AHC: Dragon Fad in Popculture

The Cosmonaut Cat

Banned
For better or for worse, the Twilight books & movies brought vampires back to the forefront of popular consciousness and made them the buzz of tenage girls.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to have dragons reach the same popularity in pop culture (not necessary among teenage girls).
 

Saphroneth

Banned
The Cosmonaut Cat said:
For better or for worse, the Twilight books & movies brought vampires back to the forefront of popular consciousness and made them the buzz of tenage girls.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to have dragons reach the same popularity in pop culture (not necessary among teenage girls).
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Assuming it's possible, it might work if you moved several of the series which involve dragons substantially so they overlap. (I'm thinking of works like Temeraire, Pern, How To Train Your Dragon... if they all turned up close enough together, assume that could be done, it might achieve a kind of "perfect storm" by making it so that there were series involving dragons on the go for several different age/interest groups at once.)
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Kung Fucious said:
Off the top of my head? Maybe have the Dragonriders of Pern books be adapted by HBO instead of Game of Thrones/ASOIAF and reach the same level of critical/ratings success.
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...okay, minor bio point about me. I've been dragon obsessed for well over half my life and for almost as long as I have memories.

In other words, this post made me go WHYYYYYYYYYY?
For how much I want that to have happened. Can we tune into ATL HBO yet?
 

eliphas8

There briefly was a stillborn fad of dragon riders in young adult fiction around the time Eragon came out. Make the Eragon movie not suck and be a hit and it very well could become bigger.
 
oshron

oshron

Saphroneth said:
Assuming it's possible, it might work if you moved several of the series which involve dragons substantially so they overlap. (I'm thinking of works like Temeraire, Pern, How To Train Your Dragon... if they all turned up close enough together, assume that could be done, it might achieve a kind of "perfect storm" by making it so that there were series involving dragons on the go for several different age/interest groups at once.)
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i'd add the Inheritance Cycle to that for good measure. regardless of what one's opinion of it is, it IS about dragons, and was released at around the same time as 2/3 of those others ones

a slightly earlier release of Skyrim (for better or for worse) would probably come up on the tail end of this fad and maybe pump some life into it for at least another year or so
 
Tom Colton

Tom Colton

eliphas8 said:
There briefly was a stillborn fad of dragon riders in young adult fiction around the time Eragon came out. Make the Eragon movie not suck and be a hit and it very well could become bigger.
Click to expand...

This is only possible for certain values of "not suck", given the source material.

The How to Train Your Dragon animated movies and series, if spun off into a massive franchise, could be what you're thinking of, OP.
 
oshron

oshron

Tom Colton said:
This is only possible for certain values of "not suck", given the source material.
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even I won't defend the film adaptation of Eragon and i like* that series. getting a better film adaptation, or at least one which doesn't fudge some of the more important details of the book, (namely the ending, since that kinda ruined one of the key plot points of a sequel) could result in at least one more of the books being adapted. remember, we're not talking about the quality of the Inheritance Cycle, we're talking about a dragon fad, and since lots of people know about the series regardless, it would've contributed to a dragon fad in the same way Twilight contributed to the vampire fad. whether that's a good thing or not is a matter of opinion, but since Twilight arguably allowed Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter to be written, Paolini's work could very well inspire other dragon-based books and media, if not as homage or following the leader, then potentially with the "I can do better than that!" mentality

*it's been ages since i read any of the books so i can't really say if my opinion of the series has changed
 
Zulufoxtrot

Zulufoxtrot

Tom Colton said:
This is only possible for certain values of "not suck", given the source material.
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If the makers choose to pretty much ignore it though you might get a better end product. They may as well have anyway given how many differences there are between the film and the books, and in doing so you can limit the total Gary Stu that is Eragon.

Also maybe improve the original Dragonheart enough to where it's a bigger blockbuster, and critical reception so to get a better sequel and potentially more sequels?
 

Whanztastic

The problem with a dragon fad is that the audience will have to connect with the dragon riders, not the dragons. Extreme fandom comes when people want to be the characters. You are a step removed and makes a fad launching off harder.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Arguably, the best thing to do to get this kicked off would be for some of the OTL dragon stuff from the late 90s and early 00s to be moved later. This would mean that there was enough animation resources available to pull off something good.

