Webcomic / Draconia Chronicles

Draconia Chronicles is a webcomic created and drawn by Danny Valentini, and temporarily written by Donnie Sturges. (although Donnie seems to have been quietly dropped from the billing around the time the comic became colorized, where Danny took full control back). Found here.

The story centers on a centuries-long war between two anthropomorphic races. They are the Dragons of the Dragonlands, led by Queen Oscura, and the Tigers of the Tiger Territories, led by Princess Kiriad. Only the females of the two races are anthropomorphic. The males look like average tigers and standard european-style fantasy dragons.

The story shows the warriors and leaders from both sides of the war. There is clear dissension within the ranks of both races as individuals and factions fight for power and influence. Recent events hint that there might be other races working against both the Dragons and the Tigers and new alliances will need to be formed if both races are to survive.

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Draconia Chronicles provides examples of:

• Action Girl: Nearly every named adult character, with the exception of Ghislain and Roh- the two named male characters.
• Aerith and Bob: We have such names as "Scyde," "Shie," "Eone," and "Xihanil," alongside surprisingly mundane names like "Red," "Mabel," "Raz", "Eleni," and "Elektra" (the last two, while uncommon, aren't outright made up).
• All There in the Manual:
  • The 2002-2005 calendars have a huge amount of backstory, including how Kilani came to raise to Chuki/ Lumina for six years-and indeed how her egg ended up in tiger territory in the first place, Sombrana's exile, the start of Kess and Kilani's feud, and how Kess, Riah, and Shie got captured.
  • There is also yearly calendars released afterward, which explain and introduce new characters before they're added to the comic.
• Alternate Universe: The Christmas and Halloween episodes take place in a parallel reality called "Draconia Lane," which is a Setting Update to modernity; and with peace between dragons and tigers achieved.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Dragons have colors appropriate to their castes. Fire dragons are shades of red, Earth dragons yellow, Water dragons blue, Lightning dragons purple, and Light dragons mostly greens or light-blue variations.
• A Mother to Her Women: Casual racism aside, Lady Red is shown to be very caring and considerate to the Royal Guard, long as it doesn't interfere with her job.
• Amplifier Artifact: One dragon has a gauntlet that enhances her magic. She attempts to use it during a thunderstorm, misses, and drops a mountainside on her head.
• Animated Actors: Shows up in Filler strips every so often.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • Its a story about a war, what do you expect? The volcano eruption in chapter 2 alone has brought the body count well into the hundreds, if not the thousands.
  • Word of God says that none of the characters have Plot Armor, even though some have survived what should have been fatal, several times.
• April Fools' Day:
  • 2013 had Xhianil, Briella, Rula and Niasha auditioning for Rascals, a fellow Katbox comic.
  • It also had Queen Oscura showing up in The Eye of Ramalach.
• Are We Getting This?: In a Valentines Day extra (filler) page, the Animated Actors switch gears and do something "Valentines-ey".
• Artistic License – Biology: Dragons are reptilian, but they have hair, they sweat, and they have boobs (but that's handwaved as hypertrophied pectoral muscles-which are still not strong enough to allow a humanoid to fly, but that's another trope). Also considering typical flight muscles aren't breast-shaped, nor pliable as mammalian breasts are, another trope entirely. According to some of the more risqué strips, they are indeed an erogenous zone, which pectorals aren't.
• Artistic License – Geology: Chapter 2's volcano eruption goes by the dramatic, stereotypical "Strombolian" eruption model (yes, "a fine dusting of flaming rocks and a huge gout of lava" has a name), whereas most "exploding mountain" eruptions go by the "Plinian" model, which produces more hot gas and ash than anything (discounting some debris, which is essentially turned into buckshot by the forces involved), which is what got Pompeii. Realistically, the dragons should have been able to dig a trench long before lava hit city, if it produced enough to do much more than coat one mountainside in liquid basalt. Moreover, all the poison gas and ashes got blown hundreds of miles away, when they would have smothered/buried the city in what's known as a "pyroclastic flow." The tiger lands would have gotten a rain of gravel, if that, rather than an ash fall and a lava bomb (which might have made it two kilometers but certainly not a hundred). Furthermore, lava bombs are about the size of a canteloupe, rather than an office building. Presumably, Draconia (or, at least, the Dragon Kingdom) has gelological conditiond given to creating strombolian eruptions, and extremely light ashes. However, Eone claims that this is the result of the Earth Dragon's patron god Loessa being upset at her people's oppression, so maybe She made it "disaster-movie style" instead of how it usually works.
