6. How long did I rant about this for? Compared to what I save over several years, was it worth it?

[jack]

I 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.

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Definitely a story. Now go and write it. :-)

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.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:)

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

Can you work a noble and upstanding homosexual into the plot? :)

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

You know, actually I really like that idea, largely because it would be so difficult. This is a fairly bog-standard fantasy mediaeval setting, so homosexuality is going to be a bit of a no-no (like quite a lot of other things; it was very interesting to write in a setting where my hero could not even take the arm of his beloved, let alone go so far as to kiss her, without a proposal of marriage first - I personally don't do sex before marriage, but that level of restraint in courtship made for fascinating psychology that I hadn't even thought about before I had to write about it). So if you have a noble and upstanding homosexual, he's going to be in a difficult position, and it will be more than intriguing to write about how he deals with it.

Frankly I don't think Almard can deal with it, and he's a dangerous mage...

[mair_in_grenderich]

This is a fairly bog-standard

... why did I read that as blog-standard?