Headscratchers / Raya and the Last Dragon

• Why weren't the dragons unstoned during the first Druun plague but brought back after the second one? What exactly was different when her siblings gave Sisu the stone than when Raya gave Namaari the stone that made it so powerful that unfroze the dragons and not just humans?
  • The Druun were apparently created from humanity’s own discord, so the dragons’ sacrifice could have been a Secret Test of Character for the people of Kumandra. They ended the first plague and the Gem temporarily held the Druun at bay, but the people needed to realize that they had to commit their own act of trust and unity to vanquish the Druun for good.
  • Alternative explanation: it's been established that the gem used trust as a magic component / source of power. Considering Sisu's and Namaari's character and their standing with their respective groups, it can be argued that the second time around there was a greater amount of trust involved, so the effect was stronger.
  • Or possibly, the true opposite of the Druun's discord isn't trust, but forgiveness. The dragons trusted Sisu, and that was enough power to seal the Druun away, but Raya gave Namaari the stone in spite of being betrayed by her, and that was what released enough power to undo what the Druun did.

• So there are 5 clans: Fang, Heart, Talon, Spine, and Tail. Raya spends most of the movie searching for the lost pieces of the dragon gem that each clan took. Now, she has one piece for Heart, gets the second from Tail's traps, gets the third from Talon's leader, goes to Spine to get the fourth but shortly after, has to escape before any discussion as to its whereabouts is. The group she's with decides all that's left is to go to Fang for the final piece. My question is, why did no one ask about the location of Spine's piece? It's like they just upped and forgot. There was no indication that Tong had it or knew where it was. They never talk about getting him to share it with them, it's like they just assumed he had it without ever stopping to ask, "Where is Spine's gem?"
  • They must have quite reasonably assumed the only living person in the village would only be so if he had the shard.
  • In addition, Tong's first act after capturing Raya and Sisu is to mock them for thinking they could steal Spine's gem piece, which would also lead them to the reasonable assumption that he does have said piece. You wouldn’t assign the interrogation of captive trespassers to an average villager, nor would you entrust him with the gem pieces confiscated from them instead of passing those onto the chief. Based on that, Raya and Sisu probably assumed that Spine had gone through the same thing as Talon did — where the original chief ended up dead or stoned at some point, and therefore Tong is just his replacement. From then until they learn he’s the last villager left at all, their assumption that he had the gem piece wouldn’t have changed.
  • They went to the village to try to find out who had the gem piece, and then are immediately caught by Tong. They don't realize that Tong has it until he offers it to them after Sisu reveals she is the Dragon and he joins their quest to destroy the Druune
  • But it doesn’t make sense for them to leave Spine without securing the gem piece first, especially when they know forces from Fang are about to storm the place. The scene on the boat is when it’s confirmed to the audience that Tong has Spine’s gem, but it’s easy to infer that he had it before then, and he probably told and/or showed them that he had it as they were preparing to leave.

• Near the end, Raya and Namaari have one last battle after the latter reluctantly shoots Sisu with an arrow, and Raya ultimately spares her life. During Namaari's speech, she mentions that Raya would be partially responsible for Sisu's Disney Death. How exactly?
  • Raya lunged at Namaari, causing Namaari to fully fire the crossbow. Namaari seemed to be hesitantly squeezing the trigger and could have released it but Raya's lunge caused Namaari to fully pull the trigger.
  • While the above is true, Raya can hardly be blamed for this. Namaari had just betrayed her a second time after Raya had taken a huge leap of faith to meet her, and Namaari's blame-shifting comes off as gaslighting to assuage her own guilt. She specifically blames Raya for not trusting her when Sisu did, but when had she done anything, in any of their interactions, to earn Raya's trust? Sisu's trust comes across as painfully naïve.
    • I think the point was that Raya should’ve at least trusted Sisu if she wasn’t going to trust Namaari. She was being too presumptive and trigger-happy when she tried to intervene, all based on her seeing Namaari sort of twitching her trigger finger. You can argue about whether her suspicions were valid or reasonable, but she still chose to hijack Sisu’s attempt at negotiating and in the most violent and provocative way possible, thereby assuredly screwing up something that had a chance of working if she hadn’t stepped in.

