So is Blizzard retconning that proto drakes are not as sentient as modern dragons? The scale born book depicts some drakes being able to talk. Tyr mentions “intelligent Proto drakes” helping him to fight Galakrond in the Tyr’s guard quest. The proto aspects are literally talking to each other in a language we understand in the Rise of Murozond dungeon.
Am I the stupid one?
In Dawn of the Aspects some proto-dragons are just animals and some others are capable of speech. Kalec (who is seeing visions of the past from an artifact Tyr left behind) notes how weird this is, but an answer is never given.
So some are sapient and others aren’t, and we don’t know why.
Yeah, from what i looked up (i had this same doubt). The aspects being fully sapient even before becoming Aspects is quite old lore.
I could chalk this up to your bog-standard fiction writers not understanding how evolution works. Proto dragons went from beast to sapient in one leap.
Evolution has nothing to do with Azeroth… it’s like six kinds of creationism with sometimes opposed ideals and goals.
Also, proto-dragons are somehow “evolved” elementals… which is its own kind of stupid.
Also, elves… we have seen several times in the lore that elves “evolve” in less than a generation. Blood elves are mentioned to have changed during their exodus. In game we watch it happen with the Nightborne.
It varies… just as some dragons are dumb enough to let us use them as mounts.
There was a thread about it on the old forums that blew up, comparing it to the dragons trying to get rid of their… “special needs” dragons, from a piece of removed text in a quest in early wrath beta. It was an interesting post that caused a few silences.
From even the first time we heard about proto dragons the lore was that they exist all over the spectrum naturally, all the way from almost pure instinct to fully sapient and everything in between.
“Some are perfectly intelligent sentient beings and others are just winged lizards” never made a lick of sense to begin with so now that we got to meet a whole bunch of sentient Primal Dragons in Dragonflight I suggest we forget about that awkward stuff and just roll with “Primal Dragons are sentient”
The first of the Legacies shorts that Blizz put out before DF touched on that, albeit briefly. Mentioning that at the time of Galakrond most proto-drakes were basically just animals but with some, like the proto-Aspects, being a bit “further ahead” in cognition. Which doesn’t make a ton of sense, but this is the same world where humans were “evolved” from giant robots made out of metal and stone. Standard rules shouldn’t apply.
But based on that I’d assume that the “intelligent” proto-drakes would have either ended up uplifted like the Aspects or joined the Incarnates. Leaving the ones who didn’t make it that far to… continue not making it for tens of thousands of years.
Missed oportunity in having talking mounts with DF.
They have the tech, we have Ban-lu, it is possible.
Just like how not all primates have the same level of intelligence?
When your fantasy world is run by literal magic, the concept of evolution is allowed to be extremely fluid, rapid, and malleable on any time scale you want and to any degree that you want. I’m not sure the discussion warrants such a deep analysis, personally.
Sure, find me a species in which some individuals happen to be full-blown persons like you and me (and who may be extremely smart even by human standards) while others are just regular primates, then we’ll talk
Many species of Octopus have a high-degree of intelligence on par with primates that may classify as full-blown sentience, while squids and most other cephalopods are less cognizant than a bag of rocks.
Ok can I discuss political oppression with an octopus and expect them to arrive on time for our war council where they’ll be entrusted with conducting highly complex military operations
Cuz I can do just that with a Proto-Dragon
Yes.
But they shall simply be ambivalent to it all.
Octopi are notoriously apolitical and peace-loving.
Probably not, you seem like the type to accuse the octopus of being woke for using a big word like oppression.
Wtf can’t believe these bad boys are to be blamed for Blizzard’s centrist writing and neutral Gilneas
Ok
The dragon situation is very unique and I don’t think there is any real life case supposed to be that way.
Thats a fantasy universe after all.