But the land of Merlin and Arthur was better than these, and best of all the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons. Such lands were pre-eminently desirable. I never imagined that the dragon was of the same order as the horse. And that was not solely because I saw horses daily, but never even the footprint of a worm. The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faërie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire.
J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”
I.
Charizard brings us back to the Borges quote I began this series with: the dragon, mysterious as the universe itself, appearing again and again in the human imagination. I will not attempt to explain the universe or solve the mystery of the dragon here. As Martin Arnold writes in the introduction to The Dragon: Fear and Power, “dragons as depicted across world myth and legend are so varied in their behaviors and appearances, let alone their cultural significances, that any attempt to provide an all-purpose description of them is simply impossible.” Instead, I have two much more limited goals for this essay.
First, I will give a brief history of one specific type of dragon, the European monster faced by St. George, Beowulf and Tolkien’s own Bilbo Baggins. Several different families of dragons inhabit the Other-world of Pokémon, to use Tolkien’s term, and I will address east Asian dragon folklore when I get to Magikarp, Gyarados, Dratini, Dragonair and Dragonite. Second, I will analyze how the Pokémon Charizard — the final evolution of Charmander and Charmeleon — reflects this long history of dragon folklore.
The winged, fire-breathing European dragon needs no introduction. You’ve seen it in paintings, movies and tv shows, read about it in books, killed and/or commanded it in video games of various genres. Our pop culture, especially post-Tolkien, has seen a “surfeit of Dragons,” in Borges’ words, or an epidemic of them, in Arnold’s.
Where did this creature come from? There is no single answer. Earlier in “On Fairy-Stories” Tolkien uses the metaphor of a bubbling cauldron, containing ingredients added at different times and places, to describe the complex history of folklore. Whatever now-shadowy historical figure inspired King Arthur, he writes, “was boiled for a long time, together with many older figures and devices, of mythology and Faerie, and even some other stray bones of history (such as Alfred's defense against the Danes) until he emerged as a King of Faerie.” The witches’ brew that congealed into the medieval European dragon contained at least the following ingredients:
1. A possible genetic inheritance from our distant ancestors. In The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, Carl Sagan suggests that the dragon could be an ancestral memory of our “ancient enemy,” the snake. Building on Sagan, anthropologist David E. Jones argues for dragons as a combination and amplification of three key ancestral predators: snakes, big cats and birds of prey. He calls this the “snake/raptor/big cat complex” in his book An Instinct for Dragons and connects the dragon’s fiery breath to the hot breath of big cats.
2. Fossils of dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles. “The discovery of the bones of such formidably large creatures would have needed explaining,” Martin Arnold writes in The Dragon: Fear and Power.
3. Observations and especially embellished travelers' tales of real reptiles. The medieval bestiary’s dragon is not Of Faërie but instead a large reptile that lives in India and Ethiopia and hunts elephants; images and descriptions of the prey are only slightly less fanciful than those of the predator. Embellished descriptions of tropical reptiles may have inspired similar legendary creatures. In his bestiary translation, T.H. White connects the basilisk, which can kill with a single glance, to African spitting cobras.
4. The snake's ancient role as a totemic figure, representing strength, fertility and regeneration as it emerges from its own shed skin. The ouroboros symbol of the snake eating its own tail originated in ancient Egypt, whose pharaohs once wore representations of the snake goddess Wadjet on their crowns. Minoan figurines known as "snake goddesses" hold snakes in each hand; on the mainland, the half-man, half-snake Cecrops was said to have founded Athens. King Arthur himself is the son of Uther Pendragon (“dragon’s head” or “chief dragon” in Welsh.) As with the bear, the snake’s power as a pagan symbol contributed to its demonization in the Christian era.
5. The reptilian monsters of ancient Greek mythology, completely lacking Cecrops' civilized qualities, such as the gigantic serpent Python slain by Apollo at Delphi, which becomes his holy sanctuary and the site of his oracle. The hundred-headed dragon Typhon wars against the Olympian gods and fathers a bestiary of monstrous children — including the sphinx, the chimera and Cerberus, the three-headed canine guardian of the underworld — before Zeus buries him under Sicily’s Mt. Etna. (Legend attributed the mountain’s volcanic eruptions to the fiery breath of the monster beneath it.)
