Explaining how Viggo can understand the wolves is something I felt I had to do since it was something that we’d never seen before. If you think about it, the explanation I give makes sense. All animals communicate in some way be it through sound, body language, or a combination of the two and the bee thing is totally true. And it’s completely plausible that if you studied and watched closely enough, you might get a very basic understanding of what an animal may be trying to “say”. Dolphins use clicks and whistles, all are slightly different from each other.

The fantasy aspect of the story carries this idea the rest of the way. Of course, it’s impossible to tell exactly what an animal is trying to communicate no matter how much you study and watch their behavior, but since this is set in a world where all animals age at the same rate and are just as mentally coherent as people, Viggo and Leyla being able to perfectly understand them isn’t too out there.

You may be wondering “why not just have the animals actually speak English instead of their own animal language and that way the humans can automatically understand them without all of that extra stuff to explain it?” Well, that’s because of one little thing that happened in the fifth movie. In Family Vacation, when Kate, Humphrey, the others come across the old lady from the first movie, Humphrey basically mimes to her that they want her to drive them across the border. If humans could understand the wolves’ speech, he would’ve just straight up asked her. Instead, it seems they went the usual route of having personified animals speak English so the audience can understand them, but to people in the movie, it just sounds like regular animal noises.

I added the meeting pretty late because after writing The Next Generation and Rise of the Hunter, characters like Oscar, Jax, Jonas, and Martin had gotten a lot more development than I had ever intended them to have. The Final War was always going to stray from that, but now with their added development, they had actual arcs and stuff that needed to be finished and they needed to play a bigger part than I originally gave them. So, I made chapter eleven longer and had them have a meeting to talk about their current situation and that way, I could have each character say at least one thing and bring up their own personal things that they have to deal with.

I had Oscar talking about the Crimson Pack since they’ve been hunting him and all he wants is to overcome his fear of them and be free, Jax and Jonas wanting to rescue Martin from the Crimson Pack so they can have their brother back, and Viper just needing more “page time” in general since I never originally intended for her to be a part of Humphrey’s group.

My decision to have Viper act as a spy for them was done to give her something to do instead of just adding her to the group where a lot of the characters don’t do much anyway. That did present a problem since Viggo was working on a big master plan that would drive the next ten chapters, and of course the wolves couldn’t find out about it. Luckily, I had already established that Viggo has an incredible sense of his surroundings so Viper would never be able to stick around long enough to find out what he was up to.

I wanted to have Viggo have a really complex, manipulative plan that would take up the second act of the story and set up the climactic battle. Admittedly, it was largely inspired by something else at first, but I was able to slowly pick away and add to it to make it unique, but it started the same way, and it worked well for the story.

Viggo proposing a truce would be suspicious right off the bat because the last thing he would want is to give up and have peace with Humphrey. I was going to drop the idea of Humphrey taking the map back with him, but then I realized that the group would need to know where to find this hidden pack of wolves. Viggo cleverly luring them there and the thought process behind their decision to go there was uncomfortably similar with the material I had drawn from, but that’s where I did my best to sever the tie between my version and the piece that inspired it.

There’s really not much to say about chapter thirteen. The group reaches the spot they saw on the map and when they get there, they get captured by the pack living there. The idea for the Protectors came from a want to add something more than just another regular wolf pack. For this storyline to work, I needed to have the artillery cannon in it, which I didn’t mind having, even if it was a bit extreme, because, again, that’s exactly what Viggo is. Plus, it raises the stakes and allows for a lot more of my own ideas to happen later on.

The conversation in the den pretty much wrote itself. Of course, I had the basic script to go from, but I ended up improvising a lot. I realized I had some time where my characters weren’t stuck doing absolutely nothing, but they also weren’t caught up in too much stuff and I was able to shape the conversation to further establish some things and give some of the “lesser” characters more to say; giving Mick a thing about just fighting their way out, sidelining Humphrey for a little bit to give the other characters from The Next Generation and Rise of the Hunter some more “page time”. And I was also able to use it to dig a little deeper into how Viggo is affecting Humphrey mentally and how he’s getting to him.

The origin of the Protectors is another thing that came much later on. As I was reading through, I realized that they just randomly have this artillery cannon in the middle of the woods, and I had completely dismissed it. It’s a huge plot point, and there was absolutely no explanation for how it got there or why they had it. So, I figured there had to have been some kind of fight that the humans had between each other where the cannon would’ve gotten involved. Nothing huge because that would’ve been too large scale, but eventually, the fighting ended and because of the cannon, there would’ve been a lot of destruction to the forest and the death of many animals. Then, this group of survivors could band together and form this pack to keep something just as bad from happening again. They take the cannon deep into the woods and guard it, which is where the pack is formed.

I was going to have everyone go to find Viggo and the Destroyer, but then I remembered that Oscar couldn’t see him or else he would identify him as The Wolfslayer, and it was still too early for the wolves to find that out. So, I decided to have some of Viggo’s men stay behind, that way I could leave Oscar and some of the other wolves behind to help fight them.

Simply put, the idea for including a cannon came from me wanting to up the stakes and give Viggo a terrible weapon. And it also led to a bunch of other fun ideas coming to life.

I didn’t have much reason to destroy the sandstone cliffs, I just needed Humphrey and the others to be trapped so that Viggo could get away and burying them under the rocks seemed like the best way to do that. Bringing back Arnold was another one of the many things I had planned from early on. Of course, this was the end of the whole story, so everyone that could come back had to. And it also gave me the chance to give him a line I had been wanting to use ever since I came up with his character. I finally got to make a guy named Arnold say, “I’ll be back.”

I wanted to keep some emphasis on Martin since I was drawing close to the end and the time was coming to bring him back into focus a little. So, I had Jax and Jonas sneak off toward the Western Pack to try and rescue him. At first, I was going to have Humphrey say the regular thing about promising to get Martin back, but then I realized that it was getting a bit redundant, but instead of changing it, I just had Jax and Jonas state that Humphrey always said that, and it ended up turning into more growth for their characters.