Well, what were you expecting? They aren't buildings - they're entire walled cities, and have individual buildings inside them. They have to be large enough to house shops, schools, guard barracks, entire (segregated) living areas for ALL of the Hivewing and Silkwing citizens,, and so on. They're probably as tall as a human city is long.
...And now you realize the pure terror of being a wingless Silkwing dragonet leaning over a balcony or climbing along the threads on the outside of the hives...that's a long, long way to fall...
Kestrel didn't actually kill her son (or anyone) that day - it was all theatrics for Scarlet's benefit. She believed that Scarlet would have killed Peril had she left her, and refused to actually murder one of her own kids, so she decided to make it look like she killed one child to comply with Scarlet's twisted game (Sky), take the dragonet she was certain would have been murdered if she'd done things the other way (Peril), and planned on returning to the river to fish Sky out after Scarlet and her troops had left, escaping with both kids alive (but a little soggy). Unfortunately, Peril and Scarlet unknowingly messed this plan up - after Kestrel faked snapping Sky's neck and lowered him into the water, Scarlet changed her mind and ordered the guards to kill Peril anyway, and Kestrel panicked; her repeated attempts at picking up her squirming Flamescale daughter allowed the current to drag Sky much further downstream than she realized, and even after finally giving up and abandoning Peril, Scarlet's troops lingered a bit on the shoreline to see if Kestrel would come back for her, which made it too dangerous to start looking up and down the river for Sky immediately; by the time it was safe to start looking, Wren had already found him and 'saved' him from Kestrel, who was calling out for him the whole time. Kestrel left thinking she'd actually drowned one child and left the other to be murdered by Scarlet, resulting in her bitter attitude towards raising other dragonets later on.
The story we see in the comic is being told from another perspective (was it Scarlet talking or Osprey? It's been a while), so they only said what it looked like had happened. Which was the point - Kestrel wanted Scarlet and her guards to believe she had killed Sky, because the condition for letting her leave with one child alive was that she would have to kill the other, even though she had no intention of escaping without both of her kids.
Literal Biologist now, actually - I was already a bit old when I started the series 12 years ago. I'm honestly too old for the fandom now, but I wanted to finish the current arc (I wasn't going to drop the series at Book 13 just because I'm 'too old') and have decided make some final contributions to the wiki before saying goodbye for good. Once I've finished filling out the Scorching-related articles, you guys won't be hearing from me again.
(SPOILERS for The Flames of Hope)
So...at what point do I get to declare myself a Nightwing Prophet for calling this two years ago? The minor details I presented as examples to convey the theory were a little off, but the theory as a whole (The whole thing is Pern inspired, humans were indeed the dominant and technologically advanced species on the planet with laboratories and knowledge of advanced genetics, they did try to enslave dragons and use them as weapons, the dragons were more or less losing to them until they banded together, they did annihilate all traces of the advanced human civilization and force the humans underground, and everyone - both dragon and human, though the dragons were a bit better with their historical records - did forget just how advanced and dangerous humans actually were) turned out to be canon. And yes, humans were the instigators. Not that it justifies the destruction, but (as I said literally years ago), it's what we were told happened - and now, what we've been shown happened. Guess it wasn't so silly and unlikely after all?
'Kib-Lee'. 'Q' without a 'u' after it is pronounced as a 'K', particularly in the Arabic language from which his name is derived.
In real life, most deep-sea dwelling fish do indeed have blue blood; the chemical makeup helps them survive the freezing temperatures down at that depth, where no light can reach to warm things up. Seawings are known to live in roughly the same region, with the Deep Palace being more or less in the Abyssal Zone (hence why they have glowing photophores on their bodies like deep-sea fish and can see in the dark). So either Tui realized this long after her initial descriptions and retconned the blood color to be more in-line with what they should have (based on what Seawings were inspired by), or she's forgotten everything she wrote in the previous two arcs concerning bleeding Seawings.
