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Lazy Scales Review: book 1-6
2 years ago
Lazy Scales Review 1-6
I was a bad dog and went on a book binge the last couple of days. This review is going to take place over 3 audiobooks and 3 kindle editions, so some points I might bring up may be wrong because I misheard them, and I DO NOT have the time to go re-listen to them, but I need to get some thoughts out of my heard and this is going to be the best way to do it. This will have spoilers.
Lazy Scales book 1.
This is a classic version of the “I’m a kid who suddenly turned into ___! Oh no!”
It’s a little more graphic than you’d expect, it’s a young adult book, but it has some pretty detailed hard vore scenes I didn’t expect. Like when he eats a human just after he first transforms. They make sense from a plot perspective, and they’re nothing worse than you’d see in a PG-13 movie.
There’s also a really graphic skin-ripping transformation scene, which leaves enough DNA evidence for them to think Lewis, the main character, is dead. It’s the only violent transformation scene in the 6 books I read, oddly.
There’s some great character interaction, and I really love the spirit of the last dragon who lived, Lasthope (said as: Last Hope). Lewis/Lazyscales has some great conversations with him, especially in audiobook form, and he jokingly refers to him as “ghost dad” occasionally, since it’s the spell Lasthope last cast with his dying breath as dragon slayers killed him that randomly transformed him.
Book 2: Idle Claws
Lewis/Lazyscales is having some hard time adjusting, getting food as an untrained dragon hiding in the mountains who can’t fly is not an easy feat. Lasthope is trying to teach him, but Lewis is someone who has always had their head in the clouds and that didn’t change as a dragon. Lasthope can be kind of an ass at times, but I kind of understand why. If he wants Dragons to continue, Lewis is his one and only hope of doing so. Just like he was the Lasthope before him. The old dragon has generations of trauma to deal with, and being dead does not help with that.
I liked this one, it had a lot of good character building, and introduced a great villain with the Dragon Slayers.
To TL;DR it, he goes on a very public rampage, eats the immortal dragon slayer who tried to kill him and kidnapped his friends. The cops the cops want to kill him, but the mayor steps in and makes a deal with him to allow him to live. He just has to agrees to raise money for the town to fix the damage he’s caused. And also, doesn’t kill anymore (tasty) humans, and wears a shock collar to keep him on his mountain. He agrees, and that leads to book 3.
Book 3: Dull Teeth
He's been able to get close with most of his human friends again, Becca and her girlfriend Lucy most of all. He’s figured out that if he adds them to his “horde” it allows his nose to ignore their scent and not think about how good they’d taste.
Both the town and Lewis know that the more fed he is, the less chance there is for him to go on a hunger fueled rampage through the streets. They start stuffing him full. He actually starts to get a little fat and has a hard time flying.
This book sets up more of the magic in the world, and leads to a big climatic battle scene where he fights the old witch who has been trying to kill off every dragon on earth to bring back the Fea, since like in True Blood for vampires, they’re SUPER DELICIOUS to dragons. And if dragons are still around, then she can’t bring them back without fear they’ll be hunted down.
In this one you find out that the reason Lasthope’s spell targeted him. There’s some plot reasons stuff, but to TL;DR it: The old Crone is the last of the immortal fea and Lewis was her great grandson, and as it turns out, Becca is her granddaughter birthed by one of the daughters the immortal human dragon slayer gave her over the centuries. So Lewis had a buttload of magical potential, so the spell latched onto him like a lightning rod.
But the major thrust of the books is a coming out story. He’s an anxious teen who wants to let his parents know he’s still alive, but he’s afraid they’ll call him the M-word (monster) or worse, that he’ll accidentally hurt them, or maybe eat them. But Becca can see it’s tearing her friend apart, just like it had been when she’d been struggling with being bisexual. More so since he knows his parents think he’s dead, and he knows that’s hurting them. He can’t decide if them thinking off he’s dead is better than them knowing he’s a dragon. In the end, he decides to come out of the cave.
