#and maybe vermithrax because she's cute

[hurgablurg]

I'll be honest, four-limbed dragons (not wyverns, but dragon-dragons) are pretty lame. Not because of any style reason, but for the baffling demand for "realism" and "logic" that comes with them.

You take something fantastical and symbolic, intelligent and avaricious, and then whinge over how it's unrealistic that this already-impossible entity has 6 limbs instead of 4, before trying to neatly slot it into an actual ecology, as if the giant snake-bat-cow-cat from a time before time guarding an ill-gotten pile of stolen valuables, knowledge, love, and valour needed to be phylogenetically catalogued like a breed of pug.

Nerds HATE things that are esoteric or exist-as-they-are, so they try to categorise it to understand it better. They write stories about and publish lore books about dragon "breeds", chromatics, metallics, moral alignments, evolutionary lines, and reduce unique individuals to easily-identified archetypes that can be prepared for by googling elemental weaknesses outside the fiction in place of researching accounts and trying to understand the individual within the fictional itself.

As soon as you make a mythological creature a measurable, quantifiable species, you've killed it - and for what? Smaug satisfaction that you've connected dots that were never there in the first place?

It's like how disparate gods and spirits and monsters from all over the world are lumped under "dragon" because they have vague similarities to what Europeans reckon a dragon should be: "Their beliefs are misinterpretations, ours are one-to-one with reality." Quetzalcoatl is NOT a dragon, he's a snake, a god, and a scholar. It's why I don't count lóng as "dragons". They are serpentine spirits as wise and as powerful and as fickle as the river waters of which they are born. Nothing connects them to European dragons except a vague shape. Yeah, Dragonology was captivating for little me, but I can recognize it's flaws.

Just let dragons be weird freaks.