“Prince Aodran,” she greeted with a curtsey.
“Princess Lavinia,” he replied, face breaking into a handsome smile as he offered a bow in return. “A pleasure to see you again so soon.”
Lavinia fought the urge to ask where he’d been for Jane’s trial, offering instead a polite smile. “And you.”
A very Lavinia-centric chapter in my Dragonblade rewrite, in which she fights to restore Jane's apprenticeship - which means I've been thinking an awful lot about tween Lavinia and her curious-but-naive worldview lately. Please also enjoy some fanart.
My Thoughts on Dragonblade as A Writer, and some lessons we can all learn from it
I have been thinking about talking about this for a little bit, and @sarnai4 encouraged me to finally make this post. Not posting this to my main writing account, because tbh I don't really want it there.
Since 2022, I have been watching some very strange, but entirely harmless book fandom drama slowly unfold, surrounding Dragonblade, an obscure book written by a well-established author and television producer. Despite this all starting in 2022, there's no sign of any sort of end in sight. This post will be breaking down:
What Dragonblade even is and the circumstances surrounding its creation as a whole.
How things started to get weird when it came to Dragonblade's release, resulting in the aforementioned drama.
Lessons that I think writers can learn from this situation.
(Disclaimer: I am not hating on anyone involved in this situation. Please don't hate on anyone involved in this situation, in any way. This post is being made, for lack of better words, for educational purposes only.)
Part One: What is Dragonblade and who wrote it?
To answer that question, we're going to have to get into a time machine and go all the way back to the late 1980s.
In 1988, author and illustrator Martin Baynton published Jane and the Dragon, a children's book about a girl in medieval England who wants to be a knight, but isn't allowed to be, because of her gender. When a fearsome dragon threatens the kingdom, Jane shocks everyone by proving it can talk, and befriending it. Jane is celebrated for her bravery and allowed to become a knight. A couple sequels followed, and, years later, in the early 2000s, Jane and the Dragon was adapted into an animated TV series for kids.
The television series introduced new characters and conflicts, expanded on the worldbuilding, and more. The general plot of the series follows Jane training to become a full-fledged knight, while also helping Dragon search for others of his kind, since he is the only dragon around and he believes something must have happened to the others. Standard kids-show lessons about things like friendship, honesty, and conflict resolution, are sprinkled throughout. The series was generally well-received by children and adults alike, but sadly, it was canceled after only one season.
But don't worry, said Martin Baynton, author of the original books and a prominent figure working on the show. I plan on writing a book that continues the plot of the canceled show, continuing Jane's adventures!
Years went by, and although a small and steady fandom remained, no news about the sequel book ever came. It gradually faded to the back of everyone's minds.
Until spring of 2022, when, out of the blue, Martin Baynton, announced that Dragonblade, the long-awaited sequel book, was here. It was here, and you could read the first chapter for free on his website, right now!
At the time, I was a nostalgic teenager who had recently dipped my toes into the Jane and the Dragon fandom after re-visiting the show that I had loved as a young child. When I heard the news, I was thrilled. It was a big day for my inner child. I ran home from school that day and frantically pulled up his website, ready to dive back into the world of Jane and the Dragon uninterrupted.
But here is where things got very complicated, very fast.
Part Two: Dragonblade's release.
The entire novel of Dragonblade was not all released at once. It was released chapter-by-chapter on Martin Baynton's website, similar to updates on a website like ao3. During the initial promotional period for the release, he said that new chapters would be released every two weeks or so.
This didn't work out. Soon into the book, chapters were being released on a rather erratic basis. By the time Dragonblade was "ending", you could expect a new chapter to come out once every few months. There was never any official statements explaining the change in release schedule, by the way, usually just some social media posts. Sometimes not even that.
(Why did I put "ending" in quotation marks? I will explain that soon.)
Another thing that a lot of readers felt wasn't working out was, well, Dragonblade itself. After several months, readers often remarked that the pacing felt "chaotic", events felt "random", certain plotlines felt under-explained, or like they were dropped without proper resolution. Many people also expressed dismay at things like inaccurate depictions of some real life scenarios, and the typos and grammatical errors littered throughout.
After two years of this, Martin Baynton came out with a statement.
He had been writing and releasing Dragonblade as he went along. The first six chapters were the only chapters he'd written with a plan, everything else had been written on the fly. (Many readers of Dragonblade often expressed that they felt that the first six chapters were the best ones.)
At first, the instant audience feedback had been good for him, but the longer it went on, the more he realized that he hadn't plotted the story properly. He also hadn't had enough time to properly edit each chapter, which he needed to take extra care to do, because he turned off spellcheck while writing and then would later turn it back on while editing. He said that he was going to take Dragonblade down from his website, and then later re-upload the finished version. The finished version would be complete, polished, and more detailed, with some all-new changes to the worldbuilding.
