How could I establish half-dragons as existing without the squicky implications?

How about pollination?

Coming back to this post to add that I believe I've come up with an answer I like. True half-dragons are human babies that, as a punishment to their mother, have been magically cursed with draconic traits by their "fathers". Half-dragons can and do also interbreed with humans and other half-dragons, producing different variants following a loose genetically inherited pattern.

Could you elaborate a bit? Because the idea of women being punished for sex/reproduction could have some rather weird implications and honestly i'm not sure if you want to go there. I think (at least without further info), it goes against the idea of this thread and your question, namely how to remove the squicky implications.

I don't see any punishment for sex in A_Really_Big_Cat's most recent post above; the crimes for which this punishment might be inflicted don't seem to be specified, as far as I read it.

Dragons that can turn into humans? I have a similar idea that the Angelic Abomination can produce Nephilim by using a human as a host

Yeah the crimes for which they are punished are unlikely to have anything to do with sex. That really wasn't what I was thinking of. The crime could be anything from treason to petty theft. The dragon acts as judge, jury, and executioner, and can decide whatever penalty he thinks is just.

Edited by A_Really_Big_Cat on Sep 6th 2020 at 7:54:25 AM

I'm just not sure why mothers are being punished by harming their kids. It still makes it feel....questionable. I would propose just directly transforming people.

If questionability is the intent, then a magical curse is fine. But maybe being draconic is genetic or something?

The transformation it'self could be very unpleasant but being born a half-dragon might not be. The Dragon doesn't really care, it's got a new half-dragon servant whose children will also be servants.

So I actually just came up with an idea that I think is even better than the previous one. It was inspired by a mention of skinchanging in folklore; creatures like selkies and swan maidens that can shapeshift by shedding their outer skin. I had the idea that dragons could leave their physical form, becoming pure spirit. To a normal human, this form appears as a humanoid spirit of flame. In this form they can mate with humans. But they can't stay in this form forever, because a soul without a body will soon try to escape the physical world.

Currently going through The Magicians (2016), which did an episode about this. Dragons in the setting fertilize externally like fish, so the local dracophile claimed she stole some dragon jizz and artifically inseminated herself.

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 24th 2021 at 2:09:01 PM

How about this?

Make them fungi.

1. Dragons releases spores in their breaths (not all the time, only certain times during the year, their mating period...)

2. The spores gets inhaled by animals (of all kinds, anything that breaths, really, even fish and plants.)

3. Few spores attaches inside the throat of the animal, and then starts gaining nourishment from the oxygen and the body heat in the host. They travel through the bloodstream and stops in the brain, a lobe of random location, to be precise. (Success-rate: Very small.)

4. The spores form together into a beautiful pearl (color random, check up gemstones for reference) as the spores trigger the body to try and get rid of them by invoking the same process clams does when they get dirt in to make pearls.

5. The pearl stops growing once it reaches a certain size (Grape is the normal one) and then its cells starts to affect the host's body in draconic ways (gene therapy, more or less.)

6. Congratulations, the host is now a carrier to a dragon egg or a "Dragon Ball" as they are also known, and is in the process of transforming into a member of the draconic species. (As long the "dragon ball" remains in their brains, that is.) Turning them into "hybrids" with more and more "draconic power" as time and gestation moves on.

7. The gestation time depends, but eventually, (even if it takes decades) the process will be complete and the host's former species will be eradicated from the genetic code in favor of a true draconic creature instead, with faint traces of their former appearances in their external bodies.

8. Draconic "reproduction" complete.

Honestly, that sounds a lot more creepy than dragon-human sex. I dunno, maybe I am too familiar with parasitic wasps and fungi...

Yeah, at least you can consent to human-dragon sex (probably). But you can't consent to spores entering your body and proliferating. (EDIT: And I *just* watched a The Magicians episode about Festering Fungus...)

Edited by Synchronicity on Mar 1st 2021 at 1:05:18 PM

How about some mad scientist injecting dragon DNA into a fetus?

Honestly the most illuminating part of this thread is seeing what people consider less squickly than straight up dragon sex.

I find it funny how my post about how I think I've just found a satisfactory answer for my purposes ended up reviving the thread and causing more people to offer ideas

Since the thread came up again, I will reaffirm my earlier assertion that the method of reproduction is far less squicky (regardless of the mechanics behind it) than the fact that this reproduction is happening with slaves (and yes, serfs or second class citizens who form an underclass to a different group who are universally in the ruling class counts).

To the point that I halfway object to the notion of making the coupling more 'palatable' because that coupling, ultimately, still is an act of rape where one partner has all the power and the other is incapable of informed uncoerced consent.

If I read a story that did this and it was terrible and violent, at least I my supreme discomfort as a reader wouldn't be doubled by having to also wonder why the writer is trying to dress up rape.

Edited by Robrecht on Mar 12th 2021 at 7:14:13 PM

Genetic splicing. I mean, assuming you want to include science in there.

I mean i agree with your notion there, but the fact that dragons are described as monstrous in the OP to me suggested that squick was definitely intentional. Just... different kinds. You still have a powerful dragon elite interbreeding with humans somehow, to me even without slaves that's inherently squicky. Especially since OP explicitly did not want dragon shapeshifting to make it geometrically possible. Dragons as powerful beings versus humans, even non-slaves, is an inherent power imbalance.

You'd have to dig pretty deep to find a mechanism to make this work that doesn't still create half-dragons against people's wills, and still violates their dignity (which again, is fundamental to the setup as dragons are both overlords and monstrous).

I guess it's worth mentioning that the lore surrounding the society itself has changed quite a bit from my original conception, the dragon-ruled society is much less like a tyrannical overlordship and now it's more like a society of zealous half-bloods and humans ruled by a dragon elite; chattel slavery as we would recognize it is not really present. The consorts mentioned before have been removed entirely. The humans which live under the dragon rule almost all have at least some draconic ancestry, as the original interbreeding which created the first half-dragons occurred in the distant past, and individuals with varying levels of draconic traits are now present in many social strata, and they and their bloodlines have been living with the dragons for thousands of years by the time of the main plot. The dragons themselves now rarely interbreed with non-full dragons, due to their feelings of insecurity surrounding whether they can claim any special status as "dragons ruling over humans", as everyone in the society now speaks some variant of Draconic, has some Draconic ancestry, and everyone shares basically the same culture and religion after millenia of coexistence) It is also part of the story and its themes that these dragons claim adherence to a religion devoted to virtue, peace and honour, yet also are brutal and ironfisted in how they wage war and execute justice.

Also, I'm still working on the relation of dragons to humans; are they truly considerable as "different species" (for whatever little meaning the word "species" might still possess in a fantasy setting...)? Are their souls identical to those of humans? Are their souls the same as those of other magical beings in the same setting (e.g. Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Merfolk, etc.)? What is the dragons' origin? Were they originally identical to humans or other beings? What was their original role in Creation? Were they always possessed of the same fearsome physical forms they have now, or is their form the result of a curse, or even some magic gone wrong? I don't yet know the answers to these questions.

Edited by A_Really_Big_Cat on Mar 20th 2021 at 8:42:26 AM