Dragons are the Starbucks of Mythological Creatures

Starbucks is known for having copious amounts of coffee customization to satisfy a person’s individual tastes, much like a dragon. Dragons also come in many forms to suit anybody’s needs. A dragon can have wings or not, multiple heads, shoot out various elementary projectiles. They can come in all shapes and sizes, be smart or dumb, even have a beard.

Picture: Bearded Dragon
(Note: In fact an actual dragon)

Picture: Dragon's Beard Candy

(Note: Not made from an actual dragon)

The possibilities are endless, unlike say, a unicorn. By definition a unicorn has to have one corn.

Picture: Unicorn.
(Note: Unicorn’s are dumb.)

In fact the rest of the mythical kingdom is very specific in it’s classification of creatures. Griffins are eagles with lions bodies while hippogriffs are eagles with horse bodies. The name of any other creature besides the dragon will automatically conjure up the same image, where as a story with a dragon must also include a description of the dragon in order to properly get a visual.

Example:

Philbert: “Hey Phoebe, I just saw this dude get eaten by a manticore. First he was poisoned, then gored. At that point he was pretty much dead…then he was eaten.

Phoebe: “Cool…”

Phoebe doesn’t need any clarification because she already knows what a manticore looks like. She understands that the ‘dude’ got poisoned from the manticore’s serpent tail. Then he was rammed/gored by the goat head sticking out of the manticore’s body and finally eaten by the lion head.

Let’s see what happens when Philbert brings up what he saw that same afternoon.

Philbert: “Then I saw this DRAGON attack a castle. It burned down a wall to eat a princess. Then a knight tried to fight the dragon so the dragon froze him with his ice breath and ate him.”

Phoebe: “What?”

Notice how confused Phoebe is. She has no way of knowing what happened in the story because he failed to provide a description of the dragon. She had no way of knowing that the dragon flew over to the castle. If she was smart, she could deduce that the dragon had two heads because, as we all know, one dragon head can’t breath fire AND ice. Nevertheless, it shows the importance of how varied dragons can be. Dragon’s the customizable mythical creature of choice.

- D