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Silver Dragon Breath dragon forums
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Hyraxylos
Shining Dragonstar
Joined: 13 Jun 2007
Posts: 805
Location: Atlanta, GA
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 Posted: Fri 13 Jun 2008 12:06 Post subject: |
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| dragonwriterX wrote: |
Ever try looking at things through the Dragons point of view? Think of that. Dragons don't attack people just for the sake of attacking them. Something had to have been done to provoke them.
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Do I ever try looking at things from a dragon's perspective? Good question. I was murdered by humans in my past life for no reason at all, and my favorite novels are the Dragon Knight series by Gordon Dickson. Naw, of course I wouldn't know anything about that. 
The point I was making is that YOU have to see the HUMANS' perspective. It's not difficult at all to demonize someone for trying to eat you alive. I'm not justifying whatever attacks are unprovoked, but merely explaining the mental dynamic.
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Just type in his name at the search engine you'll see his point of view.
After all no one deserves to be so condescended. |
I can't find it; the search only shows pictures. But I'm going to assume that you put in some sort of justification for killing a bunch of dwarves out of greed for their shinies. So let me explain something about characters in literary work.
If, in the stories you wrote, you did not make Smaug look like a complete jerk, then you destroyed his character. Tolkien himself made ALL dragons on Arda into evil @#%&s (because Melkor the Dark Lord got their blueprints first and designed them that way), and Tolkien is the final authority on what a character is and isn't like. I don't like what he did with dragons any more than the next otherkin but there's no denying the simple truth that dragons were all greedy evil bullies because the author said so and that's that. Personally, I liked Smaug. He was a very well-made villain and the exchange he had with Bilbo was awesome. It was a tad stereotypical of evil dragons, but there was still a lot of finesse put into the conversation.
I don't like what the dragons were portrayed as in the Pit Dragon Trilogy (dumb beasts that only think about their stomachs), but there's nothing anyone can do about that except for the author. I'm not speaking in praise about her portrayal, but again I'm defending the obvious truth that only she makes the decisions. Obviously you should depict dragons differently if you ever write your own books. But specific dragons created by other authors are off limits. That's as irritating as otakus saying that they thought Sephiroth was "really just a nice guy deep down inside". >_<
Try not to think of dragons as being incapable of wrongdoing or evil. They're almost always powerful, and in many cases they're extremely intelligent, and they're almost always fanatically materialistic. Almost to a point of paranoia actually. But just because you happen to like dragons doesn't automatically determine that they're all good and humans that fight them (often in self-defense; sometimes dragons are the ones who get hungry and thus are the ones who start it all up) are all bad. And don't think that an author doesn't respect a certain character just because that character was evil. Sometimes villains are the MOST respectable characters put together.
As for the "death" thing. Does that irritate you because of the specific character being killed off or because of the species of that character? If the latter, then that's a rather poor reason to mourn someone.
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Rayadragon
Shining Dragonstar
Joined: 28 Oct 2003
Posts: 264
Location: Somewhere between reality and imagination
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| Posted: Tue 17 Jun 2008 12:10 Post subject: |
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I put in an edit to my original comment to basically state that the comment I made was because *I* was in a bad mood, not because I thought DragonwriterX was in a bad mood.
I tend to be bothered when people make blanket assumptions about things (probably in part because I tend to be horribly guilty of it). It's fine to defend dragons, but not if the only reason you're defending them is because they're dragons. If a person butchered 50 people because they were picked on as a child, would you still say it's disrespectful for the families of the victims to speak ill of the murderer because it's another human being?
Like Hyraxylos said, there's a context you have to keep in mind as well. The dragons in the Pit Dragon Trilogy weren't exactly intellegent beasts who thought about things like right and wrong and motivation. At best they were like dogs. Like dogs, they can be trained to be sweet and loving animals, or they can be trained to fight in a pit and kill others of their kind. They simply don't know any better.
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| Dragons don't attack people just for the sake of attacking them. Something had to have been done to provoke them |
For humans anyway, there are sociopaths who don't really need any sort of specific provocation. Even on the news you'll hear stories of teenagers killing someone because "they were bored" or "they wanted to see what it was like." If the occational human is like that, why wouldn't dragons be that way as well?
And Sephiroth was just misunderstood 
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