The Dragon Paradox

[Dragon Roaring] The problem started with a book. Actually, I suppose it started with a show, “Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real,” that I watched, enraptured, late one school-night. And you could say it made me a little… obsessed — not just with dragons, but with the paradox right there in the show’s title. If dragons aren’t real, the show asked, how does seemingly every culture, no matter how far apart, have legends of the same creature? …It's a question that kind of ruined my life. Title: The Drago

n Paradox “Who are you?” “I’m the Le Choy Dragon!” [Earsplitting Crash]. There’s one obvious solution to the Dragon Paradox, seven-year-old-me would have told you. ‘Dragons are real animals, they can just like, turn invisible, or something and that’s why scientists haven’t noticed.’ And to be fair to my younger self, the worldwide predominance of the dragon myth is genuinely remarkable — there is a fascinating anthropological mystery we need to unravel here. But young-me wasn’t here for that, I

was going to prove that dragons existed as living, breathing creatures. So, I went to a primary source. I had… a few dragon books when I was younger, but really, I had one dragon book. Dragonology is the ur-text that truly began to slow-cook my mind with dragon fever. These pages seemed to contain answers for my every burning question — how dragons breathe fire, how they took flight, the consistency of their dung (yes, really). And the whole thing was written from the perspective of a fake natur

alist — it’s really no wonder I treated it like an actual guidebook. It’s really no wonder I became so obsessed. Yet there was a problem — none of my sources were lining up. Books and documentaries disagreed on whether dragons were friendly or aggressive, two legged or four legged, a few meters long, or a few hundred. Looking directly at global myths and legends only frustrated me further — everything seemed inconsistent, like these things were made up… But I wasn’t ready to give in: ‘obviously,

’ I reassured myself “there are multiple species of dragon, and different cultures have interacted with different ones.” This taxonomy-based explanation for divergences in folklore was the loophole many of my favorite pieces of dragon-media employed anyway. So, I began to obsessively categorize the dragons of fiction and mythology, disqualifying interpretations that failed to meet my invented criteria for ‘real dragons.’ If a dragon had hair: Not A Dragon, if it couldn’t fly: Not A Dragon, if it

sang about reading — …actually those dragons got a pass, I thought the blue one was cool. Looking back, this full-blown fixation on classification is… kind of funny, and kind of, uh — …I spent a lot of time wandering into imagined realms during this period, researching and looking for dragons. And though I remember being happy, I also remember feeling isolated, and just generally confused why everyone seemed to interact with the world so differently than I did. And somehow, I thought the soluti

on was to… talk about dragons more. I felt that if I could explain the topic well enough, if I could disentangle the taxonomy and solve the paradox, I could… I don’t know. So it almost felt like fate when at the peak of my dragon-themed social-idiosyncrasy, DreamWorks released the first How to Train your Dragon film — a story about dragons, but also otherness; maturity; empathy; loneliness; and being an outsider because you like dragons too much. Yeah, it’s no surprise this movie struck a chord

with my young self. At its core, How to Train your Dragon explores why a social outsider might sympathize with or even relate to the nonhuman or monstrous. At the start of the film, lead character Hiccup desires societal acceptance, which in his Viking culture requires physical strength and an unthinking readiness to commit violence against a demonized other (in this case, dragons) — two traits he distinctly lacks. When he finally gets the chance to kill a dragon and gain approval, his guilt pre

vents him from finishing the job, “I did this.” Instead, he nurses the creature back to health, and though Hiccup believes the reason he befriended the dragon instead of slaying it is because he’s weak and an overthinker, it becomes clear the real reason is because he couldn’t help but connect with the dragon’s plight. He encountered a frightened, lonely, ostracized being and saw his own reflection. Now, I’m not going to act like young-me was conscious of all these themes. I was mainly pulled in