Book 4: Broken Horns
In the last battle, Lucy fainted, and started to show the same signs that Lewis had when he first started to transform. She’s rushed to the same hospital he was, but her transformation takes longer. Everyone is confused about what’s going on, and why there are two dragons now. Lasthope is thrilled, but they have no idea why she changed, since she had no Fea blood in her. They come to find out that Lasthope’s spell tried to target Becca, but because she was hugging Lucy at the time, the spell basically grounded through Becca and into her.
The witch reappears to beg for help, because she’s found out Lasthope’s spell never had an end worked into it. With each new dragon it creates, the more energy it has to pull from, and the faster it can trigger again, and again, and soon everyone on earth will become a dragon. Starting with the part Fea descendants she'd hoped to elevate to full Fea in a few generations. She can feel their connections getting snapped one by one, and after her fight with Lewis, she only has enough power left to protect Becca from the spell’s effects. With each minute they wait, the worse it will get.
The book has a lot of great tension in it, and I loved most of the character interactions. But Lasthope, who seemed to be growing more attached to Lewis/Lazyscales, gets mad they’re trying to stop his spell, this is better than he ever dreamed. He tells them he won’t help them stop the spell, but he won’t try and stop them later. This is understandable, it is sort of the undoing the last work of his life, and is against his plans.
Skipping a lot, this leads to another gran battle in Lasthope’s former home, where the spell is etched into the rocks of the cave and the last library of ancient dragon knowledge is stored. Prior, Lasthope had tried to talk Lewis out of destroying the spell, wanting the world to be filled with dragons, consequences of having 8 billion meat eating dragons destroying the environment be dammed.
When Lewis, his friends, and The Crone try to stop the spell, Lasthope jumps in and does something to Lewis he said he would never do. He reaches in and pulls out the human parts of Lewis’s soul and memories that were attached. The dragon is left confused, thinking that he’s only ever been a dragon and that Lasthope was his actual father, since the last two months are all that he can remember. He attacks his friends, and almost stops them, until Becca breaks the protection spell, letting Lasthope’s spell target her, and become a dragon to stop him. She manages, but when she does, the broken spell severs Lasthope’s connection to the mortal world, and he fades to the after life, accidentally dragging Lewis with him.
There’s a very tender scene where Lasthope apologizes for what he did to Lewis/Lazyscales. During this, Lewis’s soul keeps flickering between human and dragon shapes as they walk across the dragon version of the rainbow bridge. The young lad forgives the old dragon, and when they cross the bridge, Lasthope finds his parents. You watch as the years fade off of him, and he becomes around Lewis’s age, the same age he was when his father died, and he was left alone for the next few centuries to try and rebuild the dragon world by himself. There’s some more touching dialog, and the ancient dragons from the afterlife give Lewis/Lazyscales the language knowledge to read all the ancient books in Lasthope’s library.
The problem is, Lewis’s form keeps flickering between his human self and his dragon self. As he goes to fly out of the afterlife, his soul rends. The human bits fall down into the abyss, while the dragon parts manage to ascend back into his body.
When Lazyscales wakes up, he can’t remember ever being human, and he thinks he’s always been a dragon.
Book 5: Kindled Flames
This is the main reason I’m writing this. Because there’s something that’s been nagging at me ever since I read it, and the more I think about it, the more it begins to make sense, but I have no way to prove it.
Two new characters are introduced, Rocktooth and Aroura. Rocktooth is a famous rockstar who became a dragon, but Aroura is the one I want to talk about.
From the way her entire character reads, it feels like she was supposed to have been trans, before she became a dragon, but it was scrapped and re-written. When she’s introduced, her parents are having this massive fight, and a line of dialog reads something along the lines of “if you hadn’t coddled him so much”, I think in any other series I wouldn’t have paid attention to that, but considering how queer this book is, that gave me pause. This could have been about her brother, but there was an entire book that was basically a coming out story, so I don’t think that they were talking about her is that farfetched.
