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.

[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.

[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. :)

[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'.)

[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

[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.

[fractalwolf.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.