424 – Dragons

Show Notes

• Uncle Iroh 
• The Dragon
• Viserys Targaryen  
• Smaug 
• Beowulf Dragon 
• Smaug’s Wealth 
• Memoirs of Lady Trent 
• Blue Moon Rising
• St. George and the Dragon 
• Wyvern 
• Temeraire 
• City in the Middle of the Night 
• Dragon’s Hoard 
• Saphira  
• Pern Dragons
• Draco 

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. 

Wes: Welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is:

Chris: Chris.

Wes: And:

Oren: Oren. 

Wes: And upon entering the massive chamber, you see a hoard unlike any other. Intricate jewels, priceless artifacts, and gold. So much gold. So many tiny little pieces of gold. Tiny gold coins that fit right in your hand. And yet, some gargantuan dragon beast is going to know if you just take one of them? Wait, how did the dragon get this hoard in the first place? Its claws. How could it even pick up a gold coin? [laughter] And we don’t see them flying around with saddlebags or sacks and things like that. And anyway, this is just a preview of the very fine discourse you’re all going to hear on today’s Dragoncast. [laughter]

Oren: I think we should specifically talk about characters who are not dragons, but are referred to as dragons. 

Wes: Like who? Uncle Iroh?

Oren: Yeah, Uncle Iroh. He’s the dragon of the West. Great guy. The dragon from Uprooted, who is awful and I hate him and I don’t know why he’s called the dragon. I think he has a fire spell? [laughter] I don’t know. It made him sound- 

Chris: Is it because he takes young women? 

Oren: Is that why? I don’t know. It made him sound way cooler than he was. 

Chris: I haven’t read this book. From what I understand, the idea is he takes a young woman from the village and I think she just becomes his assistant before she goes off to university or something? 

Oren: He kidnaps young women and makes them clean his house for ten years. And then he sends them to college. In the protagonist’s case, he picks her because she has magical talent. And the whole time I’m reading this, I’m just like, why? Why does he do this? Their village is right there. Why doesn’t he just let them go home at night? There’s no answer. [Wes laughs] 

Chris: So then the story couldn’t happen. 

Oren: So the story can happen. Because we really wanted a story where the love interest kidnaps the protagonist, but we wanted to pretend that wasn’t super messed up. But I assume that we’re talking about actual dragons and not what Viserys calls his temper. I also hate that guy, but I’m supposed to hate that guy, so it didn’t feel as bad. 

Wes: Yes. Now, I think we can probably segue maybe back into these metaphorical dragons, but I think just dragon-dragons, whatever comes to mind in whatever shape or form, that should probably also be discussed as well. 

Chris: I have opinions. I have come to conclusions about dragon sandwich. 

Wes: Good. [laughter] Okay. What should we start with? How big is a dragon? Is that appropriate? 

Chris: I think it can be any size as long as it is relatively big. But here’s the thing I realized. You can have mini-dragons in your setting, but only if the setting also has large dragons. So anytime that I’ve seen that a book has the cat-sized dragon that’s the cute pet – the convenient-sized dragon, the setting also has a big dragon. And that’s why we can call them dragons, even though they’re small, is because of the fact that they resemble the big dragons. 

Wes: Yeah, I like that. There really hasn’t been a situation where there’s only been tiny, cute dragons. 

Chris: Right, because then you probably just wouldn’t call them dragons, if the big dragons wouldn’t exist. So they can be lots of different sizes, but they’re always big, or at least there are big ones in the setting. I would say probably the smallest size is like a horse, but usually bigger than a horse. 

Oren: Yeah, if it’s not megafauna of some kind, I think people are going to be asking, why are you calling it a dragon? Dragons are flexible. They can be a lot of different things. You can change a lot of things about them. I think that if you wanted to make one smaller than a horse, you would have to come up with a pretty compelling reason why it’s called a dragon, or I would just start rolling my eyes. 

Chris: And usually that reason is that there’s other dragons in the setting that are much bigger and it resembles them. 

Wes: Well, that’s just a really important thing, is no matter what subversion we’ve probably encountered, the word dragon sets serious expectations for size, power, ability – all of those things. 