• Artistic License – Physics: Briella's UV laser spell should have killed Red, not given her a sunburn. UV lasers are *really* powerful. Moreover, UV lasers cause the air to be flash-heated to plasma, which limits their range to "emitter must be touching the target."
• Art Shift: "Enemy" characters are drawn far less attractively. Dragons are shown to have a spear-shaped muzzle from the tiger POV, and tigers are shown to be hulking Phlegmings with big, nasty, sharp, pointy teeth from the dragon POV.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Scyde (Kiriad's Second-In-Command) and Eone (Stand-in leader of the Earth Dragon brood) started out in the calendars as "The tiger off to the side" and "E-1" (short for Earth One).
  • A newer entry being Jitoux, a guard that was just a designation in the background, "G-2".
• Ascended Fangirl: In-Universe, Saph. An earth dragon who absolutely worships Lady Red and is conscripted into her personal squadron.
• Badass Pacifist: Kilani. advocates peace between the races, Friend to All Living Things, master infiltrator and rescuer, and previously Kiriad's top warrior (in the calendars).
• Baths Are Fun:
  • A calendar scene (narrated by Kess) mentions that she, Riah and Shie ended up playing in a hot spring after Sombrana pulled a "Get Back Here!" Boss.
  • Similarly, an early scene features Scyde's group bathing in a hot-spring. Justified in that IRL tigers are one of the few cats that can stand getting wet.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: While the dragons are technically nude all the time, they have no visible nipples (justified that they are reptilian) nor genitalia, which by Word of God and shown in more erotic works, is covered up by a section of skin that can be pushed aside.
• Battle in the Rain: Averts the "no-one ever slips" part. The treacherous footing makes for the occasional turn of the tide. It also overlaps with Mud Wrestling a little. Rain also reduces the lightning dragon's magic attacks to point-blank, effectively shorting them out.
• Bawdy Song: Strip 359. It's apparently the local version of "Roll Me Over In The Clover".
• Big Badass Battle Sequence: Page 18, which shows a pitched battle between tigers and dragons in the borderlands.
• Bilingual Bonus: The spell Gaia casts when fertilizing her egg is written in real life runic. It's a good-will and protection spell.
• Blank White Eyes: Dragons when using powerful magic. Flashbacks also give enemy characters these.
• Break the Cutie: Kilani seems to have become a Death Seeker due to what Kess said to her.
  • One strip shows her preparing to hang herself.
• Burning with Anger:
  • Ennek when finally pushed too far.
  • Literally with Red, when Kess smacks Kilani with a rock while trying to rescue her. This is apparently the fire dragon version of the "Surge". Notably, she burns so hot, it's blue (for context, heat-glow follows a Law of Chromatic Superiority, with blue being hottest).
• Call-Back: A guest strip shows Oscura playing with one of Luminia's dolls and telling her that it'll turn up later. In a later strip, Luminia mentions she still can't find her doll.
• Canon Foreigner: The lightswords have yet to make more than a single cameo in over 400 pages.
• Censor Box: In this case, a patch of mushrooms in one panel, a slug in another. Conveniently placed tails and speech bubbles are another favorite. And, of all things a panel gutter!
• Central Theme: How factions and peoples opposed to one other are more similar than they want to believe. It's emphasized by Chapter 2's main conflict— a volcanic eruption which leads to suffering for the Tigers and Dragons alike, and showing how they each manage the crisis.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Started has a fairly lighthearted High Fantasy adventure comic, but ever since the end of chapter 1, its become progressively more dark, bleak and tragic.
• The Chessmaster: A Fox woman named "Shaleigh" manipulating both sides, on the behalf of a shadowy third side called "the conclave".
• Comfort Food: Riah's favorite food is burnt-outside-raw-inside lamprey. Her sister feeds it to her trying to coax some words out of her post Eye Scream, and she later reveals that's why she actually began speaking again.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Averted. During chapter 2 the volcano near the Dragons' capital city erupts. The Dragons' city is threatened by superheated rocks falling on it and a massive river of lava. Meanwhile the wind currents of the world blow most of the ash and toxic fumes into the Tiger Territories. Fire Dragons, despite knowing elemental magic, are shown being affected by the heat, while not as much as the Earth Dragons.
• Corpse Land: The Khalira/Calera, an ancient battleground inside a cave system, is full of skeletons, both dragon and tiger.