• Did Sisu actually die? She fell into the water after being shot, and no one appeared to actually go into the water and look for her.
  • After Sisu is shot and falls into the water the river and waterfall immediately start drying up. Tong guesses "It appears with the last dragon gone, so too goes the water." It's unclear whether Sisu is dead, in a coma, left the mortal plane, etc. But from a story perspective, she's no longer around until she gets resurrected in the denouement.
  • Considering the dragon gem’s power started fading but didn’t immediately go away when Sisu was shot, and that she was able to be revived in the end, it seems likely she was mortally wounded but not killed outright. She could have held out through the events of the family, and given the range of magic her siblings possess, surely there’s at least one dragon out there with the power to heal.

• When Raya and Namaari are eating together as kids, one of them picks up a skewer with two orange balls on it. Does anyone know what food that is? I could see different recipes for Tom Yum, pho, congee, etc, but not for those kabobs.
  • It looks like dango, a round Japanese rice flour dumpling that's often served on a skewer. Admittedly, that's East Asian rather than Southeast Asian, but the dish in the film could be a variation of dango that exists in a Southeast Asian country, like how congee is eaten in a lot of Asian countries.
  • Alternately, it could be a dish that's normally served as separate morsels, but Raya's father specifically requested that Heart's chefs present them in skewered pairs. It's a diplomatic feast, after all: having one skewer served to two people - presumably, people from different and mutually-suspicious nations, for whom any act of peaceful cooperation is a plus - gives them something to share graciously. A subtle icebreaker, to get strangers talking.
  • The dish is a central region Thai dish called Moo Sarong. Essentially deep fried minced pork balls wrapped in noodles and is considered a royal cuisine back in the old days. They are typically served as individual morsels but, as mentioned above, Chief Benja decided to skewer them together to represent harmony.

• Why are those that the Druun turn to stone stuck in a standing pose with their hands cupped? What's the significance of it?
  • The Druun are partially fire/drought elementals so it could be a prayer/askance for water, given the focus on the cure at the end started with sacred water filling the cupped hands.
  • Foreshadowing for the end, of course. Possibly even an intentional clue for anyone seeking to restore them, if victims experience a flash of insight at the moment they're Taken for Granite.

• Was Heart’s security for the Dragon Gem beyond the handful of traps just one guard? Why was Raya’s father seemingly the only person guarding the Gem? How did he expect to defend against an army en masse? And how come he didn’t assign anyone else to protect it while he was out during the feast?
  • It looked like the biggest part of their security was that it was hidden, save for select few members trained and trusted to continue the work. No one could take the gem until Namaari sent that flare to show where it was. The more people involved meant the higher the risk of someone betraying that secret and since he was skilled enough to reach the chamber and fend off intruders, perhaps he was relying on quality of training + obscurity to do most of the protection.

• How does Tuk Tuk's saddle stay upright while he rolls? There don't appear to be counter weights or anything.
  • Given what we can see of the design, maybe the little guy just has abs of steel and holds it upright by the axle portion himself? He does spend most of his life doing crunches.

• When Raya is about to kill Namaari to avenge Sisu, Namaari angrily blames Raya for Sisu's Disney Death. Isn't that the worst possible thing she could say, to insult the person about to kill her? Frankly, I'd expect Raya to kill Namaari just for that comment. Why would Namaari say that to save her life, and why did it give Raya an epiphany instead of angering her further?
  • Where the latter is concerned, Raya probably realized it was vanishingly unlikely that fellow Dragon Nerd Namaari would shoot Sisu on purpose (although poor trigger discipline means it is hard to split the blame evenly). As for the former... it presumes Namaari was trying to save her life.

• Why does all the water disappear once the last dragon is gone? Likewise, why is there an earthquake that starts destroying the city? For the former, at least dragons are associated with water, so there's some connection there. But they're not associated with earthquakes!
  • Immediately after the gem was first broken, there's notably a series of quakes that occurred, followed by the Druun arising. I would assume that the earthquake after Sisu is gone, is the Druun arising in even greater numbers as the water drains away and they start flooding into the city of the Fang tribe.
  • There's a lot of "dragons are connected to water." So because Sisu is a dragon, and she's the last remaining dragon, her death removes the water.

• In the Tail temple, why does Raya blithely inform Namaari that her new human friend is actually Sisu? Even if it's meant to be a Sarcastic Confession, why give Namaari any clues at all? Just a few minutes ago she had Sisu put on a disguise to avoid attracting attention.
  • And immediately after that Raya again insists that Sisu needs to hide who she is. Apparently your mortal enemy can know you’re hanging around with a dragon, but not the kind, welcoming child whose boat you’re on.
  • I suppose the difference is that Namaari is already pursuing Raya anyway, so even if her identification of Sisu was meant to be taken literally, it wouldn't really change anything. But keeping Sisu's identity a secret from Boun and the others does serve a purpose in that it helps them to keep a lower profile while traveling.