The problem is that you're not realizing that 99% of the Nightwing population had literally NO IDEA that the plan was to murder the Rainwings, or that Mastermind was having any kidnapped, tortured, and experimented on to begin with; they weren't even sure they had a living Queen, that's how out of the loop they all were. Morrowseer promised that they had found a nice home for everyone to live in, and they just had to wait patiently while they got it ready; meanwhile, he, Battlewinner, and the Nightwing Council were plotting total genocide without letting the rest of the tribe know what was going to happen. The Tribe's leaders were bloodthirsty and insane, only the soldiers most loyal to Morrowseer and Battlewinner participated in any kidnapping or assassinations, and literally everyone else was completely clueless about what was happening as they all just spent the time trying not to die on that volcanic island. This is why the Rainwings are fine with sharing the Rainforest with them - you can't condemn the entire tribe for things they literally had no idea were happening; their leaders were the monsters. You do not punish and entire people for the actions of their insane, power hungry government.
Now, for the LeafSilk Kingdom. the status quo has basically gone back to how things were before the Tree Wars - the Silkwings (and the Beetlewings, previously) originally shared their kingdoms with each other; the Hivewings are the ones who started the segregation. Things have just gone back to how they were, with the Silkwings and Leafwings cohabitating in the new jungles covering the continents while the Hivewings are sticking to their hives towards the center of the continent.
I neglected the possibility because it canonically didn't happen. Snowfox carried the Animus gene, even though she herself wasn't an Animus; when Diamond died and she took the throne, no new Animus dragons were ever born for the Icewings; if Snowfox had laid eggs and passed on the gene, a new Animus would have popped up somewhere down the line, but since a new Animus never cropped up in the Ice Kingdom after that, it stands to reason that she never had any biological children of her own. This further pushed the idea that the Nightwings had 'stolen' their magic when Arctic was 'taken', since Diamond was the tribe's final Animus.
Remember that, after Arctic left and Diamond eventually died, Snowfox was the one who took the throne. It was confirmed that Snowfox took Snowflake as her mate, meaning she never gave birth to a legitimate heir; the Icewing Royal Bloodline officially ended with her (hence the loss of Animus magic), and the current bloodline was carried on through the dragonet they adopted as an heir. Sunny, who is related to Whiteout - and therefore, Arctic and Queen Diamond - is the last known member of the original bloodline; even if she only has one one millionth of a drop of Icewing Royal blood in her, that's still more than Queen Snowfall actually does, since she's not genetically related to Diamond. Whether or not she looks like an Icewing is irrelevant, since she is descended from Queen Diamond's only male heir and therefore has a direct ancestry to the true Icewing bloodline, as confirmed by Darkstalker himself.
Would it be possible to give us a little more info on where and when this Q&A took place? Not specific locations or anything, just something general - was this at a Barnes and Noble, or during the TDG release party, or something like that?
First: Neither image was drawn by Tui. Second, each image was drawn by a different artist - Joy Ang on Dragonslayer's cover, and Mike Holmes in the GN; this means that we're seeing two different artistic interpretations of Tui's text, with neither artist consulting the other over the design. While I normally default to Ang's artwork for canon appearances, in this case I think Holmes got it right - the Dream Visitors were made by a dragon, for use by other dragons, and would therefore be dragon-sized rather than tiny and human-sized. The way the sapphire is described in Dragonslayer makes it seem bigger than what's shown on the cover, too, so it seems the error is in Ang's work this time around.
'The Dangerous Gift' is Animus magic, period. The over-reliance on it endangered the world; when it stopped working, Snowfall tried (and failed) to weaponize the few animus-touched artifacts left in the Ice Kingdom, which could have started a war with the refugee tribes from Pantala; The Great Ice Cliff and Icewing Royal Crown served only to divide the Icewings from the other tribes, while the Gift of Order served to divide them amongst themselves - both proved to actually be more detrimental to the Icewings as a whole; Animus magic is what drove the original jerboa insane, causing her to create a daughter and then constantly rewrite her very existence over and over again with no regard about what she was doing; this same magic was what Jerboa III craved for herself and used to kill her own mother - only to end up cursed so that every time she used a spell she would literally lose a part of herself in the process. Magic has created as many (if not more) problems as it has solved in the series so far, so while it can be seen as a 'gift', it is ot something to be used lightly.
Every main character who is also a princess(or Queen, in both Glory and Snowfall's cases) is legitimate royalty so far. Yes, even Sunny, who's actually distantly related to the Icewing Royal family and has a legitimate claim to the Icewing Throne, even though her mother Thorn wasn't related to royalty at all (Sunny's connection is through her father's side of the family).
