How to make giant monsters possible

[Azul-din]

I am working with a world which is primarily desert, and began to wonder what sort of beasts might inhabit it. How could a giant land animal like a dragon be physically possible, let alone able to fly? Then I wondered- what if they were insects? An exoskeleton of chitin is lightweight and very strong, and there is no real reason why they might be any size at all. Imagine a preying mantis-like creature the size of a two story building...

 

[Finchbearer]

Cold-blooded creatures for sure, and anything scorpion like. Have you thought about plants? Plants that can move according to the position of the sun or where prey can be found?

 

[Queshire]

Well we're writing fiction here. All you need to do is say that they exist.

Using real life science though? They can't basically.

A two story preying mantis wouldn't be able to breathe if it had biology like a regular preying mantis if I remember correctly.

 

[Guy]

In order to contain the weight of the creature's innards, an exoskeleton on a giant animal would be heavy as hell. As far as insects go, respiration is also an issue. At their current size, air pressure is enough to fill the air sacks they breathe with. An ant the size of a horse would need hurricane-force winds to breathe and be too heavy to move.

For my own writing, I try to use just enough scientific information to help the reader suspend belief or draw them into the story, but I write fantasy, not sci fi, so I also take some liberties. I made use of this in a scene where my unarmed protagonist was facing a guy who kept dosing himself on growth and strength potions. My protagonist defeated him by getting his own mass to work against him - she goaded him into running after her when he was 35-30 feet in height. As soon as he took his first running bound, his weight coming down on one leg broke it, causing him to fall to the ground, where the impact of his newly massive head resulted in a fatal skull fracture. Prior to that, he was overheating and having trouble catching his breath, again as side effects of being so huge.

Now, with that said, the fantasy genre allows for some liberties. The last book I wrote did indeed have a dragon in a desert setting. In real life, this would probably be impossible; desert creatures tend to be small because they're fuel efficient, and deserts are lean on resources. Moreover, a creature the size of a dragon couldn't fly. A winged quadruped is also a highly unlikely evolutionary outcome. You know what? I don't care, I'm using the idea because dragons are cool. It's fantasy; while I'll make use of some scientific facts or principles to help draw the reader into the story or make something a little more plausible, I don't have to explain everything and am free to make use of a few flights of fancy.

 

[Finchbearer]

Sorry I should have elaborated that in certain desert environments, the plants are the largest living things. Maybe these monsters are in a state of dormancy like cacti, and change as night falls or rain comes or something to that affect.

 

[ThinkerX]

Hmmm...

In my worlds, the biggest 'normal' land animal is the 'droath' - basically a supersized reptilian elephant with six legs and a snout that ends in a clutch of tentacles. Mostly vegetarian, usually placid. horrible, horrible stench. Egg layer. Used for pulling extremely heavy wagons, or sometimes several wagons yoked together.

That said, there is real world precedent for two legged land animals here on earth that topped twenty feet in height - the most famous example being the T-Rex.

 

[pmmg]

I read/saw somewhere (maybe it was a V-sauce), that big creatures could not survive today due to changes in the atmosphere or such. Those big creatures of the past were products of their time, and were somewhere fragile. A dragon really could not exist. So to ask how it could happen realistically is kind of self defeating. I could make up reasons though.

In the desert, cold blooded sounds right. If you take away the flight, giant beetles, and worms and reptiles would seem likely. If one was large enough and could mimic being a watering hole, it might catch unlucky prey. I could see large winged creatures riding on the hot air, pteranodon and the like. And anything that could run fast in sand would have an advantage.

Giant insect preying mantises make me think of Godzilla, cause I believe he fought a few of those.

 

[Gurkhal]

To help I'd ask you, what you need the dragons to do or not do in your story or world? Unless we/you know what purpose they fullfill and what the story needs from them, any suggestions here is just brainstorming without a utility for it in the end.

The easiest side is probably to, if you want to keep as much as possible realistic, to say that they are magical as opposed to mundane creatures and build from that. Or drastically scale down on the size. There have been some pretty big flying creatures but none of them are like dragons in popular imagination.