• Crapsack World: The Borderlands seen outside the Dragon Kingdom and Tiger Territories are, with few exceptions, blasted, barren, and lifeless.
• Crapsaccharine World: Both the Dragon Kingdom and the Tiger Territories, to an extent. The Kingdom gives off a Crystal Spires and Togas vibe, but the Queen is of questionable morals and sanity and banished her entire Royal Guard (the Lightning Dragons) and her top adviser (Sombrana) seemingly on a whim. Each Dragon caste is strictly racially segregated, with the Light Dragons on top, and the Earth Dragons on the very bottom. And then a volcano erupts right in the middle of the Kingdom's capitol, killing thousands, and the Queen and her new royal guard are desperately struggling to cover up the worst of the damage. As for the Territories, the inexperience and general naivete of Princess Kiriad has lead to infighting amongst several tribes, and the ash from the aforementioned volcano eruption has destroyed a lot of the Tigers' farmland as well as killing a large percentage of their children and breeding stock.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Gaia is decapitated, despite surrendering, and already having been tortured along the way.
• Cycle of Revenge: One of the things keeping the war going. Kess and Chiara, for example, each have lost their mothers to the war. Kess even points out how pretty much every combatant on both sides has a personal stake in the war at this point.
• Dark Fantasy: Of the "Society is in the toilet, none of the races can get along or see their so-called 'allies' are about to stab them in the back, and there's constant, unceasing warfare, atrocity, and bloodshed, with no potential to Earn Your Happy Ending" sort of dark.
• Dead Girl On Display: Tiger camps have dragon skulls on poles, and their horns as ornamentation. Dragons, in turn, have tiger pelts on their walls, and taxidermy specimens in tubes. The dragon queen's throne also appears to have a number of human-looking skulls on it. (Though could be just tiger skulls having been shaped.)
• Death Glare: Riah fixes Shie with one when she says she has pretty eyes-Riah having lost one.
• Dehumanization: Both sides consider the other one to be horrible monsters that need to be destroyed before they exterminate the other.
• Death of a Child: When poisonous ash from the volcano eruption spreads into the Tiger Territories, the majority of the deaths are children.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: an inverse gender dynamic also inverts Men Are the Expendable Gender, and kids are apparently fair game. there is also no concept of "civilian" or "enemy noncombatant". POW's are only taken to inflict further indignities on them. Getting away from the Rules of Warfare and into cultural norms, Fire Dragons apparently start smoking in school, and nobody minds this (a teacher says "smoke if you got 'em.)
• De-power: Dragon preistesses can ask their Patron to strip a sinner of their magic until she's proved she deserves to have it back. The gods generally comply with this.
• Distinguishing Mark: Most tigers are orange-and-black, of one of two different shades; the royal family, however, are white tigers.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Kiriad's usually too busy having sex with Shaleigh to do much in the way of princessing.
• Dragons Are Demonic: Invoked. Female dragons look very much like succubi, and have two subtypes that are so incrdibly destructive that discriminating against them is seen as good sense (in one case, their Power Incontinence poses a public safety hazard, and in the other, they're walking WMD's). Their flag also sports a pentegram. The males, however, avert the trend, as they left en masse when the War started because they refused to fight or associate with a faction dedicated to performing a xenocide.
• Dropped A Bridge On Her:
  • Gaia. Good lord, Gaia.
  • Raz's pack.
• Elemental Absorption: Dragons are immune to the elements they represent, but within certain restrictions. Fire dragons are immune to both fire and smoke, for example, and chemical fog (sewer gas to be exact) irritates their eyes as well as the next girl's; and lightning dragons zap each other as an affectionate gesture.
• Elemental Powers: The main advantage the Dragons have in the war against the Tigers , besides the fact that they can fly, is that they can use elemental magic.
• Embarrassing First Name: Roh is short for Rose.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Xhianil gets called "Piggy" due to her pink coloration.
• Emotion Suppression: The dragons have a maxim to "Never let your emotions dictate your actions." They don't seem to follow this very closely, with a lot of conflict being because someone (ex. Sombrana, Gaia, Xihanil, Oscura) did their thinking with their heart rather than their brains. The Preistesses take this even further, being outright [[Emotionless Girl]]s as a side-effect of communing with their gods. Meta is so used to this that having her emotions returned drives her to the brink of insanity. That said, when Oscura is able to reign it in, she's able to talk to Kilani face-to-face without immediately killing her.
