What defines a Dragon?

Carrying over from the All-Purpose thread. Let's get to the bottom of what exactly the trope because there's more to it than just "Big Bad's Number Two" and "final obstacle before the main villain." What exactly isn't very clear right now.

Okay, so:

• The "final obstacle" bit was the OG definition, straight from Campbell's archetypes. This is what the trope was supposed to mean. But:
• Years of decay as "the number 2" meant that the definition was ultimately altered to fit the misuse. Campbellian Dragon was considered but never launched.

This means that the OG concept is no longer how the trope is defined, and that we sort of just took a pre-existing literary term and altered it because tropers couldn't use it correctly. And that irks me to no end but fixing it would be a massive uphill battle.

Simply stated The Dragon is the greatest enemy the Hero has to deal before confronting the main villain. The villain typically represents more of a psychological opposition while the dragon is the physical might. It comes largely from old myths and legends of warriors having to defeat a monster while on their quest before facing a more personal enemy.

The trope is ubiquitous and has evolved over time, which is largely where other aspects such as being directly controlled by the villain, sent out the harass the hero and so on became associated with the archetype.

I'm trying to look for Campbell's references to "the dragon", and I can't find a concrete archetype, and definitely nothing about the "penultimate challenge for the hero to face before fighting the Big Bad" that has been thrown around. What he said about "slaying the dragon" is as follows:

Some other analysis I found about the "slaying dragons" in The Hero's Journey defines the metaphorical fight against this "dragon" as the main challenge/obstacle for the hero to overcome. Not the "penultimate" one.

So, no, I don't think we should "revert" The Dragon to the "OG definition" (or Campbellian Dragon if you will). It doesn't actually seem to be a thing.

Edited by Adept on May 11th 2023 at 11:38:20 PM

The trope really stopped being about the Campbell definition a long time ago, as more people used it as a "Villian's The Lancer equivalent" over time. Even the current description treats it more like a No. 2 position than a Final Boss type.

That's... interesting. I was going off what people on the TRS thread swore was the correct definition. Now I'm really wondering where the "penultimate threat" stuff came from.

I mean, I'm only sorta wondering it because it's very likely just early tropers trying to make a trope to describe characters like Vader, but less in the "second to the Big Bad" way and more in the "you have to face them first" way.

And yeah, the "face them first" definition is the one I always remember the trope being about before it was rewritten.

Well, he might have used it to refer to a penultimate challenge somewhere, but if that's the case, it must be a really niche and obscure source.

Because a quick search shows that he mostly uses the concept of "dragon" as any obstacle/challenge that would require the hero to "die to self" to mature and reach their goals. One quote of his even implies that there could be more than one "dragons" in a hero's journey.

Edited by Adept on May 4th 2023 at 8:54:10 PM

I think the term "penultimate" might be the distraction, as it implies they are ALWAYS the second to last fight.

I mean, in that case, how would you describe it? Being "penultimate" offers some meaning because it implies that the story is ending, the hero is nearing the final threat, and they've defeated a major enemy but haven't solved the problem.

Ignoring the accuracy of the definition for a moment, if you remove "penultimate", then what exactly would the definition become?

Back when Five Man Band was such a huge trope, there was a "Five Bad Band" trope which tried to define groups of villians mimicking the traditional five main hero archetypes (Big Bads to Heroes, Dragons to Lancers, Brutes to Big Guys, Heart/Chick to Dark Chick, and Mad Scientist to The Smart Guy). So yeah, there was a rush of early tropers redefining The Dragon to every single No 2 that every villain had, hence it's current structure.

Edited by crystalevo on May 4th 2023 at 7:48:53 AM

Oof, yeah, Five Bad Band was a trip. It was a nonexistant concept based on another nonexistant concept, lmao. And yeah, The Dragon was the counterpart to The Lancer in the "team structure". So this dates back a while for sure.

Well, I don't think it was non-existent so much as primarily just a cartoon and anime trope. But to not to go off-topic, yeah The Dragon is primarily fueled by a very old notoriously broad metric.

The Five Man Band TRS discussion explains why I think it never existed, complete with research I myself did into the lore of it. It's worth a read. But yeah, off topic.

The Dragon, being such an old trope, is of course going to attract misuse and decay (almost everything on the Time Immemorial Index has by now, to some extent). The issue is that the definition has changed so much over the years that there's no one consistent way to define it, especially if it's true that Campbell's Dragon wasn't even the penultimate threat.

I've hardly seen the trope being used as anything but "Big Bad's main subordinate".

Not to mention, we have subtropes like Dragon Ascendant, Co-Dragons, etc. that uses the current definition of The Dragon rather than the original one.

But this can occur at any half-way point in the story. Specifying it as "second-to-last battle" seems really arbitrary.

Yeah, same.

Maybe a wick check will reveal there are some Campbellian Dragon examples, but I personally never saw it.

We currently have Pre-Final Boss as a "penultimate threat" trope (it's focused entirely on videogames though) and while it mentions The Dragon often provides a penultimate threat it isn't always the case.

In what way? How can what I said happen without it being the second to last threat?

I'm being serious; I'm trying to understand what possible definition is being discussed here because I can't understand right now. Like, I'm just not really seeing what you guys are seeing.

And yeah, the other tropes were brought up in the TRS thread; those were made before the definition changed, but were based on the decay that had become so extremely prevalent that nobody really remembered the OG definition.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 4th 2023 at 1:05:57 PM

The Dragon "evolution":

• Personal psychological opponent before the plot's troublemaker. (How I read this Campbell's description)
• Penultimate villain (Apparently the trope's original description).
• A major villain's lackey.

I don't think anyone nowadays cares about The Dragon being "final / pre-final obstacle", and personally neither do I.

Edited by Amonimus on May 4th 2023 at 9:05:48 PM

I always defined it as the second-in-rank to the Big Bad in both position and physical prowess.

Edited by BlackMage43 on May 4th 2023 at 10:35:30 AM

That description seems like a blend of both concepts. It starts out about "penultimate threat" and then says "but also they work for the big bad"

The Dragon is the main villain's second-in-command / right hand man / main enforcer / main lieutenant.

Edited by ElRise on May 5th 2023 at 1:55:07 AM

The original concept was rooted in being the biggest physical threat to the hero, but not the villain of the story. So people started identifying the second-in-command as fitting that category to where being Number Two to the villain overshadowed their intended role as the physical threat to the protagonist.

While I like the idea, the Dragon-in-Chief is more scattered in examples because The Dragon by their nature tend to already be physically stronger and more engaged with the story than their superior. Too many examples are just that the second in command is stronger or more active in the plot rather than being about the character dynamics.

We also have The Heavy to cover "biggest physical threat", I think.

Well, there's this video game I played a while back where the main villain has a bunch of elite mook henchmen, but the most plot significant one—the right-hand, if you will—is not actually the strongest one, so you'd still need to clear a few more Boss Battles before fighting the Big Bad. The technical "second-to-last threat" in that game is actually a monster guarding the villain's lair, which, while very challenging and non-respawnable, is not treated differently as any other random encounter plot-wise.

I'm actually having a harder time recalling any stories where the heroes must face a definite "second-to-last threat", rather than simply having them fight a bunch of really strong underlings where it doesn't really matter which among those elite mooks gets put out last.

Edited by Adept on Jul 19th 2023 at 9:02:30 PM

The Heavy is about being the most directly antagonizing villain rather than the most physically threatening. They're the guy that physically shows up and sets up the most obstacles for the protags when the main villain is more pulling strings from the shadows.

Edited by badtothebaritone on May 5th 2023 at 10:43:19 AM