 

[Azul-din]

There seems to be kind of a grey area in fantasy around the term 'magic' . Of course by the laws of the world most of us live in, a lot of the things in our fantasy worlds are impossible- ca va sans dire. What I think is the crucial point is setting up the parameters of the created world and sticking to them. In other words, it's cheating to paint yourself into a narrative corner and then suddenly - aha! have your character pull out a wand and create an opening, unless the ability to do so has been part of the world from the outset.

Possibly in the world most of us live in, flying dragons are impossible according to the laws of physics as we know it. However let us remember the earnest scientists back in the fifties who declared that a bumblebee's wings were too short to support its body weight and therefore it was impossible for them to fly. Only somebody forgot to tell the bees.

 

[CupofJoe]

If you want RW ideals...
There have been land dinosaurs over a hundred feet long and a hundred tons.
There have been pterosaurs with 30-40 foot wingspan.
And the sauropod body plan gave us the T-Rex and the Humming Bird.
I'd write what you want.
I have a story where Dragons start off being able to fly and as they enter their "teenage" they grow much larger and lose the ability to fly.
Apparently, T-Rexes had a growth spurt as well when they morphed from teenage light scavengers into the super-beasts of adulthood.

 

[Azul-din]

Llath by Azul-din on DeviantArt

www.deviantart.com

I can dream, can't I?

 

[skip.knox]

>the crucial point is setting up the parameters of the created world and sticking to them
This is most true for science fiction, which leans heavily on that first word. Fantasy, by generally accepted convention, does not need to abide by RW rules. Arguably, it cannot.

As for setting up of parameters, rarely do we need to set up *all* parameters. Here again, especially for fantasy, it's perfectly all right to have some things that simply exist, without explanation (that is, with no explicit parameters). So you can have your dragons of whatever size you wish. Truly. You can also arbitrarily set as many parameters as you like. So, for example, your desert dragons cannot abide large bodies of water. You can invent reasons why or you can let the fact stand as stated.

You can also--and I think this would yield you the best replies--say "here are my desert monsters of great size, and here are the parameters I've established for them so far, what do you folks think?"

 

[Azul-din]

>the crucial point is setting up the parameters of the created world and sticking to them
This is most true for science fiction, which leans heavily on that first word. Fantasy, by generally accepted convention, does not need to abide by RW rules. Arguably, it cannot.

As for setting up of parameters, rarely do we need to set up *all* parameters. Here again, especially for fantasy, it's perfectly all right to have some things that simply exist, without explanation (that is, with no explicit parameters). So you can have your dragons of whatever size you wish. Truly. You can also arbitrarily set as many parameters as you like. So, for example, your desert dragons cannot abide large bodies of water. You can invent reasons why or you can let the fact stand as stated.

You can also--and I think this would yield you the best replies--say "here are my desert monsters of great size, and here are the parameters I've established for them so far, what do you folks think?"

I don't think I meant anything quite so rigid as that, certainly not a priori going through a whole number of 'laws' which govern a particular fantasy world. For example: One of the best aspects of 'The Dark Crystal' was the way characters and settings transformed in unexpected ways, yet the underlying premise remained intact. It was as if to say, 'this is a world with its own particular character, the nature of which governs all the events which will happen. One could hardly have introduced a US Marine with XM7 in hand to sort out the bad guys without ruining the magic.

 

[Renè Williams]

What if you had swarms of small creatures that could form together/move as one big being? This might help suspend disbelief and it's an idea I've applied to gigantic snake/worm like creature in my own world, although slightly different as because -magic- you don't know it's made up a thousand smaller creatures until its far too late.

 

[Azul-din]

What if you had swarms of small creatures that could form together/move as one big being? This might help suspend disbelief and it's an idea I've applied to gigantic snake/worm like creature in my own world, although slightly different as because -magic- you don't know it's made up a thousand smaller creatures until its far too late.

Wow- that's a scary idea. Like the 'Bundlers' in Michael Rohan's 'The Gates of Noon' only much larger. Magic- Hm. I should start a thread about magic. The possible/impossible? 'There are more things in heaven and earth,my dear Horatio'.

The world is a very strange place.

 

[Renè Williams]

Wow- that's a scary idea. Like the 'Bundlers' in Michael Rohan's 'The Gates of Noon' only much larger. Magic- Hm. I should start a thread about magic. The possible/impossible? 'There are more things in heaven and earth,my dear Horatio'.

The world is a very strange place.

Other animals form packs, so why not take that to a logical extreme? bwahaha