by the dragons’ designs, the music (Loud Music Conducting) which is just… what it actually sounds like to ride a dragon, I’m sure of it, and the fact the narrative pauses around the hour mark to show us a detailed CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM, LETS GOOOOOOOO. Though, on some level, I connected my experiences to that of the protagonist’s, I honestly wasn’t self-aware enough to do so more than subconsciously. I remember thinking, ‘wow… it sure would be tough to be an overly-obsessive social castaway, go

od thing everyone thinks I’m ‘the coolest.’ …It can be a challenging thing to reflect on your past self. (Door creaks), I was cleaning out my childhood attic recently, and I found some old dragon drawings that brought back… mixed memories. Recollections of sitting on my own, creating sketch after sketch. I recall how tightly I pressed the pencil, like I was trying to will dragons into existence through the sheer force of my tiny hand. In the book “An Instinct for Dragons,” anthropologist David E

. Jones theorizes that creating art of draconic monsters is a deep-rooted human instinct, derived from an intrinsic fear of reptilian predators. Although most scholars disagree with Jones’s findings, I certainly recall my art coming from someplace primal… The truth is, no single explanation for the cultural universality of dragons is entirely sufficient. Looking around the animal kingdom, there’s all sorts of species that might have birthed scaley legends in the minds of ancient peoples — hell,

the very word ‘dragon’ comes the Latin ‘dracōnis,’ a term synonymous with ‘large snake’ — but not all cultures with dragon myths exist in proximity to formidable reptiles. Dinosaur fossils have a broader distribution, and one can certainly imagine how such remains might also conjure draconic images, but direct connections are difficult to prove definitively. The anthropological origins of dragons likely aren’t a straight line. Fiction is simple, the truth is… well, it’s messy. I think that’s par

t of why child-me held so tightly onto the idea that dragons were literal creatures. I wanted them to be direct, categorizable, something that I could understand and control. I could at least… know my dragon facts. Perhaps it’s only natural for those who struggle or have struggled with human interaction to seek knowledge of the monstrous. I’ve been re-reading Ryoko Kui’s monster-centric manga Dungeon Meshi now that it’s being adapted into an anime, and it’s… kind of wild how closely parts of it

track with my personal experience. Well, in a way. What begins as a standard fantasy adventure narrative quickly goes off the rails, as the protagonist, Laios, an archetypal knight-in-shining-armor, is revealed to be a monster fanatic determined to study and, uh, cook every creature in the dungeon. It’s like Lord of the Rings meets an episode of Chopped, it's so unapologetically bizarre, but Dungeon Meshi ultimately offers a surprisingly nuanced reflection on what it means to process the world d

ifferently. Through the series, we’re shown Laios cannot pick up on social cues the same way as his peers, nor does he recognize that most people don’t want to hear a never-ending barrage of monster facts. Though often framed through a comedic culinary lens — Laios’s desire to comprehend the nonhuman ultimately stems from his difficulties connecting with the human. Perhaps Dungeon Meshi’s greatest achievement is its ability to pull you into Laios’s perspective. Like How to Train Your Dragon, the

narrative is willing to slow down and linger on the granular details of its world, getting so specific with food preparation that if you had monster parts on hand, I think you could cook these meals. It’s a story just as singularly obsessed with monster biology and their classifications as its protagonist, and teaches the viewer to think in the same terms. And even if you don’t share the same… particular enthusiasm — that desire to know a topic inside and out, to fully understand the rules of a

subject, is, at least for me, a relatable one. Though my obsessions aren’t exactly the same, I’ve never wanted to eat dragons, I do know what an all-consuming interest feels like. But no matter how hard I tried, dragon taxonomy seemed impossible to fully digest — there was no untangling it. The truth I eventually had to face is that the definition of ‘dragons’ across cultures was looser than my sources had suggested. As it turns out, ‘dragons’ don’t exist in the same way that fish don’t exist.

