#i gave Eret the little beads he had in his concept art I love them so much

[headfullof-ideas]

Presenting two more characters and their redesigns in my HTTYD/The Deep story! One is more involved in the story, but the other makes PLOT, and neither really ever interact or connect to one another plot wise to my immediate knowledge in the overall story.

Introducing Savage and Eret!

Savage is not an Outcast and Alvins right hand man, but a true Berserker warrior, serving Oswald and his family for years. But when Oswald the Antagonistic becomes Oswald the Agreeable, Savage starts to grow restless. The Berserkers aren’t at war with the Berkians and surrounding tribes anymore, Oswald trying to maintain a semblance of peace in the dragon-war ridden Archipelago. Savage is a follower, not a natural born leader, but years of peace treaty after peace treaty, and babysitting Oswalds whelps has made him seek out other like-minded Berserkers, planning an uprising against the passive Chieftain. Oswald seemed to have caught on to what Savage was doing, escaping their attempted assassination, and now Savage is trying to commandeer the Berserker Tribe as a whole through sewing doubt amongst the tribe against Oswalds children, and trying to pit the siblings against one another in hopes they’ll simply get rid of the other for him. Savage isn’t good at thinking things through though, especially what the aftermath of his plans to stage a coup or civil war amongst the tribe to try and take leadership might be.

Eret son of Eret is a budding Dragon Trapper, partaking in his father’s business of trapping dragons and bringing them to Auction Markets run by the Grimborn brothers. Dragon Trapping was introduced to Erets family through his paternal Grandfather, with loans being taken from the wrong people, with no money to pay them back leading his Grandfather to Dragon Trapping. With similar habits being passed on to his son, Eret Sr, Eret has been taken on as crew for his fathers quest to pay off the debts his grandfather failed to pay, and his fathers own drunken mistakes. Eret isn’t sure how to feel about it all, his father pushing the looming mantle of Captain on to Eret as his eventual future, leaving whatever debts his father fails to pay before retirement for Eret to try and absolve, with old bedtime stories from his deceased mother and her side of the family speaking of dragons being more than wild animals. Eret’s been grappling with his internal struggles for a few years now, and a sudden interaction with some Archipelagon teenagers apparently riding dragons only rattles his inner beliefs even more.

I decided to go a bit of a different route with Savage in this story, making him a member of the Berserker tribe instead of the Outcasts. There are a lot of elements of his prior design still in this one, but he’s got a lead part in a lot of the early Berserker central arks and plots, especially in Heathers early story, and why she makes some of the decisions she does in Riders and Defenders of Berk, which has a sort of butterfly effect on the way she is in RTTE. He’s not a MAIN villain like the Grimborn brothers, Alvin, Heather, Drago, and a certain someone from the games, more of a small villain and a reoccurring nuisance. He gets his comeuppance however, as he’s not good at thinking things through, especially in the long run, and eventually gets revealed for all his nefarious schemes, and promptly exiled

Eret is a little different to the swashbuckling Dragon Trapper that’s in HTTYD 2, but he’s also nearly five years younger, a little older than Dagur and around the age that the riders were in RTTE. So, eighteen-nineteen-nearly twenty. He’s not Captain of the ship yet, and dealing with a lot of inner family struggles and trying to come to terms with what his future may hold. Generational and pawned off debt is how I play off (Headcanon wise) how he came to be under Drago’s employment in the films, and I’m playing with the setting of the early stages of how that happened here. With his grandfather and father both taking loans they couldn’t keep or pay back, and turning to Dragon Trapping to try and pay them off. Afterall, dragon parts and living dragons sell for a LOT of money. The Dragon Riders throw a bit of a wrench in things though, and Eret ends up being one of their first allies beyond Dagur and someone else in the Archipelago. He’s also a little shorter and not nearly as beefy as he is five years from then, not having the experience to build up that kind of muscle yet. I did this partly because of his age, and partly because Nico Marlets early concept art for him (whose HTTYD art I love and want tattooed to my brain) had him being a little more scrawny, and so I thought that was a nice callback

More characters to come…eventually, as it takes time to draw these, especially with the designing process I go through