Mikayla Leskey | Arts & Entertainment Editor
Dragons have existed in almost every single culture since the birth of culture itself. Whether it be from China, America, or even Ancient Greece dragons have always been a myth that we share with one another, but why? Why is it gigantic flying reptiles that captured humanity's eye?
Some theorize that it’s because of a human’s innate fear of having a predator. After all, dragons possess all the traits of animals that humans are afraid of, like snakes, big cats, crocodiles, and birds of prey. Some dragons have the ability to harness natural disasters. Others believe that we believe in dragons due to the existence of dinosaurs, or the bones of dinosaurs, at least. When we started digging up gigantic bones and then figuring them out to be reptiles, people first went to dragons as that’s the biggest reptile we knew until then.
Even with that said, stories and tales of dragons have been passed around for generations, some information gets lost or faked over the years, and people exaggerate the idea to either scare children or make them hopeful. Despite almost every culture sharing dragons, we all have a different meaning for them too.
In the western side of the world dragons are commonly predators. They’re huge and fire-breathing and meant to harm. In fairy tales, it’s always the dragon that captures the princess, it’s always the dragon that does harm to the kingdom and the good people. The dragon is the main enemy and has been for centuries.
Yet then we get stories and movies like Eragon, How to Train Your Dragon, and Pete’s Dragon to name a few. All three targeted a more kid-like audience and became legends in their own right. To this day my younger cousins are still reading Eragon and Dreamworks is currently in the process of creating a live-action How to Train Your Dragon. Up until this point, it’s always been stories upon stories of the fight of Good vs. Evil of valor and cowardice. The idea of dragons is changing in the western hemisphere, shedding a more positive light on them, just like how they have always been in the eastern side of the world.
The eastern hemisphere commonly dictates dragons to be celestial beings meant to give you good fortune, luck, and power. China in particular is known for its dragon symbolism, some of their stories even say that dragons fathered some of their emperors. Also, the Dragon is one of their zodiac signs. They have a multitude of stories and myths telling the tale of Dragons, but one of the oldest is “The Dragon and the Pearl” in which a young boy finds a pearl in the middle of a field, only to find that it allows anything to be largely produced by magic. The Greedy Emperor finds out about it, and to hide the pearl the boy swallows it, which then turns him in a dragon.
Dragons are carved into our shared mythology, even from different cultures dragons have always been there, whether for better or for worse. Through chaos and determination or hope and prosperity, dragons give us the ability to keep our stories going, to pass them down for generations to come. We’re seeing a flip on the preference of villains over heroes, and perhaps dragons are on their way to becoming even more loved than they already are.
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