The Lair Revival Project: Intro
September 27, 2022
Oh geez, even slapping the word “project” on this makes it feel Official and Formal™. We can’t have that, though; that way perfectionism paralysis lies. So let’s do away with it from the getgo, shall we?
Howdy. I am Archaeoraptor and I have been on Flight Rising since April 2015, which is over 7 years now and also kind of insane. I’ve been writing some form of lore from the getgo, initially through blog posts (since archived, albeit in a very disorganized manner that lost the tag order and also awkwardly combines it with non-FR sideblogs) always through dragon bios directly with varying levels of outdated-ness, and more recently through the forums. When I made this website in 2019, part of my initial objectives were to make a big ol’ lore wiki-section, so everything could finally be “organized” in one place.
This Did Not Happen. At the time of writing, the site is instead a bunch of outdated resources, paltry “about” pages that exist mostly for my own reference, and while lore pages and a more recent code test (linked via forum because the source page is extremely liable to move) exist, I haven’t really touched them since creation. And that won’t do.
I am a slapdash person who will never have everything in pretty color-coded folders and I am okay with that. Also, it’s much easier to update bios and make ramble-posts on FR than through my own site. So my current thought is a compromise: The site might not host the most up-to-date dragon info, but it’s stuff that’s least likely to change (boring core data like breed and genes, previous bios), while the site itself stays dynamic.
That said, I… I have like 50 long-term keepers (at least!), not including my OC-fandragon hoard which will rot with me forever (30 and counting), and that’s is fairly overwhelming as-is. At some undocumented early point, I swore to myself early that I was capping my lair space at 100 dragons, because if I hit that amount I probably didn’t need every single dragon. And unsurprisingly, I ran repeatedly into “I want new dragons but don’t want to exalt/sell/rehome my sentimental oldies :(.”
Before Febraury 2019 you had two options: succumb and yeet, or deal with the old freeloaders. I did a bit of both—and I gotta say, while there’s some old dragons I still hold dear to my heart/memory/lore/mental library of “ooh pixel lizard pretty,” for the most part I don’t regret the exaltees. Turns out some of them make for more interesting characters when they’re not around, and others I just don’t feel the need to have anymore.
I’m still a sentimental sucker, though. So when the Hibernal Den update dropped, I was hyped! On other petsites I use equivalent mechanics to “retire” pets I don’t actively use and/or am tired of looking at, but who I don’t want to let go of either. Thus, another self-imposed limitation: Once a dragon is hibernating, they never return to the lair. I have broken this rule a couple times for leveling, but it remains very largely true; once they’re out, they’re out, and if I ever get tired of them in the den, it’s probably time for them to leave entirely.
But! I have, more recently, reached an impasse. The mildly sad fact is that dragons in the hibernal den just… don’t get looked at as much, and there’s more than a few dragons I kinda just gened up and tossed in because I was ready to be “done” with them. Idk, I find that kind of depressing? And lore-wise, this condemns them to whatever status quo (or lack thereof) I last wrote them at; for some dragons I’m happy with that, others less so.
Meanwhile I just keep accumulating new dragons, sometimes (probably often) retreading old lore ground, and… I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that. But eh, insert personal philosophy tangent here, for various reasons I think right now I’d rather focus more on the dragons I have now than keep scraping up new ones. Love what you have because the “moar” impulse never dies, or something. Doesn’t mean I will never have another dragon again, but… 50+?!??
Anyway, I think this would also be really interesting for lore reasons; (re)develop those characters, make new connections, all that stuff. I’m fine with archetypes overlapping (lord knows I have multiple angsty nomads) but they should have something distinct to ‘em.
But we’re starting small!! Small. One or two dragons at a time. Maybe up to 4–5, for one particular group, but for the most part my dragons go solo; hell, even with that squad, some more individual definement would be swell.
What’s the lore catalyst for all this? A throwaway idea I had recently, to explain/handwave giving up on a big conclusive lore arc: meteor fell, everyone died got scattered. Coincidentally I also picked up this lad recently, and last night got the idea to revive a concept I had in ~middle school—actually lemme just copypaste the bio notes:
+also, will be overseeing my giant hibden lore-revival-project-thing. more on that later?? Singularity himself (he/they/it?) will be recycling the spirit of a very very old dragon “oc” of mine, from a series I wrote in middle school—“Vortex,” a weird deus ex lizarda who showed up, made a portal for the main characters to teleport home instantly, and then never got seen or alluded to again. ah, early writing.
So Yeah.
I think what I’m going to do is focus on each dragon in order, and do a rambly writeup like this about them—both their lore and my reasons for doing various things with them, since I do sometimes put a little more thought into familiars/apparel/etc. than “it pretty.” Then all this stuff, along with whatever old bios I can dredge up, will be compiled on nice wiki-esque pages, if not immediately then in that nebulous land of Someday.
Starting with my progens, naturally—but first, this website sorely needs a layout update, and also I just wanna skim over what my lair dragons (“witnesses” of the aforementioned meteor, who will probably interact sporadically with the returning oldies) are up to.
Am excite ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