• Empathy Doll Shot: When the death of Raz and Mabel's entire tribe is callously dismissed, Raz tearfully regards a doll she found.
• The Empire: The dragons.
• Enemy Civil War: Not quite yet, but it's stated that Sombrana will attempt a coup sometime in the future; with Electra's help.
• Ensemble Cast: There's no one protagonist like with say, Two Kinds, just some characters you can point to as "on-camera". The calendars started off with Kess and Khilani, but the comics started with Scyde and Electra, and it rotates between Kess' pack, Red's flock, and the Royal Families of either faction, with an occasional Lower-Deck Episode featuring Electra's brood, Xihanil, Tam'syn, and Ennek's sister and nieces (who feature heavily in the Christmas Episodes.
• Everyone Is Bi: The Ancient Greek version, where members of one's own sex are for sexual comfort, while the opposite sex is for reproduction.
• Extreme Doormat: Kilani makes no attempt to justify her caring for Lumina, instead allowing Kess to both abuse her and destroy her reputation.
• Eye Scream: Riah.
• Facepalm Of Doom: Done by Elektra to Gaia after the latter smokes her over the head with a rock in an attempt to escape.
• Famed In-Story: Red, enough so as to have fangirls (see "running gag" and "hero worship").
• Fantastic Arousal: Tigers are as susceptable to scritchies as any other cat, with a sweet spot right on top of their heads. This is demonstrated by Tam with Roh, and Blue with Kilani.
  <...I once heard that if you scratch a tiger right around here, she'll turn into a big kitten.>
• Fantastic Nuke: Earth magic could end the war in a day by crumbling mountains and summoning valleys, but there'd be nowhere habitable left afterwards. It's implied that this is why the borderlands look like Mordor.
• Fantastic Caste System: The Dragon Kingdom is separated like this. Light Dragons are the nobility (owing to Oscura being one), Fire Dragons are warriors and the Royal Guard, Water Dragons seem to be shopkeepers and fire brigade, and the Earth Dragons are typically artisans and builders who aren't useful to the war so they're counted little better than the tigers, and almost just as bad since Chapter One. However, the positions of the totem pole are kinda fluid. Word of God states that any dragon who learns all disciplines of magic and can whomp the current queen gets to be the next one, earth dragons used to be just as militant as the fire dragons before realizing that With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility, and fire dragons used to have the lowest spot due to Power Incontinence making them a public safety hazard, and they've been proving their worth ever since..
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Inevitable, really. At one point, a Dragon finds it "cute" how Tigers actually have names.
    "It's almost like they think they're people!"
  • And another time, Kess laughs over remembering how Xhianil burst into tears after seeing her girlfriend Flare get killed.
  • Dragons think tigers all look the same.
  • Fire dragons used to have a Jim (Jane?) Crow law against them, making it legal to either throw or keep them out of a public space for no other reason then they're fire dragons.
• Fantastic Slurs: "fleatraps" towards tigers, "scalebacks" towards dragons.
• Feminist Fantasy: Leave out how all the female characters are A) kids or B) Ms. Fanservice, either nudists or prone to casual nudity. They're all Strong Independant Women(TM) in control of their sexualities and Action Girls when they aren't Perfect Pacifist People.
• Fictional Sport: "Fireball".
• Flaming Meteor: Subverted. A volcano erupts and throws out meteor-like chunks of stone. At first, the fire dragons attempt to use their elemental control powers to deflect them, only to discover that they're actually made of rock and they can't really do anything to stop them. Giving the oppressed earth dragons the chance to demonstrate their value.
• Forever War: The two races have been fighting each other for centuries— long enough to have cave paintings of it— and no longer remember the cause of the war. At this point the main reasons for fighting are vengeance and pride.
• Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better: Female tigers are sapient and bipedal; male tigers are not and not.
• Freudian Excuse: Why is Kess such a racist bitch? Because dragons murdered her mother.
• From Bad to Worse: Chapter three, so far, has been nothing but this for all involved. Red of the Dragons, is humiliated and loses a great deal of Oscura's respect due to unintentionally allowing several political prisoners to escape and now has to hunt them back down or face severe consequences, Kilani's connection to Lumina is exposed and she's about two steps away from being forced into exile or worse, and the volcano eruption has been shown to have effectively crippled the Dragon Kingdom, a fact that Oscura is desperately trying (and failing) to cover up.
• Gender-Blender Name: Several male tigers are named after flowers, such as Petunia (Ennek's mate) and Rose (Scyde's brother/Aika's mate).
