LEFT HAND GREEN

have a good halloween little cats

Tchaikovsky - Waltz of the Flowers 

“I have chosen the form of your earth playwright and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda–do not be afraid. I come in peace.”

“Greetings. I am Glofnorbo of the cloud you call the ‘Pegasus Nebula.’ I have scanned your earth media from afar and empirically decided that you would find the form of the one known as Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson most pleasing. I have come to confer with your leaders.” 

THIS IS VALUABLE INFORMATION

roachpatrol:

roachpatrol:

roachpatrol:

twocubes:

twocubes:

ok, so you know about bowerbirds, right?

they’re these neat birds that build these fancy installations called “bowers” as part of their courtship rituals; they typically involve hoarding a whole bunch of similarly-colored things they think look neat and building a fancy nest-thingy and clearing an area of the forest. for example:

which all look neat!

usually the stuff they take is just random neat-colored but worthless things they find nearby, but sometimes it’s like:

anyways! so my first thought is, you know what hoards cool-looking, often expensive stuff for some mysterious reason?

dragons!

so my first idea was going to be dragons whose hoarding behavior is basically bower-making.

but then it occurred to me: dragon lairs are pretty often, like, elaborate dungeons, involving a bunch of other species collaborating and stuff.

so my second thought is that to dragons, both the hoard and the rest of the lair are all descendants of this elaborate courtship ritual that they had many generations ago; that, in essence, they construct this elaborate micro-society around themselves at least partly because it makes them feel Nice in the same way that bowerbirds probably feel Nice making their bowers

and basically the difference between “good” and “evil” dragons tends to have to do with whether and which humans are included in their bower-society.

i think that would be neat :3

im still thinking about this

in a number of settings, dragons are able to shapeshift. in this context, this ability would come in handy as part of how they maintain their bower-societies

dragons spend their adolescence (their first few-centuries-to-a-millenium, let’s say) roaming about the land, shapeshifting constantly, taking various roles in the societies they encounter, learning how different types of groups think and work etc…

dragon bowers are often functionally small city-states (or sometimes even just normal states for very very old dragons) but sometimes dragons bower with various other social groups, like corporations, academic institutions, professional associations, unions, religious orders, social or artistic scenes, or even just simple bureaucracies…

while it is not uncommon for dragons to set themselves up as straight-up rulers of their bower-societies, many dragons prefer to set themselves up to have more indirect power over their bower. It is more common, for example, for them to accumulate political power by powering vast and quickly vital public-works projects with their extensive magic.

societies that have had a dragon as a part of them for a long time have a tendency to develop significantly more elaborate political models, often with rather strange ideological combinations (like, weird royalty-democracy mixes or systems of systems of castes with rules that just go on and on) and mixtures of species that otherwise would only very rarely interact. this is thought to make the bower-society more attractive to other dragons.

anyways the dragon-human harmony discourse is consequently… very complicated. possibly at least partly because some dragons like to consistently make it more complicated because they think it’s “prettier” that way.

representative democracy was invented by a very sexy dragon

okay follow up suggestion: the female dragon inspects the bower by taking the shape of a single lone adventurer, and journeying through the geopolitical situation to confront the male dragon in the innermost chamber. if she defeats him in combat she gets to leave her eggs in there, and he will fertilize, guard, and raise the resultant offspring. the female dragon then journeys off to go penetrate the bower-land of another likely looking male. 

if the bower isn’t challenging enough, powerful females will snub it, (or worse, dismantle it) and only weak females will complete the quest to the final chamber. which is all very well for greasy young juvenile males with hardly a lake of lava to their name! 

more sophisticated dragons will build into their territory flashy attractions as power-crazed dynasties, temptingly evil wizards, labyrinthian forests, and/or enticing rifts into the dungeon dimensions from whence no traveler may gaze upon unmaddened. you get some really quality ladies turning up to vanquish you if you put in that extra bit of flair. 

i would assume many bower-dragon females are heterosexual but panromantic, as the relationships they form with other sentients on their quests to vanquish the males of their species could prove vital to their reproductive success. 

clearly, you just need to find a lady dragon, and go questing with her, which even considering the price of swords is much more economically achievable than founding your own dark empire.

while reproducing the original sex dimorphism is certainly in the spirit of the original, I feel that as a species of creatures that are biologically shapeshifters, it would be more thematically appropriate for them to be sequential hermaphrodites of some kind. i can think of a few ways for this to work (including for example just Bigness hierarchies like in clownfish) but I prefer this one:

dragons start out in the “adventurer” sex and only switch to the “bowering” sex after having “vanquished” other dragons a few times; they then go through a special “vanquishing” where they sort of co-rule their mate’s domain for a while while they physically shift to a “bowering” sex and then go rule their own domain. Then they stay “bowering” until an adventurer dismantles their bower too many times, or they decide they’ve been snubbed too much.

consequently, within dragon society, there would be much spilling of ink (or whatever they use, i think they might just singe text into paper…) about dragons in nontraditional relationships, including:

Questions about relationships between bowering dragons, e.g: - traditionalist dragons insisting that a proper bower is a bower that is disjoint from other dragons’ bowers   vs. - dragons who think so long as bowers don’t interact directly with one another they’re ok (so, a dragon bowering with a university system overlapping with some other dragon’s city-state bower would be ok)  vs. - dragons who build elaborate co-bowers (e.g. two dragons bowering with rival political parties, or three dragons setting up an elaborate shin-megami-tensei-ish chaos/neutral/order system, or dragons literally constructing governments with multiple co-equal branches each of which is bowered by a different dragon)  vs. - dragons that bower together and also mate together (so scandalous!)

Questions about when/how much exactly one should shift sex, e.g.: - controversy over dragons that just never stop being “adventurers” (or just adventure for “too long” whatever that means) - controversy over dragons that just never stop bowering (or just bower for “too long” or “too much given how much they’re spurned” whatever that means)

Questions about mating and raising children: - controversy over adventuring dragons mating with each-other and raising their kids on the go - controversy over bowering dragons mating with each-other, possibly communally raising their kids. - controversy over how adventuring dragons are supposed to help raise their kids (are they supposed to come back once they’ve hatched? are they supposed to, if they’re still adventurers, come back to show them the ropes once they’re adolescent?)

and so on and so forth. These might also be part of cultural differences between dragons from different places/planes/dimensions/etc…

(i like also the idea that which sex is “male” and which is “female” is a source of much debate among humans)

I would also like to point out that (whether or not you agree with the sequential hermaphroditism idea) these ideas mean that there’s a very real possibility that non-dragon adventurers thrwarting bowering dragons could be misunderstood by the dragon as the adventurers coming on to them…

Finally: 

if you seem to constantly be fighting but not killing/thwarting the plans of various dragons, it might be worth it to check that one of your party members isn’t themselves a dragon.

I’m pretty sure that after a while the folk wisdom would be that the adventuring scene is “mostly dragons trying to fuck each other”. people might also start to think of adventurer’s pubs as basically dragon cruising spots.