Friday, April 25, 2025

This is the thirtieth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

It’s that time again! Last week I took Friday completely off in honor of Good Friday, and this week we’re back to a normal schedule. The featured Florabeast for this week is the Hydra’angea (the apostrophe is important, check out how to pronounce it on the WA page), which raises an interesting question for the Frontier Flora world, or at least one that’s interesting to me.

In The Dragonfruit Express, readers are introduced to the Snap-dragon, a small reptile with fluttery-edged wings, and the Pityvern, a massive critter with hard pink and green outer covering, and its black seeds can be seen in the white flesh of its open mouth. The puns are pretty straightforward, especially with the first one, but with the addition of this week’s Hydra’angea, the question is unavoidable. Are there small dragonets, big wyverns, and multi-headed hydra running around in the world, for these plant creatures to derive their animal sides from?

The answer is yes. One of the ideas behind Frontier Flora was that everything that we consider mythical in our world is actually true in theirs. Dragons, unicorns, goblins, all of them exist and thrive in their own habitats. In the latest story, Salty & Sweet Don’t Mix, which is currently subscriber-exclusive, there’s mention made of a secretive “homeland” in South America, where the seven cities of gold are real, and they have much more advanced technology than the rest of the world, Florabeasts notwithstanding.

Admittedly most of the reason behind this was to allow the use of great puns like the dragonfruit dragon, and the ravenous Gobblins, but I also thought it would enhance the world that honestly I didn’t spend a whole lot of time developing, unlike Euphony of Seasons. That one has worldbuilding to spare.

Enjoy the weekend, more on Monday.