For someone who loves dragons as much as me, you might think all my books have dragons. Well, I blush to admit, only one of them does. That’s my second novel, Too Many Princes, published in 2007 by Dragon Moon Press.
In this book I discovered one of the problems in combining humans with dragons: scale. Dragons are so much larger than humans, it’s difficult to fit both in the same space. In a dragon-sized space, humans rattle around like the last cracker in a box. In a human-sized space, dragons don’t fit at all. If they are outdoors, standing side by side, the human only comes up to the dragon’s elbow. They can’t look each other in the eye unless the dragon crouches and pretzels its neck around.
To combat this, I gave my dragons the power to change their shape, as they do in Asian lore. So they could disguise themselves as human, fit into human-sized spaces, and hold conversations that didn’t involve humans shouting up at their gigantic friends. Also as in Asian lore, I made them master wizards who trained a few carefully selected humans to follow in their ways.
In Too Many Princes, two of the three viewpoint characters have a connection to the dragons. I was surprised how that grew out of my first vague ideas for the book. If you’re interested, my web site has more about Too Many Princes.
What really intrigues me, though, is how other writers have handled the differences in power between human and dragon characters. How do you handle conversations when one character is physically bigger than the others? (Conversations with giants would apply just as well, I suppose.) Do you give your dragons magic, or are they tough enough just with flame breath and plate armor?
Let me hear from you!
Good post- I do think the size disparity is an issue in several ways. If you have your dragons as a foe, how does a human really stand up to that? D&D aside, you’ve got a puny human (or a few) waving a little sword around. One swipe from the tail or a blast of fiery breath and its all over.
Or even if the dragon is an ally, what does the human add to the combat effectiveness of a dragon? A dragon plus a human is about the same as a dragon without a human 🙂 Dragonlance added the lances, but that always seemed kind of dorky to me. It’s one thing for something like a griffin which is a) closer to a horse in size and b) not that intelligent. But something as smart and as large as a dragon has little need for a human to make it effective.
That said, dragons are too cool as allies or enemies to pass up. I think your solution works quite well, both in books and in RPG campaigns as it “humanizes” the dragon, not just the size but even in the reader/player interaction: we can relate to something that looks like us a lot more than we can to an overgrown winged lizard.
I’ve done that in my current project, for a number of different reasons, although not to make it easier for the humans to kill her.
Another way to do it that I also use in the story for a different dragon and have used in D&D campaigns: maybe mature dragons like to pair their young with a human to help the whelp gain experience. In return for serving as a mount, the young dragon learns about humans and has the human to teach him. It’s understood to be a temporary arrangement but for a decade or two, it might make sense for the dragon to serve as a mount.
Dragons are definitely a challenge: their size and breath weapon make them fabulously powerful. It’s difficult to have humans defeat them. Tolkien’s solution was fine for a children’s book but not really that solid, since it is akin to having the heroes win by luck, never really a good thing.
I’m sure there are other ways to handle it.
Thanks for the post!
Tolkein, for all he was a seminal writer, was a very traditional story teller. The “hero spots a weakness in the armor” gambit is very traditional.
Another side of this, I think, is why so many books, especially for kids, have humans rescuing baby dragons who are being hunted. Because they are babies, they are more helpless and actually need the human’s aid.
The range of possibilities for dragons is difficult – how sentient is the dragon, how rare are they, how powerful, what is their place in society, are they friendly, evil, or both?
It seems you found a great, creative solution to a scale problem. One thought I’ve had is that If dragons or other creatures are fairly common, then many spaces would be built to accommodate them.