• Gender Rarity Value: Rare Sex Worshipped variant. Tiger males reside in a peaceful enclave known as "The Sanctuary" where nothing more strenuous than breeding occurs. Dragon males, in turn, are so rare that only the queen can speak to one (among other things), since most of them left.
• Genius Bruiser:
  • According to Shie's bio, she's the tactician of the group, and a fierce fighter.
  • Scyde as well. She seems to be one of the physically stronger of the Tigers seen thus far and proves it during her fight with Elektra. She also seems to be The Strategist of the Tigers.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: Ranges from sisterly affection to barely-censored knobbing.
• Go-Go Enslavement: As show in the calendar series, March-April 2002, when the Tiger Princess Kiriad is captured and enslaved by the Dragon Queen Oscura, she's shown in chains and a bikini with the queen holding her on a leash.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Oscura isn't exactly evil (nobody in the strip except for maybe Shaleigh but that's another story is), but she's shown to be short-sighted, vindictive and an all around pain to work with, perhaps best shown when she cares more about, and thus directs more resources towards capturing a single tiger then she does about the volcano that just wiped out half her kingdom. and she plans to use Princess Lumina, her daughter, as a superweapon when she grows up. Also, the Tiger Princess Kiriad, while not very developed yet, is shown to be viewed as incompetent by a few of the tiger higher ups.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Initially, the Dragons were the ones portrayed villainously, but as the plot goes on both sides are shown to have both their good and bad individuals, and the Tigers themselves start to get some immoral blemishes on their record, such as Kess' horrific treatment of Kilani after learning of her connection to Lumina and Princess Kiriad's scout, Aika casually dismissing the deaths of Mabel's entire tribe because they were "unimportant".
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Gaia's head is thrown at another dragon.
• Groin Attack: Scyde claws Elektra`s inner thighs during their fight scene.
• Harmony Versus Discipline:
  • Tigers are Harmonious, living off the land, in tents, and with a relatively high female-to-male ratio. Dragons are Disciplined, living in a permanent city, segregated by breed-based castes, their population levels are decided based on how useful their magic is in combat, they're trained not to let their emotions dictate their actions, and only one male present. Crosses over with Soldier vs. Warrior as well.
  • Furthermore, the two species share a song. The draconic lyrics are a hymn on the level of Jesus Loves Me, while the tigerish lyrics are a Bawdy Song on the level of Roll Me Over in the Clover.
• Hates Being Touched: Kess has a phobia about being touched on her right shoulder, and violently lashes out when someone-usually the hapless Ennek-does.
• Heel Realization: Kess finally begins to have one on this page, just after Blue willingly helps her and the others with finding Kilani, despite her being a dragon whose own adopted daughter lost her birth mother to a tiger.
  "Are… are we the enemy?"
• Heroic BSoD: Kilani has a major one once she realizes just how badly she's screwed up.
• Hero-Worshipper: A Running Gag has Saph fangirl out when she sees Red.
• Hoist By Her Own Petard: During the fight between Scyde's group and the Lightning Dragons, Circuitae tries to kill Scyde by using her magic gauntlet to cause an avalanche. She ends up crushing herself instead.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: Dragon females can fit in the palm of a male one's hand. Though they reproduce externally, with the female laying an egg and the male fertilizing it afterwards.
• A House Divided: Dragons are extremely fractured in their unity, to the point that Dr. Lucius (a light dragon) won't treat Fuegana (a fire dragon royal guard recruit). The only thing keeping them all from turning on each other is hating the tigers.
• Humanoid Female Animal: See Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism. Especially egregious with the dragons, since they should have a similar body structure to birds, with hugely muscled chests and wee teensy legs. They look more like succubui, horned and winged humanoids who go around with nary a stitch of clothing.
• Hollywood Tactics: Dragons apparently like getting stuck in too much to take advantage of a little thing called "air superiority". All they need to do is stay out of reach and chuck fireballs, thunderbolts, or laser beams down on the tiger's heads and the war'd be over in a week.
• Horned Humanoid: Dragons
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: The Khalira (or Calera), a cave system that is feared by both sides due to a cataclysmic battle having taken place there. Naturally, the caves that Kilani leads the freed prisoners to is the Khalira.
• Improbable Weapon User: Scythes are a favorite among tigers. In an early strip this backfires, one character gets eviscerated with her own jatalang^note  Imagine two scythes stuck together in an "S" pattern.
