The Lost Heir

An element of the Wings of Fire world building is that each dragon tribe has its own distinct culture: SkyWings prize strength and fighting ability; MudWings organize themselves into sibling troops; and NightWings seem to value appearing mysterious, aloof, and somewhat superior to the other tribes based on their supposed neutrality in the war. However, the dragonets of destiny have been isolated from these enculturation influences, making intrinsic culture versus belonging another key theme, especially in The Lost Heir. This theme interrogates whether identity is inherited or earned and what happens when someone tries to claim belonging without shared history.

An aquatic tribe, the SeaWings use their marine home to their fullest advantage, constructing a deep-sea palace for their own tribal use; the surface-level Summer Palace is reserved for non-SeaWing guests. They also utilize the ocean currents for travel, thus ensuring that swimming is of equal importance to flying, and they developed Aquatic, an underwater language that incorporates literal body language, such as gestures and their fluorescent scales. While many elements of SeaWing culture do depend on the SeaWings’ specific inherent genetic characteristics, the symbolism and significance given to these characteristics must be taught, thus linking cultural knowledge with a sense of tribal belonging, to the point that this cultural knowledge may seem intrinsic to the in-group members of the SeaWing community. This creates an invisible but powerful barrier between those raised inside the culture and those—like Tsunami—raised outside of it.

However, Tsunami proves that this is not the case, and her struggle to find belonging in this cultural experience contributes to her character growth. Tsunami isn’t entirely ignorant of SeaWing history and customs, but much of what she learned was a selective, not exhaustive, education. She is aware of her physical attributes, such as her gills, which allow her to breathe underwater, and her ability to fluoresce at will, but, like her affinity for water and preference for raw fish, these skills are superficial. Thus, though she might look like a SeaWing, she struggles to assimilate into the SeaWing kingdom. Her attempts to bridge this gap often lead to painful moments of exclusion, such as her inability to follow court conversation in Aquatic or her public missteps in palace life.

While she is eventually acknowledged as Queen Coral’s daughter—mostly thanks to genetics—Tsunami never truly becomes the SeaWing princess she initially dreamed of becoming. She stumbles through court etiquette, struggles with the ocean currents, and refuses to accept Coral’s delusions. Worst of all, she doesn’t know Aquatic, the gaffe that most constantly (and often embarrassingly) outs her as not “one of them” (34-35). While Tsunami does her best to assimilate, she is rarely given the tools she needs to do so. Many SeaWings act as if she should intrinsically know the culture taught to them as hatchlings: Whirlpool, assigned to tutor Tsunami in Aquatic, merely has her copy his fluorescent patterns rotely without any explanation or context, saying that his method will have her fluent “in about five years” (125). In this way, he, too, demonstrates the mistaken belief that Tsunami should know all this from her hatching day, when in fact Webs chose not to teach her, thus separating her from her heritage. Tsunami’s frustration is compounded by the fact that her failure is perceived as a personal flaw rather than a reflection of systemic neglect and isolation.

It is only when Tsunami accepts the ways in which she doesn’t belong that she finds what she seeks. Much like the theme of Adoptive Family Versus Birth Family, by accepting her identity as an outsider, Tsunami grows and strengthens herself more. In rejecting Whirlpool, the royal tutor, and advocating for herself to learn Aquatic properly, she gets a better, if abbreviated, education from Riptide, a fellow outsider. Tsunami also puts her unconventional knowledge to good use—borrowing Sunny and Glory’s fighting strategies when ambushed by a would-be assassin. She also uses Sunny’s intrinsic body heat as an incubator and depends on Starflight’s bookish knowledge to break out of prison. By embracing her intrinsic ignorance of SeaWing culture, Tsunami instead finds where she truly belongs—not on the SeaWing throne but with the dragonets of destiny.