Hammann 11/2: What's the Plague Flight?

Flight Rising is a browser-based web game that places every participant in control of a clan of dragons, where the main draw is ostensibly a “catch ‘em all” style of gameplay (though less “all” and more “whatever you want,” given there are millions of possibilities). Upon registering, players are asked to choose the elemental allegiance of their clan, referred to in-game as elemental “flights.” There are eleven Flights to choose from, with each element impacting the visual aspects of the site, down to the player’s lair and nesting ground aesthetics.

Perhaps the most controversial of these is the Plague Flight, the lore of which is (unsurprisingly) focused on infectivity and disease. Red is a prominent color in the artwork of the Plague Flight, especially given that all Plague dragons’ eyes are red (as eye color is determined by a dragon’s element). Its home region, the Scarred Wasteland, is likened to “a wound in the center of the world,” implied to constantly be spreading into nearby territories. The element took its origin in the history of the site’s lore when, in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event, things left out in the open rotted in an unusually aggressive way, creating the Scarred Wasteland.

Its lair background and nest art both continue that imagery. The Flight’s deity, the Plaguebringer, is herself a dragon-shaped mess of flesh and bone.

Plaguemother and nest art

Despite the element’s (canonically) darker implications, it’s only one of many elements in the game, and is not considered too much of a threat to the rest of the world presented in the setting (compared to what lurks elsewhere). In fact, the Plague Flight, depending on a user’s tastes, can take on benign qualities; though it looks and seems every bit a dangerous thing, it competes against ten other Flights, each of which have their own equally unhidden agenda (not all of which involve world domination, which is what canon wants everyone to believe).

The Plague Flight is one of the site’s larger Flights, boasting a population of over 18,000 clans – however, interpretations of its appeal vary from user to user. Though many are in it for what’s labeled on the tin, others still – including those not even in the Flight – take other approaches. Canon dictates that the Scarred Wasteland is an unpleasant place to be, where only the strong survive, where only the toughest of clans will grow large, and its artwork reflects the barrenness of the region.

However, many players find “because canon said so” an unsatisfactory end-all be-all for what the Plague Flight ultimately is, and find other ways to look at the artwork that so clearly displays a land where the ground itself is ambiguous, where clans and homes are supposedly so few and far between. The simplest and most direct presentation or interpretation of the Flight – as a vector of disease – is not an invalid one, and does not even have to be discarded to make room for other interpretations, but it does, in its limited scope, leave one to fill in the blanks however they desire.