Okay that sounds weird — what I mean is, we all understand what fish are, but because all land vertebrates are fish descendants, there’s no taxonomic definition of ‘fish’ that doesn’t include… humans. Lots of animal taxonomy gets blurry in this way. Like, ‘reptiles’ make sense as a category of similar-ish scaley creatures, but since birds are descended from dinosaurs, they technically fall under Reptilia too, which does not feel right. That doesn’t mean these terms are useless, just that life’s

categories aren’t as orderly as they seem — and folkloric nomenclature like ‘dragons’ work the same way. In my attempts to make dragons fit an inflexible structure, I remember following models I’d seen in books, labelling wingless dragons as ‘drakes,’ or legless dragons as ‘wyrms’ …but really, all I was doing was applying false rigidity to terms that in myth were more fluid. The worst offender was how I called any two-legged dragon a wyvern and, okay — this is a rant I’ve been on before, but it’

s very close to my heart. All over the internet people still claim that any dragon with two legs is automatically a wyvern. In comment sections for Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones you will find commenters repeating this like its doctrine, saying that Tolkien or George RR. Martin are idiots for giving their ‘dragons’ two legs: ‘those are obviously wyverns!’ And I get it, believe me I get it, if there is a person on this planet who gets it, it’s me. You want clean categories, you want to be

experts, but dragons in medieval manuscripts have never had a consistent number of legs. I wish it were true that Wyverns were an exclusive subcategory for two-legged dragons, that folklore divided up creatures like D&D monster types. But mythological taxonomy, like biological taxonomy, is fluid… no matter how much young-me wanted to pretend otherwise. Seven-year-old-me would have called this blasphemy, but the fluidity of dragon definitions is something that media framing them as ‘real’ frankly

… takes advantage of. How does seemingly every civilization, no matter how far apart, have legends of the exact same creature? Well, they don’t — not really. The definition of ‘dragon’ is so decentralized that countless likely unrelated creatures across cultures can be made to seem draconic if you squint. So many of the categories applied to dragons are arbitrary: it’s questionable that the relatively modern Western Dragons are often called ‘True Dragons,’ considering that the serpentine dragon

model more common in other parts of the world is almost certainly older. Yet it’s hard to let go — or at least, it was for me — to resist that urge to group everything by type. It’s hard not to wish dragon classification worked more like — “Let’s now turn to Nintendo’s newest game Pokémon —” “- Pokémon -” “- Pokémon -” I think that for a lot of people, the desire for rigid categorization of fictional creatures comes from one franchise in particular. I never had a Gameboy or DS to play Pokémon on

growing up — but I didn’t need to play the games to know I liked their dragons. Specifically, I liked that they were categorized. A series all about ‘types,’ Pokémon seemed made for me. I remember how ecstatic I was when I finally got my hands on an old Pokémon encyclopedia at a yard sale — finally, I thought, here’s a franchise that values creature classification the way I do. But pedantic little complainer that I was, I remember vocally objecting to what Pokémon placed in the ‘dragon type.’ M

any of creatures bestowed that title hardly seemed scaley, scary, or… dragon-y enough to be deserving of the designation, and other Pokémon I thought should qualify didn’t make the cut. I always figured this was just a me-thing, but while researching for this video I found out that lots of people share my opinion, and have taken to the internet to complain. People have strong feelings about Pokémon classification, a fact I learned when I mixed up the regions in my old Pokémon Biology video, whic

h is still the mistake I’ve gotten the most comments about. And I think that’s great, seriously, I understand that kind of passion! But in the case of Pokémon’s dragon type, I’m wondering if we’re being a bit… too harsh. Dragons in folklore aren’t as consistent as we like to pretend. If medieval artists didn’t have to limit their imagination with what counted as a dragon, maybe Pokémon artists shouldn’t either. Maybe forcing things that are made up to follow strict taxonomic parameters is… a lit

tle limiting? Weirdly enough, I actually think the How to Train Your Dragon series is what eventually allowed young-me to overcome my obsession with fictional rigidity. Because those films almost completely threw out the plot of the original books, and I remember not caring. And this was when I was at the age where if an adaptation was even slightly different from the book, I took it upon myself to care. A lot. But these films had their own themes, and needed to rework how dragons functioned con

