The dragon as hero, or at least not the villlain
I am not going to link to that diatribe that's been making the rounds for a while now, about how you can no longer judge an sff book by its cover* and just because something has a dragon on it may not be about a mighty-thewed hero defeating the dragon, the mighty-thewed hero may be in the moral position of the trophy hunter pursuing the last surviving rhino (at best...)**
Now, I am sure that my dr rdrz can think of other examples, but how is this - O NOEZ plitykly krekt dragon! - a disgusting new SJW trope of the 2010s, eh?
Why, it is nearly 50 years since McCaffrey's Dragonrider (1968, itself a fixup of earlier novellas) and that had a dragon on the cover. And the dragons are the good guys, or at least, in the service of the good guys. (Will concede, that some of the problematics of the human-dragon relationship unaddressed by McCaffrey have been interrogated not only in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, but the whole human/non-human creature bonding motif is explored by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette in A Companion to Wolves. However, that's by the bye.)
Ursula Le Guin and Barbara Hambly both had dragons that were very much Other, and scary because their motives and morality were not human motives and morality, but that doesn't make them Eeeeeevil and to be EXTERMINAAAAATED!!! It turns out to be possible to talk to dragons.
See also, R. A. McAvoy, Tea with the Black Dragon (1983).
Even earlier, my beloved Naomi Mitchison in Travel Light (1952) had Halla fostered by a sympathetic dragon.
I do realise, looking at these instances, that the writers are all women - weer in ur sff destroyin it for decadez?
However, one of the ur-texts in deconstructing the knight/dragon dichotomy as all about Good vs Evil dates from 1898 - Kenneth Grahame's 'The Reluctant Dragon', made into a movie by Disney in 1941.
I might also mention that the Questing Beast in The Sword in the Stone (1938) is not exactly a dragon but arguably has a draconic-style role - and how affecting is it when she is found close to death at the castle threshold and Pellinore's frantic response? Awwwww.
Like so many appeals to TRADYSHUN, therefore, this one appears rooted in a vision of what it was rather than much knowledge of what the field in question was actually like.
ETA And how could I forget Puff the Magic Dragon (1963) (warning for twee animation, not that the song itself isn't pretty twee to begin with).
*Take it away, Bo Diddley!
Click to view** As has been extensively pointed out, moral ambiguity and deconstruction of tropes generally has been going on in genre for rather a long time. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2257962.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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