Post you reblogged about the Żmij made me think about how even within cultures there can be a wide range of dragons with a wide range of traits (sometimes antithetical to each other) and I think people should talk about that more. Talk about the different slavic dragons and how they fight one another, or talk about the differences between a Ryu, Tatsu, Mizuchi, and Wani.
I think with the East Asian examples, they are actually very different creatures that just got labelled as dragons by Europeans because of similarities.
The Eastern European examples however are extremely interesting to me because oftentimes there are different words like variants of zmaj, smok, lamia or azhdaha, which at their core all mean dragon but get used to differenciate creatures that play very different roles in their myths.
But since all I have to work here are German and English folklorists and the rare English text by a Slavic (and even rarer Romanian, Hungarian, Albanian or Greek) folklorist, I'm not sure how much of this stuff is just generalization and categorization by folklorists and how different the regional beliefs actually are.
So yeah, comments by people who know more about Eastern European folklore are greatly appreciated.
