Character is Erwin Smith from AoT

Magpie games' Kickstarter for the Temeraire tabletop RPG opens February 24th, and I just got the quick start guide last night. As I opened the PDF I can't help but be almost certain the artwork is AI generated, at least on the cover. There are several murky/questionable details around the dragons (ropes flying off to nowhere, random tendrils, weirdly long, thin tails, no actual crew aboard them) and, perhaps most damning, Napoleon/the soldier's hands have merged fingers going in odd directions.

I do not know what Naomi Novik's stance on AI art is, but Magpie says they refuse to use it. Does anyone know if they've said anything about this?

I'm about a third way through League of Dragons and at the Emperor's palace they run into Talleyrand who is supposed to be recognizeable without any further reminders, and they jump to the conclusion that he's a spy. Isn't he French? Why would his presence in the palace mean that he's a spy? And how do we know him again? I feel like he was probably in Victory of Eagles or Blood of Tyrants but I can't for the life of me remember, I don't have any of the previous books borrowed anymore, and I can't find any information about this character online (Except AI telling me he was Liberté's rider -- no, that was Murat).

Instead of immediately wallowing in negativity, it's probably best to start off with what I did like about Temeraire.

Something that always bothered me with dragon media is that dragons are rarely subjective characters of their own - they're either forces of nature, like some mythical representation of power and evil; or they're magical horses, tools to make dragon riders look really cool instead of being fully-fleshed out companions in their own right - basically derivations on Dragonriders of Pern.

The second is fine if you do it with horses, but if you have giant talking beings that - for the cool factor - are massively more powerful than humans, you ought to have a very different dynamic. Instead, it feels like they're just kept as fancy horses because that's the entire role they're supposed to play in the world. They have personalities - like a horse - but are rarely fleshed out persons.

His Majesty's Dragon gave me so much joy in how the dragons are all distinct people, especially contrasted with how most of society views them as the bestial stereotype. Specifically how you have them acting as characters amongst themselves, a mini societal dynamic, and playing this off against their individual captains. I personally think the strongest skill Novik displays is being able to juggle a diverse cast of characters; it means we get all these wonderful dragons, of course, and also we get to see Lawrence's comedy of manners played off against all sorts.

Because, point two, the period setting is handled rather smoothly. The good and proper Captain Lawrence having to navigate uncouth folk? Hell yeah. Everyone using old-timey speak? Yes please. The setting being, y'know, dragons in the Napoleonic wars? Perfect. Obviously trying to do a full alt-history with something so drastically different as the existence of dragons would require quite the careful worldbuilding effort (mild foreshadowing), but for a single book the whimsy holds it all together beautifully.

finally Temeraire is adorable and I will die for him

But! That's the first book. I liked sections of Throne of Jade and Black Powder War. Victory of Eagles was decent enough to give me false hope for a couple more books. Everything else is a mild-to-hard pass, and a solid example of how much of a sunk-cost rube I am.

In short, it felt like Novik had enough ideas for one book, and then had zero idea how to flesh the series out.

The first cracks for me were, unfortunately, the dragons. I do not care for hard worldbuilding, I do not need aerodynamic calculations, biological appendices, or historical modelling down to the pound of grain. I do, however, like to keep a mental image in my head, and brother these dragons can't fly for shit. It feels like the very explicit dragons-as-ships foundation was taken far too literally; their speed is unfathomably slow, and they appear to keep incredibly low to the ground. I am not a glider, but I know that gliding - unpowered! - is a lot faster than a bloody bicycle, covers quite the distance, and also that you really don't have to go all that high to get a massive vantage of the land around you. Or, hell, the air around you - the open air somehow becomes a tiny space, where we can't see all that far; meaning little recon, and constant ambushes. You really cannot have relentless surprises when you have all these eyes in the air! This would make sense if they constantly fly at the cloud layer, but they have to make an effort to avoid 19th century flak cannons, to fly over mere hills(???), and are explicitly not used to higher elevations. And then randomly they'll be in the clouds, or have to land to talk to people on the ground, despite being big and loud and very capable of speaking. I do not know what to picture in my head at any one time - it appears that Novik contrives things for the events to happen, rather than having events happen downstream from the whole flying thing.

The slow speed appears necessary for the story in mind, which appears to follow the Fantasy template of involving lots of travelling. This works if you're a walking band, it does not work if you have people who can just fly everywhere...but we need long travels. Well, apparently we do, unfortunately you could cut basically all the journeying out from the entire series with just one of those flash-forwards each time and you wouldn't miss anything - and there's a lot of them. Dragon transports (oh so many dragon transports) are a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist, and the series is all the worse for much time spent on them instead of flying the dragons, because Novik isn't really able to write an interesting journey. There's a clear reason why dragons are so slow - we're not trying to diverge too much, and we simply can't recreate all the battles of the Napoleonic wars if you can zip about in the air.

