imo. The light fury looks a lot closer to an aquatic diver, it has a sleeker body, rounded fins instead of spikes, and a long neck.
I don't really see them hunting land animals either, they just don't look like they're adapted for that minus the resemblance with large felines and even then, they're too large to effectively hunt in forests.
The one thing I can kinda imagine them hunting is large mainland megafauna, but we're working with a setting that takes place pretty much exclusively on islands. And overall, dragons are the only abundant species there with the exception of fish and human-bred sheep and chickens.
In general, night furies have duller teeth, smaller claws and are smaller than most dragons. Disregarding the movies making Toothless weirdly OP, a night fury would be disadvantaged against most dragons in a 1v1 fight and besides, it has four huge weak spots that would highly discourage it from a direct physical fight - the primary and secondary tail fins. One unlucky rip in the membrane and the night fury is fucked.
The night fury however noticeably resembles falcons, given their dive-bombing ability and high maneuverability.
Falcons too have smaller beaks and weaker claws compared to most birds of prey, and for that they compensate by simply picking up speed, balling up their talons and Punching. Really. Hard.
And they use that ability to kill other birds, even much larger ones, by knocking them right from the sky.
Here, the night fury's plasma blast works the same way as a falcon's punch. Dragons are fire-resistant, so what the plasma blast does is really just a densely packed bolt of energy that has the effect of either stunning or outright killing prey by damaging its spine. And what the plasma bolt doesn't do, rapid contact with the ground would finish. And if even that doesn't do it, the night fury's wide jaws and dull teeth are just fine for simply clamping around the unlucky dragon's neck and strangling it, like a lion or a pitbull.
The night-time camouflage allows the night fury to soar for extended periods of time perfectly unnoticed in the night sky, and by the time it strikes, the dragon wouldn't even know what's coming.
Unless
Say the hunting night fury is aware of other dragons sleeping under the trees, as most dragons probably would at night (village raids aside, most dragons seem to be diurnal), so how does the night fury get them in position where it can use its signature attack? Well, there's That Iconic Screech Of Death. Since in the movies it tends to appear not just during dive-bombings but also when charging up a blast, I imagine it's something the night fury is able to control to some degree. So by simply fake-diving in close proximity to sleeping dragons, it can effectively terrify them into leaving their hideout and fly out into the open where it can easily take them out.
I dunno, the possibility of night furies as predators to other dragons just makes so much sense to me, I really don't know what other reasons there would be for them to evolve these particular adaptations.
And one more little headcanon to add to this whole rant - since night furies are significantly smaller and less equipped for dragon vs dragon fights and are primarily speed-based predators, I imagine there is this very likely scenario:
There is one dragon who resembles a hyena, a lil bit
Did you know Hiccup saved hundreds of dragons from starvation?
Was just reminded of a topic I would love to touch on in my fic, which Iâve named âLet Me Show You (that Iâm still here)â, thanks to another poster.
The dragons in httyd1 had to have been incredibly starved, by both Berk and the Red Death. In httyd1, itâs made clear that the Red Death has some form of control over the dragons in her nest, and if theyâre away long enough, it goes away.
The dragons, while under her control, likely werenât able to get food for themselves because she was so insatiable and constantly ordered for more and more food. Many, if not all of them, including Toothless when he belonged to her, were starving (though it is stated that Toothless wasnât stealing food from Berk, he is still shown to be incredibly hungry when Hiccup discovers him in the cove).
I do not believe Berk would consider feeding the arena dragons enough to fill their bellies either. In the eyes of the Vikings, it wouldâve been incredibly foolish and stupid to feed them more than whatâs needed to keep them alive. Youâre already sending children to train against them, why doom the kids even more by putting them against dragons at their full strength?
My point is, by Hiccup becoming a dragon rider and fixing Toothlessâ tail, he didnât just save a grounded dragon from potential poachers or predators, he saved Toothless from starving to death.
By Hiccup changing Berk and killing the Red Death, he likely saved hundreds more dragons from dying of starvation. He definitely didnât intend on it, I donât think anyone would, but it feels like one of those unspoken grand achievements that Hiccup didnât realize he was holding.
Even funnier when you consider that, at the start, Stoick was yelling about winter coming and their food being an issue and by the time Hiccup wakes up after the Red Death fight, they made huge piles of fish for the dragons to eat as much as they wished.
My favorite little goober is goobering his way deeper into my heart.
i love the idea that viggo's issue is that he's always overestimating the dragon riders and that's why he loses. other antagonists always underestimate them, they don't put in all the necessary precautions, which allows the riders to slip through, always throwing parties and gloating before the dragon is in the cage. but viggo?
my man takes so many precautions, his entire island is a war base, and yet, and YET the dragon riders got in by dyeing snotlout's hair blonde, giving him gucci boots and naming him sir ulgertorpe, SIR ULGERTORPE. viggo got catfished by snotlout with blonde hair. he's overestimating them so bad that the IDEA of them "just walking in" doesn't even come to mind. he's ready for fire and death to fall from the sky but a one-legged boy pulling a fast one on him breaks his fancy little english brain.
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