There’s also the way she thinks and talks in those first few paragraphs when you see her when she’s still human. She mentions some things like they were new in her life. She wants to run away, because of how abusive her folks are, and she even gets ready to do it, packs a bag and goes to leave. The way she acts though, it feels like there’s a layer under there, like there’s more of a reason to leave than just how shit her parents are. She has this conversation with her young brother, who is around 8, he asks her if she’s going to leave and if so why, she deflects and says something along the lines of “I’ll tell you when you’re older”. Which is another weird reaction.
If she was just running away because her parents were abusive assholes, surely, he would know why. It seems odd she doesn’t want to tell him the reason. Maybe she’s trying to protect him, but it just feels like there’s more. There’s a weight to it.
Later, when she’s brought to the dragon preserve after she transforms, her parents bring her in a horse trailer that’s way too small. Lazyscales can tell she’s in there before he can ever see her, and when she confronts her parents, he's like:
“How could you do this to her?”
The mom seems confused at that. She’s confused about how he can tell Aurora is a girl dragon without seeing her. Lazyscales says it’s the smell, but this is the one and only time this is used to figure out a dragon’s sex. Every other time, it’s been based on their horns and size.
2 horns and smaller = female
4 horns + bigger = male.
It almost feels like it was added in so we KNEW this dragon was a female now. The dialog also seems to go out of it’s way to use pronouns, almost like there was an original version where her parents were constantly misgendering her during the whole conversation. Lazyscales eventually rips the horse trailer apart to get her out, and he has to help her back up the mountain because she’s half starved.
She’s introduced to the others, and she almost feels surprised that they’re being so nice to her, and know she’s a girl. They even show her to the female side of the cavern and let her know that’s where she’ll stay for the time being, and she seems shocked that she would be sleeping on that side of the cave. She sputters out some dialog about it’ll feel like getting to go to college, and stay in the dorms. But the way it’s said feels like it was altered after the fact.
Later there’s a scene where they’re picking their dragon names, which are just basically a mashup of two words. The rockstar picks Rocktooth, and Lucy and Becca had long since picked Rosethron and Moonshadow as theirs.
However, Aroura keeps her name, mentioning, “Oh, it’s not my birth name, and I’ve used it for a while.” Which is another one of those, “wait a minute…” kind of flags. From the way Lazyscales and Aroura are starting to act now, it’s clear that both are starting to get a crush on each other.
Some more plot happens, and Rocktooth convinces them to let him hold a concert to raise money for the dragon preserve, since he is one now, and even though he plans on leaving after he’s learned how to be a dragon, he still wants to help.
This leads to some very interesting conversations between Rocktooth, Lazyscales, and Rocktooth’s manager, Shannon.
Shannon knows Rocktooth wants to go by that name, and not his original, but she keeps deadnaming him, and Lazyscales and Rocktooth seem upset about it. They don’t make a big deal about it at the time, but later they have this exact exchange:
==
“Your Shannon human does not seem to respect your newly chosen name,” Lazyscales pointed out as they plodded side by side up the mountain trail back towards the caves. His claws squished into the mud, and while he didn’t mind it, he could see Rocktooth wincing every few steps.
“It’s just force of habit. I’m sure she’ll come around soon enough,” Rocktooth said with a shrug. “She’s known me for years. It only makes sense there would be an adjustment period.”
Lazyscales shrugged. “Respecting one’s chosen name versus their assigned name seems simple enough to me.”
==
And it’s like… that is a trans allegory flag waving so high it puts those 50 foot American flags that car dealerships have to shame.
This one is big enough to block out the sun.
For the rest of the series Aurora can tell she really likes Lazyscales, but it seems her past abuse holds her back. But the way she does it, makes her feel like she’s worried that he’ll not love her once he knows the real her and that no one could love someone like her. There’s also a scene where she asks if there were any gay dragons, and Lazyscales is like, yeah of course, Moonshadow and Lucy are a couple and with such long lived creatures, it would be weird to not be more heteroflexible. This could also be for some other character reasons later on, but I’m not so sure.
