The wait for Dota 2 fans is over. All episodes of DOTA Dragon’s Blood from book one to three are now available to watch on Netflix.
During the release of DOTA Dragon’s Blood second season, the show’s creator Ashley Miller conducted an hour-long AMA on the Dota 2 subreddit a day before the new season aired.
Questions included his feelings about certain major events in Dragon’s Blood, why he chose to feature Davion and Mirana’s storylines, if he ever expected Marci to become a playable hero, and more. Here are some things we learnt about DOTA Dragon’s Blood from Ashley Edward Miller’s AMA.
When asked what his biggest inspiration for the show was by Reddit user Spikn, Ashley Miller admitted he was a huge fantasy nerd. He saw an “opportunity” to turn a lot of classic tropes “upside down and inside out.”
He pursued Mirana and Davion’s storylines in particular because to him, these characters represent the classic fantasy tropes of a princess, a knight, and a dragon. With these pieces, Ashley wanted to play around with their stories so that they don’t “land quite where you expect them to.”
Don’t expect a classic fairytale where Davion only ends up being Mirana’s knight in shining armor after defeating Terrorblade!
Of all the voice actors in Dota: Dragon’s Blood, only Slyrak is voiced by Dota 2’s original voice actor, Tony Todd. Davion, Mirana, and the rest of the supporting cast are all voiced by completely different actors.
Reddit user AngelTheTaco asked if there was a “conscious effort” not to recast the original voices for existing Dota 2 heroes. Ashley Miller indeed chose to recast voices, because he felt the “anime interpretation of the existing heroes needed to start clean.”
He explains that in television, one doesn’t “cast roles” but rather “ensembles.” Taking a “holistic approach”, he balanced the cast so that every interaction “would sound and feel right”—something that likely wouldn’t happen if he simply ran with Dota 2’s existing voice actors.
Dota 2 has a wide roster of evil or ‘bad’ heroes, but ultimately Terrorblade became the show’s primary antagonist. Reddit user STABtrain asked why he made the cut and not other heroes such as Shadow Demon.
Apparently, Ashley Miller was fascinated in Terrorblade’s ability to persuade characters who were in a vulnerable mental state to do his bidding. He found Terrorblade to be very “fun to write.”
On top of being able to penetrate the minds of others, he’s one of the baddest, if not THE baddest demon in existence. In Terrorblade’s official lore, he was feared by demonkind and eventually banished to FoulFell—a prison plane where demons banish their own—for not abiding the laws of the seven Infernal Regions. This guy is a prisoner of hell, and it doesn’t get much worse than that.
Few animated shows feature mature content such as sexual themes and blood and gore. DOTA Dragon’s Blood is chock-full of it, however, and it’s not just to check off boxes in the edgy category..
Ashley Miller wrote that he went with a more mature approach to Davion and Mirana’s relationship because he wanted them to feel like, “grown ass adults in a real thing, not teenagers mooning over each other.” Even the enclaves’ open intimacy with one another served a purpose, to show the difference between human and elven cultures.
It seems Miller isn’t quite done with the show yet.
“I hope there’s a season 3 because I’d really like to get to the crazy shit that’s rattling around my skull,” the creator wrote. Though eager to get started on book 3, it’ll all come down to whether or not the team at Studio Mir will be given the green light by Netflix for a third installment.
If you’re interested in learning more about DOTA Dragon’s Blood and Ashley Edward Miller’s approach to the show, do check out his Reddit AMA thread or follow him on his official Twitter account.
