dragons

Pronouns for Dragons

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Writing fantasy is fun, and one of the main reasons is that the author decides the rules of each fantasy universe they create. I’ve seen so many amazing fantasy universes built up from scratch, each with its own unique culture, religion, and societies.

Links to original page

Links to original page

My most recent fantasy project has dragons. I know, lots of fantasy works have dragons in them.

In this world, dragons and humans live and work together in a sort of symbiotic relationship. There’s one major difference: the dragons of my world have hermaphroditic sexual organs and gender neutral identities. I was really excited to write this story, because I was going to be able to use gender neutral pronouns.

Genderqueer

Genderqueer flag

I was originally going to use they/their/them pronouns, because it was easiest, but then I got to thinking about it more in depth. In our own society, non-binary people started using they/their/them pronouns for two reasons. One, English doesn’t have an existing gender neutral pronoun. Two, they/their/them was established as a singular pronoun for someone of whom the speaker doesn’t know the gender.

This lends that pronoun some legitimacy. However, the use of this pronoun was shaped by a history of binary genders in western societies. There was no other gender identities acknowledged until recently.

So why would I use they/their/them for my gender neutral dragons? Gender neutral identities are all that dragons know and have known since the inception of their society, at least in the history of dragons in the area they currently inhabit. Of course they already have their own gender neutral pronoun.

Transgender_symbol

But of course, that means that I now have to make up a gender neutral pronoun for them to use. I’ve already asked a few people what they thought of this, and while most people agree with my reasoning about dragons having a pre-existing neutral pronoun, no one really has any ideas of what a dragon pronoun would sound like.

So, back to the drawing board with me, because now I have to go back and decide the evolution of draconic languages.

Who knew this required so much history creation?

For those of you who have been following along on the blog, yes, these are the same dragons I was talking about before. And yes, the main character is still ace/aro.

Does that make my character’s identity really complicated? Yes.

Is it unnecessarily complicated? No.

Because you see, my friends, people who have these long and seemingly complex identities actually exist in real life. I’m just framing my character in a way that reflects the reality of both our world’s and my made-up world’s intersectionality.

Readers might worry now, but I intend to show you what those identities actually mean, and the way they intersect and interact. I won’t just throw readers off the deep end and say “learn these identities, very important, if you don’t you’re a bigot! lol”

But before I do that, I guess I’m going to be writing and rewriting sections of dialogue to see how well different made up neutral pronouns work in the text.

Wish me luck!

World-building on my Current Project

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I’m at that stage of my current project when I’ve just finished with my preliminary world-building and starting to write. World-building is important for the writing that I like to do, which is fantasy and science fiction, because neither of these genres come with a built-in framework like contemporary work does.

There are so many things that one has to consider for world-building, and these details might not even make it into the story.

The story I’m working on right now has dragons that interact with humans. They are on a somewhat equal political and social standing, which affects how this world developed, and how it develops in the future.

Questions I have to ask myself:

How does having aerial power affect their world?

Why are dragons and humans on equal political and social standing?

What kind of social structure does this world have?

Is that social structure different in other parts of the world?

Industrial_revolutionThere are many, many more questions to ask than just that, but those are an example of the types of in-depth questions a writer must ask themself. This world isn’t just a facade, it must still be able to function if you go rooting around behind the scenes if you want it to feel real to the reader.

My setting is an important thing to consider: where is this story taking place?

I’ve decided on a late 18th century to early 19th century European-esque country. What does that mean? This is the Industrial age – think trains, factories, advances in science and medicine, fancy balls. It is also the age of revolution – The Revolutionary War took place in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1792-1802. This is Romantic era literature – Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft. This is the age of Mozart and Beethoven.

pride-and-prejudiceNow imagine that, except dragons.

Think of steam power created by dragonfire. Think of the fact that the easiest way to travel, move goods, or explore is to hire a dragon. Think of the type of building that would need to exist in order to house dragons.

I wanted to explore the idea that dragons can have a social hierarchy similar to humans, and that there are dragons that have privilege and dragons that are working class. After all, this is also heading into the age of worker’s rights.

It’s a lot of work to put together a world like this, and it should be mentioned that not everything a writer thinks up will end up in the novel. I am in the middle of inking a map for this world, and most of the story takes place in the northern half of the continent. However, I know where all the cities of this world are located, what those cities do for revenue, and what path a dragon would take to get there. But no one really needs to know about exports out of a southern port town, do they?

I also may have accidentally created a family lineage that is far too complicated that won’t really be explored in the story that much. That was probably a mistake I will have to fix later.

If a story is supposed to seem as authentic as possible, a lot of world-building needs to go into it.

That’s it for now. I hope a lot of you are out there writing about fantasy worlds!