• Improvised Weapon: a lute is used as a club at one point.
• Jerkass: Kess has been becoming more and more like that, best exemplified when she bitches at Kilani for refusing to murder a child in cold blood.
• Jerkass Realization: Kess finally seems to realize what a bitch she's been to Kilani after the latter's Heroic BSoD.
• Lady Land: Justified, considering the dragon males are altogether absent (having left in protest of the war except for the queen's mate) and tiger males are rarely seen.
• Laser Blade:
  • The Zhirite weapons are said to be able to project lightblades, but this is only hinted at once in a past calendar.
  • One spell Sombrana knows involves making a Hard Light dagger, though unrelated to Zhirite.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: A guest story arc has a dragon rip her own wings off to escape a tiger encampment. She's understandably upset with Sombrana-whom she loved-for leaving her to die. [[note]] Nothing of the sort has happened in canon.
• Limit Break: Dragons can "Surge" when their lives are in danger, however, it takes a lot out of them.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Saph, one of the Earth Dragons Red brings along when she intends to raid the Khalira. She's disappointed when Meta tells them the tigers have since left.
• Loveable Sex Maniacs: The twins Rula and Naisha.
• Lovable Coward: Briella. Although rather justified, considering she's outnumbered 7-1, and only barely escapes with her life.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Kilani in the September-October 2002 calendar uses hers to deflect Red's fire breath.
• Luxury Prison Suite: Oscura has Khilani put up in a penthouse intended for royal visitors, and even had the tiger pelts usually on display put in storage. She has the cooks prepare a large quantity of rare steaks for her Prisoner's Last Meal as well.
• MacGuffin: Two: For the tigers, a powerful Zhirite artifact called the "Zhirite Claw", for the dragons, a device cryptically referred to as the "Obsidian Egg".
• Magick
• Magic Skirt: Averted, there's rather frequent upskirts, and Aika looses her shirt during the first fight scene. In fact, her outfit was created to lampshade how Awesome, but Impractical such clothes are.
• Mama Bear: Deconstructed. Oscura is hellbent on personally punishing Kilani for "kidnapping" her daughter... even to the point that she's willing to waste war resources just to track her down.
• Meaningful Name: While her adoptive mother, Kilani gave Princess Lumina the name "Chuki", which is translated into English as "a gift from my enemy", in the sense of a peace offering as opposed to a White Elephant. Ennek derides it as "a name you choose when you're out of ideas".
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: Completely Inverted. There's been 5 female deaths on-screen, all of which are fairly brutal (in order of appearance: evisceration, Buried Alive, electrocution, decapitation, and being smashed between two rock slabs), approximately 200-1000 off-screen mixed-sex deaths (killed by volcanic eruption), and two on-screen male deaths (asphyxiation).
• Merchandise-Driven: Downplayed, but if you want the whole story, you've got to read the calendars. However, the comic can still be enjoyed very well without them.
• Mood Whiplash: Quite common.
• Monster Is a Mommy: For a given value of "monster", anyways. It fuels a continent-wide Cycle of Revenge. Dragon kills tiger warrior who had kids who murder dragon who had kids and on and on since time immemorial.
• Monster Modesty: Dragons, who have Barbie Doll Anatomy run around stark nude, while tigers, who don't, wear rag garments.
• Morality Pet: Lumina is essentially this to Oscura.
• Mordor: The borderlands are a hardpan desert where absolutely nothing grows. It's implied to be because of Earth-magic being used in a way its patron god doesn't like.
• Motor Mouth: Kess. Dear god, Kess.
• Murderous Thighs: Inverted. Riah's signature move is to grab someone around the head with her thighs and then do a backflip. She hasn't killed anyone with it yet (it would be really easy to accidentally break someone's neck doing that), although she uses it to get Kess out of a sticky situation.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Kilani, after being informed Kess thinks of her as a traitor.
  • Chiara has a flashback to her torturing Riah by ruining her left eye. She nearly has a heart attack. Especially significant since they're on opposite sides of a war fuelled by abject racial hatred.
  • Implied to be the reason Earth dragons are pacifists. Tigers have legends about them throwing mountains around and instantly conjuring canyons underneath towns, but Earth dragons who have any interest in the war are vanishingly rare. In strip 431, Eone tells Red that they're walking WMD's, with all the drawbacks that implies: Mass collateral damage with potential to destroy the entire world.
