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[ • /dir//qu//cyoa//erp//monster//his//wh40k//arda/ •]

File: 1455946416097.png (19.23 KB, 750x421, 750:421, draconology.png)

 No.220191

Let's bring up the age old argument again.

Dragon, drake, wyvern, wyrm, serpent, eastern dragon, ect.

Which one is which?

 No.220194

Dragons have 2 wings, 4 legs, breath fire and are known for their cunning and hoarding tendencies.

However that is entirely irrelevant because there are so many variations of dragons it is meaningless and your dragons can be what you want, just like how vampires, elves etc have no consistency.

Dragons should be used sparingly. They are immense, terrifying things that are usually wasted on being just a tough mob. They are worthy of villains and when they were conceived there wasn't man made weapons particularly good at killing them, making their concept all the more terrifying.


 No.220196

A drake is a male duck OP


 No.220216

File: 1455956185024.jpg (492.19 KB, 1600x1236, 400:309, 3a903f934e118fb1877ebd2913….jpg)

doesn't matter OP, i'd fuck it regardless


 No.220219

Dragons are whatever you want

Drakes are whatever you want

Wyverns are whatever you want

Wyrms are whatever you want

Serpents are whatever you want

Eastern Dragons are whatever you want

All forms of dragon or draconic being are whatever you want. You're the one in charge of the setting here, why should you have to stick to a single commonly-used depiction of a FICTIONAL CREATURE?


 No.220220

I very much agree with these anons

>>220219

>>220194

But, unless my memory betrays me, I am pretty sure that the physical differentiation between "dragons" and "wyverns" originated in heraldry and not even everyone involved with heraldry agreed with it. But what don't matter don't matter.


 No.220222

Wyverns in modern vidya/film are a pretty obvious and shallow instance of animators being fucking lazy / cheap jew companies not wanting to pay better animators, and thus going with one fewer pair of legs.

I wouldn't care if that wasn't so obviously their motive and it didn't stand out like such a sore thumb.

Like if a writer has the dragons in his book with just two legs then I don't care because obviously he wasn't doing it to skimp on labour or anything, so I can let that slide and call it a dragon. Same goes for tabletop games.

But if you do that shit in a game or in CGI for film it's transparently obvious what you're up to, and I'll call it a wyvern because that's what it fucking is.


 No.220231

The difference between dragons and wyverns isn't in the amount of legs. Wyverns can't use magic or breathe fire and are dumber than dragons. Dragons do look better with four legs though


 No.220233

>>220191

Dragon, komodo dragon, crocodile, Couatl, wyvern, Chinese dragon… that's all I know.


 No.220307

>>220191

Depends on the setting entirely. There is no single right answer.

However, the following observations should be noted:

> Wyvern

Is generally not a dragon, but instead a two-legged reptile with wings and the head of a dragon. It's generally more like an animal than a magical beast.

> Dragon

Dragons, in western culture at least, are creatures embodying the evils of the world. Some, such as the Tarasque, proved to be tamed by holy powers. Most, like the one slain by St George, are defeated only through destruction. They are embodiments of greater forces.


 No.220358

>>220307

>Is generally not a dragon, but instead a two-legged reptile with wings and the head of a dragon. It's generally more like an animal than a magical beast.

Since when? In which settings?


 No.220364

As I always understood it …

Two legs no wings: Wyrm/Lindworm

Two legs two wings: Wyvern

Four legs two wings: Dragon

Four legs no wings: Long

Six legs no wings: Tarasque

But writers aren't bound to any of this, because language is surprisingly mutable, and mythical beasts are never totally consistent. Hell, the Yinglong and Feilong have wings, despite being Long, and the Dilong can't even fly.


 No.220385

File: 1456018163102.jpg (94.97 KB, 500x667, 500:667, dragon sax.jpg)

>Dragon

A fucking dragon

>Drake

Manlet dragon

>Wyvern

Dragon with no front legs, maybe dumb

>Wyrm

Faggoty synonym for "dragon" used when the setting either doesn't actually refer to them as dragons or the author feels like being verbose

>Serpent

Lumps dragons in with general reptiles

>Eastern Dragon

Those dragons what got moustaches


 No.220419

I'm in the whatever you want camp so here goes how i do it with my fantasy heartbreaker

Drakes = Baby dragons as dragon-folk. A scant few can "get their wings" if they become powerful enough and amass enough treasure. One day dragons noticed that being soulless monsters kinda sucked, so they started stuffing human souls into their eggs, and the hatchlings came out as dragon people.

