I probably should have included this when I did the post for the Favour Fire release day, but honestly, the final book and the inspiration for the series as a whole are a tad different. It was the second movie specifically that really got me writing this series.

Dragon Whisperer was written before the first movie and came out before the second. That book and Trueflame are more closely connected to each other and less inspired by the HTTYD franchise. It was Fireborn where the influence really became heavy. I kept the things I thought were cool (Hiccup’s dragonpunk aesthetic, people and dragons being friends) and got rid of the stuff that annoyed me (gods, it’s so white and straight and OMG not another dude! And how in all the hells is a FIRE-BREATHING race of sentient creatures so helpless?)

I was never going to write the dragons as the pets. That’s just so beyond ridiculous to me. I think I got my dragon inspiration less from HTTYD and more from Reign of Fire. Except, ya know, not taking over the world and destroying everything. So, as Abyss reveals in Firebound, it’s the people who are more like pets, though what I really wanted was a relationship of mutual respect.

My dragons absolutely could wipe out all of humanity but gods that’s boring and a lot of work when they can just hang out and look at their shiny toys. Besides, humans create really neat stuff with those tiny little hands of theirs and they sure know how to fatten up a cow. We’ll keep them around. Well, most of them.

And so that’s how we got Spark and Abyss figuring out how to be friends and Spark making all kinds of cool shit to help dragons and also so she can go flying. I kept what I liked about Hiccup (clever blacksmith with cool gadgets) and then made Spark someone entirely different.

And while everything is a bit fuzzy because it’s from the beforetimes, I’m pretty sure Hiccup and Valka’s reunion had something to do with me not killing off Neesha in Firebound. I’d also done some work around then in a different, as-yet-unpublished book where I killed off a character, decided that was lazy and boring, and unkilled him to dramatic effect. It made things harder but also more interesting. Keeping Neesha around took the series in a different direction, but a much more interesting one. There’s very little of Hiccup actually working with either of his parents, but when they do team up, it’s magnificent. That trilogy needed more Valka, especially the final movie! So I threw a whole lot more of that in. Family drama and saving the world? Heck yes!

You’ll note that in Fireborn onward, there are not a lot of men in these books. Aside from Croves, few of them have much of a role. All of the POV characters are women, even the dragons. Most of them are queer. It’s actually really easy to not make everyone a straight white guy. (Though I will give the teeniest, tiniest of props to HTTYD for kind of making Gobber gay and/or ace, though I’m not convinced it was intentional with only two throwaway lines and not much else to go on). And they casually made a bunch of characters disabled. So there’s that.

Okay, I’m kind of shitting on the HTTYD franchise and while I really do love those movies, they also earned my ire. Only including BIPOC as villains? Barely including women? Not even passing the Bechdel test? Having only one queer character and probably by accident? Come on!

So yeah, I took the things I liked about the movies and got rid of everything else. Also, I’m biased but I really think I stuck the landing with my series-ender better than the movies did. In my books, the characters worked together and went out to make the world better rather than hiding and waiting for things to just change on their own. I feel like the parting message of HTTYD is “Greed is why we can’t have nice things.” I hope the parting message people will take away from my series is “Greed is why we can’t have nice things and here’s what we can do about it.”

A word on reading order:

While the publication order is the in-world chronological order and you can start with Dragon Whisperer and read straight through, each book contains a synopsis of previous books so that you can, technically, start anywhere. I don’t recommend starting after Fireborn though, as things will probably get a bit confusing.

The first three books each have a different main character and the later books bring them all together. So the first three books are more like interconnected standalones. I mention this because people often start with Dragon Whisperer but end up not liking it. This book is my debut and it’s me at my publishable worst. Which isn’t to say that it’s a bad book, but that my writing is much stronger even by Trueflame.

And there’s The Dragon Next Door, which is a spinoff standalone, if you want to try my work without committing to a series. While this book does standalone, I recommend reading it before reading the final book in the series, Favour Fire. New characters from The Dragon Next Door make an appearance and play a significant role in the final book.

And I’m always happy to answer questions either through my contact form, comments here, or on social media. Happy reading!