Why does the “wyverns aren’t dragons” discourse keep finding me leave me alone! There aren’t a lot of things that piss me off but if a story calls their oversized lizards dragons then it’s a fucking dragon.
“Oh but it only has two legs and two wings it’s actually a wyvern!” I’m going to bite your arm off.
Anything can be a dragon, by extension, bats are dragons, birds are dragons. Everything can be a fucking dragon if you call them dragons in your story but people aren’t ready for this discussion.
All the different subspecies you’re referring to when putting dragons in boxes are based on a mythos that is in and of itself made up like any other story. Meaning, that it is nonsensical to force a connection between two stories that other than having big, sometimes fire breathing, lizards in them, have nothing in common.
Lore differs from fiction to fiction. You could argue that the GoT dragons are wyverns by looks but if you’re sexy you’d dig deeper, because by most popular old depictions, wyverns don’t grow as big and do NOT breath fire, but you’re not nerdy enough to know that.
That and if you care EVEN more, the dragons in GoT and its extended universe are (SPOILERS AHEAD) created with blood magic by combining a subterranean fire breathing wyrm with a winged beaked beast that in the lore itself is referred to as a wyvern. So that just shows what you know.
Many storytellers choose the “wyvern” look because, from an evolutionary standpoint, there’s no evidence of a 6 limbed vertebrate being a thing (at least if you want to keep it “realistic”) so if you put humans and dragons in the same universe then the amount of limbs, oddly enough, matters. You can explain it away within your story of course! That’s completely valid, but if the story never specifies the why and how of things then I’ll chalk it up to the wider rules of the world depending on importance and specificity.
Sorry I’m over here yapping and I’m not saying everyone is forced to go into such detail and or nerdiness about their dragons and world building but the way it bothers me when we deal in absolutes. it’s clearly so much cooler to let fantasy do its own thing and not subject it to rules that simple don’t need to be applied.
TLDR: not all dragons are wyverns but all wyverns are dragons.
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