Rule #4

Let sleeping dragons lie.

No, seriously. Look, I love dragons. You probably love them too. (If you don’t, what the hell is wrong with you? Never mind, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know what weird mental quirk you have that keeps you from thinking dragons are awesome.)

But what constantly baffles me about dragons in fantasy literature is how freaking’ often the things bite the bullet. I mean, come on! Think about it. Generally we spend countless paragraphs talking about how massive, powerful, and ancient these creatures are supposed to be and then BAM! Some human the size of a flea takes one out with a single well placed arrow? An arrow? Really? A tiny piece of flint/stone/metal and wood takes out a creature that is supposed to be bigger that a T-Rex? And that also has scales stronger than steel and can also SHOOT 50 FOOT FLAMES from its mouth? Please! Even if an arrow could penetrate the soft underbelly of a dragon (which I’m willing to accept that it could) how would it have the penetrating power to go deep enough into the dragon’s flesh/muscle to even reach its heart?

Do you see what I mean here? So maybe you don’t like dragons. Maybe you have some other hugely powerful creature that you think is the king of your fantasy jungle. Same rules apply.

Basically, why spend all that time and effort creating a super power creature if you’re going to make that creature just up and die? (This is of course excluding Dragon’s of Winter Night where the dragons are killed after they get their heads trapped in the equivalent of an enormous finger trap. You know, only with heads instead of fingers. Anyway, seeing how the trap was essentially an ENTIRE castle, I did not feel at all cheated. In fact, I thought it was kind of awesome.)

It’s poor storytelling in my opinion. Yes, I know we all want to read about heroes surmounting the odds and all but some stuff just goes beyond suspending belief and into the realm of no longer interesting. Frankly I think fantasy literature as a whole would be far better if more wannabe heroes got their heads bitten off by freshly awoken and probably irritated dragons.

Example:

Let’s talk about what I think of as a fine example of a believable and interesting hero battle. I just finished re-reading David Drake’s “Lord of the Isles” (A good book. You should read it. If only for Ilna, who continues to be the AWESOMEST character I have ever read without having a concrete reason for WHY I think so) and in it is a scene in which one of the main characters and a dog like demon wrestle. Much has been made of the main character’s strength up until that point but the demon is, of course, a DEMON, so we can imagine it too has some prodigious strength. But it’s not four hundred feet tall nor does it weigh two tons more than the main character so when he (what the hell is his name? Oh! Cashel) beats the demon it feels more much like a confirmation of Cashel’s notable muscles than it does feel like a cheap win.