Dragon metamorphosis and regeneration (spoilers for Liveship and Rain Wilds books)

[redchild]

Now that you mention this... I always felt that this was the largest flaw the dragons have; they are so absorbed in their ancestor's memories, that they have great difficulty dealing with new situations.
This while the biggest strenght of humans seems to lie in their adaptability, and their ability to carve out a life for themselves wherever they are (this is even pointed out in the books at one point). The dragons seem sluggish in their thinking by comparison, unable to wrap their heads around things they haven't encountered before.

I think that the above points demonstrate the strength of the dragon-elderling-human symbiosis. Dragons have long memories and are able to think long-term but tend to be rigid and inflexible. Humans are adaptable and innovative but incline to short-term thinking. Elderlings represent a mid-point, combining and integrating these perspectives.

Great connection there! So I suppose that Elderlings are like the paragons in their ancient society, acting as a sort of liaison or ambassadorship between the two species?

If the Elderlings are the result of the best of both worlds combined, what about the other incarnations?

The man-made dragons/creatures are works of art by Elderlings or humans, just as dragons who anoint humans as their Elderlings. By giving themselves into their work, they can live forever as powerful creatures with their own collections of memories. However, they are trapped in their stone states until woken by someone with Wit, Skill, and spilt blood; and even then they are only awake for a limited time. They don't seem to have very distinct sense of self and they seem to do the bidding of the person who summons them without question. Much like herd mentality (as it takes many humans to put together a stone dragon.) Do you suppose that this can be considered on the extreme end of the different 'forms' humans and dragons can possess?

And how about the Others? I think I read that they are the result of dragons who have become too human, but it has not yet been elaborated as to how they are made/born. Interestingly enough, they are portrayed as degenerates (at least, according to the opinions of the Cassarick dragons.) This seems very biased as dragon influence on humans is considered good but human influence on dragons is bad?
They show their human traits in their obsessive, yet unsentimental hoarding of objects and trinkets, especially of Elderling-make, thus emphasizing their focus on material goods. Furthermore they barter for goods by predicting the future for human clients and they kept She Who Remembers imprisoned to keep her from leading the serpents. It seems to me that they have deeply ingrained hatred for both dragons and humans. How else does an Other show their dragon and human influences? Do they have any positive qualities, at all?

While nature otherwise seems to have gifted them with an unnumerable amount of tools for survival (big teeth, acid, inpenetrable hide, flight, Skill, ect.), this seems like a big lack in a species' evolution. Only by adapting to one's changing surroundings can a species survive and evolve, not by clinging on to what was before. But what do the dragons have to do to survive in this changed world? They have to return to Kelsingra, their old domain, which has changed very little.

It was very important for the dragons to ground themselves in something familiar. Just as humans are. We have yet to see how the dragons will adapt to the new world after they have found Kelsingra.

With regard to Tintaglia's abandonment of the hatchlings, I wonder whether this was as much due to their lack of ancestral memories as to their physical malformation. Even the other hatchlings did not regard Spit and Sedric's bronze (her name escapes me) as "dragons" until they were able to communicate and showed some evidence of memory/sentience.

Hmm I never thought of it that way. Yes, that does ring true, she maybe sees those without ancestral memories as less intelligent, even as non-sentient beings .... she may be treating them more like 'we' would treat 'animals' than as fellow members of her species.

I remember Kettricken's shock and horror when she encountered Thick for the first time, where in her culture, any infant born with deformities would have been exposed immediately. Following that, I thought of similar situations irl in euthanasia, autism, HIV, abortion, etc, where it's more difficult to tell what conditions must be met for a person to be 'whole' or 'human' and not pathologized as 'wrong.' For example, even the Cassarick dragons, considered inferior by Tintaglia, found a liveship like Tarman to be 'wrong,' even though Tarman has the same dragon memories as they do. But in a liveship's case, even having dragon memories does not make them dragons.