• Why is Namaari looking for Raya just after the timeskip? She wants her scroll back, apparently? But the scroll isn't all that special. It just tells a story of Sisu that Namaari already knows.
  • It's pretty well-established over the course of the movie that Namaari is truly a lover of dragons and holds a deep respect for them. Even if it's only for personal reasons, she'd certainly want that scroll back. And if that reason isn't enough, it's also possible that Fang got word of Raya heading for Tail, which Namaari perhaps was sent to investigate.

• Why is the Tail gem piece left with the Tail leader? Wouldn't the leader give it to some other Tail citizen before they died? People need that gem piece. It's one of the only things that can protect you from the Druun!
  • Considering they're the only skeleton we see, they were probably so distrustful that they refused to trust anyone else with the gem piece or allow close to themselves.

• Who the heck set up the traps in Tail? Raya speculates that the leader "got caught in her own traps", but one of the traps relies on the precise positioning of the leader's skeletal arm! That's the sort of thing you can't set up until after the leader is dead! And if someone else was here afterwards and set up the trap, why didn't they just take the gem piece while they were at it? It's not some holy treasure that no one should ever touch; it's a practical tool for keeping the Druun away!
  • Maybe the leader designed the trap for her arm herself when she was alive, to prevent anyone from wrenching the gem out of her hands if they got through. Of course, not being able to leave without very carefully undoing the trap may explain why she's a skeleton now...
  • Similarly, wouldn't the arm fall down after the chief dies?? The chief is no longer alive to keep their arms in that pose!

• What's the deal with that skeletal-arm trap in Tail? If you move the arm to take the gem piece, it dumps a bunch of sand...on the entrance? Not on the spot where you're standing? And also, couldn't they use something deadlier than sand? This feels like a minor inconvenience at best; you'd just swing back to the entrance and shovel out the sand.
  • Because it takes time to get back to the entrance. A smart thief could prepare for a trap to drop sand right on top of them, but it is harder when you have to get back across a long gap. That time also provides a better opportunity for the opening to become covered. Pretend you have two doors in sequence that would take five seconds to pass through and each door takes five seconds before you can't pass safely. A little difficulty on the first door isn't a big deal. A little difficulty at any time is a problem on the far door. I'm honestly not sure why more stories don't have sequential doors closing from the outside inward or even outer and inner meeting in the middle.

• In the beginning, Raya has to get past a bunch of net traps on the way to the gem. She has her pet go ahead of her and activate the nets, since he's too low to the ground to get caught in them. But then Raya simply crawls under the nets herself, since even she is too short for the nets if she crawls. So...did she even need her pet to help her out? This is the most precious treasure in the world, and apparently you can get in the room just by crawling? Or even just cut yourself out of each net if you get caught. This is a terrible security system.
  • Presumably Raya doesn't know how far the nets extend so it makes sense to get Tuk Tuk to just activate them first so she gets a better sense of the terrain. And the point is that anyone who doesn't know anything about the traps wouldn't realise you should/could just crawl. As for cutting yourself out of the net, who knows - maybe there's an alarm system in place that notifies the chief when the traps are triggered. It's not impossible.

• Raya blames herself for the loss of the Dragon Gem, since she showed Namaari in and Namaari tried to take it. But it seems like anyone could have taken the gem at any time. The net-traps are laughable, and there's only one guard, who presumably needs to sleep once in awhile. Also, it turns out that the guard can be felled by a single crossbow bolt. So...yeah, I'm thinking that the gem was going to be stolen any which way.
  • As was pointed out above, one of the primary defenses surrounding the gem was seemingly its remote and unknown location. That’s why Namaari had to shoot out a flare to alert her troops. She didn’t need Raya to get her past the traps, she needed her to show her where exactly the gem was. And barring that, it doesn’t really matter whether the gem could’ve been compromised under different circumstances; all that matters is that Raya was responsible for what did happen to it.

