A Collection of Minor Dragalia Theories
1: Some inspiration for Wyrmscale was drawn from tuberculosis.
Wyrmscale frustratingly was talked in minimal frequency for something that has supposedly haunted the royal family to a known degree. What little we do have on it says or suggests this:
-It produces exceedingly durable dragon scales over the afflicted's body
-It is invariably fatal (provided one not get possessed by a literal creator deity)
-It is only known to occur in the royal family's blood (though it is unknown whether it truly is family-exclusive or if any of the exceedingly few dragonblood lines that may have survived could also pick it up). Overall uncommon but it's popped up enough to be a known phenomenon.
-It seems to produce internal damage to organs, based on Phares' comments:
-By implication, it's not infectious, as there is 0.000 isolation or hesitation between Phares and any other sibling when it comes to interacting.
-A common sentiment of wyrmscale is that it's just 'trying to turn you into a dragon' but fails in the face of the weak human body.
-This isn't immediately connected to it but I figured I'd throw in the fun fact that in Japanese, it seems to be more literally called 'dragon scale - itis'
But how does this connect to tuberculosis?
I'll start with a more casual link that I still find interesting: Tuberculosis, among its names, has been known as 'the White Death' - which to me instantly calls to mind Phares' ivory scales.
To actually start digging in the weeds, though, the disease is predominately one that affects the lungs. It's especially famous for producing the ~dramatic bloody cough~ we all see in media.
And lo and behold, as I just displayed above, Phares does indeed have it!
Now, wait, you might be saying, TB is infectious, having caused epidemics aplenty, and you're correct!
...However, there's also another wrinkle to this: most TB cases never 'bloom' into its full potential and instead just kinda quietly sit there.
As a matter of fact, in 2023 it was estimated that 1/4 the WORLD'S population 'had tuberculosis', either its active or latent form. Even if you focus on a country like the US, there's still 5-10% of people that have it.
So who knows if wyrmscale could be contagious? It might just have a particular quality to it that is only really able to take root in dragonblooded bodies, and even then, it could be that the rest of the fam caught the latent version since there's a high enough percentage of people who just never develop active TB.
Ignoring the infectious matter, there's more that I would like to bring up: the surrounding culture of TB.
'Culture' is a strange word when talking about a disease that for a long time was very deadly with no cure possible, but there was! Tuberculosis was a disease that was also called the 'romantic disease', and was at one point portrayed as a sort of 'cool' thing. It's the whole 'pale skin, delicate soul' vibe that caused this, though it also has been attributed towards supposedly making one smarter/more creative especially re. the arts.
Funnily enough, this whole thing was sort of a flip-flop from previous portrayals of it as a poverty disease. But that's not relevant.
The point I'm trying to make here is that TB for a while had an idea of it being this ~noble disease~. And while we don't exactly get Public Opinion 101 regarding most the royal family, they don't exactly seem to fear or otherwise have a negative opinion of him for his disease or otherwise, which, ya never know, may be partly informed by the idea that it's a 'cool noble one' instead (and even more literal than its real-life counterpart, as dragon scales are admittedly cool). People can get mean about uncontrollable things as it is, and for a family that's already held up as special because of their dragonblood, it would be easy to see how they could have pivoted to view wyrmscale as a 'mark of disfavor/poor character/etc' in another world.
Theory 2: Euden, in a somewhat vague way, could be considered a fiend.
Ah, Euden, and your complicated creation process. What are you? Human, a god, human god, demon, amalgamate of baby blood...etc etc?
However, I believe that you could argue that Euden's overall 'presentation' to the world in a broader sense is that of a fiend instead of 'just a human'. How so?
I'd like to take a small detour to canon, and this line in ye olde Dragalia lore when they were first trying to drip Da Lore on us:
So fiends in general were portrayed as generally drawn to it, created from it, bad stuff happens yadda yadda yadda. It also is very harmful to humans and dragons alike. See all the void dragons and everyone generally stress everyone has to get moving whenever it gets too thick.
You might already be looping around to the Euden-Morsayati thing, and you're absolutely right, but that's more the 'why' of 'why I think you could consider Euden to have the traits of a functional fiend'.
A bit less concise a theory title, but hey.
