#httyd the red death

[gold4miracle]

Such a human waste your eyes without a face

[urisk-factor]

Girlboss

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

Hot take

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

Ok, rant over

[krikunjayvoice]

The Dragon Queen

[thereweredragonshere]

On my recent discovery of my love for drawing the red death, I couldn’t help myself in wanting to draw something proper of her :3

[carus26]

Putting all my favorite HTTYD dragons on one canvas seemed like a good idea to me

[toasterdrake]

botw x httyd au hard launch (that i cannot for the life of me figure out a name for so if anyone has ideas PLEASE hmu)

everyone thank @blueorchid1707 for inspiring this and reading through my yapping

im about to have a few big projects on my plate so i cant promise much content for this thing until those are over, but any contributions are welcome and i hope to continue working at it when i can! :)

(if anyone wants access to my brainstorming doc simply dm me and i shall bestow upon thee the link. its a mess in there and is mostly me talking to myself but have at it if you so desire)

[beetlbi]

Gravity falls httyd au, is that anything? Transcript under the cut, more thoughts in the tags

Texts says “red” “very protective of Stan, messes with him a lot” “doing much better than in canon bc he isn’t alone + has someone to take care of”

[tahenol]

Toothless vs Red death

(idk how to draw hiccup sorry)

[useless-moss]

Do we think that every time Hiccup wakes up, even from a normal nap, he checks his legs? Double checking to make sure his good foot is still there. That he didn't lose another limb while he was unconscious.

Do we think he has nightmares or night terrors? Does he sometimes wake up screaming, the fire and teeth of the Red Death flashing behind his eyelids? Does his stump ache and pulse with phantom pain during these moments?

How many nights has he stayed up into the early hours? Overworking his brain with whatever he can, afraid to fall asleep. Afraid to close his eyes for even a second, because the memory of what everyone else sees as his greatest moment haunts his very being. Gives him nothing but troubled thoughts and frightening dreams. Makes his heart race and lungs ache, air suddenly too difficult to breathe each time he takes a moment to actually think about and remember it.

Does he dream about the what if's? What if he'd failed, what if Toothless or himself died, what if he'd been too late or the others hadn't agreed to go with him? The list seems never ending some nights. Plenty of anxious thoughts to keep him awake. Plenty of hours left for all these emotions to build as Toothless curls around him, cooing and nudging. Trying to bring his human out of his self-induced stupor.

[kirran906]

Dragon queen

[gold4miracle]

She never came back

[ppaleoartistgallery]

HTTYD Flocking

today on Paleostream we drew HTTYD dragons!!!!

closeups and design explanations/descriptions below:

terrible terror and monstrous nightmare: you'll notice all the dragons arent hexapods, deliberate choice on my end, not much has changed about the terrible terror tbh, it just only has four limbs now, less spikes, longer feet, and a more crown-like horn arrangement.

but ooh the monstrous nightmare lmao, i decided to shrink it down and remove a lot of its spikes, i wanted to make it a sorta chihuahua of dragons, small and feels like it can pick on everything. but relies on its projectile venom to save it. instead of lighting on fire, it lights its enemies eyes on fire by spraying venom from venom glands along its neck, back, and tail at the enemy

for the hideous zippleback, i decided to give them beaks (cause i felt like it) and make it so the double head is an illusion caused by the smaller sessile male who's constantly attached to the female, the female has a smaller crest and horns which makes the male's smaller head but larger features balance out the silhouettes. the male rides on the female's back everywhere being held in place by his claws and her wingtips, i also made the female cursorial because i felt like it again

the rumblehorn, i went for beetle-like wings and elytra-like display feathers, and for the funny i gave it a rhinoceras beetle head, and two toes on each foot

the razorwhip is a really cool design, but i was thinking that it would be a sleek and efficient killer, so i gave it smooth and dark scales that are incredibly reflective, and a parankylosaur macuahuitl. i also gave it bottom tooth-like projections on its bottom jaw

for the whispering death, i made it a derived ray-finned fish because dragons are anything you want them to be (also inspired by Wyatt Andrews' Rodan design). i replaced its eyes with two white bioluminescent display features, and put its eyes where its nostrils usually are and gave it a gulper eel mouth with a loooot of gill rakers to replace the rows of teeth

the red death, i decided to keep its size large, i took a lot of sauropod inspiration from this one. airsacs replaced the posterior two eyes, and i gave it a tail club and tooth-like keratin projections on the lower jaw

we ended with the shellfire, even as a kid i hated the design, at this point i was on four hours of sleep and had been awake for about 12 hours, so i just made an over-sized placoderm with spurs on the side of its head, cause dragons are anything you want them to be

[neztune]

I like trying to think of similarities between Toothless and Hiccup, and I finally thought of how I wanted to explain this one thing:

So after Toothless comes to save Hiccup from Hookfang and is taken down, Stoick looks down at his axe before saying “Put it with the others.” I’m pretty sure it’s the same axe, but this is the same axe he tried to hand off to Hiccup so that he could become who he hoped Hiccup would become. This is more of a Stoick and Hiccup parallel for this part, but this same axe that could have been used to kill a dragon in one Haddock’s hand is once more not used as intended. A moment of mercy is shown.

Now, “put it with the others.” We all know Stoick meant for Toothless to be put with the other dragons in cages, but that isn’t what we see. What we see the moment after is Hiccup being tossed into the great hall. The very place where one statue after the next is of possibly great Vikings before. Hiccup is being put with “the others,” all people he was expected to be like. The goal Stoick had for Hiccup. These are the people he’s “supposed to be.”

Toothless has been caged like the other dragons, all because there’s an expectation on what he’s supposed to be. “The others” are what Stoick expected from Toothless, just as much as he expected a great Viking out of Hiccup.

But none of them fit that expectation.

[cookies-artblog]

Httyd inktober day 31: The Red Death

[thereweredragonshere]

Hiccup is such a dramatic person like hey DAD remember how you said I need to kill like a singular dragon to be cool well what if I killed the biggest fuck off mountain sized dragon and ended a three hundred year war that will stop about 76% of your current problems AND get permenant life insurance in the form of an extremely angry night fury. What if huh??? What if?????