Herakles encounters two of Typhon’s draconic children on his adventures, slaying the many-headed hydra and the dragon Ladon that guards the golden apples of the Hesperides. After decapitating the gorgon Medusa, the hero Perseus rescues the princess Andromeda from a sea monster, a scene illustrated in many paintings and both versions of Clash of the Titans. This dragon and princess motif would become an integral part of Christian dragon lore, most famously in the legend of St. George.
6. Monsters in other Mediterranean and Near Eastern mythologies. The Egyptian sun god Ra, for instance, descends each night into the underworld to slay the monstrous serpent known as Apep or Aapef before rising as the dawn. (Winged serpents, legendary in ancient Egypt, may have also contributed to the dragon archetype.) Similarly, the Babylonian god Marduk fights and eventually kills the draconic sea goddess Tiamat. Martin Arnold mentions the Hittite Baal Cycle, “preserved in thousand of tablets from the Bronze Age Canaanite trading center of Ugarit,” which includes a confrontation between the god Baal and the sea dragon Yam.
7. Monsters in pagan Northern European mythologies. Norse mythology, for instance, has two fearsome dragons: Níðhöggr, who gnaws at the roots of the world-tree Yggdrasil, and Jörmungandr, the world-serpent who dies fighting (and fatally poisons) Thor during Ragnarök. Beowulf also kills and is fatally poisoned by a dragon in that half-Christian, half-pagan epic poem. The “nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs” that so entranced young Tolkien was the world of the Germanic heroic sagas — most famously preserved in the High German epic poem the Niebelungenlied (c.1200) — that inspired both The Lord of the Rings and Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle. In it, the monomythical hero Siegfried (or Sigurd) slays the dragon Fáfnir, eats its heart and drinks its blood, which gives him magical powers. Originally a man, Fáfnir’s greed transformed him into a dragon, establishing a motif of greed and especially treasure-hoarding that would help shape pop culture dragons such as Tolkien’s Smaug.
Celtic mythology, Arnold writes, contains western Europe’s oldest dragon folklore, with dragons serving as “guardians between this world and the fairy otherworld, usually at a sacred grove or loch.” Dragons remain Celtic symbols, most famously as the red dragon on the Welsh flag.
8. The dragon standard carried by cohorts of Roman soldiers. These standards, Senter, Mattox and Haddad write in a Journal of Folklore Research article,
resembled elongated windsocks and would writhe and hiss as wind passed into their open mouths and through their fabric torsos. The fact that these were held aloft may have contributed to the planting of the image of dragon flight in the public mind.
The use of the dragon to symbolize imperial Roman power likely contributed to its becoming a symbol of evil in the Book of Revelations and in Christian Europe after the fall of the western Roman Empire.
9. Dragons and dragon-like creatures in the Bible, starting with the serpent in the garden of Eden. Dragons, Arnold writes, “are frequently invoked by the prophets or in the Psalms when the Jewish people are either oppressed by their enemies or have strayed from the path of righteousness.” The Book of Job describes the sea monster Leviathan as breathing smoke and fire; its mouth became the mouth of Hell itself in medieval Christian art. The Book of Revelation, of course, features the climactic end-times triumph of the archangel Michael over “that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan,” which John of Patmos describes as seeing in his dream vision as “a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.” This particular dragon’s cultural impact, writes Arnold, “cannot be overstated.” As Senter et al argue, for instance, this dragon’s status as a fallen angel — and the celestial location of its battle against St. Michael — encouraged medieval artists to add wings to their dragons, which were formerly imagined as mere giant snakes.
II.
With these elements combined and Christianized, the dragon became a powerful symbol of evil by the time of the medieval bestiaries: an often explicitly Satanic embodiment of sin in general and pagan persecution of early Christians in particular. (It had also taken on its archetypal form, as seen in the bestiary page above.) A twelfth century English bestiary describes the dragon's every aspect as representing the devil, from its size to the crest on its head — a symbol of pride — to its habit of ambushing elephants and strangling them with its tail, which stands for the devil's deceitfulness and ability to entangle humans with "the knots of their sins." As in earlier myths, the medieval dragon became the hero’s ultimate test; Borges calls dragon-slaying “one of the stock exploits of heroes” in The Book of Imaginary Beings. England’s patron St. George is only the most famous of many saints who encountered dragons in their legendary adventures.
