My Mind Is Started Up, And My History-loving Soul Is Happy. Thank You!

My mind is started up, and my history-loving soul is happy. Thank you!

Drago Bludvist’s Origin Story

As we all know, Drago Bludvist is a victim of the ‘ambiguously brown’ trope, due to the writers inability to commit to a specific culture. He’s described as having Slavic, Asian, Mediterranean and North African influence in his design; all of which are disparate areas with multiple cultures. However, there is one potential melting pot where all four of these areas mixed geographically or via trade/war/slavery, which in the Viking age would’ve been the Byzantine Empire.

Now to narrow it down even further. Drago’s spiel about how his village was destroyed by dragons and he’s out for revenge…should be taken with a grain of salt, since he had every reason to lie. His exact words, however, are “my village, burned. My family, taken.” Now to me, that’s an odd word to use. If they didn’t want to have him say “killed”, why not have him say “lost” or “gone”?

What if there’s a grain of truth to his story? What if his village was burned and his family was taken…not by dragons, but by soldiers? Here’s where things get interesting. The Byzantine Empire had slaves, and according to Wikipedia: “After the 10th century the major source of slaves were often Slavs and Bulgars, which resulted from campaigns in the Balkans and lands north of the Black Sea.” So assuming it’s the 11th century, that lines up with the Viking era.

“The Bulgars were Turkic semi-nomadic warrior tribes that flourished in the Pontic–Caspian steppe and the Volga region during the 7th century. They became known as nomadic equestrians in the Volga-Ural region, but some researchers say that their ethnic roots can be traced to Central Asia.”

There’s the Mediterranean and Asian influence. The Bulgars went on to found the found the Bulgarian Empire in, well, Bulgaria, which is in the Balkans. What else is in the Balkans? Slavic countries. If you want to include African influence, maybe Drago could have mixed heritage in his parents or even grandparents.

I really do think Drago being a Bulgar who was enslaved by the Byzantine empire fits his character almost perfectly. It’s not much of a leap to go from ‘warrior on horseback’ to ‘warrior on dragonback’, it gives him a plausibly tragic backstory as motivation, and he must have gotten the idea to build an empire and/or conquer the known world from somewhere. Why not like this?

TL;DR - my headcanon is that Drago Bludvist was born in Bulgaria to mixed heritage parents (Turkic & African), enslaved in the Byzantine Empire, at some point found a young Bewilderbeast and used it to escape (possibly losing his arm in the process), only to abuse it into obeying so he could start conquering.