The Monster Within

Freud (or, that Frood Dude, as I will forever think of him) strikes again in our latent fears of being turned into poo. This reminds me of wading through all of the visceral myth and fairy-tale centred writing in my early literature years. Lots and lots of being devoured and what it means to us. What I like about this article is that it extends the complexity even more logically, in an evolutionary way. (Because, among other things, Freud is now a bit old hat.) There is a dragon-like creature in almost every culture, and while the development of RPGs made them more of the domain of creative fantasists, it was once the sole problem of great warriors and and adventurers, slaying beasts and gaining national notoriety.
I'll be honest, there's not a huge variety of more classical dragon images readily avaiblable, which says something about at least the internet-dwelling percentage of population and their continued fascination with them. And even some of the cheesier hand-drawn depictions have something fearsome to them. This is the perfect predator we are looking at, and even in the modern world, their is something incredibly fearsome about that.
As the end of the article states, it's only by this mishmash of evolutionary synthesis and mythic imaginary development that we remember our enemies, and ultimately a reminder of how to best defeat them:
"We want and need to feel there’s a monster within us so we can summon its power when necessary. Millions of years as a prey species have taught us that, at times, we must drink the dragon’s blood to survive."