The Meme Master Post

D is for Dragons, with gold for a bed

You know, I don’t remember being a dragons sort of girl. The winged-cat-people people don’t have dragons. Most of my early fantasy doesn’t have dragons. Elves, yes, horses, lots. Not so many dragons.

Addergoole got dragons on a whim. After all, Aelfgar needed something big to be fighting! (Actually, I think the parent story of Addergoole, Whisky Lullaby, first introduced the dragons. The same concept, though: so’jers have been fighting dragons as long as the faerie apoc ‘verse has existed.) Dragons Next Door was born as a 15-minute fiction prompt: “obnoxious dragons.” (here).

More than that: I came late to Pern, and read very little other fantasy involving dragons. I’ve enjoyed dragon movies, mostly for their spectacular effects, even when everything else in the movie (*cough* “The D&D Movie”) sucked. But dragons… dragons for me are more common as a metaphor.

I went through a period where my favorite phrase was “sometimes the maiden is safer with the dragon.” I was playing – in a LARP (Changeling: the Dreaming) – a satyr seer paired with a redcap (in that setting, the most violent of the “acceptable” “non-monster” fae). There were times when someone tried to convince my little satyr she was safer with the “good guys” – that’s where the concept came from. Dragons are the honest monsters, the safe ones. You know where you stand with something fifty feet long with scales and claws. Safer, maybe, then a would-be-white-knight.

…I should write that story sometime. I wonder what I’d do with it now, a decade later.

I think my favorite dragons story I’ve actually gotten to read would be the Dragon Librarian story eseme was writing many years ago. And this may be my favorite dragon art, by M.C.A. Hogarth.

Dragons ho!

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