I Have An Important Question About Possible Chicken-Dragons!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Hey guys! Got a worldbuilding question for you.

So while the Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic languishes in despair of finding an agent, it's mostly ready to be looked at--probably it could use an editor to point out things I've missed, but I've got it pretty polished. But I can't resist making a few tweaks while I wait, and there's one tweak that isn't so important for the actual book, but for the world.

The OGYAFE is portal fiction because, hey, I like portal fiction, but I'm trying to make OGYAFEland as independent as possible anyway. I want there to be a balance between their world and ours--some things are better there, others here. This extends to people, cultures, technology, and ecology and geography and so forth.

But one thing that's pretty darn fun about OGYAFEland is the dragons.

I really like the idea of dragons as a biological clade--not just a species. Not even a few varieties of intelligent creatures, like in the Dragonology books or similar pretend field guides. I'm thinking of them as but a whole dang taxonomic group distinct from reptiles, birds, and mammals--and with as much diversity, because dragons have been speciating just like all the other animals have. In OGYAFEland, dragons (with the exception of one notable species) are as commonplace, and as varied, as birds.

Which got me wondering.

Should OGYAFEland even HAVE birds?

I admit to going back and forth on this. It wouldn't take much to change it around in the story--a couple of place names would have to be changed, and one character's feathers (don't ask) would have to be specified to look like "dragonfeathers" (a modified scale that many dragon species have evolved--which is more or less how feathers work anyway), but that shouldn't be hard. And I like that our world would then have a biological clade completely foreign to OGYAFEland. Plus, while I'm not going for a one-to-one correlation between bird and dragon species, it's really fun to have them fill similar ecological niches that have the displaced characters from our world trying to make analogies and referring to "chickendragons" and "hawkdragons" and "hummingdragons" and "penguindragons."

But ... to be honest, I'd sort of miss birds.

I guess the whole idea is to have something be better in our world. But I wanted some other input. What do you guys think?

Comments

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

Off the top of my head, I think taking birds out changes how the plant life works. Maybe just no predatory birds? If you have seed-eating dragons, though, you might not need birds at all, and it's hard to imagine that birds and dragons wouldn't have fought each other for dominance at some point in the past.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

That's kind of what I was thinking--there'll be seed-eating dragons, and a few small pollinator dragons, and migrating dragons, etc.. That was one of the big draws--coming up with dragons to fill all those vacant niches!

Their ancestral species were not native to the world they're in now, but I suspect they've been around for quite a few million years. Possibly just as birds were getting started, in fact ...

[redbird]

If the characters keep referring to "chickendragons" and "penguindragons" and so on, I suspect you lose the "but these are dragons" wonderment because the reader is going to be expecting them to behave just like chickens and penguins and so on.

If you're going to take it in this direction, I'd go with Stephen Jay Gould's idea that evolution is contingent. Drop dragons into the ecology 65 million years ago instead of theropod dinosaurs, and they'll fill slightly different niches, and even the ones that were in very similar niches would look different. And warm-blooded dragons might not evolve to fit into the penguin niche; there might be more mammals there instead. Take out birds and maybe more marsupials hang on. Hummingbirds are weird and exist only in the Americas; if there were no birds, you might get more bats, or dragons, drinking nectar and pollinating things, but probably not small, bright-colored, hovering vertebrates.

I suspect that your displaced characters wouldn't be saying "chickendragon" and "hawkdragon," unless they're ornithologists: they might start with that, but pretty soon it would just be "hawk" and "chicken," especially if the thing in something like the chicken/jungle fowl niche was worth eating.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Point. Honestly, I was only thinking of a couple of characters from Our World who are new here and struggling to come up with analogies to what they know from our own world--just one or two comments like "So, it's like a chicken, then? This is a CHICKENDRAGON?" The locals have their own names for everything, which these characters adopt (they're all speaking OGYAFEse, anyway--my characters get some fast schoolin').

