Pornokitsch

Bex

Here are mine. I've cheated the last one, so please feel free to tell me to uncheat it and do a proper one.

• You can’t talk about dragons and not talk about the Dragonriders of Pern, can you? To my 12-year-old self they were the coolest thing since Avon in Blake’s 7, but in retrospect most of them didn’t have much personality. Ruth the White Dragon was  a bit different – he achieved the impressive feat of being a super-powered semi-mythological beast who was also an underdog you could root for.  

• In Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life, powdered dragon blood is the most sought-after black market magical commodity and dragons are an endangered species. So the little baby dragon, both of whose parents were killed by poachers, ought to be adorable. And he is – right up until the moment he hypnotises you and tries to eat you. It takes something to be a stand-out character in a book which already has Chrestomanci in it, but that little monster manages it.

• I love all the dragons of Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series including, of course, Temeraire himself, the Stephen Maturin to Laurence’s Jack Aubrey. But I’ve got a particularly soft spot for Perscitia. Who wouldn’t love a cowardly dragon who’s hopeless at fighting but brilliant at maths?

• It’s many, many years since I read R A MacAvoy’s Tea with the Black Dragon, but I remember being utterly charmed by it and its hero, Mayland Long, a courtly gentleman who loves reading, is brilliant at languages, and used to be a black dragon with a head like a chrysanthemum.

• Yes, I know Honor Harrington’s Nimitz isn’t actually a dragon. But he ticks all the boxes dragons are supposed to tick: he bonds for life with his adopted human, only picks the specialist of special people, and is tasty in a fight. And how cool would it be to be empathically linked to a cat that actually did like you, rather than just using you as a convenient source of food, warmth and occasional entertainment?

• [Edited to add uncheated pick] Reign of Fire is a pretty rubbish movie, but there's something really fun about seeing dragons taking the role of more normal action-movie menaces. And for bonus points, we get to see them annihilating London. Who hasn't sat on the Victoria line at rush hour and wished for a mythological beast to reduce their fellow passengers to ash and guts?

Jared

Unlike Bex, I'm no cheater, so all my dragons are, you know dragons. And unlike Anne, I'm a boy, so none of mine have bug-wings or the ability to shoot rainbows from their chest. You know what I want in a dragon? Big. Stompy. Mayhem. Failing that? Comic relief.

• Smaug: Claws like spears. Scales like armour. Tail like a hurricane. Smaug's a walking, talking, fire-breathing meme. As much as I love the Celtic-looking little doodles that Tolkien scribbled, Smaug to me will always be the bass-voiced air-tank from the Rankin & Bass Hobbit film. Take that, Chuck Norris.