(true) Dragons = Adult dragons, the D&D style smart dragons.

Wyverns = Literally any dragon-like monster that isn't a drake or true dragon.

Wyrm = Not used.

Serpent = Not used.

Eastern Dragon = My shitty homebrew doesn't have an oriental land.


 No.220440

Okay, first we need to talk about creativity. Creativity is about thinking up setting, plot, or character elements that make the story meaningfully different from others. The definitions below are roughly standard, and if you ignore them just because you want to be different, that is obfuscation, not creativity. You have made a setting that is slightly harder to understand, but unlike actual creativity you have not made a setting that functions any differently once it is understood (the same can be applied to calling your orcs "baal'gara" and having them be red-skinned, horned beastmen instead of green-skinned, tusked beastmen - they're still cannon fodder for the dark lord and the only thing your weird naming scheme and very slightly non-standard anatomy has added is confusion). If you want to buck the standard naming conventions because it would help you communicate a new idea, do so. If you want to buck the standard naming conventions because you want to have a new idea, don't. That is not how ideas work.

Dragons are four-legged, two-winged, intelligent, have breath weapons, and can use magic. There's a lot of room to play around with the number of legs and wings on this one. The core identity of the dragon is mostly in being intelligent and magical, and the specific magic powers aren't even standardized.

Drakes are four-legged, two-winged, unintelligent, have breath weapons, and cannot use magic. Again, exact number of wings and legs and the presence of a breath weapon or not are pretty flexible. Being "like dragons, but not smart" is the defining feature, here. If your setting has both dragons and drakes, you can have the two of them look as similar or different to one another as you like, but dragons are smart and drakes are not. Now, the tradition of using "dragon" and "drake" to refer to the same creature goes straight back to Tolkien, and if you don't have unintelligent draconic creatures in your story it's fine to refer to an intelligent one as a drake, but only after you've already established that it's intelligent. This seems like nitpicking, but it can make the difference between the audience wondering or assuming the creature is unintelligent and the audience understanding both that the creature is intelligent and that both 'drake' and 'dragon' refer to the same thing in your setting.

Wyverns are two-legged, two-winged, unintelligent, do not have breath weapons, and cannot use magic.

Wyrms are dragons who are very old, or very powerful, or it is a very old term used to refer to dragons.

Serpent is a poetic word that can be used for any of the other creatures listed here or for regular snakes. Literally it means a snake, but calling a dragon a snake falls within poetic license.

Eastern dragons have no wings but can fly anyway, some number of fairly short limbs, are intelligent, and do not have breath weapons. You can call them lung (with italics to let readers know it's imported from Chinese and not the organ you use to breathe) if you also have western dragons and need to easily distinguish the two.


 No.220449

>>220194

Actually 4 legs is common but wings and breathes fire is more important. And if you want to throw history into it, they're almost always venomous.


 No.220454

>>220440

Man your head would just explode if you went and looked at how little the original dragons looked like each other


 No.220455

>>220454

Read the post again and come back when you can tell me what part of it you misunderstood.


 No.220463

File: 1456048572095.jpg (447.51 KB, 1200x639, 400:213, 8fbef7730e86f8622252b2917c….jpg)

Dragons are FREEDOM.


 No.220466

>>220455

didn't misunderstand a single word of you sophistry


 No.220467

File: 1456050012980.jpg (1.07 MB, 1700x1301, 1700:1301, Paolo_Uccello_047b.jpg)

>>220454

>The definitions below are roughly standard

They're not tbh fam. One might say that the defining characteristics of a dragon are being reptile-like and evil (greedy, lustful etc.), whether or not they're intelligent (but they're usually beastly) or magical. Anything else is a subversion.

Your premise is not wrong, but for its purposes the definitions you gave are stupid. You seem to imply that if I call two-legged, two-winged, intelligent reptiles "wyverns" I'm fucking with my players/readers who would rightly assume wyverns are not intelligent. Well, no.

Also fantasy conventions are cancer, and spreading them like word of God is idiotic.


 No.220469

File: 1456050669721.jpg (58.9 KB, 360x552, 15:23, Ivan_Bilibin_065.jpg)

What now, faggots?


 No.220470

File: 1456051471610.jpg (2.09 MB, 1689x2025, 563:675, bestia del mare.jpg)

>>220469

>three heads

>two horns

>three crowns

Step it up nigga.