Oren: What I’ve noticed, I looked at the list of various dragon stories that I have read or have seen being popular. What I’ve sort of determined is that the purpose of dragons in stories is to take the classic example of a dragon that we all know of, which is the monster that hoards gold in a cave for some reason, and subvert that, but still assume that we know that’s the core concept of a dragon. And I was trying to find, are there any stories that just have the classic dragon that aren’t super boring? And, I mean, maybe. I couldn’t find them.

Chris: I should probably clarify that I’m mostly talking about classic Western dragons. Because Eastern dragons are similar in many ways, but also different. 

Oren: What I learned from doing some basic studying about mythological dragons is that we are sometimes perhaps a little too liberal with what we consider to be a dragon. It’ll be like, there are dragons in every culture in the world. It’s like, alright, what’s this dragon? And it’s like, well, it’s a giant serpent. It’s like, hmm. I mean, I guess we could call that a dragon if we want, but are you sure it might not just be a snek? [sic] A big ol’ snek? [laughter] Snakes are pretty common and they’re spooky, so I don’t know if we have to fall back on this idea of the universal dragon myth to explain why people would have snakes in their art forms. 

Chris: Giant snakes. I mean, people like to make giant versions of everything, so…

Oren: It’s like, what if animal was big? Small animal big now. [laughter] It’s not a particularly complicated idea. But yeah, I mean, most of the stories I’m thinking about are using either Western dragons or occasionally a combination. Sometimes you get settings that try to use different dragon mythologies to various degrees of success. 

Wes: The Western dragon as we know it, we can blame Tolkien for Smaug, because the immense popularity of Lord of the Rings meant that tons of people read The Hobbit. And so we know about Smaug that way. And he ripped that off from Beowulf. That entire saga with Beowulf’s last challenge going to fight the dragon and that dragon horde: that’s one of the older texts we have where for whatever reason, a dragon’s hanging out on a massive treasure hoard. I think they only did that because the Geats and Beowulf and all of them, they just really wanted treasure all the time. The best part of that is like Beowulf’s dying and he’s like, Wiglaf, bring me some of that sweet treasure so I may look upon it and be content while I die. I’m just like, this stuff rules. But there had to be a dragon there sitting on it. And that’s mostly it was Tolkien said, I need inspiration for a dragon. Yes – I’ve translated Beowulf. I’ll do this. I don’t know when he translated Beowulf relative to writing The Hobbit, but he did translate Beowulf. And then everybody’s like, oh, okay, that’s a dragon. It does nothing but sit on treasure. And it just doesn’t need to eat either, apparently, unless it eats treasure, which would explain things. 

Oren: I mean, there are some stories where dragons draw sustenance from gold or whatever, because people have been trying to ask since The Hobbit, why do dragons have treasure? My favorite thing about The Hobbit is that in The Hobbit, the dragon’s treasure is just the dwarves’ treasure that he moved in and took. 

Wes: That makes so much more sense though. 

Oren: Right. And that makes sense, but then he apparently gathered it all into a room for some reason. It’s like, that’s kind of an odd thing for him to do. How did he do that? How did he reach into the room?

Chris: I just love the image of this dragon looking in every corner of every room, and then finding individual coins, and then trying to scoot them slowly to the other side of a fortress. 

Wes: You got to pass the time. 

Oren: Also, apparently in The Hobbit movies, he’s just really exaggerating the amount of gold that exists. There’s an estimate floating around that smog is worth however many billion dollars, but that estimate is based on the book and the description of the pile of gold he’s sitting on. In the movie, he has like a mountain of gold, which is more gold than exists. [laughter] It would be difficult to value how much that’s worth. 

 Wes: There was a Reddit thread that said, if you have dragons in your world, it’s assumed that your world has more gold than ours. And I really liked that. I was like, yes, I accept this premise. 

Oren: Yeah. I still remember the first time I read a book that was trying to subvert dragons a little bit. In retrospect, it was pretty basic, but it was like, oh, but you see, to the dragons, gold has this song, and they really like it, and it’s beautiful to them. I was like, okay, yeah, that’s all the explanation I need. That was also the book that was like, hey, look, we’re very clever because our super cool awesome protagonist doesn’t have shiny armor. He has somewhat pitted armor. [exaggerated] Woooo! [normal] I was like, yeah, this is extremely edgy and mature. [laughter]

Chris: Of course, the hot new thing these days is dragons that hoard other things besides gold, like books.

