My project last week was dragons. At dinner a few weeks ago, friends and I were discussing the current popularity of fantasy in fiction and movies. Being an overeducated bunch, I think we squandered ten seconds pretending to care what the surge in literary dragons says about our culture. Fortunately for us, our desire for silliness won the table duel and we spent a good deal more time wondering what our taste in dragons says about ourselves instead.
Our choices from current pop culture offerings are many. The simplest are blocker dragons—big, strong, scaly brutes that stand (hover?) between a hero and a goal. These have to be killed. No subtlety. Not much fun either.
Puzzle dragons are also big, strong and scaly, but smart. With these, the hero does best who can outtalk the monster. Strabo in Terry Brooks’ Kingdom of Landover novels is a dragon of this sort—grumpy, but surprisingly honest for a villain, and quick with a crisp insult.
A big fad in dragon concepts lately seems to be the companion dragon, one linked telepathically or otherwise to the hero who will fight his battles with him. Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series explores what if dragons had been weapons in the Napoleonic wars. Donkey’s dragon in the Shrek movies, Saphira in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance cycle and the handy travel-sized dragon, Mushu, in Disney’s Mulan are other examples. In these stories the dragon is on your side and loves you.
Myself, I like pathetic dragons. My favorite is the endangered swamp dragon species in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. These are in danger of exploding every time they sneeze. And they sneeze a lot.
We didn’t go into the psychological questions, but I found myself thinking about those later. Why are our dragons so big? Perhaps because our problems are big and we want our displacement metaphors to be large enough to hold them? Why scales? Dragons are often colorful, beautiful, but never furred or feathered. Maybe we want to be tough enough to never feel afraid? Why fire? Even the sad swamp dragons can breathe flame. Power, I suppose, but power for what? The fire is always a weapon, never healing. Dragons destroy, not create.
Why do we need them? What do they do for us we cannot do with gentler metaphors?
I’m not sure, but I’ve spent the week doing sketches, and I’m afraid that, so far, my dragons are only cute, not scary. I just can’t do terror yet. But I plan to keep trying. These days I need a good terror displacement.
Above: Study for Charity's Dragon (maybe), acrylic on board, 24x12 inches. Copyright 2010 ptw.
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