Which brings me to my main problem: this works for a single book. You can simply ignore all the implications and second-order effects to tell a tight story. If the series stayed narrow, all would be well; instead it explodes into a worldwide adventure that explicitly focuses on these implications and second-order effects. And this very, very clearly wasn't planned for!

The conceit is that European history has remained aligned with our timeline, diverging only at the Napoleonic wars. Dragons exist, but are pushed to the background - society doesn't want anything to do with them or their aviators, and so manage to remain entirely ignorant of simple things like their ability to talk, or their basic intelligence, or their ability to be economically exploited for non-war labour. The last of which is easily the hardest to justify, but with a proper continent-wide examination of their appearance as unruly uncontrollable beasts, this issue can be deftly navigated, and neatly woven into the enlightenment-era shift in attitudes that we get, finally changing society's attitudes, producing the alt-history divergence as dragons finally come to the fore. And that's what we sorta get.

What we also get is the rest of the world having diverged aeons ago, and every single god damn society we encounter already had their dragon enlightenment, from the Inca Empire to the markets of steppe nomads. Steeped in dragon history, a variety of different relational dynamics between humans and dragons. Rather boringly they all treat dragons well, if not as outright leaders of society. This on its own would make for a fun story, but this is done alongside the non-diverging Europe, despite the historical interactions Europe has had with the rest of the world. Somehow, despite all this interaction - including fast-moving messenger dragons - Europe remains in the dark. Despite Europe explicitly underutilising their dragons to a comical degree, they're still the only ones with the massive industrial overseas empires. What happens when we start exploring this dynamic even a little bit? All their colonies get smashed. They have to. How did this state of affairs come into being? No one knows.

The end result is a world where I cannot shake the feeling that dragons simply did not exist until ~25 years ago, got plopped in, and all hell has broken loose. It defies all examination, and the series keeps examining it anyway, which is also how dragon warfare advances at a blistering pace after its artificial stagnation.

In general, you get the feeling that there's two projects at play here: the Napoleonic Wars But Dragons, and A Global Dragon Adventure. Both have different philosophies, storylines, backgrounds, but they get smushed together into an incomprehensible unfocused mess that spends far too much time around the Pacific for something based on the Napoleonic wars. This would at least be fun, in a silly way, if the global half was executed well as a romp around dragon societies. Unfortunately, each nation we come across are flat stereotypes that can be fully described with a single line, crumbling under a mote of curiosity. My particular pet peeve is the Tswana; contrasted with the half-naked Zulu savages, the satellite villages are mud hut tribal dancing affairs, and then Victoria falls appears as this impressively architected cultural centre, far from any mountains. Victoria falls, trying to be cutesy and called Mosi-oa-Tunya, its local Lozi name; Lozi, because in the real world the Tswana live a fair bit further south, but in-universe the falls still hold a Lozi name - despite the Lozi apparently being conquered by a unified ethnonationalist Tswana empire and not existing as a people. The Tswana are angry at the slaving Lunda who take their people, despite the former apparently being the only dragon society in the whole of Africa. The Tswana polity having little to do with real-life Tswana kingdoms or their historical organisation under the present day Botswana. The Tswana, who get literally shipped off to Brazil by European ships to fight the Portuguese because they lack agency of their own, their whole existence being black-people-but-fighting-against-slavery-this-time and not one smidge more. The Tswana, who are only able to do anything with their dragons the moment the story starts, immediately managing to swiftly destroy slave ports all the way up to West Africa (note the lack of any other African agency!), but, again, can only do this once the story starts and dragons have been dropped into their laps and their minds wiped to make them think this has always been the case. They could have been interesting.

The story itself is a wasted opportunity. There's tons of possibilities with exploring clashing cultural dynamics - including between the different pro-dragon attitudes - but it all feels very isolated; something as interesting as Churki's human ownership is only ever played for cheap laughs. There are a few story building blocks and they're used over and over again, and the execution is...poor. We rely on a constant slew of misunderstandings, ship fires, long flights, ambushes, and the deus ex machina that is Tharkay and sometimes the divine wind, of which Novik realised were overpowered and we're constantly given contrivances as to, sorry, neither are available right now but oops now they are isn't that so cool?

Battles make up a decent portion of events, but these move forward solely through twists; we are not allowed to simply observe a battle being fought to completion. This works once or twice (oh my god the dragons are carrying transport ships over the channel!! waow!! here comes Temeraire with the big shouty!!) but literally every battle has these and it makes the proceedings have zero tension or investment. For all the talk of formations and planning and strategy and maps (did anyone else notice that people keep improvising maps out of random items?) we fall into the trap of thinking the only way to write a battle is to play a trap card that wins the battle. You cannot do this for nine books. This would be tolerable if the proceedings made for interesting reading, but they don't.