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Cinder says "Cabbage! Please to be presenting your dandruff!" when trying to say "Kess, bring us to Kilani" in tigerese. She also calls her "Slow, simple!" when trying to ask her to talk slowly.
• My Little Phony: My Little Dracony: Togetherness is Magical, a non-canon (or hinted at in-canon) series, which is immensely popular despite being intended for dragonlings; so much so that it's implied that even P.O.W.'s are allowed to watch it. (although it's stated to be anti-tiger propaganda rather than a 30-minute toy commercial)-and they like it too!
• Never My Fault: Oh no, Rula, sexually harrassing Ennek for two days straight had nothing to do with her trying to strangle you, clearly there's something wrong with her.
• Nipple and Dimed: Although a teensy portion of areola can be seen on occasion, and uncensored versions of strips are available on FurAffinity, DeviantArt, and Paytreon.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: The Dragons "breasts". Word of God labels them as "flight muscles". Though several art pieces have said otherwise, however they are non-canon and purely commissioners request. Even though they are pliable and grow with age, guess that's just another trope.
• Noodle Incident: Its still unclear what exactly the Lightning Dragons and Sombrana did to make Oscura boot them out of the Kingdom's capitol, though both Briella and Red have referred to it as "The Incident". Most likely being drunk and breaking into Red's room after dark.
• No Such Thing as Alien Pop Culture: The dragons have TV shows and action figures to go along with a system of codified historical records and laws. Tigers play it straight, only having historical ballads.
• Odd-Shaped Panel: It may be easier to list the pages that don't have this...
• Offscreen Teleportation:
  • Shaleigh takes this to an art form, able to go from Oscura's castle to Kiriad's campsite in the same hour-it's a several days journey on foot from either capital to the valley that forms the border.
  • One strip shows her disappearing into a shadow on the wall.
• Only Sane Woman: Cinder and Meta on the Dragon side, Kilani on the Tiger side.
• Off with His Head!: How Gaia is killed. Complete with a jarring Splash of Color.
• Oh, My Gods!
• One-Gender Race: Only one male Dragon has been seen so far.
• Our Dragons Are Different: the males look like western dragons and the females look more humanoid; with paws for hindmost extremities.
• Our Nudity Is Different: Dragons don't have overt sexual characteristics, and the closest they get to clothing is tattoos or a beadwork collar/choker. Justified, since as cold-blooded creatures they'd want to maximize their surface area in contact with sunlight.
• Panty Fighter: Tigers wear Sarashi or bikini tops and loincloths when they wear anything at all, and dragons are outright naturists (mostly, see above). According to Word of God, the tiger's "clothing" is actually for utility, rather than modesty; rather like wearing combat webbing and nothing else.
• Pardon My Klingon:
  • "Spawn of a dritch" is a popular one...
  • "We're scaled" is used in the same context as "we're screwed".
  • Rather jarringly; "whore" goes unchanged.
• People Jars: The dragon city control room has a tiger male and female in a pair of jars.
• Population Control: Queen Oscura controls access to the "elixir" used to fertilize eggs. Attempting to steal some and have a child without permission is punishable by exile, and subsequent death
• Posthumous Character: Flare.
• Power Nullifier: Zhirite is a metal that the Tigers mine and that some of their weapons are forged from. It negates the Dragons magical abilities, and physically weakens them, though it is only effective at close range.
• Perfect Pacifist People: Earth Dragons are an entirely pacifist race, minus a few dissenters. Strip 431 states that this is because Earth magic is a Fantastic Nuke-with all the attendant drawbacks that implies-if abused.
• Privileged Rival: Subverted (Fantastic Caste System / SJW Speak nonsense nonwithstanding). Eone thinks that fire dragons are extremely privileged, and this is part of what leads to her grinding gears with Red. Red reveals that up until quite recently, it was legal to have fire dragons thrown out of any establishment for any reason (including none) on grounds of "public safety."
• Pyrrhic Victory: It's not quite clear who won the Battle of the Khalira; as there seems to be roughly an equal number of dragon and tiger skeletons. Both sides are scared shitless of the place, going so far to say it's cursed and/or haunted.
• The Quiet One: Shie and her sister Riah. Shie can be heard neurotically mumbling "stop it" whenever Kess yells at Kilani, but is otherwise pretty quiet. Riah has said all of one word throughout the entire Khalira story arc, although she recently began talking again.
• Raised by Orcs: Princess Lumina was raised by Kilani for four years. In fact, her Tiger name, "Chuki", means "Gift from my enemy." Fits the "raised by a rival species whose maternal instincts were showing" part; although Kilani had her best interests in mind.