Oren:  It’s certainly the Tumblr meme. I haven’t seen that in a story yet, but I’m always on the lookout. My favorite interpretation of that so far is the one from the Lady Trent series, where the dragons are basically just animals. They don’t hoard anything themselves, but their bones are an advanced construction material. And part of the storyline is that if people find out about that, they’ll start hoarding dead dragons. So the protagonists are trying to keep that information under wraps.

Chris: I did encounter a dragon in Blue Moon Rising that collects butterflies, but I don’t know if it was really a butterfly hoard so much as it was a subversion where somebody set out to slay a dragon. It turns out the dragon is really nice and collects butterflies, so then he takes the dragon home as his friend. And that makes it sound like a really light, sweet story. It is not, if you keep reading. This is the ultimate bait and switch story, is what it is. 

Wes: They were actually vampire butterflies. [laughter]

Chris: I wish! Man, that would have been a much cooler bait and switch. 

Wes: Thinking about the treasure hoards and stuff too – okay, it flies in and takes it or terrorizes the land and people bring the dragon’s treasure. And that’s how the hoards are made, because it’s tribute. I don’t know if either of you are familiar with Saint George and the dragon. Saint George is in Christianity. This is a Christian figure that apparently kills a dragon. So dragons are canon in the Bible. But the story for that was that the dragon was extorting tribute from a nearby village. And so they were giving them trinkets and money and livestock, and then they basically ran out of that, so then once a year they would give a human tribute. And they were fine until their lottery picked their princess. And they’re like, oh no, we can’t give them our princess. 

Chris: Everybody else can get eaten, but not the princess. 

Wes: Yeah, exactly. And then Saint George had to come in and slay it.

Chris: Is that where the dragons eating princesses thing comes from?

Wes: It definitely is one of the sources for that, yes. It’s a lot more, at least in my knowledge of it, and our listeners could correct me, but the Saint George story is a lot more popular in Slavic Christian churches. Generally the Christian sects that venerate the saints more are more likely to spend time on this. American Protestant churches that spend more time on Jesus than the saints don’t really get this story. I was raised Protestant. And then when I met Orthodox Christians and learned of this story, I was like, whoa, well that’s way cooler. 

Oren: It’d have gotten me to pay more attention at Sunday school, I tell you what. I mean the one time that I went to Sunday school. 

Wes: [excited] You’re telling me dragons are real? [laughter]

Oren: It’s like, tell me more about the dragons. And they’ll be like, mmm, okay. 

Wes: But yeah, so actual story of dragon accepting a princess’s tribute. 

Oren: Well, look, we can’t let the dragons take the high quality mates that the noble aristocratic men need. What’s the world coming to at that point? [laughter]

Wes: Okay, so because Game of Thrones was popular and everybody saw the dragons and the CGI for those dragons had the dragon wings attached to the four legs. 

Oren: Did it?

Wes: Yes. Instead of–

Chris: But they still have four legs, right? So it’s not that they’re sitting on two legs.

Wes: Yes, they have four legs, but the wings are attached to the two legs closest to the head. So like a bat.

Oren: I mean like if a bat had an extra set of limbs growing out of its wings. Yes. Wait, hang on. Admittedly, I haven’t seen Game of Thrones in a long time, but this image that I’m looking at really makes it look like its forward legs are its wings.

Wes: Yes.

Oren: Oh, I can already hear the arguments that this might technically be a wyvern.  [laughter]

Wes: Yes. Well, I just thought it was kind of funny because the dragons in Skyrim look like that too. And I’m just like, where did the wings on the back go? Just four legs and wings on the back. That’s fine.

Chris: Dragons don’t have to have wings or flight as long as they have some breath spit attack. 

Wes: Okay, so that’s a dragon. They gotta have a breath spit attack.

Chris: I think they have to have either wings/flight, so if it looks like a serpent, but then it somehow coils through the air and it doesn’t have wings, it still seems to qualify as a dragon. So it needs to have either wings or flight, or on the other hand, some kind of special breath or spit attack that’s ranged from its mouth. It could be like acid or ice breath. Doesn’t have to be fire. But I think if it doesn’t have either the wings or flight, or the breath, at that point, I don’t think anybody would want to call it a dragon anymore. Of course, then there’s the question, does this make Godzilla a dragon?

