Hard split.: Scaled Up

Although I'm not sure if the effectiveness is needed for splitting, just splitting into whether the form is a snake or a dragon.

Is there any particular reason why it doesn't work well lumped together?

Well shapeshifting into a giant monster isn't limited to those, and it seems silly to lump those together based on being scaled creatures, when they are functionally different otherwise.

But the point of the trope "villains channeling Reptiles Are Abhorrent by Voluntary Shapeshifting into one". It doesn't much matter if they're shapeshifting into a snake, or a dragon, or a lizard, or whatever. Certainly "villain shapeshifts into snake to emphasize how creepy and evil they are" and "villain shapeshifts into dragon to emphasize how creepy and evil they are" don't seem splittable.

edited 23rd Aug '11 12:15:20 PM by NativeJovian

But the dragon form isn't for being creepy. It's for trying to stomp, claw, or roast the hero to death.

Also, dragons have Rule of Cool involved in a way that giant snakes (at least to the minds of most creators) do not. A bad guy turning into a dragon is not necessarily evoking Reptiles Are Abhorrent the way he would be if he turned into a giant snake, and I've noticed that the majority of "examples where it does help" on the page involve turning into a dragon in preference to something else.

However, I'm not convinced that the "turn into a dragon" thing is a trope in its own right, and not just a common version of One-Winged Angel.

Because that trope has many forms, so this would just be one of the more common ones.

The Same But More Specific does allow for Sub Tropes. They just have to be distinct and have enough examples.

Snakes are creepy, dragons are badass. I'd say that's a pretty big difference from the viewer perspective....

Then there's the tactical differences. If the villain turns himself into a snake, what usually happens next is:

• Slowly crushing/squeezing the hero to death in his coils,
• Trying to eat the hero alive.

This really is about all you can expect from a gigantic snake. Even if it's a venomous snake, venom comes second to crushing/swallowing the hero.

Now when the villain turns himself into a dragon, this usually leads to:

• Setting absolutely everything on fire (while flying optional)

(The dragon in question is almost universally a European dragon. When was the last time a villain turned himself into an Oriental river dragon?)

That's also a noticeable difference. Sure, the underlying concept is the same, but they play out in completely different manners.

edited 23rd Aug '11 9:03:20 PM by Stratadrake

Y'know, this one really has the smell of a trope created to justify a silly pun. How about limiting it to dragons, and sending all the snakes back to the parent trope? Or, if we must split, make a trope about transforming into any sort of abhorrent creature. I don't think there's a real difference between "turned into a scary snake" and "turned into a scary giant spider" or "scary dire wolf". It's scary, ugly, and gonna eatcha!

Well, the original trope was solely about snakes, it got expanded to dragons later, so I think if anything is going to be folded back into One-Winged Angel, it would be the dragon.

That said, I'm for leaving it as it is myself.

Please don't use Instant Awesome Just Add Dragons that way. It's about gratuitous use, not just claiming they are badass.

edited 23rd Aug '11 9:39:29 PM by DragonQuestZ

Well, in a way it is slightly gratuitous (and I couldn't exactly link Our Dragons Are Different in that context either). If they could turn themselves into any monster real or fictional, but they specifically chose a dragon.

If it were (still) simply about snakes, I'd argue to cut it as a pointless The Same But More Specific trope created solely for the sake of a silly pun. Dragons, though, do have that certain something about them, so I can kind of see having the trope about them. But not snakes.

Bump?

The snakes involved in the examples tend to be giant snakes. That's a very, very small step away from "dragon". If you can come up for enough reasons why the dragon form should be a sub trope though, it's a YKTTW case. Voulentary Shapeshifting into a dragon may be by itself a trope; Dragons that shapeshift into humans is very common, and for a human to shapeshift into a dragon, villain or no, suggests control of an extraordinary level of magic.

I don't see a need for a split here. Dragons, snakes, lizards...as long as they're being used for a One-Winged Angel, they're close enough. Any giant reptile can count as a dragon—that's why we have Dinosaurs Are Dragons.

edited 1st Nov '11 3:53:57 PM by troacctid

Just because they have scales does not make them the same thing. Why not just lump any giant animal shapeshifting?

I would put all my money on the trope causing the pun and not the other way around. The snake is the classically evil monster — this goes back at least as far as Genesis.

Dragons are more One-Winged Angel even if they do technically have scales. Going dragon is terrifying because — well, damn, dude, DRAGON. Self-explanatory. Going snake, that's more symbolic of Original Evil. Not coincidentally this is the reason it's never effective, unless the author is deliberately subverting Reptiles Are Abhorrent.

Well, if you want to get me to support a split, I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the examples. How many are dragons, how many are snakes, and how many are non-dragon non-snake reptiles?

edited 1st Nov '11 4:13:42 PM by troacctid

Rough count (probably off by a few votes, but not terrible as a starting point)

Snakes: 43 Dragons: 52 Other: 1 (lizard) Unsure but either snake or dragon: 5

Sometimes we had snake/dragon combos which I either did not count or counted as both.

Dragons are far more open to heroic examples, and also more open to working.

edited 1st Nov '11 4:30:44 PM by Tyoria

DQZ, it's not enough that they're different animals, they have to be different in terms of story and associated tropes. Dragons having a more heroic angle might be part of that, but not universaly true, you can find dragons both with heroic and with Reptiles Are Abhorrent implications...sometimes both in the same work. The later would still be Scaled Up as currently written.

In short, you may well be right but right now you're making a very weak case.

edited 1st Nov '11 4:48:41 PM by Elle

I was reacting to the argument of not splitting solely because they are big reptiles.

Does anyone besides me think the existing soft split between "doesn't work" and "does work" doesn't make much sense?

As best I can tell, it exists only because of the Evil Overlord List quote.

I don't know - it might have actually been necessary if people felt obliged to add "subverted in show X, where it worked" type stuff to each case where it worked before the split was added.

Yeah, I don't think the split between "does/doesn't work" is particularly important.