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jackI'm depressed and need hugs. But fortunately it hasn't been long enough since my last whiny post, so instead I'll cheer myself up by listing all the reasons I like dragons:
1. Tradition. There are other popular monsters. Vampires are in vogue. But if martians wanted to characterise humanity with a fictional beast, I think they could do worse than a dragon.
2. Coolness. They're big (even the little ones), beautiful, bad-ass... We love whales and dinosaurs and elephants. I'm always moved by Kipling's descriptions ("An elephant doesn't run. If he wants to catch up a steam train he will, but he won't run.") It's just amazing that something natural can be so powerful.
3. The metaphor. In so many different stories dragons mirror us in some way. Does anyone sufficiently important have a corresponding dragon form? Are dragons and humans different evolutions from the same being? Are dragons our darkness taken form? Are they a greater intellegence completely unconcerned with us? Whichever way, they're a philosophical point as well as an animal.
4. Relatedly, they inevitably have magic resistance, or magic, or psionics, or wisdom, or kevlar skin, or whatever local equivalent keeps them from being easy prey to things other than direct force.
5. The physics. OK, it falls down here. Every attempt to make dragons pseudoscientific, from Pern's teleporting firestone-eating dragons, to Chess with a Dragon's implausibly large dragons, to starfaring dragons, to flammable-gas regurgitating dragons is at best satisfactory. None ring true and many are awful. Maybe PTerry got the best explanation with the "They're a disaster area without magic, but with it they're amazing" schtick, only by recognising the problems and invoking magic.
6. The independence. A human one day chatting to a thief and the next razing a village would be ill or evil. Smaug is just who he is, and seeing someone acting outside the moral framework is both refreshingly straightforward, and puts your species in perspective.
7. The cult. So many powerful symbols are ruined by casual use, but almost any variation on the word dragon is an acceptable and often impressive name for an illdefined boding :)
8. The cachet. If you kill a demon, you almost certainly used some sort of trick with a mirror. If you killed a vampire, you probably staked it in a weak place near the heart, or brought it to light in a crowded place and robbed its mystique. If you kill a tiger you probably didn't need to. But if you killed a dragon, big or small, you'll get respect anywhere. And dragonhide clothing is mockable by *no-one*
1. Tradition. There are other popular monsters. Vampires are in vogue. But if martians wanted to characterise humanity with a fictional beast, I think they could do worse than a dragon.
2. Coolness. They're big (even the little ones), beautiful, bad-ass... We love whales and dinosaurs and elephants. I'm always moved by Kipling's descriptions ("An elephant doesn't run. If he wants to catch up a steam train he will, but he won't run.") It's just amazing that something natural can be so powerful.
3. The metaphor. In so many different stories dragons mirror us in some way. Does anyone sufficiently important have a corresponding dragon form? Are dragons and humans different evolutions from the same being? Are dragons our darkness taken form? Are they a greater intellegence completely unconcerned with us? Whichever way, they're a philosophical point as well as an animal.
4. Relatedly, they inevitably have magic resistance, or magic, or psionics, or wisdom, or kevlar skin, or whatever local equivalent keeps them from being easy prey to things other than direct force.
5. The physics. OK, it falls down here. Every attempt to make dragons pseudoscientific, from Pern's teleporting firestone-eating dragons, to Chess with a Dragon's implausibly large dragons, to starfaring dragons, to flammable-gas regurgitating dragons is at best satisfactory. None ring true and many are awful. Maybe PTerry got the best explanation with the "They're a disaster area without magic, but with it they're amazing" schtick, only by recognising the problems and invoking magic.
6. The independence. A human one day chatting to a thief and the next razing a village would be ill or evil. Smaug is just who he is, and seeing someone acting outside the moral framework is both refreshingly straightforward, and puts your species in perspective.
7. The cult. So many powerful symbols are ruined by casual use, but almost any variation on the word dragon is an acceptable and often impressive name for an illdefined boding :)
8. The cachet. If you kill a demon, you almost certainly used some sort of trick with a mirror. If you killed a vampire, you probably staked it in a weak place near the heart, or brought it to light in a crowded place and robbed its mystique. If you kill a tiger you probably didn't need to. But if you killed a dragon, big or small, you'll get respect anywhere. And dragonhide clothing is mockable by *no-one*
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Date: 2006-08-02 03:43 am (UTC)The hug distrubutor bimbles on
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Date: 2006-08-02 06:14 am (UTC)*nnnynng*
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Date: 2006-08-02 09:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 09:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 12:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 11:53 am (UTC)It's 12.50 in the morning, sleep!
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Date: 2006-08-02 11:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 12:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 05:20 pm (UTC)*realises she needs a vampire icon... as well as all the others*
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Date: 2006-08-02 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 05:21 pm (UTC)Are these points based on particular fictional dragons, or dragon mythology, or what? In conclusion: tell me about your dragon corpus.
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Date: 2006-08-02 07:50 pm (UTC)It's like those stupid arguments on message boards about "can a vampire do kill a werewolf" when the answer is almost always dependent on the corpus. Except that I'm saying I like the *idea* of a dragon, because almost always, these points seem to hold :)
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Date: 2006-08-02 05:29 pm (UTC)Please don't kill a dragon. They're on the almost-exterminated list.