• Really 700 Years Old:
  • After reaching adulthood at 18, Dragons age four times slower, therefore making the oldest dragons to be well over one hundred human years old.
  • Disputed by Word of God.
• Redemption Quest: Chapter 1 has Oscura instructing Elektra to both escort Gaia to her exile and recover an artifact, promising to lift the exile on the Lightning Dragons (of which Elektra is the leader of) if she succeeds. A run in and subsequent fight with Scyde and her team causes Elektra to fail both objectives.
• The Resenter:
  • Briella really dislikes how Sombrana was exiled and that "the elegant and intelligent Light Dragons" have been replaced by "the brutish Fire Dragons" as the Queen's main advisors.
  • On the Tiger side, quite a few people, Mabel in particular, don't consider Kiriad a "true" leader due to her inexperience and indecisiveness, and instead look to Scyde (the closest woman the Tigers have to a military leader) for leadership.
• Resistant to Magic: Dragons come in a quintet of subtypes; fire, water, earth, lightning, and light. They're completely immune to their element, both generated by their people, and natural sources, to the point that mother and child will cast cantrips in each other playfully.
  • They're also immune to things in their element. For example, it's said that Water Dragons are immune to water pressure as well as extreme temperatures in deep oceans. Or, Fire Dragons using a lava pool like a hot-tub.
• The Reveal: The dragons could simply wipe the tigers out if they really wanted to, but if they did, they'd be without an external enemy to vent their racial tensions on.
• Running Gag:
  • Rula, Naisha, and Kenzi teasing Ennek for being touchy about sex (then we get her backstory and it stops being funny).
  • Saph squeeing over Lady Red.
• Sanity Slippage: Queen Oscura after her daughter's egg went missing.
  • Briella, following her ordeal in the Khalira.
• Schizo Tech: Dragons apparently have TV (Non-Canon) — complete with expies of Hello Kitty and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, whilst tigers are still at the "Metal is feakin' sweet!" stage.
• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: Mabel makes an art form out of this.
• Sexy Dimorphism: While the Dragons and Tigers females that are most prominently featured are anthropomorphic and look like curvy women, the males of their respective races are actual full feral formed Dragons and Tigers.
• Shout-Out:
  • To Star Wars: A New Hope, and others, throughout.
  Kess: This is some rescue
  Kilani: Maybe you'd like to get back in your cell?
  • Rula and Naisha reminisce over the MLP:FIM episode The Best Night Ever, specifically the "You're... going... to LOVE ME!!!!!" scene.
  • Briella has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad... nightmare here.
  • Xihanil doesn't know what Shwarma is, but the Royal Guard wants to try it.
  • Rula's had it with "these tiger-fuckin' dragons in this tiger-fuckin' cave."
  • Riah has no trouble helping Shie up, because "She's not heavy, she's my sister," a reference to the Kelly Gordon song "He Ain't Heavy, he's my Brother."
• Sinister Scythe: As stated before, a favorite among tigers.
• Speech Impediment: Kenzi has a lisp, due to breaking a tooth.
• Tiger Versus Dragon
• Tragic Keepsake: Raz' doll.
• Trespassing to Talk: In Xihanil's backstory, Red warned her that she was leery of taking Elektra's recommendation because she'd broken into Red's house at two in the morning to deliver it.
• Trophy Room: Lady Red maintains a Trophy Room with such things as "Perfect Attendance" and "Spelling Bee, Second Place," to the confusion of a certain Stalker with a Crush. Due to how her caste of dragon is treated, she's had to work twice as hard as everyone else for half the recognition. She's earned her title after a century of hard work and is damn proud of it.
• The Unintelligible: Tiger males communicate in grunts and snarls. The females can understand them, the readers can't.
• Webcomic Time: IRL timespan is twelve years. In-universe timespan? About a week, or less, as of page 400
• Winged Humanoid: The Dragon Females
• Woman Scorned: The reason for Ennek's sexual hang-ups.
• Worthy Opponent: According to RazorFox, Scyde and Elektra consider each other this.
• Wrestler in All of Us: Shie, Ennek and Riah.
• Your Favorite: Shie brings Riah a lamprey, cooked burnt-outside-raw-inside in an attempt to coax some words out of her.
• Zerg Rush: Tigers outnumber dragons 2-1, at least. Especially after Chapter 2.

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