While realistically they'd be considered extremely emaciated, the reason the Hivewing and Silkwing tribes have such narrow waists is to make them more evocative of actual insects (which have a 'pinched' waist that separates their thorax from their abdomens). Note that the Leafwings, the only Pantalan tribe not based on insects, have relatively normal looking waists (their stomachs actually look pretty close to Rainwings). It seems to have been a deliberate stylistic choice on joy Ang's behalf, though in reality they'd have no room for their pancreas, liver, large intestines, and a good chunk of their small intestines.
Good genetics. There are humans that live that long or longer these days, so it's not unheard of. Also, I swear this was a dead thread.
Nerds were a mistake.
Every work of fiction has a grain of truth that inspired it, even if you have to do a lot of digging and reading between the lines to find it. That aside, as Vengeful-Vindice said, this is just for fun - some people actually enjoy trying to figure out how things work, even if it's theoretical. I'm sorry you don't enjoy thinking - perhaps you can find another thread to go hang out in where you can comfortably switch your brain off, rather than coming here and trying to spoil everyone else's fun.
Because she was terrified for her life. She never admitted it, but she knew the other False Dragonets weren't joking around when they kept telling her they wanted her dead. Morrowseer wasn't exactly the best person for company, either; Starflight was the only dragon she felt safe with - and it turns out it was totally justified, since everyone literally did try to kill her as soon as Morrowseer gave the order, no questions asked. Think about that a bit - does it really count as 'annoying' when, in actuality, it was her way of pleading for help? It makes perfect sense that she would latch on to the first person that showed her any kindness - she instinctively knew Starflight would protect her.
A: The planet's gravity is much stronger than Earth's.
or B: The moons are made of (figuratively speaking) Styrofoam.
If A is correct, and the planet's gravity is much stronger than Earth's, than this appears to contradict the vast size of most creatures on Pyrrhia and Pantala, and even the simple fact that most humans on the planet can move and even climb with the same ease that they would on Earth. Dragons, some of the biggest creatures on the planet, are somehow are strong enough to fly in this environment. Square-Cube Law being in effect, this must mean that dragons (and most of the other giant plants and animals on the planet) somehow have bones made of titanium, and hyper-effective muscles.
You're correct about the gravity - everything on the planet would be much heavier than here on Earth. That doesn't necessarily contradict the size of the native creatures, though - for one, we know that dragon bones really are sturdy - Tsunami likens them to diamonds in the very first book. If an organism grew up in a high-gravity environment, and if its body is engineered to deal with this gravity, then there's really nothing keeping the lifeforms from reaching dragon-sized, like in the books - provided there's a high enough oxygen-saturation level to support them, which makes total sense on a Super-Earth anyway. There is a 'height ceiling' though - a maximum possible height that an organism can reach before their own bodies can no longer support their weight and musculature, and I believe the dragons are already at that height (Darkstalker being an exception, but dragons weren't meant to live and grow for as long as he did - his magic protected him from harm, even if it meant defying known laws of physics and biology). Notice that there's no other lifeforms (other than plants) that are bigger than dragons - they're the largest living vertebrates on the planet.
We're not talking about gas-giant levels of gravity, here - even if the planet is generating 1.5 to 2 times the amount of gravity that Earth does, it wouldn't be enough to cause serious effects on most organisms - a human, for example, can safely survive up to 5 times Earth's gravity (5G's). So this Super-Earth planet is somewhere larger than Earth, smaller than a gas giant, big enough to hold three moons in stable orbit, but small enough to generate tolerable gravitational forces on organisms that they are still able to adapt to. That's perfectly possible, and planets that meet these requirements have actually been found already in real-life - some of them are even believed to have liquid water on them! I don't think it's too far-fetched to say the planet in WoF certainly seems to fit the description of one, or that it's impossible for life to exist on such a world (even if it might not be totally plausible).
It doesn't defy any laws of physics - you're incorrectly assuming the planet is the same size as Earth. Tui has already confirmed that both Pyrrhia and Pantala are bigger than North America and Asia combined - they're two supercontinents that are apparently spaced so far apart it's impossible to see the shorelines of one from the other. Combine this with the fact that the planet can hold all three moons in a stable orbit while still not suffering from massive tectonic shifts every time the moons are in the same place at the same time (a Brightest Night), and it becomes apparent that the planet is more massive than Earth/Mars but smaller than Jupiter/Saturn - something called a Super-Earth, which is a real thing. Since the planet is so massive, the pull of the moons is negligible in comparison.