Extra Limbs and Other Burning Issues

The other day, I posted an item I’d seen in The Atlantic’s “Photos of the Week” of a little girl in a city crosswalk being followed by a dinosaur from the Australian theater company, Erth. Erth was performing at Underbelly’s Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, when the photo was taken, and until you notice the pair of very human legs underneath the puppet, the illusion is quite enchanting, like something from a children’s picture book.

By coincidence, I was looking at a picture of Drogon, one of the dragons from “Game of Thrones,” the other day, trying to figure out why there seemed to be an extra pair of legs underneath it. We seem to have a minor trend of extra pairs of legs under large reptilian creatures, extinct and/or fantastic; Wordplay is unaware of the origin of this trend, but now that we have seen it in the culture, we feel obliged to point it out. If we don’t address it, someone might become alarmed and wonder, “What can it mean?”, unleashing a tsunami of unintended effects in his or her efforts to find out. Besides, I’ve been casting about for a topic this week, and this will do just as well as anything else.

While my former opinion on mythology in the culture was that everyone should try to be knowing observers, I’ve come to believe that this isn’t a pastime everyone excels at. In fact, some people are downright disasters when it come to “seeing through” and should probably be placed under house arrest for their efforts—but that’s someone else’s department. I’ve got my hands full with dragons and dinosaurs, am an observer only, and hope to be nowhere within a hundred miles of any round-ups that take place. Of course, I make no claim to always being right either, and my observations are strictly my own.

What about these extra pairs of extra-large reptilian legs, though?

It’s kind of weird. In the photo from the Underbelly Fringe program, you can clearly see the legs once you know they’re there. I didn’t notice them at first, probably because my eye was so charmed by the illusion—in other words, I wanted to see a dinosaur in the crosswalk, so my brain edited out the extra pair of legs. I was seeing what I wished to see, falling in with the illusion, which is exactly what you do when you go to the theater. The photo is an example of what happens when theater spills out of the theater house and into everyday life. It’s something unexpected, a little bit of magic in the midst of mundane reality. If you were on your way to work or running an errand and saw that scene, it would probably make your whole day.

Now, the image of Drogon is a bit more problematic. The more I look at it, the less I can figure it out. One of the legs doesn’t even look like a leg, because it doesn’t seem to have a foot: it’s more like an enormous paddle. And are there three legs on the dragon’s right side, including that claw hanging down? What’s become of all the legs on the left side, because all I see are one leg and a wing. Of course, we’re talking about a creature of fantasy here, but it’s a dragon, not an amoeba, so is a symmetrical arrangement of arms and legs too much to ask?

Maybe, after all, it’s just the angle. Wordplay does not wish to manufacture a crisis. Because no other explanation comes to mind, other than the possibility that this camera angle is meant to imply that there’s something freakish about this creature, we will take it that this is simply not Drogon’s best side. Since a dragon is already kind of a freakish thing, we see no reason to double down on this idea . . . But we were not writers or special effects crew for “Game of Thrones” and have no particular insights into their reasons for crafting this scene as they did.

I guess what this really demonstrates is that there isn’t always a clear answer to everything. Where things are unclear, the mind will often try to provide clarity by manufacturing a credible explanation, but it’s often little more than projection. Entertaining perhaps, revealing certainly, but at the end of the day . . . something you made up. If you’re good enough at it, sometimes you get paid for it.