There’s also some interesting talks about sexual dimorphism in this. They mention it’s supposed to be hard to tell that a dragon is male or female other than the horns, there are other ways to do it which are way harder, but Lazyscales tagged Aroura through her smell. Something that should be easier than even sight, so that smell comment makes even less sense now. Like it was tacked on after the fact, and they forgot to change the parts later in the book. And all the dragons are fairly young as dragons go, so sex isn’t the only thing on their mind like horny teenagers. At one point, one of the male dragons even asks if they have balls. He looks between his legs, but his question is left unanswered. It’s like it was a segway to about the internal workings of dragons, because everything points to everything sexual being internal.
So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Aroura didn’t >know< she was biologically female to match the gender she’d always felt, until she met Lazyscales the first time. And she was transformed with magic, and if your soul remains, I see no reason a MtF transition is out of the question.
The end of the book is where things kind of start to break down. Rocktooth goes on a rampage during the concert, because he’d been so busy he forgot to eat. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because he’d been a dragon for a while before coming to the dragon preserve, and by then he and his manager should KNOW that him not having eaten is a dangerous thing. There should have been an entire pig dropped at his feet the day before as a precaution.
It almost feels like there was another way it was supposed to end, but it changed at the last second. When Rocktooth first starts singing in a rehearsal, it triggers familiar memories for Rocktooth, and it makes him feel good. But, if everything that was human should have been left in the abyss, that shouldn’t have happened. At one point, the Crone even explained that Lazyscales and Lewis’s souls could merge back together on their own with time, but that thread feels like it got dropped. Through this, Lazyscales starts having headaches.
Book 6: Beating Wings
Lazyscales is sadly no longer pudgy. He also gets violently ill from having a missing portion of his soul.
This is probably my least favorite of all the books. I liked the decent into hell/the afterlife to rescue Lewis’s soul, it was fun.
I also really loved when Lasthope takes Lazyscale’s soul to the dragon afterlife for safe keeping.
More when you see how Lazyscales becomes aware of this when he hatches from a dragon egg, and he turns out to be the most adorable little hatchling ever. Lasthope greets him, the dragon still looking much younger than Lazyscales ever saw him. His dragon dad explains that the afterlife is a place for souls to heal, and the younger you look, the more your soul needs to heal and growl. That’s why he and Lazyscales look so young.
They have a lot of very cute interactions, and he gets to meet his dragon grandparents.
During this whole thing, everyone keeps telling Lazyscales that he is Lewis, and even if they manage to merge their souls back together, he’ll still be Lazyscales just as he is Lewis. Lazyscales doesn’t like it, but he knows he’ll die if he doesn’t go back to the world above and there will be no one to help the new dragons. He’s scared and worried about this, and you can tell the thought hurts him so much.
Lewis gets rescued, and they convince Lazyscales to merge back with him. But from the start… it’s clear Lewis is the one who is fully in control. It isn’t a merging of his personalities and from the lessons he’s learned, he’s still just that human boy in a dragon’s body. Lazyscales guides him for a bit, but it sort of feels like he just fades away. There’s a coup subplot for the last 20% of the book that I don’t want to get into, but it was dragons + American capitalism = bad (which I 100% agree with).
Lazyscales gets one last speech, getting to be the dragon I’d sort of come to really like over the last two books, before he just sort of defaults back to Lewis, who has no character growth from the experience. There’s a rushed epilog that explains the after events of the coup and the dragons going off to populate other areas in the world, and in that, it even says Lewis no longer goes by Lazyscales at all. Which is his chosen name, and he’s right to do whatever, but the way it’s written, it sort of feels like Lazyscales died. The parts of himself didn’t come together, just one part was eaten by the other, and he’d been forgotten.
He did pick Lazyscales sort of at random, originally it was something Lasthope kept saying to describe him. Because he was a Lazydragon, so I can see why he wouldn’t have a big connection to that name, but Lazyscales liked it because it was what his ghost dad liked. I feel like it would have been more realistic after the re-merge to go by L-scales or maybe Lewscale, to show that he had changed a bit. But he was still two parts that now made a whole.
The series was interesting, and the writer was very good at keeping you hooked. I read all 6 of these books in 3 days. My eyeballs still kind of hurt. There’s another series of books after these that focus on Becca, but I’m going to skip those for now, I kind of burned myself out. Plus, I need some time to process what happened to Lazyscales.