The historical St. George came not from England but from the eastern Mediterranean, probably Cappadocia in modern-day Turkey. According to early Christian tradition, he was a 3rd-4th century Roman military commander who refused to renounce his Christian faith during the Great Persecution of the emperor Diocletian, who eventually had him executed. Arnold credits the influence of Greek myth, the Book of Revelation and medieval chivalric romance for the dragon becoming first a symbol of this oppression and then taking on a life of its own. To return to Tolkien’s metaphor, George was boiled together with and seasoned by these myths, especially that of Perseus and Andromeda, and then emerged as a Faërie knight, if not the Faërie knight.
Thus the mythical St. George arrives in Libya to find it plagued by a swamp-dwelling dragon unappeased by the locals’ sacrifices of livestock and, eventually, of their own children. Desperate, the Libyan king sends his own daughter off to the swamp as a sacrifice to the dragon. St. George rescues her, slays the dragon, baptizes the local population and inspires the local king to build his town’s first church. He then rides off into the sunset — as Arnold writes, “declining any reward for his deed and having instructed the king in the right-minded Christian way to rule over his subjects.” This George still dies a martyr’s death under Diocletian, at least in the earlier tellings of this story, but not before symbolically triumphing over paganism.
History has become archetype, with a global appeal. Arnold notes George’s many patronages in addition to England:
Aragon, Catalonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Ethiopia, Bulgaria, Palestine, Portugal, Brazil, Canada, Romania, Germany, Greece, Malta, Moscow, Istanbul, Genoa and Venice. He has traditionally been venerated by soldiers, farmers, archers and horse-riders and has been seen as a guardian of lepers, plague victims, and those suffering from syphilis. For many Muslims, most notably those in the Palestinian regions, George is associated with the holy man and martyr Al-Khidr, who is believed to have been both a spiritual guide to Moses and a dragon-slayer.
The flags of England, the United Kingdom, the City of London, Georgia, Barcelona, the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario, and the isles of Guernsey and Sark all incorporate St. George’s red cross into their designs. The United Kingdom awards the George Cross, one of its highest honors, to “those who have displayed the greatest heroism or the most conspicuous courage whilst in extreme danger,” in the words of the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association.
(Like the Green Man, George’s dragon-slaying has enjoyed a prolific afterlife as a motif on pub signs; WhatPub lists no fewer than 84 British pubs called the George & Dragon. Shakespeare himself mentions a George & Dragon pub sign. In King John, the Bastard refers to “Saint George, that swinged the dragon and e’er since/ Sits on’s horseback at mine hostess’ door.” Speaking of Shakespeare, I took this essay’s title from Lear’s warning to Kent in the first scene of King Lear: “come not between the dragon and his wrath.”)
Arnold argues that the dragon became a symbol of pagan persecution of Christians as early as the 4th century A.D. He summarizes several early stories of holy dragon-slayers:
imprisoned and tortured for refusing to forsake God, St. Margaret (Marina) of Antioch is swallowed by a dragon, but, when she makes the sign of the cross, the dragon explodes and she emerges unharmed, thereafter to be revered as the patron saint of childbirth; St. Hilarion commands a ravaging dragon to settle on a pyre which he then sets alight… St Donatus employs the unusual tactic of spitting into a dragon’s mouth and so killing it; the exiled St. Victoria expels a dragon from a nearby town by praying before it and, in so doing, achieves the conversion of the town’s obstinate pagans; St. Andrew lays a divinely inspired fatal curse on a dragon that has killed a young boy, whom the saint then revives.
We’ve already heard the tale of Rouen’s St. Romanus, who supposedly slayed a dragon and used his head as the first gargoyle. Rosa Giorgi’s Saints in Art lists no fewer than seven saints with a dragon attribute, including the pope St. Sylvester, who according to legend both tamed a dragon and baptized the Roman emperor Constantine. A number of other saints were said to have tamed dragons instead of killing them. When visiting Metz Cathedral, for example, I learned the legend of Saint Clement, who tamed a dragon terrorizing Metz and converted its inhabitants to Christianity; the cathedral's crypt still contains a statue of this dragon, called le Graoully. A similar French legend has Saint Martha, sister of the resurrected Lazarus, taming a dragon in the Provencal town of Tarascon, which to this day continues to celebrate her as its patron saint. Arnold mentions St. Ammon (Ammonius the Hermit) who “tames two dragons and has them guard his hermitage from thieves.”