Wes: Well, Godzilla has a breath weapon. Yes.

Chris: Godzilla has a breath weapon, so I guess it does make Godzilla a dragon.

Wes: The rare dragon that has gone bipedal. [laughter]

Chris: That does make Godzilla a little different.

Wes: But I do like how Godzilla likes to swim. That gets on the whole sea serpent type dragon thing. So that works.

Oren: Aquatic dragons are fairly popular. A lot of stories feature those. I think what it comes down to is, could I make a creature that people would recognize as a dragon without wings or a special breath weapon of some kind? Probably. Would I want to? Ehhh… At that point, the question is, it sounds like it’s probably a lot less cool. The Temeraire books, for example, have a lot of different kinds of dragons, and most of them are very boring and forgettable. The ones that you remember are the ones that have some kind of special ability. They can mostly fly. A few of them can’t, but most of them can fly. But only a handful have anything resembling a breath weapon or something that would substitute for one, and those are the ones you remember. The fire-breathing ones, the ones with acid. Temeraire himself has some kind of sonic wind attack. And then you have the others, and it’s like yeah, there’s a bunch of others, I guess. They’re also around.

Chris: I think you could get away with calling it a dragon if it doesn’t have those things, if, again, it resembles another dragon in the setting that does have either wings or some breath attack. But I think if you had a story where you didn’t have those other dragons, and you’re just like, here’s a big lizard. It doesn’t fly; it doesn’t have a breath attack; and called it a dragon, people are like, eh, it’s not really a dragon.

Wes: It isn’t really, though. It’s just a super crocodile. [laughter]

Oren: Or, according to the naming conventions of some books, we could call it a bison.

Wes: Oh my gosh. Oren. 

Chris: No…

Wes: Oren, why would you do that?

Oren: Bam! Y’all thought I forgot about City in the Middle of the Night. [pained laughter]

Chris: No. No.

Wes: Oof. That hurts me. That hurts my brain.

Chris: Or a zebra. Who knows?

Oren: [laughing] Call it a zebra.

Wes: I’m already, like, I was thinking about the weird monikers for dragons, and calling them wyrms is cool, but also weird to me. But then you went and dropped that.

Chris: But only wyrm with a Y.

Wes: Yes, wyrm with a Y. But then Oren drops “bison” and now everything’s just ruined. 

Oren: Well, I feel like the wyrm term, as it were, is a nod to the mythological origins where they were very often just giant sneks [sic]. They were big ol’ snakes. And that’s sort of a worm. Worms and snakes are basically the same thing, is what I’m saying here on Mythcreant’s podcast. So you can quote me on that.

Wes: I think it’s kind of funny. I just popped into the etymology on Merriam-Webster’s, and it’s just like how dragon, go back far enough, oh, it’s just the word for serpent. It’s just like, okay, thanks, Latin.

Chris: Oh, see, we gotta get Oren now, because Oren, you said that a culture that had a giant serpent meant they didn’t necessarily have dragons. But see, the word dragon means serpent. 

Oren: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s definitely what people today mean when they look back at ancient cultures and are like, see, they’ve got dragons. [laughter] They’re like, oh, you see, because technically the word dragon, if you go back far enough, just means serpent, and so anyone who drew a big serpent had dragons. Retroactively, it’s all the same, it’s all the collective unconscious, the monomyth. It’s all true, open your eyes. [laughter] Okay, so we’ve sort of covered what dragons. Now my question is, why dragons?

Chris: There’s actually a lot of purposes for dragons. It’s surprising how many different roles they fulfill.

Oren: Okay, are you going to suggest that someone maybe write a short story about a classic adventurers vs. dragon fight, but from the dragon’s perspective, like some kind of real basic weirdo? So you’re suggesting we should do something like that? Because I’ve never heard of anyone who wrote a story like that. And if they did, they should feel bad.

Chris: Excuse me, but I have it on good authority that such a story would have been called cute by commenters and very sweet, despite the potentially violent dragon protagonist. It’s quite an accomplishment if you think about it.

Oren: That’s an odd story to call cute. That story was pretty graphic.