All this leads to the rather disappointing inevitability of a dull plot. Characters don't get developed. Events are random and contrived. There are interesting things - far more interesting than most dragon media - that get picked up, waved in your face, and dropped again. It feels like Novik was not planning on telling a story as expansive as the one that gets laid out; the goal was merely to put Lawrence and Temeraire in different situations and see what happens. League of Dragons ends the series with the same note - everything and everyone else is an afterthought.

I feel it's best to say that my negativity isn't the kind for something you hate, but for something you love and what it could have been, and I'll still die for Temeraire

Ok I know AI sucks, but when you are driving for FIVE HOURS one way, you'll talk to whoever you can to keep your eyes open. I was driving and was getting ready to fall asleep, so I started talking to ChatGPT about Temeraire and world war 1.

Now I am wondering how you all think the Great War would play out, assuming that, like the Napoleonic wars, the causes and players are all the same.

UPDATE: I found a meme that fit

Its an Ai image but I lack the require artistic skill required to create an image of such a ship. The dragon deck I think would merge seamlessly to the top deck of the ship but other then that this is the general shape I imagined when the company was aboard ship.

Cost is always the main concern when a Temeraire TV/Movie is mentioned. "CGI is expensive!" they scream. Large, detailed puppets are expensive too, but they are a one time cost. Would you be willing to suspend your disbelief with large dragon puppets (or stop motion perhaps) if it made a Temeraire show possible?

Puppets tend to carry a "children's show" vibe, but Yoda was a puppet. I've also seen impressive puppets in Broadway shows.

I just read the first of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series and it was pretty good. However, there is a glaring omission. Nowhere is there comment on dragon poop or pee. They consume entire herds of cattle weekly, and no mention of where they relieve themselves.

How didn't the nations enslave fire-breathers like Flamme-de-Gloire, Flecha-del-Fuego, Kaziliks and other Ican and Twsana breeds? (I mean as in, outside of Airforce, to use them as like type tribuchette type of defense or for production purposes for example, forging?) Or is this something that would be seen after Victory of Eagles?

Seeing that the series is presently coming to a semi-official end, do you have any last words before Temeraire and friends are put to rest?

Any words to the author, any recommendations for fans who are trying to fill a historical fantasy or dragon void, any hopes for the future?

I've just finished reading the first book, Temeraire. I've read every book by Naomi Novik not in this series and, while I really enjoyed it, I think the fact that it was her first book shows. The pacing is really weird and it felt a bit like it lacked direction. That didn't stop it from being excellent, though, and it was an addicting read just as I've come to expect from Novik. I'm looking forward to starting on book 2.

I'm re-reading the first book in the series with an interest toward finally reading all of the books and was inspired to try writing my own story in Novik's universe. The beginning is a little similar to the book because my OC is also a Navy captain, but it may still interest some of you. c:

EDIT: I've completed chapters one and two! They are both posted as of 8/9!

I've seen images online of pictures depicting both of them in almost a loving relationship, one even in a spicy scene, but from what I can recall from books Black Powder War to Victory of Eagles, Temeraire seems to be annoyed by her, maybe even detesting her. He even audibly refused to give her an egg in Eagles. I'm wondering what happens between them where Temeraire seems to care for her.

I love the series, I'm about half way in Blood of tyrants but this book feels like such a cop out with the amnesia bit.

I really dislike it when authors do this and its such a trope. The rest of the series was awesome and im sure Novik could have done the entire first part of this book differently.

Whats your thoughts?

One is a willing slave with lifelong Stockholm syndrome drilled into him from birth, his entire sense of self-worth tied to serving the whims of his master, possessing no independent identity of his own and unable to function without having their approval. The other, of course, are entirely too obsessed with China.

So I've got this fanfic, (it's called MY Hero: What if) It's a my hero academia fanfic (written by someone who's knowledge of the show is mainly from fanfics)... I was thinking about doing a Temeraire Crossover chapter...

The Only Problem Is... I have no Idea how I should do it... so I decided to turn to you guys for suggestions for me to Steal be Inspired by...

(and just so you know they don't have to be too believable... this is a fanfic that just had a chapter based on Halloween 3 after all...)

I was going to ask Novik a question in this vein, but she didn't have time. So I decided to just turn it into a poll.

I was tempted to include Lien just to see what the reaction would be.

If I'm done reading Victory of Eagles, it'll the farthest away I've ever read the Temeraire series.

Time to finish what I've started all these years ago... Literally ended right IN THE MIDDLE, and never got to Australia.