So, remember how I mentioned Dragonblade's "ending"? Well, "ending" keeps getting put in quotation marks because it never officially ended. The last chapter that was uploaded before the takedown was a brief chapter after the climax.
Then, fans were left waiting. Some new, curious people drifted into fan spaces, asking what happened to the Dragonblade chapters and why they were no longer available. Veteran readers were left to explain.
Now, I don't remember exactly when this happened, but I do remember that, at some point, Martin Baynton said that he had initially planned for Dragonblade to be a television script, and that it was supposed to be the script for a sequel series to the original tv show. Why he chose to release a TV script 1. In the format of a novel and 2. To the internet at large before it was even complete, remains unclear. But the script explanation explained a lot about the style in which the original version of Dragonblade was written. He also shared ai-generated images of the characters in Dragonblade, to try and display his artistic visions for them. He said that the ai-image generator he used only used images that he fed it, but based on how they looked, not a lot of people believed him. The backlash was swift, and he stopped quickly.
Anyway, fast forward several months, and Martin Baynton announced that the rewritten version of Dragonblade was finally ready! Yay!
I remember reading the rewritten version of the first chapter for the first time with a couple of other people, and at the end of it, we all had the same question:
Why did one of the main characters have his last name changed between Dragonblade Version 1 and Dragonblade Version 2?
When asked about this by a fan, Martin Baynton admitted that this had been an honest mistake. The fans were left with ample time to ponder this, because the update schedule once again meant months with no updates. When asked what was taking the updates so long, he explained that it was a struggle to work on Dragonblade while also navigating a busy life and work schedule. Which is entirely understandable! I get it, I've been there.
But that left readers wondering-if he was still actively working on it, why'd he release it after claiming it was the final version?
The short answer is: We don't know. We don't know a lot of things about what Dragonblade's production has looked like behind the scenes, but I do know what we as writers can learn from this.
If you're releasing your WIP to be read by people while it is still in progress, it would be a good idea for you to let people know that it's still a WIP.
Spellcheck is your friend when it comes to writing.
Even a little bit of research is better than none. A big point of contention among readers was the fact that some scenes in Dragonblade: Version One, didn't represent some irl things accurately, when even a small bit of research would have gone a long way.
Please don't use ai art.
If you're going to write something as a script, just write it as a script and don't force it to be a novel or something that it's not.
(For any Dragonblade readers reading this and thinking "But what about the-" I'm keeping this post focused on everything that a writer could learn from this situation. Yes, I am aware that there are some complaints people had that I didn't mention here, but I'm not going to go into them because they were what someone expects in an unedited first draft, which is what Dragonblade: Version One was. I don't think Dragonblade: Version One, should be torn down just for being a messy first draft. I just think the author should not have released it when it was still a rough first draft. Yes, I am aware that there are complaints some people have when comparing the book to the show, and some aspects of the content of Dragonblade itself. Again, I'm not going to get into that here, because this is a writing-focused post. I really do think many concepts in Dragonblade have the potential to be executed really well, they just needed more time in the oven and not on the internet.)
Book janester my beloved 💕💕 (tw : dragonblade spoilers and graphic deceptions of blood, broken bones near the end)
Book janester while still leaning into the friendship related part of their relationship showcases how jester is one of the most important people to Jane if not the most outside dragon and how he was always there to support her even when people like her family etc didn't and even when he was literally dying he still supports her and tells her how far she's come ( along with how much he loves her 💔 )also Jane x Gunther fans I like them too pls don't attack me for this post ( I actually like a little bit of banter in my ships normally )but idk I just like janester a bit more throughout jane and the dragon media epically the books 😭.
This is being talked about a lot on the JATD Discord and Martin Baynton's official Instagram, but I'm not sure how many people on Tumblr know about it, so I'm going to talk about it here.
Recently, Martin Baynton worked with an ai developer to create a personal ai tool to create aged-up versions of the JATD characters based off of his own art style. He said on Instagram that it does not rip off anyone else's art, but some people are suspicious about this due to the way that the ai images look. Even if I wasn't a staunch ai art hater, I would still think that the images look terrible, unlike his previous art, and uncanny.
A lot of people don't know that he (allegedly) uses only his own art in this tool, so he's started receiving backlash about his usage of ai art. I understand, I hate all forms of ai art and have become suspicious of him due to his usage of it. Because to be honest, there's something genuinely kind of disheartening about seeing an acclaimed artist who created something you love begin using ai art in any legitimate capacity. I also feel weird about the fact that he's posting them (seemingly with increasing frequency) without openly discussing the harmful impact of ai art that much. He's clearly *aware* of it since he referenced it in a statement he put out about ai art, but that didn't feel like enough to me, since his "official statement" was just a comment on his own Instagram post.