3.7 out of 5.
I was a bad dog and went on a book binge the last couple of days. This review is going to take place over 3 audiobooks and 3 kindle editions, so some points I might bring up may be wrong because I misheard them, and I DO NOT have the time to go re-listen to them, but I need to get some thoughts out of my heard and this is going to be the best way to do it. This will have spoilers.
Lazy Scales book 1.
This is a classic version of the “I’m a kid who suddenly turned into ___! Oh no!”
It’s a little more graphic than you’d expect, it’s a young adult book, but it has some pretty detailed hard vore scenes I didn’t expect. Like when he eats a human just after he first transforms. They make sense from a plot perspective, and they’re nothing worse than you’d see in a PG-13 movie.
There’s also a really graphic skin-ripping transformation scene, which leaves enough DNA evidence for them to think Lewis, the main character, is dead. It’s the only violent transformation scene in the 6 books I read, oddly.
There’s some great character interaction, and I really love the spirit of the last dragon who lived, Lasthope (said as: Last Hope). Lewis/Lazyscales has some great conversations with him, especially in audiobook form, and he jokingly refers to him as “ghost dad” occasionally, since it’s the spell Lasthope last cast with his dying breath as dragon slayers killed him that randomly transformed him.
Book 2: Idle Claws
Lewis/Lazyscales is having some hard time adjusting, getting food as an untrained dragon hiding in the mountains who can’t fly is not an easy feat. Lasthope is trying to teach him, but Lewis is someone who has always had their head in the clouds and that didn’t change as a dragon. Lasthope can be kind of an ass at times, but I kind of understand why. If he wants Dragons to continue, Lewis is his one and only hope of doing so. Just like he was the Lasthope before him. The old dragon has generations of trauma to deal with, and being dead does not help with that.
I liked this one, it had a lot of good character building, and introduced a great villain with the Dragon Slayers.
To TL;DR it, he goes on a very public rampage, eats the immortal dragon slayer who tried to kill him and kidnapped his friends. The cops the cops want to kill him, but the mayor steps in and makes a deal with him to allow him to live. He just has to agrees to raise money for the town to fix the damage he’s caused. And also, doesn’t kill anymore (tasty) humans, and wears a shock collar to keep him on his mountain. He agrees, and that leads to book 3.
Book 3: Dull Teeth
He's been able to get close with most of his human friends again, Becca and her girlfriend Lucy most of all. He’s figured out that if he adds them to his “horde” it allows his nose to ignore their scent and not think about how good they’d taste.
Both the town and Lewis know that the more fed he is, the less chance there is for him to go on a hunger fueled rampage through the streets. They start stuffing him full. He actually starts to get a little fat and has a hard time flying.
This book sets up more of the magic in the world, and leads to a big climatic battle scene where he fights the old witch who has been trying to kill off every dragon on earth to bring back the Fea, since like in True Blood for vampires, they’re SUPER DELICIOUS to dragons. And if dragons are still around, then she can’t bring them back without fear they’ll be hunted down.
In this one you find out that the reason Lasthope’s spell targeted him. There’s some plot reasons stuff, but to TL;DR it: The old Crone is the last of the immortal fea and Lewis was her great grandson, and as it turns out, Becca is her granddaughter birthed by one of the daughters the immortal human dragon slayer gave her over the centuries. So Lewis had a buttload of magical potential, so the spell latched onto him like a lightning rod.
But the major thrust of the books is a coming out story. He’s an anxious teen who wants to let his parents know he’s still alive, but he’s afraid they’ll call him the M-word (monster) or worse, that he’ll accidentally hurt them, or maybe eat them. But Becca can see it’s tearing her friend apart, just like it had been when she’d been struggling with being bisexual. More so since he knows his parents think he’s dead, and he knows that’s hurting them. He can’t decide if them thinking off he’s dead is better than them knowing he’s a dragon. In the end, he decides to come out of the cave.
