I hate this stuff.
What they're actually doing: Showing that heroic men are idiots.
Here's the deal: Dragons are mythical creatures intended to be scary, even if they are good, as in Chinese mythology. A cuddly dragon is a non-dragon creature of some other kind. That's the point of dragons.
I'm sick to death of dragons being the good guys. Dragons want to eat us. Dragons are no good for human companionship. Dragons suck. Boo dragons. Leave them alone.
Where did it start? Ogden Nash's "The Tale of Custard the Dragon," about a cowardly dragon (who does in fact eat a human)? Anne McCafferty's Dragonriders of Pern series? Wherever it did, we find now that the world is on its head, that the dragons are always (surprise!) good and the guys who want to take them out bad. Whether it's Dragonslayer, Dragonheart, How to Train Your Dragon, it's hard to find a dragon in fiction that's not the good guy. It's like finding a police office or priest in fiction who is the good guy, especially if he's white and male -- like finding hen's teeth.
It's all part of the crap that gave us Wicked and all the new Disney pictures that root for the bad guy. (As long as the bad guy is, you know, a girl -- Captain Hook and Gaston remain bad.) The ladies are just misunderstood, you know. Men were mean to them, probably. That's why they're bad.
Or maybe they're just power-hungry crapweasels. I don't care what made the green babe mad in Oz; if she sends a pack of wolves to rip up a little kid, kidnaps her with terrifying flying monkeys, and threatens to slaughter the little girl when the sand runs out of the hourglass, to hell with her. Drop a freaking house on her. SHE'S THE BADDIE. How she got that way is irrelevant; she chose her path.
As Germán Saucedo wrote recently in First Things:
The clear images of true evil present in the best fairy tales, ballads, myths, and legends offer both a vision of what is to be avoided at all costs, as well as a vision of virtue. As such, the “sympathetic villain” genre is a symptom of a society that disagrees on what is good and what is evil, or that tries to explain evil away as trauma, psychopathy, or pathology. But to identify and avoid evil, we must first learn to recognize the good. The insistence on subverting villains is a sign we have lost confidence in our belief that we can know what heroism looks like, a heroism that displays the good that would oppose their unrighteousness. In a world without any moral certitude or any agreed upon system to define true virtue, what is wickedness anyhow? It would be just a matter of perspective.
In this light, we see that stories like this tell us a lot more about the storyteller than they actually do about good or evil.
One dragon story that takes a more serious approach to the topic was based on Fred Saberhagen's Swords books, which I discussed here last year. An Armory of Swords features stories by other writers about what happened to various normal people whose lives were touched by the mighty god-forged Swords that were circulating the world. In "Dragon Debt" by Robert E. Vardeman, my favorite story in the collection, a young man comes into possession of Dragonslicer, the Sword of Heroes... and also a small, helpless baby dragon. A moral dilemma ensues in which the stakes are not small.
The point of dragons is that they're dangerous, and dealing with them requires valor, not tea and cookies. Pretending they are all nice and lovely is just pretending that there is nothing really dangerous in the world, which we know is false. As C.S. Lewis wrote in the essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," "Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker."
Meanwhile, the librarian type in the meme above are the sort who expect their native goodness to make everyone but the genuinely evil side with them -- and when people don't, they go on TikTok demanding the ruin of their lives.
I've had it with dragons, but when the one pictured above turns on his bookworm buddies and eats them, I will offer him a mild nod. Not that I want the wicked dragon to win, but smugness and stupidity must be punished if we're to understand why these are bad things.
It's the dragon's nature, like the scorpion in the story.
ReplyDeleteAs a former librarian, please do not reshelve your books. Most people don't understand Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress. Reshelved books are lost books if you don't know what you're doing. A KF900 book misshelved as a KG900 won't turn up again unless you do a shelf reading, which entails going over every shelf in the library. Something to be undertaken once a decade. Dragons who reshelve are dragons who misshelve and hence are evil.
ReplyDeleterbj13
Many years ago I was unfairly charged with possession of marijuana because the guy whose car I was riding in wouldn't own up that it was his. In order to expunge my record, I went through "Offender Aid and Restoration" which involved doing 100 hours of volunteer work. I chose to do my volunteer work at the local university library; most of it involved collecting books from reading tables and re-shelving them. rbj13 is exactly right, precision in re-shelving is critical and I was meticulous about it. During quiet times, I would sometimes simply walk the stacks looking for any book that was mis-shelved. It felt like rescuing an orphan when I found one and replaced it in its proper location.
ReplyDeleteOn the matter of dragons and heroes. C.S. Lewis: “Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” And better still, something by Tolkien I read in an obscure source: "There is something in human nature that demands there be dragons, and nothing else but dragons will do."
ReplyDelete