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

[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).