• If Raya's dad wants all the nations to live in harmony, and if he also knows that the other nations want the gem, why didn't he consider sharing the gem with them? He mentions that the gem doesn't bring prosperity; apparently it just keeps the Druun away. So if Fang wants it so bad, just let them have it. It would be just as useful over there as it is over here, and Fang would see for itself that the prosperity thing doesn't work. Maybe every nation could take turns with the gem. That would ease tensions, wouldn't it?
  • Even if he proposed sharing the gem or taking turns owning it, the other nations don't yet trust each other enough to believe that they'll willingly hand over them gem when their "turn" is done. Besides, they would probably fight over who deserved it first and end up breaking it anyway.
  • Just because the gem doesn’t actually bring prosperity, that doesn’t mean it would be easy to prove that to the other nations. All it would take is a slightly better harvest than usual or something for whoever has the gem to say, “This random good thing happened spontaneously to my nation; it must’ve been thanks to the dragon gem!” If you look at it that way, Raya and her dad can’t even say with certainty that Heart’s prosperity isn’t caused by the gem.

• Is Fang short on rice, or what? Namaari mentions it early on, and it's heavily implied that she wants to steal the gem so she can fix the rice shortage. But we see Fang six years later and it's doing quite well for itself. It's only been six years, and there was an apocalypse in the meantime. How could things turn around so quickly?
  • Is that really heavily implied? It's possible that Namaari's claim of having no rice is a straight-up lie for sympathy. It seems more like her reason for stealing the gem is that her mother put her up to it, probably with more half-truths and manipulation, just like we see later in the scene where Namaari tries to explain to her mother that Sisu has returned.

• When Tong, Noi and Boun are evacuating the city at the end, where are they evacuating people to? The Druun are everywhere. Being outside the city is no safer than being inside the city.
  • Being outside at least gets people in an open area with the chance to run away. Being in the city means possibly getting stuck in a collapsed building (thanks to the quakes), or just getting lost or trapped, a sitting duck for the Druun.
  • One of them mentions getting people to the river, which makes sense since the Druun can’t cross water. The river is drying up quickly though, so that safety isn’t going to last very long.

• Can the Druun cross water, or not? In a flashback, Sisu and her siblings are on a little island surrounded by Druun. They create the Dragon Gem, and they can do that without interference because, again, they're surrounded by water. Then the siblings hand the gem to Sisu, and they immediately get turned to stone. How? Did something happen to the water? And isn't the Dragon Gem supposed to keep Druun away regardless? They're standing quite close to her.
  • It seems like it might be on purpose? Everyone deliberately steps into the Druun after giving their gem pieces to Namaari, so maybe it’s supposed to be a trust thing. You show complete confidence in the gem-holder by letting yourself be petrified. It’s pretty lucky that they all knew to do that without being told though...

• How is it that Raya didn't know that there were stone dragons in the Dragon Gem temple? She's the temple's guardian! She's been training for this. Did she never bother to look around? Did her dad never tell her? It seems like it would be an important part of temple lore.
  • She had literally just become a temple guardian. It's likely she had never been allowed to poke around too much.
  • It’s possible she knew the statues were there (some of them are sitting out in the open, after all), but didn’t know that they were actual petrified dragons — let alone Sisu’s siblings. The scene in question is where Sisu tells her that their last stand against the Druun was made there, to which Raya responds with “I never knew they were here.”

• How did Sisu wind up in that shipwreck? Did the Dragon Gem knock her unconscious for some reason? And then apparently she was washed away in a river? Does the the top of that giant donut thing even have a river? Did she stumble off the side and survive a hundred-foot drop? And what state was she in when got to the river's end? She wasn't dead, apparently. She was in some sort of unexplained dragon hibernation thing where you can only be revived if someone shows up and prays to you? Apparently?

• The idea is to find Sisu at the end of a river. Don't most rivers end in the ocean, though? And if so, wouldn't you have to search the whole ocean once you got there?
  • Yeah, rivers almost never split (except with a delta, which isn’t what we see in the movie). Raya was clearly searching the river’s sources, not its ends, which does directly contradict the legend she’s told.
  • She’s not searching its sources. The water where she finds Sisu is flowing away from her, toward the “source”, which makes no sense. She was at the place where the water slowed to a trickle and disappeared or went underground or something. We are talking about Namari’s telling of a vague legend from countless ages ago. It’s not out of the question that “the river’s end” was taken to mean “the place in our known world where the river ends.”

• Namaari goes to her mother and gets permission to use the Fang army to search for Raya. Then she shows up at Spine with... maybe 8 people. Is Fang's army ridiculously small for some reason?
  • Namaari wants to go search for Raya, a single person who hasn't had the benefit of regimented military training and three meals a day in years. She doesn't need an entire army at her back, especially not when the army might need to be present and ready to defend Fang from any threats that might arise while Namaari is hunting for Raya. Presumably Namaari or Virana just picked a few soldiers that they thought would fare best on the hunt and sent them off.

