Clickbait title: Individualistic fantasy in fantasy.

Dragon is a strong word. It is certainly not meaningless, but it is very flexible in what it can be applied to. I do not think we can find some platonic ideal of a dragon, but I want to discuss the complex emotions the concept gives me.

Dragons

Firstly, dragons are powerful, certainly physically and sometimes also magically-gifted. In basically every story a fully-grown dragon has the agency to do whatever it wants. This means that in most stories there has to be a good reason why the dragon does not intervene, often its boredom, self-interest or some cosmological balance.

But dragons are not gods. The traditional dragon has to be slayable by some amount of effort. But importantly the slayer has to be special, often prophesised. Dragons are basically only slayable by the higher power of a story. “Conventional means” like another strong creature tend to be ineffective. Dragons are at the top of every hierarchy, like we humans are used to being.

We can go several ways now. Dragons can in some ways just be the fantasy version of a lion. At the top of the food-chain but man supersedes through intelligence. But if you want your dragon to not just be a monster but an actor, you may make your dragon intelligent.

So you have this marriage of something with at least human intelligence with the raw strength of the strongest animals. And to grow this large, the dragons probably also live far longer, being able to amass more knowledge or wisdom than any human which is itself somewhat monstrous.

That being said, the power of dragons tend to always be in the imaginable realm. Compared to stories about gods or aliens, dragons tend to maybe be 100x longer-living than humans and 1000x stronger. And in our stories we at least can pretend like we somewhat understand this concept, compared to something that lives a million times longer than us.

In fictional worlds with an actor that is this powerful, dragons tend to need to be delegated to either being zealots or emperors, the latter being much harder to write. Of course you may also invent a fantasy world of crazy things that match a dragon’s powerlevel, but I think that tends to lose sight of the point of the concept of a dragon (even D&D tends to keep dragons out of reach of most campaigns).

Dragons as protagonists

Some people want to play with literary fire. If dragons can be conceptualised as sort-of human intelligence, why not follow one around? Well, you tend to end up needing to justify a lot of things. If your dragon is so powerful, why have they simply not reached their goals yet? Indeed we sometimes do conceptualise humans as dragons, especially when we want to emphasise their power and wealth and how they are not using it to help others.

You may have a dragon which does put all of its effort into helping others. This can be a different kind of wish-fulfilment, one of an altruist who does not reject power as a concept. But it opens you to more questioning: Why have all problems not be solved yet with someone to strong working against them? Well of course some problems are very complicated, but this tends to go against the fantasy of a simpler world. There’s a reason most growth stories end when the hero has saved the world.

Here’s another dangerous concept. Dragons with a human form. I think this idea is quite prominent due to D&D and because the current literary force in fantasy is pushing further and further towards wish-fulfilment (I blame fan-fiction? idk). This of course simplifies a lot of interactions between dragons and humanoids (as well as saving on the animation budget). A powerful chosen origin story is of course one of draconic ancestry.

Right, so our dragon may interact with humans, but their interests have to be such that they don’t “rock the boat” in the world, whilst still retaining their power. Maybe that is the great contradiction to wrestle with: Some kind of Dr. Faust of a dragon who has everything but is still dissatisfied. And maybe instead of a pact with a dragon, they dedicate themselves to research. I like knowledge! A lifetime of a 1000 years to gather knowledge.

Fantasies beyond stories

In (Western) storytelling you tend to need some kind of goal and adversity. As illustrated above, it is hard to find any adversity for a dragon, because it is somewhat in their nature to not have any adversity (except for chosen ones). This is what makes them a strong tool in fiction and less so good protagonists.

But let’s be honest here: Facing no physical danger ever? Not needing to rely on anything or any system to survive? Living forever? Being able to fly? If this isn’t the bucket list of any individualist fantasy ever. There are billion dollar industries trying to give you all of these things, and they aren’t billion dollars for nothing.

Being a dragon, is an escapist fantasy of being extremely rich in wealth, power, security. And what do dragons do in fiction? They destroy, they steal and they hoard. Because who is going to stop them?