Slav art pleases my penis, post more zmey


 No.220519

>>220440

This post summarises pretty much how I feel about the subject, yes fictional terms can be used for anything and changed by the writer's whims. But, there's no good reason to not apply some standard to them anyway, especially when going against a good standard can only be defended by, "IT'S FICTION LOL."

Imagine a film comes out and calls itself a zombie movie, it states it has zombies in it and they talk about how much effort they put into making the zombies look good for the screen. Then you go see the film/watch a trailer and the zombies are transforming into bats, only entering houses they have permission to enter and primarily sucking the blood out of maidens they tempt into their castle-lair. They're deathly pale, don't have a pulse, have unearthly beauty and don't age/decompose. Is this a zombie? Is this a zombie film? It's being called one by the people that came up with it, so they must be right. If you argued it was a vampire film because it has all the traits of one and the creatures featured act in a vampire manner, would you be wrong?


 No.220536

>>220519

>>220440

Those.

You are free to do whatever you want with your story, but ain't nobody happy or excited that your tree-hugging knife-eared bowmen are called A'ela-Ecra and the short bearded drunks who sit in caves are called Dun'dungara.


 No.220581

>>220466

Then you should have no trouble explaining my position back to me to my satisfaction. Let's hear it.

>>220467

The medieval legends are 1) not actually the originals and 2) not at all relevant to the expectations of modern readers.

So far as calling two-legged, two-winged, intelligent creatures wyverns, that is exactly a hybrid of two of the standards, so it's a grey area. You get those in language, because language is ad-hoc. And because language is ad-hoc, when you call your smart lizards "drakes" and your dumb lizards "dragons" you're actively making things worse.

>fantasy conventions are cancer, and spreading them like word of God is idiotic.

Spoken like someone who's never, ever made a good faith effort to buck them. Either that or you tried and failed. There is a pretty hard limit on how many new ideas you can introduce before people get bored with trying to parse the new ideas and keep track of the new vocabulary. Only rank amateurs think it's a good idea to waste audience focus coming up with brand new creatures whose basic function in the story is identical to an existing one. If you need a very powerful, long-range monster who terrorizes villages for miles around its lair, your default response should be to just use a fucking dragon, because using anything else means sapping your audience's patience for new ideas on something that's just being different for the sake of being different, which means your audience has less patience for ideas which actually meaningfully change how the world functions. And if your settings are so similar to standard fantasy fare that you don't ever run into the problem of the audience running out of focus before you've finished introducing new ideas, then you don't have a fucking leg to stand on complaining about unoriginality.


 No.220585

>>220454

How are those relevant to modern fantasy dragons?


 No.220590

>>220358

In heraldry you fuck.


 No.220605

>>220581

>The medieval legends

That I didn't mention, but whatever.

are 1) not actually the originals

They're better than nothing, and that's when "dragon" came to mean something else than "big snake".

>2) not at all relevant to the expectations of modern readers.

If your audience is 12 year old kids, then no, they're not. Medieval legends are absolutely irrelevant, sure.

>If you need a very powerful, long-range monster who terrorizes villages for miles around its lair, your default response should be to just use a fucking dragon, because using anything else means sapping your audience's patience for new idea

Using a fucking dragon would sap my patience for clichés, but to each his own I guess.


 No.220616

>>220605

Dragonriders of Pern came out in fucking 1968. Dragons as agents of evil went out of style over three decades before today's twelve year olds were born - and there's no way you're so sheltered from the real world that you didn't know that shit, because dragons have also been agents of good in D&D since the 70s. You hate on "fantasy cliches" on one end and then insist on ignoring the genre's past four decades of growth and changing influences. You're not a guardian of high culture, you're a hipster with an autistic obsession about medieval legends - and no, nitpicking about whether or not you literally mentioned medieval legends by name does not make a difference when you're defending and posting images of the concepts of that era.


 No.220617

>>220616

Shit what needed saying.


 No.220723

>>220616

Hear, hear


 No.220730

>>220191

>dragon

4 legs, 2 wings

>drake

Like the dragon, but smaller and/or younger

>wyvern

2 legs, 2 winged legs/arms

>wyrm

Winged big scaly snake

>serpent

A serpent

>eastern dragon

4 legs, long body, and all that.


 No.220731

>>220616

>You're not a guardian of high culture, you're a hipster with an autistic obsession about medieval legends

Are you retarded? You proposed a canon as if it was somehow official, and I gave you another to show you an alternative. You understood the opposite of my point, congratulations.

>growth

Ayy.

