On Wyverns

YEAR OF THE DRAGON, BABY!!!

[I realize that Lunar New Year isn’t until February 10th, but I had an idea for a Note and I’m scared that if I don’t do it this week, I’ll forget. Hopefully, we’ll have plenty of dragon-themed Notes this year.]

I’ve had a rough week, I’m behind on posting pictures and writing things, including emails and book reviews. I have however started watching Delicious in Dungeon–we’ll see if that lasts, as I don’t generally stick with anime that aren’t as heavy on Plot. I will say watching it has made me surprisingly hungry.

Random side note! The mechanical pencil I use to draft/outline these is not working. I’m back to using a classical wooden pencil.

On Wyverns

Alright, friends, we need to Talk about how dragons are depicted on the screen. For whatever reason, they’re almost all wyverns. It’s not a bad design, I just wish we’d get something different every now and then.

…I should probably define my terms.

In a lot of fantasy, especially in texts like The Dracopedia or Dragonology, dragons are classified in different ways, mostly to make up for the ways that they’re differently depicted in different cultures all over the world. Classifying dragons is inherently silly, though fun, because we’re taking a bunch of different things that have been called ‘dragons’ at one point or another and trying to act like these mythical creatures have some sort of scientific, biological sense to them.

If someone tells you something like, “That’s not a dragon, that’s a wyrm!”, then tell them to shut up. ‘Wyrm’ is an old word for dragon. It doesn’t mean ‘snake dragon’ or whatever they’re telling you. It’s not a classification.

For whatever reason, I’ve seen a lot of media use ‘wyvern’ to mean ‘lesser dragon’ or ‘flying snake thing’, which isn’t actually correct. A wyvern is a dragon often used in heraldry that has two legs and wings. You’ve seen one before, because that’s how just about every major dragon is depicted in movies, television, and a ton of video games these days. To whit: Reign of Fire, Harry Potter (the films/games only), The Hobbit (movies only), God of War: Ragnarok, Game of Thrones, the 2007 Beowulf movie. All of them depict dragons this way. It’s basically become standard. 

What makes some of these examples frustrating is because they’re adaptations based on books where that’s not the case. The Hobbit and Harry Potter feature dragons with four legs, yet the movies go with bipedal dragons (the latter, apparently because they were pulling references from other movies, especially Reign of Fire). The Hobbit is actually worse about this; if you look at concept art for Smaug, or y’know, watch closely in the first movie in the trilogy, Smaug is a four-legged dragon.

I’ve seen different versions of excuses as to why the change was made, from “We thought four legs was unrealistic,” to “We wanted to follow the snake-like description in the book, since he’s called a ‘wyrm’.” Again, ‘wyrm’ is an old Germanic word for dragon, and the actual text of The Hobbit describes Smaug as having four legs! It’s a BS explanation.

The one explanation I’ve seen most often, though, for why movie dragons are often shown with two legs and wings instead of four legs, is that “It’s more realistic.” What kind of weaksauce explanation is this? It reminds me of that Tumblr post where someone said, “Why are we letting the most boring people make movies?” in response to someone asking where a fairy’s glow comes from. They’re dragons! They’re made of Rule of Cool! The idea that the anatomy of a dragon has to be ‘realistic’ can work in some low fantasy settings, sure, but in high fantasy there’s no reason that giant flying creatures that can fly, grow to enormous sizes, and breath fire need to adhere to the shape of standard reptiles shaped by evolution. Heck, in many of these cases dragons didn’t evolve at all, they’re created supernaturally. Why would they follow the rule that a reptile only has four limbs?

Where is our sense of grandeur, here? Why are we acting like dragons can’t look like whatever the heck we want them to? Audiences have certain expectations, sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a dragon with four limbs! Dragons are mythical creatures! We can do amazing things in depicting them! We can make them look as fantastical as we want! And yet we’re sticking with making them look and move like oversized bats.

Give me four-legged dragons. If that one Animal Planet documentary could do it, while trying to tell a story about “realistic” dragons, then these other movies and shows don’t have that excuse.

—