First, I'd like to pull out this moment from ch.5. Mym's feeling bad vibes, Ranzal and Elisanne, both very strong themselves are feeling very poorly... and Euden just never really seems to be bothered. He's just chilling.
Now, it's not like Euden is immune to mana shenanigans. He's just as easily knocked down a peg from things like Sophie's story, where mana being off makes everyone miserable for a little while.
But, generally, from what I can dig up... black mana doesn't really seem to get him complaining. In fact, we saw it as a plot point several times, between him just chilling in Lefkos' ruins and later in an area absolutely packed with black mana:
He's more upset about the fact he's going to be eaten by a black hole than any black mana (understandable). By all indications, even before Da Lore developed to say he's immune, Euden just didn't really care about it.
However, I'd like to suggest a particular moment in ch.13 as another 'hm' moment.
They address this more as 'artificial mana' but I'd like to point out that it's not 'just' artificial by implication - it's able to corrupt Poseidon into Void Poseidon, implying that it is at least somewhat tainted with black mana.
And here Euden immediately keys onto it, and in contrast to Ranzal's heeby-jeebies, instead wants to go to it. Or, maybe one could say, drawn to it in the same manner that fiends are? It could be a thing that he's tried to suppress since black mana has been drilled into his head as 'the thing to go away from as fast as humanly possible', and how weird is it that he wants to go to it instead of running away with his friends? Better to just resist the urge, he's not a bug that needs to go to the light, and his friends are struggling already, he's not going to insist they risk themselves more.
Jokingly, I could also suggest that this is the source of his unstoppable ability to just find danger (whether that's fiends finding him or him finding fiends)!
'Now wait', you might say, 'fiends are those weird hooded creatures or manticores and stuff, not humans, even if they can be sentient. Plus, since they're Bad Vibes manifested, all the mana sensors in the gang could Sense him'... but we do already know of at least one exception: Mei Hou Wang, who is perfectly humanoid in appearance. It takes Cleo making a dedicated effort to deduce that he's 'not human', and even then, she can't conclusively ID him as a fiend.
All he registers is 'weird', to say the least. Which, you guessed it, we've several that suggest Euden just 'feels weird' too, mana-wise. Granted, some suggestion for that is that his mom is haunting him, but whether it fully explains the weirdness several register regarding him is unknown.
As a final little thing for this theory, I will also throw in the pot that fiends and black mana seem to be 'frenzy-ing' in nature. Driving dragons and humans mad, becoming crazed themselves, yadda yadda... Heck, even Beren, who we know is a human constantly inundated with the stuff, seems somewhat impulsive and driven by any whims of his. This, to me, intersects with Finlorda's vague words of warning regarding Euden, that he feared Euden going berserk.
You could interpret this as though he feared that the Other's demon flesh would make him a 'true fiend' in behavior to match the material he was made from. In a broader sense, as I've long argued on here, Euden is... not fully stable, mentally. And while that part of him ultimately stems from the way he was raised and how he thinks of himself, if he's a 'fiend' in a technical sense I'm sure that doesn't help regulate him at all.
This combines into the vague picture that Euden, a person whose physical form is predominately made from Morsayati, a demon overlord/fiend, may possess more than just an immunity to black mana but an outright compulsion as the 'real things' do, and potentially shares their capacity/inclination to go berserk.
Theory 3: They(tm) were thinking about maiming Leonidas at least a bit post ch.12
'They' being the dev team and more specifically the writers.
It stems from the overall vibes I pick up from a mix of the story and art. Of course, there's no smoking gun to confirm anything, as is the case with the other little mini theories here, but hopefully you can see where I'm going with this!
It starts with the heavy stress that Leonidas was just wrecked by the end of ch.12. He's wounded enough that Euden immediately flips his mood from 'I need to beat you up' to 'I am concerned for your life' once Phares shows up.
The next piece to this puzzle comes in his later meeting with Chelle. She stresses how injured he was and how bad she was expecting him to be.
Gala Leonidas' lines, when combined with this, paint the broader narrative that Chelle personally ferried his gun to him in this visit.
In short: she understood that he was injured enough to render him more or less defenseless from his typical means of sword and shapeshift, and likely was intending to supplement her brother's capacity to defend himself in his infirmity.
