(no subject)

[raincitygirl]

I think I’ll have to go back to proofreading my posts before I hit submit. I’m making careless mistakes again.

In my last post, I said that legionseagle was against blanket podficcing permissions. I inadvertantly omitted to mention that she is against them for her own fic only, rather than against them in general. So I misrepresented her post in a fairly significant way, for which I apologize. It was sheer carelessness. I had read the whole post and understood it, so I have no excuses.

I am re-reading Ben Aaronovitch’s Broken Homes (book #4 in the Rivers of London series) and I like it rather better the second time around. I still think it has structural problems, though.

I am also re-reading Naomi Novik’s Blood of Tyrants (book #8 in the Temeraire series) and it also has structural problems. Cutting for spoilers: the scenes where the starving Russian dragons go marauding don’t get any less disturbing the second time around. Novik has spent seven-and-a-half books on dragons as sentient beings who are only a threat to their nation’s enemies. Your average human’s fear of dragons has been presented as irrational prejudice. And then, after all that build-up of dragons as civilized members of society, Novik gives us dragons who eat people.

Which is not to say that the Russian ferals are any less sentient than Temeraire & Co. They’re a product of their environment: deliberate starvation and torture by their own country. Naturally they feel no loyalty, and will eat whatever comes their way, including wounded humans. The whole mess isn’t the dragons’ fault, it’s the fault of the Imperial Russian Aerial Corps for keeping their dragons in gulags. But it still results in horrendous carnage.

Comments

[wanderer]

Horrendous carnage, but at the same time, I liked that it adds depth to our image of dragons. They're not 'tamed,' even when they've been raised with people who treat them well/form their own society independently - they're thinking, living creatures with a society and innate drives of their own. Take away that society, subject them to extreme tortures, and they respond as predators. It makes me wonder where that initial English/European prejudice against dragons came from - before they were first bred and raised with aviators to form bonds, were they the starving beasts that posed a danger to medieval villages, the way they've been pictured? Temeraire doesn't have many compunctions about personal property; an independent dragon without the belief that humans are worth talking to might see the sheep and the shepherds in a very similar way! When did that shift from 'prey' to 'property' take place?

[wanderer]

I'm not actually sure that comment made any sense whatsoever, reading it back. I do like that no dragon society is the same; they're very much a product of their own environments and how they've developed working relationships with humans. From Europe's 'trainable beast' attitude to China's sort of equal-but-separate, and the dragon-as-social core structure you see elsewhere, it's very believable.

[raincitygirl]

No, what you said made sense to me. The carnage does indeed add depth to our image of dragons.

They're not 'tamed,' even when they've been raised with people who treat them well/form their own society independently - they're thinking, living creatures with a society and innate drives of their own. Take away that society, subject them to extreme tortures, and they respond as predators. It makes me wonder where that initial English/European prejudice against dragons came from - before they were first bred and raised with aviators to form bonds, were they the starving beasts that posed a danger to medieval villages, the way they've been pictured?

Nodding frantically here. And I’d add that they’re not simply predators, they’re apex predators. They’re right at the very top of the food chain, thanks to their size and built-in weaponry. Although feral dragons are tiny compared to the likes of Temeraire, they’re still BIG.

I wonder if the first truce between wild dragons and early humans came about a bit like the truce with the bunyips in Tongues of Serpents. In exchange for the bunyips not actively hunting them, the group leave freshly killed kangaroos as an offering at the edge of the camp. Presumably kangaroo tastes better than human, less bony and crunchy. Maybe the early hunter-gatherers sacrificed a portion of their kills to the local wild dragons, and that’s how the first interaction started.

Also, I suspect animal husbandry has a lot to do with dragons. Cows, pigs and sheep are a heck of a lot easier to hunt than their wild predecessors, who were by all accounts smarter and wilier. Cultivated livestock will just stand there and wait to be eaten, unlike an auroch, a wild boar, or whatever the wild ancestor of the sheep is called. And the open pastureland which is good for humans herding livestock is also probably a lot easier for dragons to hunt in than dense forest. So when human hunter-gatherers transitioned to herders and farmers, and cleared forest, they were changing the environment not only to suit themselves, but also to suit wild dragons. Which would actually make them more of a plague rather than less, because the dragons would be preying on the cultivated herds.

Okay, I just wrote three paragraphs about the origins of a fictional animal in a fictional universe! But it’s fascinating to speculate, particularly given that the different societies which have dragons in them are set up in such different ways. And you’re right, Temeraire doesn’t have much of a concept of property. Well, he has a concept of his own property (like his breastplate and talon sheaths), but not of that belonging to people.

I suspect the only reason that dragons don’t rule the roost over humans all over the world is because they’re so disorganized!