But yeah, hummingbirds are actually one of the reasons I'm reluctant to dump birds--they're cool and useful. I was also considering making them be a smallish class--you'd get a few kinds of birds, but not nearly the variety we have here, rather like how marsupials got crowded out.

I also want to take advantage of the weirder morphs. Hummingdragons were a passing thought, but hey, evolution can come up with some weird stuff. I hope I can figure out even a small percentage of weirdness to match it!

[beccastareyes]

Hummingbirds are America-specific, but the niche of 'nectar-eating pollinator' has several groups of birds depending on where you are. Like sunbirds. You also have insects and a few mammals (and wikipedia tells me there's a genus of gecko as well).

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

Well, our world has birds and bats, so there is no reason OGYAFE world shouldn't have birds and dragons. Bats and swallows both eat mosquitoes but don't run each other out of an area. Would a goosedragon be a sea serpent?

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

Chickendragons! Hummingdragons!

I wouldn't mind a world with flighted not-birds taking those niches.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

I'll take what may be a superficially unpopular opinion and say drop the birds! Note that I'm expecting my opinion to be tempered by many other people's, and I'm not too worried about how well you'd handle the converse if you do end up going with it after all. But if I'm going to chime in just for fun's sake, I'll say drop the birds, possibly precisely because that's what the reader doesn't want, at least not at first.

"No birds!" The reader will share the Our World characters' astonishment and weirdly bond over their outrage at the lack of birds. It'll become emblematic of just how "Otherworldly" the "Other World" which has dragons is, an easy way they could convey its outlandishness to other Our Worlders - "No birds! How do they manage?" Yet just as other cultures we wonder this about regarding so many things - how do they manage? - on some level they'd manage just fine, and when the reader would accept that, it'd be like they'd be accepting a wider part of the in-world reality along with it.

Plus, if you're trying to come up with dragons that will catch the reader's imagination, I think it will force your own mind to go in directions in which it normally wouldn't if you're forced to navigate around a lack of birds, giving it extra motivation to come up with more specific dragon subspecies functions. But, as I said that's just my opinion at first whiff, without having read the story itself of course, so make of it what you will and take it with a shaker of salt. :)

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see how long it takes the portal-visitor to notice. At first the excitement and the newness and the dragons will be overwhelming and then at some point they'll say (maybe to themselves) "you know, I haven't seen any _birds_ in a while...".

I'm also reminded of this scene from Erfworld.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

I am now deep in an archive dive. I hope you're happy.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

Welcome to my morning and early afternoon :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

https://twitter.com/kistaro/status/483801248211406848/photo/1

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hah! Yeah, one does react with "How do they manage?" And later on somebody from OGYAFEland takes a look at a bird field guide and is just BAFFLED.

Also, somehow your comment made me realize just how I could make this into a useful plot point. So thanks!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

You're welcome! Glad to hear it.

On a random note I've been writing a lot recently, more stories in Boko's, Diaz's and Mandrake's universe, in case the mood should ever strike you to peruse any of them:

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13901456/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13917513/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13937343/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13952714/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13998177/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/14006721/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/14017205/

[beccastareyes]

I'd say yes, if you can manage to create an ecology where the narrator is actually wrong about the Domestic Dragon being a chicken-dragon, for all that people keep them for eggs and meat. I like the instruction upthread to mix it up a bit: have dragons take over some niches mammals or true reptiles have, and have mammals/reptiles/fish cover some niches instead of a one-to-one dragon-species for bird-species swap.

(Also, have you read A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan? It features an alternate world where there are many types of dragon. The main character is biased towards charismatic megafauna, but she mentions small garden creatures like 'sparklings'.)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's more just an analogy than a true chicken-dragon.

I have not read it! Another author who had my idea before I did? I usually wind up liking those, after I've sworn a couple of times.

[beccastareyes]

I don't know. It's a non-magic world with rather scientific dragons going through the start of its Industrial Revolution, so it's the standard 'geeks being bio-geeky around dragons*', and bio-geekery is not uncommon (Seanan McGuire's InCryptid books also fit my 'fantastical bio-geekery category', though those are urban fantasy with at least some magic present).

