I can see dragons doing and making just about anything if their body configuration is pretty much like ours and aren't the quadrupeds they are in my story. Reading a book with dragons "as humans," I'd just want to see more dragony bits, such as flying into their apartment instead of taking the stairs. Just little things sprinkled throughout the book to spark my imagination and make it a dragon world, y'know? Again, a great example is Zootopia (or even My Little Pony, really), where these animals are doing everything humans do, but there are enough things to remind us that they're animals and do animal things. Of course, it's a wee more difficult to do that in a novel than it is in a movie, but it's still very possible. After all, these dragons share some necessities with humans: they need a good supply of good food and water (though their stomachs can probably handle worse than ours can), shelter from the weather, protection (even dragons kill each other!), and of course entertainment. A bored dragon will likely become a trouble maker and/or killer. What Infel said is what I'm talking about! You don't have to go out of your way to change the world you've created; just add some fun stuff in there to remind us they're dragons.
Touché, but didn't we establish that dragons should be able to control their fire in their sleep already? Let's get back to the point of this discussion within the thread. Torchpikes.
Like a Pride Rock-style dias in the throne room so the emperor can tower over his audience? Or the protagonist working a job as a hunter, bringing in kills to different clients who need a sheepskin or venison or a set of moose antlers (not that I know why specifically a dragon would need a pair of antlers?) Like dragon dances involving flying? (Because of course they would.)
Whatever works for you and your book, really. I really like the hunter idea, though, hehe. As for moose antlers: trophy, decoration, etc. Heck, they're dragons, maybe they like cooking them or chewing on them! Copy-pasting my ETA on another post: ETA: I do agree with Chickenfreak that you need to ditch the flaming spear, though. If they just look like giant torches it doesn't image well in my head. Once it doesn't look like a spear anymore it just doesn't look intimidating, especially if there's a cage around the pointy tip. If you want the guards to have a greater reach with their fire, you could give them a flask of something they can drink/spew with their fire to increase its reach and intensity. Basically take the example from real life "fire-breathers" and up it a notch or ten. How to make the liquid could be a castle secret.
I still like the idea of better fire breathing being a skill. Little toddler dragons are taken out in a well-watered field (so as to avoid grass fires) and tested for the power and reach of their fire. The best ones are urgently recruited as soldiers (maybe their parents are well-rewarded; maybe it's a family pride thing) and raised with diet and training intended to maximize the advantage. Or it could even be a nobility/royalty thing; it's assumed that the "high born" are the best fire breathers, but historically sometimes a lower-class dragon can compete with the best, and sometimes they usurp the king and start a new dynasty.
[two guys fighting over a girl] "Mine's bigger than yours!" "No, mine!" [both blow jet of fire to prove it] [girl rolls her eyes and blows a bigger jet]
Dragon anatomy: So you know the way an animal's back leg bends, vs the way a human's knee bends? Say dragons have a combination of the two, like General Grevious's leg. What's the second knee thing called, the one below the one that bends like a human knee? Research indicates it is called a tarsus. Is that correct?
Human like in how they behave for the most part, but beyond human in what they can do, is enough unless you want to be experimental and avant garde.
Just gonna be blunt, here. You rely too much on what everyone else thinks. Just log off WF and go and do some writing. It has become painfully clear to the WF community (or at least, for me; I shouldn't speak for everybody) that you are obsessively in love with your novel/s. This in itself isn't a negative thing. But you have thought through every single last little detail of every single element of your books. This, to my mind, is dangerous. You have put, what, six? seven? years into planning and writing the drafts of this series. You have become very attached. The danger is that because of this, you are going to try to include every single detail in the manuscript. Because what's the point to all that hard work if the readers never know about it, right? But the danger in that is that you risk over-stuffing your books with trivial, irrelevant info-dumps of things that make one appearance to do homage to your methodical planning and then never appear again. Things that hold no intrinsic value to the plot. I mean ... Your potential readers are already leery. Unless there is a LOT of plot relevance to the movement of a dragon's bowels, you really don't need to worry about it. I have noticed that to every question anybody has ever asked you, no matter how trivial, you have had a detailed and intricate answer. Let go of your darlings. Just let the story be told, the way the story needs to be told. Stop asking us for an opinion every time you need to make a decision. Thanks to all of your threads on the forum, I've spent almost as much time thinking about the issues you're facing in your series as I have thought about the problems in my own WIP. I don't mean to be rude, I really don't. But you rarely even take people's advice anyway. You keep coming back with your long and detailed thread posts, asking questions that people really can't answer anyway because they come down to what YOU need to accomplish in your plot. People do their best to give their answers, and then you just tell them how they are wrong. So just log out and go and write. Rant over.
What ChaseTheSun says. Plus you're spending so much time on these questions - time that could be better spent on getting your novel written. Dammit Janet.