While many of these stories seem quite fantastical in the 21st century, long after dragons have come to signify fantasy itself, the bestiarists saw dragons as of the same order as elephants, lions and tigers, as did the proto-scientists of earlier and later periods. The pioneering natural historians Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, for instance, both described dragons as real animals, with the latter’s description of dragons strangling elephants (as if they were gigantic boa constrictors) influencing the bestiaries. As mentioned in the first part of this series, Conrad Gesner’s 16th century animal encyclopedia Historia Animalium covers dragons and other mythical creatures in addition to real animals. Gesner’s entry on dragons — which I read in Uta Mattox’s translation — draws on many earlier authors to provide a thorough, almost exhaustingly detailed description of dragons, from the etymology of the word “dragon” itself to their size, habitat, color, methods of locomotion (“many of them have wings, and many do not”), diet and poison, as well as antidotes for dragon venom. He does attempt some scientific skepticism, rejecting an African legend of dragons being born from the mating of a male eagle and female wolf as “unbelievable” and identifying so-called “dragon’s blood” as red sap from Indian trees. (He cautions the reader that the dragon’s blood “sold in our area in pharmacies is nothing but goat’s blood with mountain cinnabar or service berries.”)
“Gesner’s encyclopedia set the standard for subsequence dragon descriptions,” Senter et al write. Encyclopedists such as Shakespeare’s contemporary Edward Topsell (The Historie of Serpents, 1608), Ulisse Aldrovandi (Historia serpentum et draconum, 1640) and Athanasius Kircher (Mundi subterranei, 1667) all drew on Gesner. The sixteenth century also saw a boom in the production and sale of fake dragons made from a variety of animal parts; Senter et al note Gesner’s “naïve underestimation of the talent of taxidermic artists” in a footnote.
However, a combination of the age of exploration, the rise of the scientific method, the exposure of these faked dragons and the rise of biology as a scientific discipline ended any lingering belief in the existence of the dragon as a real creature. Our satellite-imaged, GSP-coordinated maps have no shadowy edges labeled “here be dragons.” While there are creatures called dragons in today’s zoology, such as the Komodo dragons of Indonesia, they are no hydra or Apef, no Níðhöggr, no Devil. Komodo dragons are themselves now an endangered species; Dragons, extinct to science, continue to thrive in the world of culture.
III.
I lack the space to fully summarize the European dragon’s long career in popular culture. If Joseph Campbell’s archetypal hero has a thousand faces, then the dragon has almost as many, including the Jabberwock, Chrysophylax Dives, Smaug, Maleficent (whose death heavily evokes that of St. George’s nemesis), Drogon, Rhaegal, Viserion and of course Charizard. Western pop culture has, in Arnold’s words, truly experienced a post-Tolkien “dragon epidemic.”
The European dragon even made its way into Japan, which has a dragon folklore of its own. Godzilla, for instance, bears a much closer resemblance to the destructive European dragon than to its regal, rain-giving Asian counterpart. (Godzilla’s enemy King Ghidorah looks much more like the traditional Asian dragon.) In Gojira (1954), the irradiated, mutated, enraged dinosaur first comes ashore on an isolated island whose oldest resident recalls an old legend. On this island, a sea monster called Godzilla was said to devour the islanders’ fish supplies unless propitiated by a virgin sacrifice. (The film’s human characters name the monster after this legend.) Godzilla’s sheer malevolence and sheer destructiveness in that first film echoes that of the European dragon, as does his long-running signature attack, the ‘atomic breath’ that updates the dragon’s fire for the nuclear age.
On a much lighter note, Mario’s nemesis Bowser has many of the characteristics of the European dragon, such as greed, pride, fiery breath and a propensity for abducting princesses. Japanese RPGs abound with dragons, beginning with the very first JRPG, Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior (1986) and continuing through Breath of Fire, Fire Emblem and other long-running series.