A Natural History of Dragons also has birds. I'm pretty sure most of the major Old World taxa are still present; dragons just supplant some of them in some niches.

(Sorry for derailing your post with a book review.)

* All the more because the protagonist is a noblewoman trying to make a calling as a naturalist in a sexist society, so the author has to pay attention to science because the protagonist is noticing things like anatomy and speculating about life-cycles. The protagonist's world doesn't quite have a Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection yet, but it's definitely a world where that sort of thing works. (Who knows, maybe that's what the protagonist is going to do in later books.)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Nah, it's cool! Books are great! And anyway, my sister sent me the second book in the series and I've been thinking I've got to read the first one. I just hadn't realized what it was about. Sounds interesting.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Actually, when I read of chicken-dragons, I recall that scene in Stargate where the natives serve up a giant lizard as a feast centerpiece. It's fun to watch characters get to grips with foreign delicacies.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I had a few moments like that in Kenya. Mostly the food was fine, but I couldn't eat the goat-gut soup.

[deathling.livejournal.com]

Maybe all the birds can have dragon feathers and dragony wings, then you can have normal dragons too.

[deathling.livejournal.com]

Although, these are adorable http://hbruton.deviantart.com/art/Bird-Dragon-bookmarks-set-1-117843989

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, those ARE cute!

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

It's hard to imagine a world without birds, or something similar. It's such a huge niche that you'd expect something to fill it. Of course, dragons, being flighted, could fill it, and if they're anything like the hexapodal, armor-scaled, fanged nightmares of traditional fantasy, they could fill it so well that birds might never arise. Provided that at least some of them are also herbivorous.

But the really important question, I think, is what did the dragons evolve from? Dinosaurs? If so, they could be an alternative path to birds that developed at the same time, with the two groups perpetually competing against each other, somewhat hampering the evolutionary diversity of each. Perhaps all dragons are beast and insect eaters, while birds are seed and fruit eaters. Perhaps it's dragons that prey on birds rather than hawks and falcons. Perhaps dragons circle and seek roadkill rather than vultures.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I mention this in another comment, but dragons aren't actually native even to OGYAFEland. Their ancestors actually started out in another world entirely, but they found their way to this particular world millions o years ago--possibly just in time to battle birds for dominance. The question of whether either group completely won is kinda what I'm looking at here.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

But that still leaves the question of what they evolved from- or at least, for story significance, what niche they filled originally. That would determine what they were able to do when they crossed over, and how effectively they were able to displace original wildlife.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

True! That's part of what I'm working on.

The question of how effectively they could displace original species is kind of what I'm considering right now.

[fractalwolf.livejournal.com]

My first thought on reading this was honestly... what about birdsong? What do dragon calls sound like?

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

If there wasn't any equivalent, there could be some cool cultural misunderstandings. "These 'bird' creatures sing? You mean when you walk around there's music playing all the time?" "Well, yes, but not for that reason."

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

Like someone else pointed out, it's possible for the same niche to be occupied by several different creatures, so long as that niche is not too small. There could be influences like, birds handle cooler weather better than dragons, dragons are nocturnal/birds are diurnal, different predators in different areas favor birds over dragons as prey. etc.

So I think it really depends on how 'alien' you want to make the world.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Another good possibility!

[baby-rissa-chan.livejournal.com]

I'm going to veer away from the "is it reasonable and justifiable?" arc of conversation, because we're talking a fantasy story and as long as you're internally consistent, I think there's a certain amount of leeway for allowing creativity to take free rein. I just feel like the sheer amount of foreignness that the idea brings to this world is great. It forces you to stop and rework a bunch of assumptions about how things work, and that's a really good thing. Bringing an element of "this is not Earth" into the equation is a challenge, and that seems like a great note to add to the ongoing introduction to a new and unusual environment.