Book 4: Broken Horns
In the last battle, Lucy fainted, and started to show the same signs that Lewis had when he first started to transform. She’s rushed to the same hospital he was, but her transformation takes longer. Everyone is confused about what’s going on, and why there are two dragons now. Lasthope is thrilled, but they have no idea why she changed, since she had no Fea blood in her. They come to find out that Lasthope’s spell tried to target Becca, but because she was hugging Lucy at the time, the spell basically grounded through Becca and into her.
The witch reappears to beg for help, because she’s found out Lasthope’s spell never had an end worked into it. With each new dragon it creates, the more energy it has to pull from, and the faster it can trigger again, and again, and soon everyone on earth will become a dragon. Starting with the part Fea descendants she'd hoped to elevate to full Fea in a few generations. She can feel their connections getting snapped one by one, and after her fight with Lewis, she only has enough power left to protect Becca from the spell’s effects. With each minute they wait, the worse it will get.
The book has a lot of great tension in it, and I loved most of the character interactions. But Lasthope, who seemed to be growing more attached to Lewis/Lazyscales, gets mad they’re trying to stop his spell, this is better than he ever dreamed. He tells them he won’t help them stop the spell, but he won’t try and stop them later. This is understandable, it is sort of the undoing the last work of his life, and is against his plans.
Skipping a lot, this leads to another gran battle in Lasthope’s former home, where the spell is etched into the rocks of the cave and the last library of ancient dragon knowledge is stored. Prior, Lasthope had tried to talk Lewis out of destroying the spell, wanting the world to be filled with dragons, consequences of having 8 billion meat eating dragons destroying the environment be dammed.
When Lewis, his friends, and The Crone try to stop the spell, Lasthope jumps in and does something to Lewis he said he would never do. He reaches in and pulls out the human parts of Lewis’s soul and memories that were attached. The dragon is left confused, thinking that he’s only ever been a dragon and that Lasthope was his actual father, since the last two months are all that he can remember. He attacks his friends, and almost stops them, until Becca breaks the protection spell, letting Lasthope’s spell target her, and become a dragon to stop him. She manages, but when she does, the broken spell severs Lasthope’s connection to the mortal world, and he fades to the after life, accidentally dragging Lewis with him.
There’s a very tender scene where Lasthope apologizes for what he did to Lewis/Lazyscales. During this, Lewis’s soul keeps flickering between human and dragon shapes as they walk across the dragon version of the rainbow bridge. The young lad forgives the old dragon, and when they cross the bridge, Lasthope finds his parents. You watch as the years fade off of him, and he becomes around Lewis’s age, the same age he was when his father died, and he was left alone for the next few centuries to try and rebuild the dragon world by himself. There’s some more touching dialog, and the ancient dragons from the afterlife give Lewis/Lazyscales the language knowledge to read all the ancient books in Lasthope’s library.
The problem is, Lewis’s form keeps flickering between his human self and his dragon self. As he goes to fly out of the afterlife, his soul rends. The human bits fall down into the abyss, while the dragon parts manage to ascend back into his body.
When Lazyscales wakes up, he can’t remember ever being human, and he thinks he’s always been a dragon.
Book 5: Kindled Flames
This is the main reason I’m writing this. Because there’s something that’s been nagging at me ever since I read it, and the more I think about it, the more it begins to make sense, but I have no way to prove it.
Two new characters are introduced, Rocktooth and Aroura. Rocktooth is a famous rockstar who became a dragon, but Aroura is the one I want to talk about.
From the way her entire character reads, it feels like she was supposed to have been trans, before she became a dragon, but it was scrapped and re-written. When she’s introduced, her parents are having this massive fight, and a line of dialog reads something along the lines of “if you hadn’t coddled him so much”, I think in any other series I wouldn’t have paid attention to that, but considering how queer this book is, that gave me pause. This could have been about her brother, but there was an entire book that was basically a coming out story, so I don’t think that they were talking about her is that farfetched.
There’s also the way she thinks and talks in those first few paragraphs when you see her when she’s still human. She mentions some things like they were new in her life. She wants to run away, because of how abusive her folks are, and she even gets ready to do it, packs a bag and goes to leave. The way she acts though, it feels like there’s a layer under there, like there’s more of a reason to leave than just how shit her parents are. She has this conversation with her young brother, who is around 8, he asks her if she’s going to leave and if so why, she deflects and says something along the lines of “I’ll tell you when you’re older”. Which is another weird reaction.