Chris: I remember originally looking at that story and be like, okay, you gotta make it angrier. 

Oren: Why else would you have a dragon in your story though, Chris? You had ideas.

Chris: Okay, yeah. It’s interesting how much people do with dragons, because kind of traditionally they’re supposed to be antagonists. But of course, anything that we use often enough becomes good. Because we like it, because it’s not as scary anymore, that kind of thing. So we’ve got a surprising number of dragon protagonists, just like this very cute short story we were talking about, Dragon’s Horde. You can find it on Mythcreants.com. Also the Wings of Fire series, dragons are protagonists there. They’re a really popular choice for xenofiction.

Oren: Whoa, that’s a big word. Hitting me with the fancy new terms today.

Chris: Xenofiction being stories where you have very non-human protagonists.

Oren: People also just love to ride dragons, and so there are a bunch of stories where you do that in various forms.

Chris: The Temeraire books.

Oren: Oh man, the Temeraire books, when I first started reading them, I was like, wait, so hang on, so dragons have nets on them? Big nets, and a bunch of people hang on to the nets, and that’s how they get into battle? The dragon flies into battle with 15 guys hanging off of it on nets? And I was like, that’s silly. I’ll never take that seriously. And then eight books later, I was like, now tell me more about the nets, and how the people hold on to them. I’m very invested now. [laughter]

Chris: Let’s see, Eragon, another example story with mount and animal companion. You have to have that animal companion that you’ve got a mental link with, and they talk in your head.

Wes: Very important.

Chris: Very important. Great wish fulfillment there. Sometimes they’re supporting characters, especially if they talk in your head.

Oren: I was a big fan of the Dragons of Pern series for a bunch of reasons, but primarily because it was the first series where I encountered the author trying to provide an in-universe explanation for some weird sexist assumptions that they had made. Because for the first bunch of however many books, all the dragon riders are guys, except for the queen dragons, who are just baby makers. And everyone who fights the threat is mostly guys. And I was like, that’s kind of weird. And then in one of the books, they do a flashback book where they’re like, oh, you see, it’s like that because the person who made the dragons was sexist. That’s why it’s like that. I was like, hang on, I feel like you actually made the dragons. [laughter]

Chris: Is this self-commentary?

Wes: Yeah, it’s self-commentary, for sure.

Oren: That’s not a real explanation.

Chris: Sorry! I was sexist.

Oren: I also got super weirded out in that series when it turned out the dragons could time travel and teleport. Took me forever to figure out what was going on there.

Wes: Yeah, when dragons get magic, nothing makes sense anymore.

Oren: I mean, I don’t mind dragons having special abilities. I don’t like it when the dragons are also wizards. I feel like that’s just cheating at that point. Once you make the dragon also a wizard, it kind of loses its identity.

Chris: This is the issue with dragons that are protagonists, or especially pets and animal companions or side characters in the first place, is that they’re just too powerful already because they’re big and they either fly or have a breath attack. So already we’re getting into a lot of trouble. Like in Eragon, his dragon, Saphira, in the first book just disappears. You can tell Paolini’s just looking for reasons why she won’t be around so that the main character can actually be in trouble. They’re always heading into a town where they can’t bring her or what have you.

Oren: Temeraire had a weird opposite problem where because basically everybody has dragons in that setting, it didn’t give the protagonist a huge big advantage to have a dragon. But it did create this weird situation where the dragons are supposed to be huge, but we also want Temeraire the dragon to be in almost every scene. And so I sometimes just had a hard time figuring out how Temeraire was following Laurence into these buildings. I get that the buildings are sometimes larger than regular ones, but Temeraire is the size of a ship. How is he getting in there? I don’t understand. It’s like if the USS Constitution was just following you around. That’s how big Temeraire is sometimes described as.

Wes: Reduce-enlarge spells, clearly.

Oren: Yeah, just shrink down.

Chris: And of course you can have dragons as antagonists. A little more traditional. I don’t really like the idea that all dragons are evil. Not a big fan of that.

Oren: Yeah, I ran into that in The Priory of the Orange Tree where there were fire dragons and water dragons; water dragons were good for reasons, and fire dragons were evil for reasons, and I found it super boring. It’s like, and here are the fire dragons! I’m like, yeah, I bet they are. Yeah, they are for sure.