The Dragon: Fear and Power is a book-length cultural history of this creature and I would recommend it with the following caveats: Arnold spends too little time on non-Western mythology and culture (George R.R. Martin and the whole of Asian mythology each get one chapter), occasionally resorts to rather simplistic sociocultural explanations, and almost entirely neglects one of the dragon’s main haunts in the contemporary world, tabletop and video games. (RPGs, the only game genre mentioned, account for but a single paragraph.)
One pop culture thread identified by Arnold bears mentioning here. We’ve already seen the preponderance of legends about dragon-taming saints in medieval Europe. This motif has continued into the present, perhaps most notoriously with Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones but also in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, and How to Train Your Dragon (all mentioned by Arnold) as well as characters in video games from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to the Final Fantasy and Fire Emblem series, World of Warcraft, Panzer Dragoon and of course Pokémon.
IV.
Charizard has stood out from its fellow Pokémon since the very first games, Pokémon Red and Green, which feature Charizard and Venusaur on their respective boxes. Thus, Charizard was the very first Pokémon seen by many players, especially in 1996-1997 Japan before the series became a global multimedia phenomenon. It remained the mascot of Pokémon Red Version (and its Game Boy Advance remake) in the rest of the world, appearing on millions of game boxes and game cartridges in addition to a draconic horde of plastic figurines, plush toys, t-shirts and, of course, trading cards. Charizard finished as the most popular Generation 1 Pokémon in an official 2020 Pokémon Company poll, receiving almost 94,000 votes. (Gengar finished second, Bulbasaur third, Pikachu fourth and Eevee fifth.) Players of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Smash Bros. 4 and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate can pit Charizard against Mario, Luigi, Donkey Kong, Link and the rest of the Nintendo gang.
The holographic Base Set Charizard I began this post with undoubtedly brought back childhood memories for many of my fellow millennials. It was the single most sought-after Pokémon card in my boyhood, with a unique combination of triple digit hit points and an attack dealing 100 points of damage. A friend of mine in the collectible cards industry tells me that this card remains the most expensive of the thousands and thousands published in the last quarter century. A mint condition first edition holographic Base Set Charizard can sell for upwards of $400,000; Beckett values pristine copies at around $1 million.
I attribute this notoriety to Charizard being the Pokémon equivalent of probably the quintessential mythical creature. The choice of Charizard as one of Pokémon’s initial mascots must have contributed to the success of the franchise as a whole — a fiery dragon on a video game box immediately and wordlessly communicates “fantasy adventure” to a global audience of all ages. Like its earlier form, Charmander, Charizard does represent a diminution of a once-overwhelming mythological archetype. It has lost the medieval dragon’s pagan and Satanic overtones, and neither hoards gold nor menaces young princesses. Nonetheless, it retained enough of the old dragon to make it a superstar among Pokémon.
Charizard’s Pokédex entries and trading card flavor text, for instance, emphasize its sheer capacity for destruction. “Its fiery breath reaches incredible temperatures,” in the words of the Pokémon Stadium Pokédex; this breath “can quickly melt glaciers weighing 10,000 tons.” According to the Red and Blue Pokédex, it “spits fire that is hot enough to melt boulders” and is “known to cause forest fires unintentionally.” Destruction is very intentional in the words of the Team Rocket Set’s Dark Charizard card: “Seemingly possessed, it spews fire like a volcano, trying to burn all it sees.” (“Possessed” offers an unintentional evocation of the demonic thread in the dragon’s history.)
Similarly, Charizard’s attacks include Rage, Slash, Flamethrower and Fire Spin in Red and Blue with the addition of Wing Attack, Dragon Rage and Blast Burn in the Game Boy Advanced remakes. Dark Charizard (Team Rocket #21/82) attacks with Continuous Fireball, while Blaine’s Charizard (Gym Challenge #2/132) unleashes Roaring Flames and Flame Jet. And of course the Base Set Charizard dealt 100 points of damage with Fire Spin, the most powerful Trading Card Game attack of its era.
