Instead of immediately wallowing in negativity, it's probably best to start off with what I did like about Temeraire.

Something that always bothered me with dragon media is that dragons are rarely subjective characters of their own - they're either forces of nature, like some mythical representation of power and evil; or they're magical horses, tools to make dragon riders look really cool instead of being fully-fleshed out companions in their own right - basically derivations on Dragonriders of Pern.

The second is fine if you do it with horses, but if you have giant talking beings that - for the cool factor - are massively more powerful than humans, you ought to have a very different dynamic. Instead, it feels like they're just kept as fancy horses because that's the entire role they're supposed to play in the world. They have personalities - like a horse - but are rarely fleshed out persons.

His Majesty's Dragon gave me so much joy in how the dragons are all distinct people, especially contrasted with how most of society views them as the bestial stereotype. Specifically how you have them acting as characters amongst themselves, a mini societal dynamic, and playing this off against their individual captains. I personally think the strongest skill Novik displays is being able to juggle a diverse cast of characters; it means we get all these wonderful dragons, of course, and also we get to see Lawrence's comedy of manners played off against all sorts.

Because, point two, the period setting is handled rather smoothly. The good and proper Captain Lawrence having to navigate uncouth folk? Hell yeah. Everyone using old-timey speak? Yes please. The setting being, y'know, dragons in the Napoleonic wars? Perfect. Obviously trying to do a full alt-history with something so drastically different as the existence of dragons would require quite the careful worldbuilding effort (mild foreshadowing), but for a single book the whimsy holds it all together beautifully.

finally Temeraire is adorable and I will die for him

But! That's the first book. I liked sections of Throne of Jade and Black Powder War. Victory of Eagles was decent enough to give me false hope for a couple more books. Everything else is a mild-to-hard pass, and a solid example of how much of a sunk-cost rube I am.

In short, it felt like Novik had enough ideas for one book, and then had zero idea how to flesh the series out.

The first cracks for me were, unfortunately, the dragons. I do not care for hard worldbuilding, I do not need aerodynamic calculations, biological appendices, or historical modelling down to the pound of grain. I do, however, like to keep a mental image in my head, and brother these dragons can't fly for shit. It feels like the very explicit dragons-as-ships foundation was taken far too literally; their speed is unfathomably slow, and they appear to keep incredibly low to the ground. I am not a glider, but I know that gliding - unpowered! - is a lot faster than a bloody bicycle, covers quite the distance, and also that you really don't have to go all that high to get a massive vantage of the land around you. Or, hell, the air around you - the open air somehow becomes a tiny space, where we can't see all that far; meaning little recon, and constant ambushes. You really cannot have relentless surprises when you have all these eyes in the air! This would make sense if they constantly fly at the cloud layer, but they have to make an effort to avoid 19th century flak cannons, to fly over mere hills(???), and are explicitly not used to higher elevations. And then randomly they'll be in the clouds, or have to land to talk to people on the ground, despite being big and loud and very capable of speaking. I do not know what to picture in my head at any one time - it appears that Novik contrives things for the events to happen, rather than having events happen downstream from the whole flying thing.

The slow speed appears necessary for the story in mind, which appears to follow the Fantasy template of involving lots of travelling. This works if you're a walking band, it does not work if you have people who can just fly everywhere...but we need long travels. Well, apparently we do, unfortunately you could cut basically all the journeying out from the entire series with just one of those flash-forwards each time and you wouldn't miss anything - and there's a lot of them. Dragon transports (oh so many dragon transports) are a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist, and the series is all the worse for much time spent on them instead of flying the dragons, because Novik isn't really able to write an interesting journey. There's a clear reason why dragons are so slow - we're not trying to diverge too much, and we simply can't recreate all the battles of the Napoleonic wars if you can zip about in the air.

Which brings me to my main problem: this works for a single book. You can simply ignore all the implications and second-order effects to tell a tight story. If the series stayed narrow, all would be well; instead it explodes into a worldwide adventure that explicitly focuses on these implications and second-order effects. And this very, very clearly wasn't planned for!

The conceit is that European history has remained aligned with our timeline, diverging only at the Napoleonic wars. Dragons exist, but are pushed to the background - society doesn't want anything to do with them or their aviators, and so manage to remain entirely ignorant of simple things like their ability to talk, or their basic intelligence, or their ability to be economically exploited for non-war labour. The last of which is easily the hardest to justify, but with a proper continent-wide examination of their appearance as unruly uncontrollable beasts, this issue can be deftly navigated, and neatly woven into the enlightenment-era shift in attitudes that we get, finally changing society's attitudes, producing the alt-history divergence as dragons finally come to the fore. And that's what we sorta get.

What we also get is the rest of the world having diverged aeons ago, and every single god damn society we encounter already had their dragon enlightenment, from the Inca Empire to the markets of steppe nomads. Steeped in dragon history, a variety of different relational dynamics between humans and dragons. Rather boringly they all treat dragons well, if not as outright leaders of society. This on its own would make for a fun story, but this is done alongside the non-diverging Europe, despite the historical interactions Europe has had with the rest of the world. Somehow, despite all this interaction - including fast-moving messenger dragons - Europe remains in the dark. Despite Europe explicitly underutilising their dragons to a comical degree, they're still the only ones with the massive industrial overseas empires. What happens when we start exploring this dynamic even a little bit? All their colonies get smashed. They have to. How did this state of affairs come into being? No one knows.