>nitpicking about whether or not you literally mentioned medieval legends by name does not make a difference

>I can put words in your mouth and if you disagree it's nitpicking

Fuck off.


 No.220732

File: 1456143656544.jpg (9.47 KB, 300x168, 25:14, images.jpg)

Dragons are noble animals, very powerful built and dangerous and they can spit fire.

I don't kill Dragons, but they are very rare if not extinct. You probably saw a wyvern or a forktail.


 No.220737

>>220731

Your argument style screams of tumblr.


 No.220746

>>220737

Epic comeback, I'm impressed.


 No.220810

>>220191

Dragons have four legs and two wings.

Drakes are young dragons.

Wyverns have either two or no legs.

Wyrms is a derogatory term for a dragontype creature.

Serpents are fucking snakes.

Eastern dragons are for fucking gooks.


 No.220825

>>220581

>Either that or you tried and failed. There is a pretty hard limit on how many new ideas you can introduce before people get bored with trying to parse the new ideas and keep track of the new vocabulary. Only rank amateurs think it's a good idea to waste audience focus coming up with brand new creatures whose basic function in the story is identical to an existing one.

Better lay off the dew bro, the formaldehyde is clearly wrecking your neural plasticity


 No.220842

>>220467

>You seem to imply that if I call two-legged, two-winged, intelligent reptiles "wyverns" I'm fucking with my players/readers who would rightly assume wyverns are not intelligent. Well, no.

Well, you kind of would be. After all, most folk would assume a wyvern to be either an unintelligent monster, or at least quite significantly less intelligent than proper dragons.

If you want to, that's your business, and sometimes it can be good. But don't be surprised if folk use standard norms to judge the world around them, and end up possibly confused as a result.

It's like he said: If you want to buck the standard because it helps communicate new ideas, that's perfectly fine. If you want to buck the standard just to buck the standard, that's lazy, and stupid.


 No.220847

>>220605

There's literally a cliche for everything in existence.

If you have no patience for cliches, I don't know how you could stand any form of writing.


 No.220848

>>220746

said the guy who uses "Ayy" as an argument.


 No.220881

>>220847

There's a difference between 'tropes' and 'cliches'


 No.220886

>>220881

Sure, but that doesn't make practically everything not a cliche.


 No.220893

>>220731

He explained how modern fantasy is and why you're an idiot for acting as though ancient, outdated medieval depictions of dragons are somehow relevant in a modern audience's expectation of what a dragon is.


 No.220950

>>220731

Right. So clearly you are either completely arguing in bad faith or else you are legitimately too stupid to even recognize the concept of inferences, let alone make them yourself. Either way, you are not worth my time.


 No.221048


 No.221065

>>220191

Dragons have 4 legs, Wyverns have 2. Wyverns also have scorpion tails with poison stingers.

Dragons are ancient, majestic, potentially huge, and are associated with magic.

Wyrm, Serpent, and Drake are synonyms for dragons.

also it's "etc" not "ect"


 No.221067

>dragon

>lizard

>long lizard

>quetzalquatel

>wyvern

> confused lizard

> craftsmen quetzalqueatl

>snake

>anime bullshit


 No.221086

File: 1456246147846.png (11.33 KB, 170x176, 85:88, 1433365236337.png)

>>221067

You forgot

>snek


 No.221220

>>221067

>So, wanderer. You seek to slay the dreaded beast that plagues our fair land. Hmph, you would not be the first. For decades we have seen brave bands of heroes from afar challenge our oppressor and all have failed. What makes you so different? What makes you believe you have the mettle, the will, to slay this great destroyer and bring a new reign of peace? Do you truly have what it takes to defeat…the Long Lizard?


 No.221258

>>220191

Same shit, just different names from different languages.


 No.226240

>>220191

you forgot Linnorms.


 No.226246


 No.226247

File: 1458150138902.jpg (1.26 MB, 1920x1080, 16:9, DragonlordKolaghan_DTK_192….jpg)

>>221067

I don't feel multiple sets of wings is totally unreasonable


 No.226248

File: 1458150394086.png (61.29 KB, 346x303, 346:303, A_dragon.PNG)

Dragon is the one with S and more different S.


 No.226253

Here's a real question:

why-vern

or

whi-vern (as in whip)


 No.226258

>>226253

Y vern for me.


 No.226259

>>226253

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wyvern

Both, and it comes from Old French "wivre", pronounced "WEE-ver".


 No.226260

>>226259

Cannot unhear oui-vern


 No.226283

>>226260

I want ouiaboos to leave.




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