If she was just running away because her parents were abusive assholes, surely, he would know why. It seems odd she doesn’t want to tell him the reason. Maybe she’s trying to protect him, but it just feels like there’s more. There’s a weight to it.
Later, when she’s brought to the dragon preserve after she transforms, her parents bring her in a horse trailer that’s way too small. Lazyscales can tell she’s in there before he can ever see her, and when she confronts her parents, he's like:
“How could you do this to her?”
The mom seems confused at that. She’s confused about how he can tell Aurora is a girl dragon without seeing her. Lazyscales says it’s the smell, but this is the one and only time this is used to figure out a dragon’s sex. Every other time, it’s been based on their horns and size.
2 horns and smaller = female
4 horns + bigger = male.
It almost feels like it was added in so we KNEW this dragon was a female now. The dialog also seems to go out of it’s way to use pronouns, almost like there was an original version where her parents were constantly misgendering her during the whole conversation. Lazyscales eventually rips the horse trailer apart to get her out, and he has to help her back up the mountain because she’s half starved.
She’s introduced to the others, and she almost feels surprised that they’re being so nice to her, and know she’s a girl. They even show her to the female side of the cavern and let her know that’s where she’ll stay for the time being, and she seems shocked that she would be sleeping on that side of the cave. She sputters out some dialog about it’ll feel like getting to go to college, and stay in the dorms. But the way it’s said feels like it was altered after the fact.
Later there’s a scene where they’re picking their dragon names, which are just basically a mashup of two words. The rockstar picks Rocktooth, and Lucy and Becca had long since picked Rosethron and Moonshadow as theirs.
However, Aroura keeps her name, mentioning, “Oh, it’s not my birth name, and I’ve used it for a while.” Which is another one of those, “wait a minute…” kind of flags. From the way Lazyscales and Aroura are starting to act now, it’s clear that both are starting to get a crush on each other.
Some more plot happens, and Rocktooth convinces them to let him hold a concert to raise money for the dragon preserve, since he is one now, and even though he plans on leaving after he’s learned how to be a dragon, he still wants to help.
This leads to some very interesting conversations between Rocktooth, Lazyscales, and Rocktooth’s manager, Shannon.
Shannon knows Rocktooth wants to go by that name, and not his original, but she keeps deadnaming him, and Lazyscales and Rocktooth seem upset about it. They don’t make a big deal about it at the time, but later they have this exact exchange:
==
“Your Shannon human does not seem to respect your newly chosen name,” Lazyscales pointed out as they plodded side by side up the mountain trail back towards the caves. His claws squished into the mud, and while he didn’t mind it, he could see Rocktooth wincing every few steps.
“It’s just force of habit. I’m sure she’ll come around soon enough,” Rocktooth said with a shrug. “She’s known me for years. It only makes sense there would be an adjustment period.”
Lazyscales shrugged. “Respecting one’s chosen name versus their assigned name seems simple enough to me.”
==
And it’s like… that is a trans allegory flag waving so high it puts those 50 foot American flags that car dealerships have to shame.
This one is big enough to block out the sun.
For the rest of the series Aurora can tell she really likes Lazyscales, but it seems her past abuse holds her back. But the way she does it, makes her feel like she’s worried that he’ll not love her once he knows the real her and that no one could love someone like her. There’s also a scene where she asks if there were any gay dragons, and Lazyscales is like, yeah of course, Moonshadow and Lucy are a couple and with such long lived creatures, it would be weird to not be more heteroflexible. This could also be for some other character reasons later on, but I’m not so sure.
There’s also some interesting talks about sexual dimorphism in this. They mention it’s supposed to be hard to tell that a dragon is male or female other than the horns, there are other ways to do it which are way harder, but Lazyscales tagged Aroura through her smell. Something that should be easier than even sight, so that smell comment makes even less sense now. Like it was tacked on after the fact, and they forgot to change the parts later in the book. And all the dragons are fairly young as dragons go, so sex isn’t the only thing on their mind like horny teenagers. At one point, one of the male dragons even asks if they have balls. He looks between his legs, but his question is left unanswered. It’s like it was a segway to about the internal workings of dragons, because everything points to everything sexual being internal.
