im-fairly-whitty:

(That are *Actually* Interesting Creature Design, and a Bonus of Why Dreamwork’s Likely Excuse Wouldn’t Actually Work.) 

So by now we’ve all seen the new “How to Train Your Dragon” poster making the rounds, and have seen the new “Day Fury” dragon that’s been causing all the discourse.

Sporting a soft looking and feminine design, the Day Fury (which honestly does look like a bleached toothless that was rolled in snow glitter and had its spikes and claws filed down) is already drawing criticism for its overly gendered looking design, not to mention the almost inevitable feeling romance plot that everyone is bracing themselves for.

But! As a hobbiest biologist, I’m here to say that there’s a few cool Nature Approved™ explanations for why the Day Fury might look this way, for non-femme pandering reasons. 

I’m not saying I think they are likely, I’m also convinced the studio just wanted an obviously “girl” dragon, but I’m going to ignore that for now because actual nature is way cooler.

Here’s the top 3 Nature Approved ™ reasons the Day Fury might look that way that are actually interesting creature design.

1. It’s a Night Fury subspecies evolved for arctic water, not specifically air and certainly not forests. 

If we compare her to a beluga whale (an animal that Vikings did have contact with in their region) there’s already a visual resemblance. 

With a coloration to blend in with ice floes, the Day Fury’s bizarre color scheme finally makes sense for a large predator, as does her lack of threatening spines and ridges, since being streamlined in the water in order to pursue prey would be the top priority. 

In this theory, Day Furies would be excellent swimmers, and since they have the added ability of flight they may have a hunting style similar to gannet, seabirds who hover high in the air above the water, and then once they spot prey, plummet down at a dizzying speed to slam into their prey at top speeds and snag it.

^^Seeing a Day Fury hunt like this would not only make biological sense, but would be pretty sweet to see it plummeting into the ocean at 100 kph to catch a passing narwhal.

2. A Day Fury is actually a genetic mutation of a Night Fury. 

There is a genetic mutation that occurs in animals called Congenital Sensorineural Deafness, which manifests in a dog or cat or other animal by making them have a white coat and blue eyes. Sound familiar? When this mutation occurs the animal actually has a “normal” coat color in its genes, but it’s not expressed correctly, not only turning the animal an unnatural white, but also making the animal deaf. 

^^A cat with this mutation, look familiar, doesn’t it?

If the Day Fury has this physical mutation it could explain not only its lack of developed spines and “ears,” but dealing with a deaf dragon would be a spectacularly interesting situation for the movie. For a deaf Day Fury to have survived this long in the wild, she would have had to develop coping techniques to make up for her disability, like vibration sensing and enhanced sight and smell to survive.

She may even have been rejected from her flock for her visible deformities, and meeting another differently-abled dragon (like Toothless, who has a prosthetic) would be a much more interesting interaction and story than the bland romance plot that many people are predicting.

3. The Day Fury is a female juvenile that is not yet fully developed. 

Since the other species of dragon we’ve seen in the HHTYD movie world (I’m not sure about the TV show) have had no real visible difference between male and female, there doesn’t seen to be any biological reason for female dragons to be underdeveloped or less able to defend themselves and hunt than the males. The opposite however could be true in that maybe she isn’t fully developed yet, and it is the males that are less physically impressive at full maturity. 

^^A male and female New Zealand falcon, demonstrating size difference.

Plenty of species feature females that are larger and more physically imposing than male specimens, including birds of prey, and hyenas. The Day Fury’s lack of developed features could mean that she is still a juvenile, that she still has growth ahead of her and will eventually be bigger than the male Toothless. 

This would result in her eventually having equally, more, or even differently developed physical features than the male Night Fury. This would explain the smooth and almost babyish look she has when compared to Toothless. (And frankly, it would be pretty cool to see her full grown and formidable looking, like the real terror of the skies that Night Furies are meant to be.)

4. Bonus: The Day Fury is a cave-dwelling subspecies that has lost its pigment over the generations…and why that doesn’t actually work.

Here’s a possibility that actually seems to have some support from the movie poster clues. The environment the characters are in on the poster is a cave with exotic gems and fungi growing on the walls. There’s lots of cave creatures that look pale and are colorless after spending thousands of years in the watery depths of the earth. If this is Dreamwork’s justification for making a white Night Fury though, there’s plenty of problems with that. 

First of all, it takes a long time for that kind of drastic evolution to take place, like at least hundreds of years of cave-dwelling Night Furies selectively breeding genes that would make them better adapted to cave life. Living in that kind of environment would make much different changes than making a sparkly white dragon though. 

^^A real deep-cave-dwelling dragon would more likely to evolve to be colorless and blind, and gross looking meaning you could see through its pale hide, made pinkish by visible blood vessels, and that its eyes would be small and underdeveloped, if they existed anymore at all. (Not big and blue like in the poster.) 

A pale hide would only have evolved in a truly deep cave environment where there was absolutely no light, meaning that color was meaningless and eyes useless. This environment probably would also have led the cave Night Fury to evolve much much smaller to adapt to meager food supply and to lose use of its wings since flying would not be an option most of the time in the often cramped cave environments.

But if we’re going by the movie poster clues then a pale-evolved deep cave dragon if off the table anyway since the cave we see in the poster is a wide well-lit cavern with plenty of air and light and room to fly. 

In that kind of shallow cave a dragon would evolve to be more like a bat than a deep cavefish: good wings, excellent hearing or echolocation ability, large eyes to see at night, and dark coloration to blend in at night and during the day. There would be no practical reason for a shallow cave dwelling dragon to evolve a bright sparkling white pelt that would make it obvious to both predators and prey in both the night and daytime. There’s a good reason that bright white animals are far and few between, and its always because they are specifically adapted to a particularly demanding environment. (Or have been domestically bred for their snowy coloration.) 

It looks like this might be Dreamwork’s excuse for making a white dragon anyway though, which I really hope isn’t since that’s really lazy and ill-researched creature design…

So that’s my three nature approved and biologically justified reasons for the Day Fury’s creature design, as well as a bonus take-down of what is probably going to be the movie’s excuse. 

Do I really think the first three are the reasons behind Dreamwork’s design choices? Not really, but all three of these possibilities would, in my humble opinion, be much more interesting than “look she’s pretty.” 

And besides that, they could potentially lead to a much more intriguing storyline than the “Toothless falls in love and leaves Hiccup for a life of freedom at the end of the movie” storyline that many of us are bracing ourselves for.

Nature is darn cool you guys, and often it has far more interesting characters and situations than we naturally come up with off the top of our heads. When we do our research and let it inspire our stories and characters they often come out far more complex and intriguing than we otherwise could have imagined for ourselves.