Chris: I think the problem is either they’re sapient, because sometimes dragons are sapient, and you’re basically created an evil race. Or they’re not sapient and you’re like, hey, let’s go murder a bunch of animals.

Wes: Yikes.

Chris: It’s a little better if there’s one dragon that’s making trouble, as opposed to all dragons are bad, because then the story is kind of supporting genocide or animal extinction to some extent. I just don’t like that idea. I don’t like the idea that the world would be better off if we just went and slaughtered every single dragon in the setting.

Oren: I mean, that’s why I couldn’t watch the anime Drifting Dragons even though it had dragons and airships. They hunt dragons like this is some kind of sky whaling. I was like, I don’t really want to watch that.

Chris: No, let’s not do that.

Oren: No thank you.

Chris: And it’s weird because it also seemed like it was advertising itself as a light, fun show and it’s like, yeah, I’m not seeing this.

Oren: A light fun show about the whaling industry.

Chris: A really interesting depiction I’ve seen is in the book Seraphina. Dragons are Vulcan-like. They remind me of Vulcans. First of all, they can change into human form. Another thing that’s surprisingly common is dragons that can shapeshift so they look like humans.

Oren: Well, we were just saying enlarge-reduce spells, right? That’s the main focus of getting them to be human sized.

Wes: And everybody wants to find out that they are part dragon.

Chris: The book spends a fair amount of time talking about the differences between dragons and humans and their cultural differences, and how they’re trying to build an uneasy alliance between dragons and humans to fight against the dragon antagonists that are villains, because dragons are not inherently evil. The dragons suppress their emotions. It’s like Vulcans where I think the idea is that they were kind of violent and fight each other a lot normally. So suppressing their emotions is one way that they take care of that problem.

Oren: That’s also very Vulcan-like.

Chris: Yeah, exactly. It’s Vulcan-like. They love the sciences and the arts to some extent too. Yeah, so it’s just kind of interesting to see that take on dragons.

Oren: And of course there’s the classics. Dragonheart is a movie that holds up surprisingly well because it’s a subversion of the whole “Dragons are evil monsters that we have to kill” because actually, no, it was the king who was evil the whole time. That’s not super groundbreaking these days, but it still made a pretty good movie. Plus, I really love the thing where they pretend to do dragonkilling jobs. That’s my favorite part. I know that’s only a small part of the movie, but I wish that was the whole thing.

Wes: And the scene where he tries to sink, but it’s too shallow, and so everybody’s like, oh my gosh, let’s go eat it. [laughter]

Chris: Oh no.

Wes: Something that I think is funny with dragons is: dragons have a natural enemy. What is it? And for the Dungeons and Dragons world, they decided giants are the enemies of dragons. I don’t know what the equivalent of that is; I guess it’s us and alligators, maybe. No, that still sounds terrifying. Us and monitor lizards? That’s still terrifying. I hate it.

Chris: I would think that the most logical enemy would be some group that is competing for their food source, especially since there’s no way dragons, if they’re in any number, would have enough to eat. I guess maybe giants in the setting are grabbing cows and eating them.

Oren: If I was going to pick a classic D&D monster to be the dragon’s enemy, I would have picked beholders because it’s not just about the logic of the fights, which, obviously giants don’t have any particular chance against dragons, but it’s also just the cultural clout that they have. And within the setting, dragons are literally in the name, and then beholders are probably the most famous monster. So I think that would work. If I was inventing a mythology for D&D and I wanted dragons to have a natural enemy, I would pick beholders because those are like the two most prominent monsters.

Wes: I like that ,because giants are weird anyway. They’re just people, big.

Oren: Or, I mean, the obvious actual enemy of dragons is adventurers, who’re basically their own species by D&D rules. It’s like, I haven’t seen any peasants with 10 levels of fighter, let me tell you. [laughter] All right, now that we’ve covered why giants are a weird natural enemy for dragons, I think I’m going to call this episode to a close and go add it to our horde, as we are dragons who hoard podcast episodes. Yeah, that’ll track.

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon. You can even choose Dragon Tier, if you so wish.

Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Plotter, the popular writing software, which you can learn about at plotter.com. Next there’s Callie MacLeod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. 

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.