expedient wrote:As to the way the the humans are described as reacting, they are observed from Kell's perspective which has a clear chauvinistic bias, "humans". Overall the response by the Navy was very professional in a surreal situation.
Glad someone caught what I was trying to do. Just ONE sailor on a ship of some 2,000 or so has a bad reaction, and Kell condemns the entire species. Though he likes humans, it's clear that he believes he's far superior. Typical draconic arrogance.
expedient wrote:Jenny, by the way, has shown analytical abilities about the political unrest with the dragons beyond those of Kell, our other main narrator. Despite the situation being new to her she correctly predicted what would happen and already had worked up contingencies for supplying aid before the earth dragons thought about asking for it.
That's because in some ways, Jenny has much more experience than Kell when it comes to politics, and despite the differences between humans and dragons, she has an almost unnatural basic understanding of draconic mentality (and yes, this is deliberate, for reasons that will become clear later in the story). Think about how she more or less completely analyzed the entire draconic civilization's social structure after just a day of observation and talking with Kell, and was mostly correct. That wasn't just her training as an observer and her college education (she took a lot of political science while pursuing her PhD in computer science, thinking she might run for office someday).
She's also very adept at looking through scenarios and correctly predicting courses of events, a necessity in her line of work that's been refined by experience working with the Hunters, but her own bias shows in how she wants to basically Americanize the dragons. She sees nothing wrong with manipulating them under the banner she carries for her own country, even if that is neither what they want nor what is best for them. As much as she likes Kell and is intrigued by the dragons in general, she's blinded by her own ideals. She wants the dragons to more or less be American citizens, and under American control, and she can't see how that simply will not work. That's also something the dragons would never tolerate.
expedient wrote:On a different note, I hope that the story of how the earth dragons came to the island is only a partial truth. At the time the Church was local to Europe whereas the dragons were evidently global travellers. The story doesn't quite fit somehow. I'm more inclined to believe that the chromatics had some other purpose (not necessarily nefarious) to gather the dragons together and have somehow subverted/edited dragon history.
Only the chromatics and sky dragons were global travelers. The earth and fire dragons were very much natives of western and southern Europe.
Back when the dragons interacted with humanity, the only dragons people ever really saw were the chromatics, and only then if you were in a major city or seat of power, like Rome, Camelot (before it was destroyed in 588 in this story timeline), Paris, Constantinople, etc. Chromatics gathered in places where they could teach humanity magic, which they saw as not only their duty, but their privilege. Back then, the chromatics were scholars in every aspect, and didn't just teach humanity magic, they taught them everything you might learn in a college today. Mathematics, science, engineering, philosophy, in their way they were the harbingers of the western world, trading knowledge with the Greeks, teaching them magic and learning from their master scholars such as Pythagoras, Socrates, and Aristotle in return, helping to spread their knowledge to the Romans, then spreading across Europe after the empire split. In many ways, the chromatics saw the humans as their "pet" race, training them, teaching them, trying to make them better. They were deeply attached to humanity, more so than their own cousins, and they had an honest and enduring affection for the human race.
That's why the ultimate betrayal of the humans hit them so hard. The Catholic church mistook their magic for satanic power (which of course it's not), and as they spread across Europe through the first millenium, their teachings became more and more hostile to the dragons. Eventually, the pope declared that the chromatics were demons, servants of satan, and eradicated all history of how the chromatics had helped humanity and replaced it with legends and tales of the evils of the dragons. As was mentioned in the story, it was at this point when the chromatics changed, because they were greatly wounded by how the humans they had so loved had turned against them. The modern chromatics bear the scars of the emotional wounding of their ancestors in how their racial culture works.
During this time, the other dragons avoided human contact for their own reasons. The sky dragons didn't really care, the fire dragons saw any encroachment on their territory as an act of aggression, and the earth dragons just wanted to be left alone. Things changed for them as church teachings spread over Europe and the lay human citizen became hostile to them, causing the earth dragons to retreat north, the fire dragons to Sicily and the more rugged islands in the Mediterranean, and the sky dragons never really had any issues with the humans because they could never hope to catch or hurt one. Eventually, things happened as you now know.
Just another guy from the shallow end of the gene pool.
I know you don't particularly like humans as characters, Fel, but this whole section is downright disrespectful for serving men and women in uniform.