Ash’s Charmeleon (originally a Charmander) evolves into Charizard in the anime’s 46th episode, Attack of the Prehistoric Pokémon. It becomes even more unruly, even more disobedient than its earlier form and like Charmeleon refuses to fight opponents it considers unworthy. On one level, this is merely a dramatization of an aspect of the original Game Boy games. While a Pokémon caught by the player will always remain loyal, one acquired in a trade will act disobediently if at a high level, disobeying the player’s commands and occasionally refusing to attack at all during a battle. Only by acquiring all eight badges — earned by defeating the eight gym leaders — can players ensure the loyalty of Pokémon at all levels. Thus Charizard refuses to follow Ash’s orders in battles against Cinnabar Island gym leader Blaine and rival Ritchie in the Indigo Conference tournament, causing him to lose both.
While the anime writers obviously drew on the Game Boy games for this plot point, the choice of Charizard as the unruly Pokémon has broader echoes. First, it further emphasizes the almost complete transformation of Ash’s Charizard from timid child (Charmander) to sullen, wrathful teenager (Charmeleon) to powerful and perhaps even independent adult. Second, and on a closely related note, the challenge of taming Charizard illustrates and externalizes Ash’s coming of age, with winning badges and gaining control of all Pokémon perhaps representing the same for the player-character in the games. Third, it echoes the dragon-tamers of myth and legend, a motif that can itself be read as a symbol of growth and maturity; Joseph Campbell would certainly do so, as would Pokémon co-creator Satoshi Tajiri, who told interviewers that the series’ theme of controlling monsters reflects the need to control “the monster within yourself” such as “fear or anger.” For Campbell, “the mythological hero is the champion not of things become but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo,” or, in other words, the obstacle to be overcome on the hero’s road to maturity, to self-actualization.
This dragon-taming as coming of age theme is perhaps best seen in The Electric Tale of Pikachu, Toshihiro Ono’s loose manga adaptation of the anime. (The anime itself includes a similar plotline across a number of episodes.) In the manga’s 12th chapter, Ash enters the Indigo League Novice Tournament alongside Gary and his new rival Ritchie. Ash shows Brock and Misty his “secret weapon,” a Charizard he had painstakingly raised from its childhood as a Charmander. Both gym leaders express misgivings, with Misty observing that “even professionals have a tough time controlling a Charizard.” Ash agrees and ultimately decides against using it in his next battle, which he wins anyway. He faces Ritchie — his doppelganger, or perhaps his shadow self, to use Jungian terms — in the next battle, which takes up almost all of Ono’s 13th manga chapter. Down to his last Pokémon, Ash sends out his Charizard against Ritchie’s Charizard, ‘Charley.’ (“Looks like we’re in for a Charizard duel,” says Professor Oak, commenting on the match in the press box. “I’ve never seen such high-ranking Pokémon battle each other in a novice tournament before.”)
As illustrated above, Ash’s Charizard becomes completely uncontrollable during the battle, which — combined with the plot contrivance of Ritchie’s malfunctioning Pokéball — forces Ash to forfeit the match rather than risk serious injury or even death to his opponent’s Pokémon. Afterwards, Misty and Brock interrupt Ash’s ensuing crisis of confidence to give him emotional support, with the latter telling him to never give up.
The Electric Tale of Pikachu ends with its 18th chapter, “Pikachu’s Plan,” in which Ash faces off against the Orange Islands’ ‘supreme gym leader’ Drake in the final round of another tournament some months later. Ash sends out his Charizard against Drake’s Dragonite, confident in the knowledge that he has trained it well and gained its trust, as Misty points out above. This time, Charizard puts up a valiant and obedient fight, contributing to Ash’s eventual victory. (Pikachu, of course, wins the battle for its trainer.) Ash has both successfully tamed his dragon and defeated an opposing dragon; he has, in his world’s admittedly childish and watered-down way, followed in the footsteps of the mythic heroes and dragon-taming saints.
Unlike the anime, which has lasted for well over 1,000 episodes with Ash as a perpetual novice who never attains the status of Pokémon Master, Ono’s manga has a beginning, middle and end, and is an actual coming of age story, ein Bildungsroman that ends with a more mature, more confident Ash as the result of his journey; Brock even muses that “you’re all grown up, Ash” in the aftermath of the climactic match. Ash winning the trust and loyalty of Charizard perfectly symbolizes this growth and self-actualization. He has, in truly mythopoeic fashion, tamed the inner monsters of fear, doubt, and insecurity by taming a literal monster.
