prokopetz:

Those trending posts about dragon taxonomy annoy me because when you come right down to it, what we call “dragons” are a bunch of essentially unrelated critters from entirely disconnected folkloric traditions that have been smooshed together under the same category – mostly by tabletop RPG writers – on no firmer basis than the fact that they’re all at least vaguely lizard-shaped.

In practice, nearly all of the terms that are being tossed about as describing this or that very specific variety of “dragon” would have been used to describe many different mythical critters in different times and places – and conversely, the exact same mythical critter might historically have been referred to by any or all of those names. Heck, the beasties that historically were actually called “dragons” by their originating cultures typically bear very little resemblance to what a “dragon” looks like in contemporary popular media. When was the last time you encountered a fictional dragon that had strong opinions about elephants?

Basically, any time somebody gets on your case about what is and is not a “dragon”, the only proper response is to hit them with an anthropology textbook.

biologically what classifies a dragon as a dragon? what are the criteria that need to be met is there any creature that only checks off some of the boxes but people commonly mistake for dragons due to similarities in appearance?

Jan 01, 2021
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    Or throw a plucked chicken at them and declare it a man
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