ceptually to fit those themes. In the books, Hiccup’s dragon Toothless is this weedy little thing, not an intimidating personification of the unknown, and Vikings and dragons get along from the start. But directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders recognized a narrative about an outsider connecting with the monstrous required a rework of the established lore, and… even young-me could admit, it made the story better. For the first time, I remember considering if fictional uniformity was perhaps… a

little juvenile. I wish I could say that my fixation on dragon classifications ended peacefully, as the natural result of outgrowing the subject. But that’s not what happened. On the cusp of my teenage years, fear of seeming immature, of being… an outsider, led to me going full scorched earth, trying to erase any record of my ‘childish’ interests. You might have noticed I used a stock image for my Pokémon encyclopedia — that’s because I threw the real copy away. And I wanted to throw my dragon b

ooks away too, I would have, if they hadn’t gotten lost in a box years ago. The same is especially true for my drawings — which to pre-teen me were, as something I created, an excruciating reminder of the person I used to be. If they hadn’t, too, been forgotten… I honestly might have burned them. And it’s hard, even now it’s hard, to overcome that fear of childishness. There is still, on some level, someone else’s voice in my head telling me I should laugh at and belittle my past-self for… what?

Having an imagination? I said at the beginning of this video that the question of how so many cultures have legends of the same creature kind of ruined my life. That’s honestly not… entirely fair. Yes, Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real just appeared on TV one day with footage of what looked like a real scientist finding a dragon’s corpse. Yes, that convinced me that dragons were real, kicking off a lifelong fixation. But is that the documentary’s fault? The narrator guy does say “What if the legends

… were true?” it was seven-year-old-me who heard “the legends are definitely true, and it’s your job to prove it.” To be honest, I was probably always going to turn out the… way I did — it’s just how I was made. It’s a curious thing to be born different. You can feel the shape of this person you were expected to be, and you find yourself wondering why you aren’t that person. And I still don’t know exactly what’s… up with me, I don’t have a precise label or category for it. I think I’m all right

with that. Likewise… as I’m sure you’ve probably guessed, there is no single solution to the dragon paradox (which yes, I know, isn’t strictly a paradox). And maybe it’s a groanworthy conclusion: that the real answer was the friends (or dragons) we made along the way, but… that feels right to me. Dragons have been with us since civilization’s beginning. It’s actually possible that, like most languages, all draconic myths stem from the same ancient root. It's also possible that making dragons is

just… something that humans do. That we independently find them in pieces of driftwood, in bends of rivers, in the patterns of the sky. There’s evidence a third century Chinese historian labeled dinosaur fragments as belonging to a dragon around the same time peasants did the same thing with whale remains a continent away in Central Europe. And when I think about these past humans, linked through how they chose to imagine a more exciting explanation for the phenomena around them, I like to pictu

re a connection across time to my younger self, . . .doing the same thing. I’ve spoken in past tense a lot in this video, about who I was, the person I used to be. But I mean —a quick glance at my channel and the sheer number of dragons and creature classification videos I’ve made, and it’s clear that’s all… still a part of me. I’ve just found ways to manage my obsessions and channel them into new outlets, and though teenage-me might be mortified, I think it’s important to make peace with your p

ast selves instead of trying to bury them. While making this video, sorting through the remnants of my childhood, I started thinking about how I haven’t drawn anything in a while. So, I picked up my pencil again. Dragons still fascinate me, and it’s clear they still fascinate the world as well — continuing to be part of culture, changing forms as worldviews shift, never but so beholden to strict categories. I wouldn’t want it any other way. And as always, thanks for watching. This ended up being

more of a personal essay than I had anticipated, but hey, if you enjoyed this entry, please lend your support by liking, subscribing, and hitting the notification icon, it helps me out tremendously. See you in the next video, and stay curious.