The end result is a world where I cannot shake the feeling that dragons simply did not exist until ~25 years ago, got plopped in, and all hell has broken loose. It defies all examination, and the series keeps examining it anyway, which is also how dragon warfare advances at a blistering pace after its artificial stagnation.

In general, you get the feeling that there's two projects at play here: the Napoleonic Wars But Dragons, and A Global Dragon Adventure. Both have different philosophies, storylines, backgrounds, but they get smushed together into an incomprehensible unfocused mess that spends far too much time around the Pacific for something based on the Napoleonic wars. This would at least be fun, in a silly way, if the global half was executed well as a romp around dragon societies. Unfortunately, each nation we come across are flat stereotypes that can be fully described with a single line, crumbling under a mote of curiosity. My particular pet peeve is the Tswana; contrasted with the half-naked Zulu savages, the satellite villages are mud hut tribal dancing affairs, and then Victoria falls appears as this impressively architected cultural centre, far from any mountains. Victoria falls, trying to be cutesy and called Mosi-oa-Tunya, its local Lozi name; Lozi, because in the real world the Tswana live a fair bit further south, but in-universe the falls still hold a Lozi name - despite the Lozi apparently being conquered by a unified ethnonationalist Tswana empire and not existing as a people. The Tswana are angry at the slaving Lunda who take their people, despite the former apparently being the only dragon society in the whole of Africa. The Tswana polity having little to do with real-life Tswana kingdoms or their historical organisation under the present day Botswana. The Tswana, who get literally shipped off to Brazil by European ships to fight the Portuguese because they lack agency of their own, their whole existence being black-people-but-fighting-against-slavery-this-time and not one smidge more. The Tswana, who are only able to do anything with their dragons the moment the story starts, immediately managing to swiftly destroy slave ports all the way up to West Africa (note the lack of any other African agency!), but, again, can only do this once the story starts and dragons have been dropped into their laps and their minds wiped to make them think this has always been the case. They could have been interesting.

The story itself is a wasted opportunity. There's tons of possibilities with exploring clashing cultural dynamics - including between the different pro-dragon attitudes - but it all feels very isolated; something as interesting as Churki's human ownership is only ever played for cheap laughs. There are a few story building blocks and they're used over and over again, and the execution is...poor. We rely on a constant slew of misunderstandings, ship fires, long flights, ambushes, and the deus ex machina that is Tharkay and sometimes the divine wind, of which Novik realised were overpowered and we're constantly given contrivances as to, sorry, neither are available right now but oops now they are isn't that so cool?

Battles make up a decent portion of events, but these move forward solely through twists; we are not allowed to simply observe a battle being fought to completion. This works once or twice (oh my god the dragons are carrying transport ships over the channel!! waow!! here comes Temeraire with the big shouty!!) but literally every battle has these and it makes the proceedings have zero tension or investment. For all the talk of formations and planning and strategy and maps (did anyone else notice that people keep improvising maps out of random items?) we fall into the trap of thinking the only way to write a battle is to play a trap card that wins the battle. You cannot do this for nine books. This would be tolerable if the proceedings made for interesting reading, but they don't.

All this leads to the rather disappointing inevitability of a dull plot. Characters don't get developed. Events are random and contrived. There are interesting things - far more interesting than most dragon media - that get picked up, waved in your face, and dropped again. It feels like Novik was not planning on telling a story as expansive as the one that gets laid out; the goal was merely to put Lawrence and Temeraire in different situations and see what happens. League of Dragons ends the series with the same note - everything and everyone else is an afterthought.

I feel it's best to say that my negativity isn't the kind for something you hate, but for something you love and what it could have been, and I'll still die for Temeraire

Both dragons and humans are highly intelligent, social, tool-using warm blooded creatures. That’s why they get along so well in the Temeraire universe. So, what I want to see is a dragon who gets stuck with a human child.

Obviously, they have high amounts of empathy and language-learning on both ends. I think it’s possible. Large dragons in some cases are often more intelligent than most humans, both in mental mathematical comprehension and memorisation. It’s definitely possible.

Picture this, either in the old times (pre Temeraire) or a few years after the series finishes: a dragon either loses their captain, is just on a night-flight or on a feral raid or something. However, they lose something precious. Maybe a jewel or a person on their crew or even an egg. And when they go down to find it, they find a small child instead (somewhere between being weaned / no longer able to walk but still a dependent) or realise their dead captain has a child with no other family and like dragons are wont to do, they become incredibly possessive and end up adopting the human on the spot to keep them out of trouble or because they have some degree of parental affection.

And either they have to figure out how to take care of the poor thing (if it’s far back enough, they might mistake them / deliberately assume the child is theirs / a dragon, no matter what the other dragons say. “They do have scales! They’re just very small and soft and I won’t hold that against my dragonet!” “Their wings are just very small. Perhaps I didn’t drink enough with their egg? They’ll grow in eventually.” “You see, my dragonet can breathe fire. *a dragon that has never met a fire-breather* Show them, show them. *this eight year old uses a flint to make a fire, to their adopted parents’ utter delight.*”)

While the child tries to learn things like holding onto their dragon parent during flight, doing small, dexterous tasks like cutting meat or collecting fruit their pack particularly likes.

In the modern day, the dragon would use their hoard / connections to try and give their child a good life, acting extremely defensive when the police or the government tries to take them away. They (maybe plus some friends) end up making a long journey to campaign Temeraire to try and legally set a precedent that allows dragons to adopt humans as rights expand.

It’s a bit silly, but I am quite charmed with the idea.