So, if this lot turn up inside a relatively few year period:
Desolation of Smaug
Eragon (film)
How To Train Your Dragon (which is probably going to be a major lynchpin, those films are just so good. Also, reduce the sequel time lag to two years, so you can get 1 and 2 inside this three year window.)
An HBO series involving Pern
Voyage of the Dawn Treader
And an entirely ATL production - The Volsunga saga gets given to Michael Bay to produce, and the battle with Fafnir is an all-up SFX super-bonanza on the kind of scale he can pull off.

That's enough dragon to do something useful.

Whanztastic said:
The problem with a dragon fad is that the audience will have to connect with the dragon riders, not the dragons. Extreme fandom comes when people want to be the characters. You are a step removed and makes a fad launching off harder.
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Speak for yourself. ;)
More seriously, giant robots have people wanting to be the pilots, and that doesn't prevent the giant robots being the symbols.
 
Tom Colton

Tom Colton

Whanztastic said:
The problem with a dragon fad is that the audience will have to connect with the dragon riders, not the dragons. Extreme fandom comes when people want to be the characters. You are a step removed and makes a fad launching off harder.
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The Pokemon model suggests otherwise. ;)

Re: Improving Eragon, seeing as abject failure didn't work, it would somehow need to reach a fine balance of being good enough to spur knock-offs while at least attempting to stick to the original story, with all of its flaws. Alternatively, there's the aforementioned idea of doing an in-name-only adaptation...
 
oshron

oshron

Whanztastic said:
The problem with a dragon fad is that the audience will have to connect with the dragon riders, not the dragons. Extreme fandom comes when people want to be the characters. You are a step removed and makes a fad launching off harder.
Click to expand...

Paolini found a way for this to work: the dragon and rider are connected, their minds are essentially as one (Eragon grows into this during the course of the series, but other authors ITTL could have that already having taken place). kinda like how Ryuko and Senketsu become as one in Kill la Kill.
 

Corbell Mark IV

Whanztastic said:
The problem with a dragon fad is that the audience will have to connect with the dragon riders, not the dragons. Extreme fandom comes when people want to be the characters. You are a step removed and makes a fad launching off harder.
Click to expand...

There was a RPG where the characters were reincarnated Mythic Dragons who grew in power and recalled more and more of the past as the game went on.

To the point that the game was played in two time periods the present and the Mythic Past.

And the characters today effort's would drive that events of the past. I wasn't sure if this was a change or just a story driven plot device.

Something like that could give you the best of both worlds.



Love the Dragon Riders of Pern HBO series BTW!:cool:
 

tigercat

Invent Dragon lycanthropy. Make a series involving teenage dragons . Make it about star crossed lovers ie Hatfield and McCoy s meets Romeo and Juliet . Market heavily to the tween and young teen demographic. Cast some young hearthrobs .
 
oshron

oshron

tigercat said:
Invent Dragon lycanthropy. Make a series involving teenage dragons . Make it about star crossed lovers ie Hatfield and McCoy s meets Romeo and Juliet . Market heavily to the tween and young teen demographic. Cast some young hearthrobs .
Click to expand...
i actually came up with something like this recently, though it's more to the effect of absorbing dragon souls a la Skyrim and changing in response to emotion, namely anger, as well as occasionally getting some permanent passive changes. what i'd specifically written included as occurring along with anger being one's eyes suddenly resembling those of a dragon, breathing fire (including as spontaneous expulsions of air like sneezing), spikes sprout from the back, the hands are replaced by talons, skin turns into scales, teeth become dragon-like, horns sprout from the head, sprouting a dragon-like tail, the ability to sprout wings at will, temporary size increases, and finally completely hulking out and transforming into a dragon, with passive changes being one's blood becoming like that of a dragon (assuming there's any difference at all), immunity to cold thanks to a very hot internal temperature (but bad heartburn in exchange :p), a permanent size increase to 7.5 feet, immunity to disease
 

Emperor Julian

The Inheritance books don't need to be better; look at Twilight's success after all. They just need to have a successful movie series to be influential.
 
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