adventure games poetry site info

by Arethinn
January 2004

These bits are taken from posts I made on Other-Haven (now defunct).

On whether colour means anything:

It just depends... in some places colour might be absolutely meaningless. Others might have societal constructs related to it, e.g. clan being based along colour lines. Asking what a colour "means" outside of its social context (if any) is really pretty meaningless. There's no way we could draw a single chart of "what colour means" because 1) the colours would mean different things no matter where you went, and 2) in many cases I would speculate that there's no "meaning" to begin with; that is, that the underlying assumption that dragons have to be associated with an element or natural feature as their "type" to be often erroneous. Try to get away from the D&D or human-occult perspective. (I'm not accusing anyone of getting their information from D&D - just saying that that sort of categorization is a typical example.)

That said, I myself use the term "star-dragon" because we both lived in, and were ... made of... stars. But that's a descriptive term I thought of in this life; it doesn't mean that that's how we thought of ourselves, which I think is the more important bit of information to try to seek out when contemplating one's draconic memories.

> Typically, from what I've seen, the dragons that are two colored
> have the same color for body, and a different color for chest,
> wingsail, eyes, and tip of the tail, if it is a barbed/arrowheaded
> tail. That's just me though, I don't know about other dragons.

Different colour on the belly is common scale pattern among snakes. Those scales are also much larger. As for the wingsail and tailtip being a different colour, that's probably because it's the naked skin, without scales covering it. Then again, there are dragons which are all hide (like Pernese dragons), too. Again, one really can't make too many general statements.

On common, or stereotypical, dragon traits:

Fire-breathing: Now that you mention it, I don't recall any of the dragons I know ever mentioning that they do/did this. I know that I didn't as either of the two types of dragon I remember being.

Hoarding: There was a related thread on the FAE boards where it was mentioned that regardless of the size of a collection, or whether a dragon had a specific collection at all, that dragons seemed to like to have things organized in some fashion. (Whether this organization would be apparentl to a casual observer is something else again.) This is definitely true for myself; if I had a standard "gold and jewels" type hoard, I'd be arranging it according to material, or when it was acquired, or something, rather than just having it all in a pile!

Possessiveness: In my experience, this seems to be a common trait of most dragons, no matter where they come from (curiously, since most traits don't, for any species of 'kin). However, especially in the case of "possessing" other beings, this shades into a curious thing where it's not "control" exactly, but becomes a quality of the person "possessed"... to try to explain by analogy: If I look at an object, and do nothing else to it, that object has still been changed: it has acquired the trait of "has been looked at by me". Possessing a person would be the same... they acquire the trait of "being possessed by X dragon" even if that doesn't imply further effect. In the case of physical objects, it tends more towards the normal interpretation of the words. The thing I am most possessive about, though, is space. I don't claim a lot of territory, but I hold it dear. Heaven help the person who enters my room without knocking and getting permission first!

On dragon "government":

I have two separate dragon memories... in one case, I don't yet recall any political structure. There were things vaguely like "families" (groups of relation, anyway) but in large part we were solitary creatures, occasionally pair-bonds or groups of three. These dragons were non-corporeal (although they had the ability to "manifest") and very intelligent, although the consciousness was kind of... dreamy... with collective elements to it, rather than the pointed, awake "I" that we associate with our current consciousness.

In the other, it was more "animalistic" in the way that Tresh describes, but not that harsh. We weren't a "pack", "pride" or any other such mostly tight-knit kind of grouping. We were semi-solitary, but I do think that there were some that were more or less dominant than others, and over a region of territory was a loose grouping, like being aware of your neighbours down the street and maybe one of them is a local bigwig, but you might not have any particular connection to them.

Those dragons in general, though, were more like Earth animals in terms of intelligence than most people generally think of dragons as being. We were not magical philosophers or anything like that. We did have language, but it was simpler than human spoken languages are. I would say we were not as intelligent as most humans, but more intelligent than Earth apes.

Back to the miscellaneous types section

Back to the main otherkin page