![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI had another several days worth of rant about mobile phones, market segmentation, confusopolies, complicated metaphors involving concatenations of pseudo-linear functions, jumentous companies, and other things that make my spell checker throw up its hands in dismay.
But I decided to talk about dragons instead. I know people whose animal is a panda, or an elephant. That has some individuality. Somehow dragons are too *obvious*. But hey, I have to accept I can do something well but not have to be the first, the only, or the best. I like dragons.
Why do dragons eat princesses? It's like in the matrix. Princesses are not a good source of nutrition, people. For starters, there's not very many of them. In LOTR there are no female characters at all (though there are a relatively high proportion of scions), Smaug would be toast. And humans aren't particularly interesting metabolically.
If you just want food, stick to cows. If they're eating for nutrition, Dragons are in an evolutionary dead end. Sea-serpents, crocodiles, fireflies, etc probably do better as a species, however badass a dragon is one-on-one. Princesses didn't even EXIST for millions of years, any dragon who could eat anything else would be at a great advantage.
No, it's a power thing. They get off on making the kingdom dance to their tune.
What do Dragons get from their food that isn't meat? They need to eat souls. (This is also why carnivores always have so much more oomph than herbivores, they recharge their mana an awful lot more. And why the more militant the religion the more specific the kinds of meat you eat. You may notice at about this point in the post that I'm making up things that aren't true.)
What is a soul? I'd normally say something else, but here I think we're talking about accumulated life experiences. There may be something else, but we're talking about that which is eaten.
Which is why dragons want princesses. There's two basic things you want out of life, adventure and luxury. Knights have adventure, but dragons don't have to form convoluted plans to find knights, they just have to sit down somewhere and demand princesses. Dragons want a taste of the high life, and they want to feel special, hence princesses.
Also notice dragons in stories are male. Female dragons are larger, more majestic, more intelligent, and generally so successful they don't hang around terrorising kingdoms. And all the stories are written by knights' bard squires, and jousting with a female isn't chivalrous to them.
That means the bards, like vampires, have a sexual metaphor thing going on, which means princesses. And preferably unmarried princesses, being so much more tragic. (And besides, life experiences of being married off to powerful ugly foreign potentates probably isn't a dragon's cup of tea.)
Do you think there's a story in this? I'm thinking reversing a few things, where the knight is the evil soul-eater, (who starts off just big and brash, but is shortly wearing all black armour, and then pushing back his visor to reveal only swirling darkness underneath) and the princess is the hero, and she and her family band together with the dragon to defeat him. Basically, I want to ask the_alchemist if I can rip off the royal family in her book.
But I decided to talk about dragons instead. I know people whose animal is a panda, or an elephant. That has some individuality. Somehow dragons are too *obvious*. But hey, I have to accept I can do something well but not have to be the first, the only, or the best. I like dragons.
Why do dragons eat princesses? It's like in the matrix. Princesses are not a good source of nutrition, people. For starters, there's not very many of them. In LOTR there are no female characters at all (though there are a relatively high proportion of scions), Smaug would be toast. And humans aren't particularly interesting metabolically.
If you just want food, stick to cows. If they're eating for nutrition, Dragons are in an evolutionary dead end. Sea-serpents, crocodiles, fireflies, etc probably do better as a species, however badass a dragon is one-on-one. Princesses didn't even EXIST for millions of years, any dragon who could eat anything else would be at a great advantage.
No, it's a power thing. They get off on making the kingdom dance to their tune.
What do Dragons get from their food that isn't meat? They need to eat souls. (This is also why carnivores always have so much more oomph than herbivores, they recharge their mana an awful lot more. And why the more militant the religion the more specific the kinds of meat you eat. You may notice at about this point in the post that I'm making up things that aren't true.)
What is a soul? I'd normally say something else, but here I think we're talking about accumulated life experiences. There may be something else, but we're talking about that which is eaten.
Which is why dragons want princesses. There's two basic things you want out of life, adventure and luxury. Knights have adventure, but dragons don't have to form convoluted plans to find knights, they just have to sit down somewhere and demand princesses. Dragons want a taste of the high life, and they want to feel special, hence princesses.
Also notice dragons in stories are male. Female dragons are larger, more majestic, more intelligent, and generally so successful they don't hang around terrorising kingdoms. And all the stories are written by knights' bard squires, and jousting with a female isn't chivalrous to them.
That means the bards, like vampires, have a sexual metaphor thing going on, which means princesses. And preferably unmarried princesses, being so much more tragic. (And besides, life experiences of being married off to powerful ugly foreign potentates probably isn't a dragon's cup of tea.)
Do you think there's a story in this? I'm thinking reversing a few things, where the knight is the evil soul-eater, (who starts off just big and brash, but is shortly wearing all black armour, and then pushing back his visor to reveal only swirling darkness underneath) and the princess is the hero, and she and her family band together with the dragon to defeat him. Basically, I want to ask the_alchemist if I can rip off the royal family in her book.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 02:42 pm (UTC)This sexual metaphor thingummy wotsit is tricky stuff. I realised I'd got quite a lot of homoerotic undercurrents going on with young Almard in my story (that's Ardrus' troubled teenage son), but the lad's worse than his father and I think the gay community would be up in arms if my only homosexual character was the biggest villain in the book. I didn't mean to write him like that. It was just how he happened.
I shall have to get round it by never mentioning that he's gay and not having him realise it himself, but, heck, he is gay. Oh well.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 08:27 pm (UTC)Frankly I don't think Almard can deal with it, and he's a dangerous mage...
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 11:59 pm (UTC)... why did I read that as blog-standard?
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 04:55 pm (UTC)Though switching gender roles feels like something I want to throw in as an automatic extra in ALL my stories, not try to write something around.
There's still a lot of struggle to get that sort of thing into the mainstream. But I'm not particularly good at it, so trying to write a story around it wouldn't be particularly good. And not even particularly new, seeing as how people do that. It just needs a lot of oomph to get people to ACCEPT.
Simon Green's Blue Moon Rising had a great take on it. The dragon says "You're here to kill me? Do you by any chance rescue princesses too? Her family sent her up here and I didn't like to kill her, but I can't bear her any more." Rupert is also sent on his dragon-killing quest to die, being the spare royal son, and is a real person tiredly experiencing some of the cliches of adventure. Julia is the violent princess thing. The dragon accompanies them back. The story then turns grimmer, then turns larger than life, but it's all well worth reading.
But what made me tingle was the idea that the dragon was bad but the knight was worse :)
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 04:48 pm (UTC)5. Opportunity cost
How long did I spend ranting about this? Compared to the amount I save, even over several years of contract, was it worth it? But I am in some sense a perfectionist. That means some things don't get done at all. But things that are done, have to be right :(
OK, I understand market segmentation. (Make things hard for people so poor people pay SOMETHING and rich people can't be bothered and pay LOTS.) But does it have to be so painful? If I could actually pay more for no hassle service, I might. But paying more to feel like I'm being ripped off makes me use obscure excretory terminology in anger, and flame you all over the internet.
You're only saved from being named because I fear everyone would laugh at me if they knew which company I I'd signed up to!
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-24 10:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-24 12:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-24 02:57 pm (UTC)