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dragons

2024-05-02 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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dragons
Votey panel for dragons
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Explanation

This comic imagines what fantasy literature would look like if it were written from the dragons' perspective, treating humans the way human-authored fantasy typically treats dragons and other creatures.

The first panel has a dragon saying "I hate the way humans write about us" and complaining that humans always portray dragons as savage beasts when in reality (from the dragon's perspective) the reverse is true -- humans are the violent, primitive ones with their strange soft skin and tiny brains.

The punchline is a passage from a dragon-authored fantasy novel: "'Never,' said Short-neck in human language through her mostly square-shaped front teeth. She knew she was vulnerable due to her weak human skin and tiny brain, but she had to save her hairless offspring, Thumb-hands and Two-Legs, from the evil human wizard, Dangle-balls."

The humor works through the inversion of perspective. The dragon names for human characters -- "Short-neck," "Thumb-hands," "Two-Legs," and especially "Dangle-balls" -- are exactly the kind of reductive physical-feature-based names that human fantasy authors give to dragon and creature characters. The passage reads like typical overwrought fantasy prose, but with humans cast as the exotic, primitive creatures described by their most basic physical attributes. The name "Dangle-balls" is the comedic capstone, reducing a presumably dramatic human villain to his most undignified anatomical feature, mirroring how fantasy literature often reduces non-human characters to their most alien physical traits.

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