Even for whenever Ilia shows up after, he's still wounded enough for a wide scope of them to be clearly visible to her, and he's overall maybe a bit less sharp than normal, getting surprised...
...And Ilia able to incapacitate both his guards before he so much blinks.
So, obviously, whatever injuries he had weren't just for show, and did affect him in the days and weeks after the fight even in canon, but Leonidas largely seems to convalesce more or less entirely.
Here's where we loop around to the why I think that wasn't originally the plan!
A big part stems from this draft artwork for him in the songbook, of all things...
Pardon the poor picture but between the scan and the texture on the image itself, it's... tough to find anything better. But from the start of them, there's a clear pattern of his right arm being... oddly emphasized, with his mismatched black sleeve until it got phased out for his B design.
I'm also noting the small detail of him holding the gun in his left hand, instead of the right. It could be just artistic choice to show the details of his right, I can't say for certain. Heck, even the asymmetry could just be more 'Japanese artists love asymmetry'.
But something about it to me just feels... off. Like the black seems to extend past the arm onto his chest, where it almost vaguely looks like there's a gap in the coat. Maybe, if so, to allow a less-flexible arm through if he can't quite manage the sleeve?
Even more unlikely related, Euden also does generally seem to have/like having a tighter undershirt on underneath the main armor/outfit he's wearing. See his default art or even just 'Unexpected Requests'. The former, it also seems to be a one-sleeved thing to match with his higher amount of armor, implying it maaaaay be just a cultural tradition thing for what to wear under armor in Alberia. My probably-incomprehensible mind connects the two- Leo's wearing a black sleeve seemingly underneath the main coat that -> is that what would be his 'under armor shirt+sleeve' -> ...that he's now unable to fully cover up because whatever injury makes him incapable of fully dressing in his overcoat and is just using it as the 'good enough' coverup?
Like I said, this is high-level nonsense and projection, but in some wild world of mine it makes sense.
This is all speculative, but more concrete 'hm' material in his drafts can be found in this drawing:
Aha. Again, nothing concrete, but something between these drawings, between the artist(s?) playing with an eyepatch for him or the weird shirt-sleeve thing he was wearing in his beta designs, makes me seriously wonder what was going on.
Add in again all the extra notes and drama about him being so injured, etc etc, and I can start to see a thread forming: Leonidas might have been originally planned to be at least a bit maimed!
As a final note to this, note his sudden disappearance in canon for a long while after 16. 16-~24, he's content to be what I call jokingly Euden's secretary, instead directing Ilia and Emile to Euden's location instead of doing much himself. As if he's not fully up to his previous capacity to start causing problems, either because he's still in a long recovery or just flat-out not able to go out as much anymore and kill stuff.
He's overall relegated to filling this role in the story, as depicted with my microsoft-paint memery skillz:
In fact, you could almost think that the devs just weren't... intending on him being a problem again, despite his still-contrasting beliefs with Euden. Or maybe just unable to immediately create massive drama for round 3. I could see Leonidas pulling a 'wow Euden nice to see you're back but you see here your kingdom is also kinda mine now? I never said I'd give it back... ok now join me or die' whenever Euden came back, disabled via injury or not. By then, he could've had time to plant seeds of defenses/discontent with Euden+puffing himself up or other strategies to ensure Euden can't take back his kingdom, too.
Honestly, I could've seen that being a fun/interesting plot. Leonidas, just as potent a threat to Euden, but now has switched his means to Euden's, turning Euden's advantages against him. Words or violence, Leonidas will have his way!
Ahem. This is getting long, so I'll cut it off there, but yeah, something about his overall treatment in the post-12 canon world reeks of something to me, that they were thinking of more permanent consequences for Leonidas' fight. Which, too bad! The siblings as a whole probably ought've been a bit more maimed in true throughout canon. They seemed afraid of that or the wider fear of killing them and taking their pieces off the board, as we later see with the Gala!Zethia copout there with her now being 'blind'... and also having no problems in Bondforged, which in retrospect kinda adds to argument with Leonidas.
In any case, I do hope that these little theories have given someone more to chew on regarding Dragalia and its lore!
gummygunk
annaxmalina
2087
blakekathryn
kaledo-art