V.
Charizard is just one of many, many roles played by the dragon of many faces, who emerged several thousand years ago (at the latest) and has never left the spotlight. The almost 5,000 words you’ve just read represent the briefest introduction to this creature, which never lived yet continues to haunt the global imagination. I have not solved the mysteries of the universe but I hope I have explained Charizard’s special status in the Pokémon world, which of course comes from the profound and universal desire for dragons.
Bibliography
Aldred, Cyril. Egyptian Art. 1980. Thames and Hudson, 1996.
Arnold, Martin. The Dragon: Fear and Power. Reaktion Books, 2018.
Blount, Margaret. Animal Land: The Creatures of Children's Fiction. 1974. Avon, 1977.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Imaginary Beings. Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. 1974. Vintage, 2002.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Princeton University Press, 1973.
Cep, Casey. “The Endurance of Notre-Dame.” The New Yorker, April 12, 2020.
Giorgi, Rosa. Saints in Art. Translated by Thomas Michael Hartman. Getty Publications, 2003.
Grant, Michael and John Hazel. Who’s Who in Classical Mythology. 1973. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Jones, David E. An Instinct for Dragons. Psychology Press, 2002.
Littleton, C. Scott, ed. Mythology: The Illustrated Anthology of World Myth & Storytelling. Thunder Bay Press, 2002.
Mercatante, Anthony S. Who’s Who in Egyptian Mythology. ed. Robert S. Bianchi. MetroBooks, 1995.
Morrison, Elizabeth, ed. Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World. Getty Publications, 2019.
Ono, Toshihiro. Pokémon Graphic Novel, Volume 3: Electric Pikachu Boogaloo. VIZ Media, 2000.
--. Pokémon Graphic Novel, Volume 4: Surf's Up, Pikachu. VIZ Media, 1999.
Sagan, Carl. The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. Random House, 1977.
Senter, Phil, Uta Mattox, and Eid E. Haddad. "Snake to Monster: Conrad Gessner's Schlangenbuch and the Evolution of the Dragon in the Literature of Natural History." Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 53, no. 1, 2016, pp. 67-124.
Tolkien, J.R.R. "On Fairy-Stories." Poems and Stories. Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Unerman, Sandra. “Dragons in Twentieth-Century Fiction.” Folklore, vol. 113, no. 1, 2002, pp. 94–101.
White, T.H. The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the 12th Century. 1954. Dover, 2010.
Zimmerman, J.E. Dictionary of Classical Mythology. 1964. Bantam Books, 1971.
Nice.
We've had this conversation already with regards to Squirtle. I'd have been much more likely to classify Bowser as a Kappa than a dragon, even though I concede he fulfills much more of a dragon role. (And then kappa, koopa..)
With regards to Charizard having served as a mascot to the game, it occurs to me that of the three starter Pokémon that Ash owed, Charmander was the only one that had gotten to evolve.
With regards to the out of control Charizard. It occurs to me that it corresponds to a Shōnen trope, namely that of a warrior losing control as he gains some great power (a kind of “going berserk”). In Pokémon it is not the characters who fight, but their pokémon. So, in effect, when Ash recalls whatever pokémon preceded it and sends the unruly Charizard, it is not unlike the hero who sheds his restraints. That also goes with the creator message of the series being about "taking the monsters within."
I'm surprised that you categorize Dragonite as an eastern dragon. I'd say its preceding evolutions are so, but Dragonite itself... I'd say perhaps it something of a hybrid. Generally it strikes me more as a European dragon, what with its four limbs, its wings. Nonetheless its wings are small and the dragon whiskers have moved to become feelers on its head. I'll wait until your corresponding piece, though I think there's a long way to go.
This was such a great piece!
It is so in-depth and makes so many interesting connections.
The idea that the myth of the dragon came to be - in part - as a combination of the snake, big cats, and the Komodo dragon type lizards - especially the fire breathing as the hot breath of big cats - is fascinating!
I also totally agree with your idea that the Pokémon franchise using Chirzard as the symbol of Pokémon red would have helped their popularity.
I always used to wonder about which Pokémon were based off which animals, and with some it was easier to figure out than others, but I had never thought about it in anywhere near as much depth as you covered here.
Great read, thanks.