So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Aroura didn’t >know< she was biologically female to match the gender she’d always felt, until she met Lazyscales the first time. And she was transformed with magic, and if your soul remains, I see no reason a MtF transition is out of the question.
The end of the book is where things kind of start to break down. Rocktooth goes on a rampage during the concert, because he’d been so busy he forgot to eat. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because he’d been a dragon for a while before coming to the dragon preserve, and by then he and his manager should KNOW that him not having eaten is a dangerous thing. There should have been an entire pig dropped at his feet the day before as a precaution.
It almost feels like there was another way it was supposed to end, but it changed at the last second. When Rocktooth first starts singing in a rehearsal, it triggers familiar memories for Rocktooth, and it makes him feel good. But, if everything that was human should have been left in the abyss, that shouldn’t have happened. At one point, the Crone even explained that Lazyscales and Lewis’s souls could merge back together on their own with time, but that thread feels like it got dropped. Through this, Lazyscales starts having headaches.
Book 6: Beating Wings
Lazyscales is sadly no longer pudgy. He also gets violently ill from having a missing portion of his soul.
This is probably my least favorite of all the books. I liked the decent into hell/the afterlife to rescue Lewis’s soul, it was fun.
I also really loved when Lasthope takes Lazyscale’s soul to the dragon afterlife for safe keeping.
More when you see how Lazyscales becomes aware of this when he hatches from a dragon egg, and he turns out to be the most adorable little hatchling ever. Lasthope greets him, the dragon still looking much younger than Lazyscales ever saw him. His dragon dad explains that the afterlife is a place for souls to heal, and the younger you look, the more your soul needs to heal and growl. That’s why he and Lazyscales look so young.
They have a lot of very cute interactions, and he gets to meet his dragon grandparents.
During this whole thing, everyone keeps telling Lazyscales that he is Lewis, and even if they manage to merge their souls back together, he’ll still be Lazyscales just as he is Lewis. Lazyscales doesn’t like it, but he knows he’ll die if he doesn’t go back to the world above and there will be no one to help the new dragons. He’s scared and worried about this, and you can tell the thought hurts him so much.
Lewis gets rescued, and they convince Lazyscales to merge back with him. But from the start… it’s clear Lewis is the one who is fully in control. It isn’t a merging of his personalities and from the lessons he’s learned, he’s still just that human boy in a dragon’s body. Lazyscales guides him for a bit, but it sort of feels like he just fades away. There’s a coup subplot for the last 20% of the book that I don’t want to get into, but it was dragons + American capitalism = bad (which I 100% agree with).
Lazyscales gets one last speech, getting to be the dragon I’d sort of come to really like over the last two books, before he just sort of defaults back to Lewis, who has no character growth from the experience. There’s a rushed epilog that explains the after events of the coup and the dragons going off to populate other areas in the world, and in that, it even says Lewis no longer goes by Lazyscales at all. Which is his chosen name, and he’s right to do whatever, but the way it’s written, it sort of feels like Lazyscales died. The parts of himself didn’t come together, just one part was eaten by the other, and he’d been forgotten.
He did pick Lazyscales sort of at random, originally it was something Lasthope kept saying to describe him. Because he was a Lazydragon, so I can see why he wouldn’t have a big connection to that name, but Lazyscales liked it because it was what his ghost dad liked. I feel like it would have been more realistic after the re-merge to go by L-scales or maybe Lewscale, to show that he had changed a bit. But he was still two parts that now made a whole.
The series was interesting, and the writer was very good at keeping you hooked. I read all 6 of these books in 3 days. My eyeballs still kind of hurt. There’s another series of books after these that focus on Becca, but I’m going to skip those for now, I kind of burned myself out. Plus, I need some time to process what happened to Lazyscales.
3.7 out of 5.
