No More Dragons

Nota Bene: Like all my denunciations of literary trends, I have to jump in and say this, lest I get even more of a flame war than I'm hoping for/fearing:

I exempt those who are writing for the purposes of irony, parody, metacommentary, and symbolic commentary on deeper issues, and I will always listen to an inventive application of an old idea.  After all, one of my favorite Neil Gaiman stories is about the Holy Grail.  And I exempt, too, my good friend (and Actual Published Author) Sara Harvey, who has gotten a story about dragons sold to a small press and should not take this as an attack against her story.  She had prose on her side.  Also, lest I be forced to eat crow, I may write a story about dragons some day; but I wouldn't really count on it.

Okay.  So, seeing as how I already posted some link salad today, I'll make this one brief.

Dragons.

It's more than a little astounding to me that I missed these guys in my discussion of fantasy tropes; looking back I think I was mostly focused on urban fantasy, but I'm 90% positive that shouldn't have stopped me.  This whole thing starts with an unfortunate contradiction, but one that I have to shore up in order to hold onto my Master's degree. 

I, like any red-blooded boy who wore glasses and defended the literary cachet of Piers Anthony, loved dragons.  I'll even go so far as to say I love dragons; I love what they symbolize, I love the imagery, I love their deep archetypal potency. 

That said, people of the world, fantasy authors everywhere: stop writing about dragons.

I'm not old; I'm not the pinnacle of literary experience.  Six years in college and I never read Proust.  But trust me when I say that I have seen dragons done to absolute death.

I have seen classic Arthurian dragons and wise Chinese dragons; I've seen dragons as fire-breathing lizards; I've seen dragons as genetic experiments; I've seen dragons as a joke and dragons as a linchpin in the idea that believing in something enough can make it real.  Heroic dragons, villainous dragons, stupid dragons, smart dragons.  I've seen dragons made of molten stone and lightning.  I've seen dragons who looked like silver-scaled cats.  I've seen dragons with spotlights for eyes.  I've even, and I don't recommend putting this into Google Image Search, seen a dragon made entirely of boobies.

(In fact, I think this might be a valid way to judge the remaining stamina of any fantasy trope: has it been converted wholecloth into science fiction?)

"But Tyler," you're asking, with a presumptuous familiarity, "why can't we use dragons anymore?  They're so symbolically potent!"

First of all, dragons are not that symbolically potent anymore; in a sense they've started more and more to represent themselves, and while you can get some mileage out of different cultural approaches to dragons, you can only get so far with that.  But to address the more important question, you can't use dragons for the same reason that you can't use werewolves, vampires, Cthulhu, or zombies: It's too easy to write a story that goes no deeper than "dragons and…".

What do I mean?  Take a book I picked up and put down last week, the currently critically-acclaimed His Majesty's Dragon.  It seemed well-written enough; the prose was good, though not really my thing, and it seemed like the 70 or so pages like there would be a bit of military politics and quasi-real-world nationalism, and that seems like it might be worthy of praise.  But in the same breath, you had a main character thrust into a life-changing situation for no apparent reason, and his new companion, a young dragon who [SPOILERS!]

 

 

 

is, of course, one of a rare breed of dragons who are Very Special and who have never been seen in England before.

 

 

 

[END SPOILERS!]

 

           

 

I read, as I said, about 70 pages; and then I was given the new John Hodgman book, and I switched over to that, because the truth was, it seemed like a lot was hinging on me being interested in a story that was, in essence, "dragons and the Napoleonic Wars".

Without being exhaustive, I've seen plenty of stories that have done this, and not often done it well.  I've seen "vampires and politics"; "zombies and corporate America"; "Cthulhu and Sherlock Holmes" (there's an entire book of that combination and I'd argue only half of it really works); and of course, like everyone, I've seen "dragons and spaceships", or even better, "dragons and a troubled assassin".  In other words, I'm not saying His Majesty's Dragon is unique, and I don't want to seem to be disguising a negative review as an essay.  I just think that it's one of the latest in a long line of books that are using the addition of dragons to carry something very  

I could just as easily try to claim that Dune is crap for expecting me to enjoy "politics in space", or that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is crap because it expects me to enjoy "vampires in high school".  And I'll admit, some of it is that my love for dragons is not as strong as it once was.  But some of it is also that dragons have a tendency, again like zombies or Lovecraftian horrors, to become a major force behind getting people to read a book.  Buffy used its vampires (and werewolves and demons and what-have-you) for more potent effects than just garnering viewers—in fact, most of the viewers I know love Buffy despite its use of vampires, not because of them, and I think that's ultimately the difference.

I go back to my point about their lack of symbolic cachet.  See, dragons have this problem: they're pretty god-damn distinctive.  You can put theoretically new spins on a dragon, but you're going to wind up with some variation of a flying lizard; nameless horrors from the depths and shambling animated corpses have at least a little more variation, though they're starting to wear out their narrative elasticity as well.  They have a tendency to crowd out other aspects of the narrative: people come to dragon fiction and one of the first things they want to know is "how do these dragons work?!"  Which of course forces the author to find some new way to portray their dragons; which means they spend time on that and not on, oh, characters or plot; and the downward spiral continues, all thanks to the addition of dragons. 

This is my complaint with dragons—they take over a story, and they do it so effectively that they have a tendency to receive a warm welcome when doing so.

Save narrative.  Don't write about dragons.