• Do the people who got turned to stone still age? By the looks of it, although Raya and Namaari aged after the six years, Chief Benja (who got turned to stone) hadn't. Wouldn’t that cause some problems?
  • Emotional problems yes and Benja missed Raya's childhood but like the Avengers in Endgame, it's not like the heroes couldn't try to save everyone and bring them back. They'll have to live with the consequences great and terrible but it's better than not doing it.

• Similarly, shouldn't Noi be older? If six years had passed since the world was "broken," then why is she still a toddler? Everyone else left alive grew up, why didn't she?
  • Noi's family likely wasn't petrified until recently. Remember, Noi is from Talon which due to being on water is protected to an extent. But only an extent, if you were careless or unlucky and found yourself on land after dark you would be petrified which is probably what happened.
  • The Talon chief was petrified and the old lady who took his place was acting like a Mob boss. It's likely Noi's mom stole from someone she shouldn't have, or had a debt she couldn't pay.

• How does Tuk Tuk keep getting stuck on his back? He moves by rolling, can’t he just curl up and roll again until he’s right side up?

• How would getting the gem pieces let Fang safely expand across the water? Namaari and her mother decide on that plan before they know that the gems can be put back together and before they know about Sisu, but the gem pieces only seem to be able to protect people in a very small radius. I don’t see how they could protect a whole settlement.
  • Water is the main defense against the Druun and the canal protects the one side of Fang that isn't naturally surrounded by water. When Namaari pitched her plan to her mother I had assumed they were going to dig more canals and use the gem pieces to protect the workers as they did so. Thinking about it now they could also use the pieces to drive the Druun away from the areas they are already occupying, forming a wall that would push them back.

• Why didn’t Raya’s friends take the same "palms up" pose as everyone else when they got petrified? Throughout the whole movie everyone who gets petrified takes that same pose, including Raya, but her friends are all able to be frozen holding on to her/each other.
  • Similarly, why do the petrified dragons not take the pose, other than Pengu (Sisu's oldest brother)? I wonder if it has something to do with trust, as the team keeps their stance. But that doesn't explain why Raya does take the pose after being petrified.

• How does the timeline at the end work? The gem is activated in Fang, which is the nation furthest to the east. Heart is right next to Fang, and all the other nations are farther away. But somehow all of Raya’s friends are able to go home, gather groups of their people, and arrive at Heart just after Raya does. Her father is still on the bridge where he was frozen, so it doesn’t seem like time has passed. The world is pretty small, but it’s not that small.
  • Raya might not have immediately returned home. She could have taken the time to extend the inventions. Her father seemed to be healthy, so he might have had time to heal up and was simply back at the bridge as part of the rebuilding process as well as thinking about Raya, as that was the last place he saw her. He was holding the flag and seemed like he was returning it, not likely the first thing he would have thought of after getting restored.

• How does Raya know what to say to bring back/awaken Sisu? If it's on her Fang scroll, how did that person know? Did she just make it up?

• How did the former Talon chief manage to be accosted by the Druun inside his own house? Even if we assume that his gem piece was stolen at some point, he's still living in a Druun-proof city due to it being built over the water.

• How are Namaari and her troops able to travel all over the world without any protection from the Druun? Raya and Tong are the only two un-stoned characters who aren't living constantly on the water, because they both had gem pieces to protect them. And it doesn't seem like Namaari is taking Fang's gem piece on her journeys, since her mother still has it before Namaari first returns from Tail.
  • It's clearly possible to outrun and outmaneuver the Druun, and it's not like they're covering every single inch of solid ground in the land. Between that, sticking to wide open areas where the Druun are easy to spot, and the speed of their mounts, Namaari and her troops could easily avoid them if they were cautious enough.
  • In addition, it does seem as though the Druun congregate more where there are large gatherings of people who haven’t already been petrified. Hence why we see most of them lurking on the outskirts of populous Talon and Fang, only one out in the barren wastelands of Tail, and none whatsoever in Spine.
  • It’s also likely that they have boats to ferry them around. Their entire city is surrounded by water, so the only way to come and go from Fang is by boat, and the surrounding areas are shown to be crawling with Druun, so the boats would need someplace safer (and farther away, probably) in order to make landfall.

• Why didn't the father jump into the water with Raya, instead of just throwing her into it? His leg was injured, so he couldn't outrun the Druun, but he could probably still swim.
  • He probably didn’t think he’d be able to swim in his condition. If he could, he probably would have jumped into the water, so it’s safe to assume he didn’t think he would make it either way.