#archi rambles

Like I will always be sad that after da2 we never saw drakes again and they were kinda displaced from lore. But that’s a whole separate thing.

It’s that if the dragon has wings it is always female. Has been since dao. That’s why in lore it was always argued that the old gods weren’t true dragons - and is even spoken by Tevinter and early Orlesian Chantry scholars that they were spirits that took the form of dragons. (I’mma go into this more later maybe in a separate post. Honestly the foreshadowing and building they had for the old gods in place since dao/da2 made me feral when playing datv. Especially considering they originally weren’t intended to be dragons)

I digress, something that I think is always forgotten by the fandom is: if it has wings it’s a female dragon. It cannot be a male dragon aka drakes. Drakes die at a century if not sooner because they’re killed by great bears, wyverns, other drakes, hunters, etc. lots of things out there to kill a drake tbh.

Male dragon life stages:

Egg -> dragonling -> drake

Where as female dragons don’t even reach adulthood till they’re a century old. So their brothers are already gone from the nest and dead by the time they’re ready to leave and find dens of their own. Often very far from where they were born.

In contrast to drakes, female dragon life stages:

Egg -> dragonling -> Adult dragon (100) -> High Dragon (100+) -> Great Dragon (no clue what age they hit this stage)

So by the time a female is ready to breed, she has likely no siblings to accidentally fall into. Their chance of inbreeding is extremely low (can’t say this about griffons rip). Which is such an excellent point of world-building for them.

The lore overall has been consistent on that fact. Which was for the longest time why I really thought that the old gods weren’t true dragons - or that Tevinter pulled a patriarchy and mislabeled them (which even if they had been spirits they would have absolutely been projecting perceived gender into spirits since they are sexless/gender neutral.)

I loved that da really stuck to the “females are large and more colourful and stronger than the males” for their dragons. That it was something that didn’t change throughout the whole series even when they did simplify their behavior/dynamics by removing drakes. I will continue to dream about how when dragons came back to Thedas, roaming packs of drakes became an issue for people.

That sure high dragons were the more flashy problem. But then you also had to worry about a smaller, stealthier version of them skuttling through your pasture and frying up your livestock to take back to the sleeping high dragon and her brood. That nobles were having to patrol lest the merchants were beset upon by the elemental breathing harem a high dragon had surveying her lands while she rested up.