What is your favorite animal?

I answered a similar prompt back in late November, but rather than being the singular ‘animal’ that one was plural. You can read my answer to that prompt here if you like. It’s a quick rundown of the progression of my favorites over time.

For this prompt I’m going to dive a bit deeper into the history of why my favorite (mythical) animal is the dragon.

If you were a kid growing up in the 90’s and early 2000’s then you probably watched, or at the very least heard about, a little cartoon show called Jackie Chan Adventures. This was probably my earliest encounter with the Chinese Zodiac that I can recall, and is how I began to learn about the different animals of it.

Shortly thereafter is when I learned that I was born in the Chinese year of the dragon in 1988, so between that and other popular/mainstream uses of dragons in storytelling is how I started to develop an interest in dragons (but funny enough, that year is an Earth Dragon year, and I didn’t know that until about ten years ago when I was first figuring out a new handle for Twitch, which ultimately led to the artistic theme of my channel and naming inspiration for my blog).

As an additional side note for the element of Earth, a few years prior to Jackie Chan Adventures was when I had a brief encounter with the Five Elements Theory (Wuxing) of Chinese philosophy via the live-action fantasy martial arts film Warriors of Virtue where five anthropomorphic kangaroo warriors represent each of the elements of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. I wanted to mention this because, again until about ten years ago, I had no idea that Wuxing and the Chinese Zodiac were tied together.

Alright, so that should cover my connection to dragons, but not why they’re my favorite.

Dragons are incredible things in so many ways, and their existence somehow spans hundreds of years of history and multiple continents. They’ve taken on slightly different forms but always have similar features. Huge, scaled, magical lizards that breathe the elements as weapons? AND most of them fly? Awesome, sign me up. Their portrayals in stories were always fascinating to me. There are even some who were amazingly intelligent and manipulative, either sending a mortal human being on a quest for glory or to simply be rid of them and watch them die.

If you’ve read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card then you’ll probably recall there was a Dragon Army at the Battle School that Ender gets sent to, so there’s another reference for you (the first time I read the book was probably 98-99). Again, I didn’t make the mental connection to the (potentially symbolic) importance of dragons, but it’s another source that most likely influenced my future interest in the creatures.

Okay, I think I’ve rambled enough about dragons and why I like them so much.