There are a lot of "ASoIaF dragons are not real dragons" people out there, and really, as I said in the post I suspect you are responding to, I think it's really stupid.

Why exactly is this a big deal to people except that they want to feel comfortable with creatures such as these they have seen all their lives stay so when they feel they are themselves gone?

So that it doesn't feel like they've "wasted' their lives or something loving/obsessing over these fantastical creatures? We're fantasy readers--since when has it been the MO to subscribe to such strict rules?!

Or is it they still that to "protect" the genre, to protect it from people who think of fantasy as this "lower" intellectual property bc it is highly "unrealistic" (read Ursula K. LeGuin's 1974 essay on why Americans hate fantasy) that they have to be anal about such insignificant properties? But they don't know that by doing so, they have fallen back into the same spot as those who claim fantasy is just escapism or un-valuable bc it is "impractical"--they insisting on this weird seriousness by focusing on the more superficial "rules" or appearances of some conventions in fantasy, they relegate fantasy to this static character of superficiality, unimaginativeness, and "childishness/womanishness" that they want fantasy to be less regarded as. Bec without element of repurpose and "recombination", fantasy becomes relevant and joyful.

By "imagination," then, I personally mean the free play of the mind, both intellectual and sensory. By "play" I mean recreation, re-creation, the recombination of what is known into what is new.

Perhaps it's bc they want to protect, as I have said in that other post, the dragons of their childhoods they way they do other stuff that partially lead to so many damn remakes? In that case, 🙄. Not everything is about the past and nostalgia, people. the past is fodder for new things.

The crazy part is that it's just legs, it's not like Twilight that completely did a reverse on vampires in multiple ways!

Fantasy of any genre--urban, high, "grim-dark", sci-fi, historical--has always "broken" or "strayed" or, truly, repurposed some "traditional" elements of the creatures. think of vampires...even before Twilight, have vampires always been the Bram Stoker kind in popular media? Have we not seen more vampires take on a more pseudo-sciency character, with injections of "viruses" and such? Zombie-like vamps? Hello?! There wasn't even the rule about having to eject one's bodily fluids in the vampiric creation process in the orig Bran Stoker story, not it's damn near everywhere!

It's not even about "realism" for me or how we should or should not strive for the most "realistic" dragon. It's about the flexibility of fantasy writing and the history of the super-genre itself. As long as one maintains the rules they set up for their own lore ANd they stuck to the some basic-basics, I really never cared abt whether they conformed to supposedly, popular description for a cryptid or mythological creature. If it flies, uses the elements (earth, air, water, fire), and has scales, it's a fucking dragon. Some non-EU dragons have NO legs!

I could even let go of wings, bc many non-European dragons don't have wings, esp in Africa. Because, almost near around the world (as all of the current popular cryptids and creatures like werewolves, vamps, dragons, succubi, etc), we have adapted fantasy fiction's villains and monsters from. And this insistence on dragons having 4 legs stems much from the EU-description of a dragon, that as GRRM said in his blog post, itself comes from the long-ago bifurcation of medieval people calling that and that a wyvern vs "dragon". It was arbitrary then, it is so, now. Calm the fuck down. More energy is better spent criticizing the HotD and GoT writers for fucking up so many human characters or, idk, defending enby and PoC/black actors!

If we hadn't been more flexible with how we created lore...would there even be sci-fi and fantasy fiction?! DRAGONS DO NOT EXIST IN "REAL" LIFE and fantasy has not always been about keeping as close to reality as possible but the creation of alternative worlds to explore ideologies and human behaviors/relationships to their worlds--to explore, isolate and work around the "chosen" heart and patterns in human behavior.

To create these worlds, fantasy writers choose fantasy to see/portray how humans may understand what a human/society is not in spite of but because of the environments they grow in! and fantasy affords them much more room for high drama that non fantasy cannot "reasonably" have!

As for myself, I prefer dragons having 2 legs when you want to impress that these are creatures who may or may not have higher cognitive functions but can't necessarily talk to humans or feel emotions like humans can or in the same exact range of reactions, etc. When you want to make them more like nonhuman animals. Whereas, ironically, 4 legged dragons, I associate with more "wise", super-repositories of the knowledge of the earth. It's, again, not abt "realism", it's abt character and role in the story and how we are to understand the symbolism of such magnificent creatures and how they are going to work/be repurposed. Making sure your chosen rules remain consistent and plausible.

Popular dragons are air/fire creatures (water for Asian cultures), but have developed from the humans' observations of lizards', snakes, and other reptiles' proximity and making homes in the ground. They are chthonic, which means associated with the underworld or world of the dead (esp in ancient Greece) and often associated with death in EU cultures more than say China or Japan. Of which dragons are much more associated with bringing life as well as death (the Yangtze river flooding often), but are benevolent rather than malignant anyway. From the chthonic associations, Christianity solidified dragons' symbolism to be "evil" and mainly destructive for popular media to then reuse for its own generations of projects where capitalist execs prefers the the past popular thing to assure the money flow stays consistently in their favor. A "secure" mode of income, lovley.

Am I to expect dragons to look & represent the same associations the same forever and ever and ever in fantasy fiction?! And not only that, but to make them more in line with a European Christian oversimplification of evil vs good?! To hell with that (wordplay intended). Because a few people whine about these dragons not having the number of legs they deem to be sufficient and "real"?!

Elf fans similarly are typically very snooty and…weird. The less I expand on that the better but needless to say the “mature” side of the elven fanbase is interesting. They elf fans are all about looks, aesthetics and act all superior about it all.

Goblin fans are equally rambunctious, have a very meme-y rabid nature and are just EVERYWHERE doing EVERYTHING like true Goblins and when they’re not contributing to society are just invading and raiding, like true Goblins you can’t even flip a rock without running into them.

And as an Orc Fan (such as myself) you’re all about the action, no time for ladies, no time for men. You’re making technological abominations, raiding, partying and charging into things yelling “Waagh!” With the same enthusiasm Dawrf fans chant “Rock and Stone” theirs memes with Orcs of Elf women trying to convince and Orc to “take interest” them and Orcs every single time are completely not into it and try to leave the situation as quickly and effectively as possible. I even saw memes during the Wizards of the Coast boycotts when their competitor created their own OGL they called ORC. Immediately Orc memes started rolling or Orcs attacking Wizards of the Coast.