wade into the quiet of the stream

Peter Parker, edgy Gen Z kid: A will to live.

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.

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.

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