like I had quite a few dragon related things going on last month and I wanted to get in deep with that shit but the more I look into it the weirder it gets really
oh and featuring \r\n\t\t\t\t\t
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IN DEPTH DISCUSSION ON THIS SHIT COMING... soonish (It's basically gonna be an essay... just let me collect my thoughts a bit)
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DRAGON WINGS
Well this is a fun topic
Usually when you ask a person to draw dragon wings or hell even batwings what would usually come up is something akin to half of an umbrella attached to somethings back. an almost triangular bunch of curved spikes that converge into a point like... well an umbrella. The difference between that and an umbrella being the spikes are curved in almost a spiral like manner.
This is not how wings work evidently... or atleast not for the closest thing we can match to dragons wings which are bat wings.
bat wings are actually segmented in a way that's far more similar to a human arm and hand even more so than most animals paws surprisingly enough for me. The very curved segment that connects the wing to the body would actually be most of what our arm would be. The curve is mostly made by the elbows bending. That and a continuation of the wing membrane thing that's attached to the inner part of the arm bend is what makes the curve. That extra bit of wing membrane also makes it so that a bat can't normally stretch their wings out completely. Because of this that portion that attaches the wings to the body will always be seen as curved which explains the prominence of the whole curved wing thing.
Now the point at which they all converge isn't just a simple hinge and nor is it really just one point. It's really more of a trapezoid really. All the other bat wing segments apart from the arm are actually fingers ad the point in which they converge is actually their weird palm. That little spike at the end people put on wings would actually be thumbs.
What's actually cool about this is it actually gives some precedence to dragons have spiked tips on their wings as those spiked tips would actually correspond to a persons fingertips and this those would be claws. I'd always thought that that shit was unrealistic and was there to look cool before but yeah if a winged mythical creature were to have bat like wings and also have claws that's where they'd be and that's where they'd look like. Now properly using those claws apart from that one thumb spike would probably be hard but at the very least it kinda makes sense as to why they'd have those.
The amount of fingers on a wing actually seems to vary oddly enough but it seems that at the very least there's always three prominent fingers in there with the fourth and fifth finger either being smaller and less prominent, becoming talons, or not being there at all. When people go overboard with that though they usually add additional fingers either to that converging point or to where that elbow should be. I personally like this interpretation thinking of them as being kind of like a dew claw but for wings. As unrealistic as they may be there's a lot of empty space actually in that arm area of the wing and design wise it helps to fill it out a bit if that makes sense regardless of how realistic they really are.
One would start to question why anybody would even want to think of applying realism to a DRAGON of all things but hey though obviously that won't ever really be realistic one could atleast try to make it a little moreso as it really does help you lose yourself in whatever media that happens to show itself in really. And speaking of that then we can go to wing size.
With wing size people often make these things a little too small especially on your usual dragons but oddly enough not when it comes to wyverns or as some people may think of "that kinda dragon that has wings for forelegs" and you know what I guess thatkinda makes sense... well it makes sense for the wyverns as if that's the only way they're gonna get around you may as well make those wings work. Physique wise these wyverns actually resemble those of chickens and other such foul except their wings are structure like bats... I like this kinda dragon. I'm more than willing to suspend my belief in them flying. Now the archetypal six winged western dragon... well they're practically vestigial sometimes which at some point is intentional now on more cartoony dragons but I do wish now that there'd be more archetypal dragons which the wings that are appropriately huge.
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When \r\n\t\t\t\t\t
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Ofcourse you could just say they fly by magic but then you might as well just remove those wings entirely and make an eastern dragon that kinda just levitates... that'd be even cooler