Astrid: “I bet he's really frightened now... what are you gonna do about it?”
Hiccup:” Ehhh... probably something stupid.”
Astrid: “Good, but you've already done that...”
Hiccup: [after a pause] “Then something crazy...!”
Astrid: “That's more like it!”
(Scene from ‘How To Train Your Dragon’ – 2010)

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a small village. The village was surrounded by a fallacious forest, a jinxed jungle, macho mountains, a deadly desert and a maddening misty march. The people in the village were afraid. There was danger everywhere around them: wild animals killed their cattle, infectious diseases killed their oldest people and youngest babies, plagues of insects ate their fruits, ghosts hunted them during the night and even Mother Nature did her best to destroy the crops on their fields by sending heat waves and ice ages and thunderstorms and dryness whenever she wanted.

 “We’ll need help.”, the people said.

One little boy, a boy named Stu, had an idea: “My grandfather told me stories about the old ages when people had a Dragon to help them and protect them. Perhaps we should find ourselves a Dragon too…”

“Pfff. Stories. Fiction. Things they tell little boys to make them sleep.”, the people said.

“You never had a grandfather who told you stories? Stories are important, you know. You can learn a lot from them. This story started with the people who went up the mountain and came back with a Dragon’s egg. Who wants to come with me?”, Stu asked.

Stu’s mother ended the story: “Stuart Pitt! What are you doing? Are you trying to escape when you should do your homework, wash the dishes and clean the floor?” She grabbed Stu at his ear and dragged him home.

Stu was gone, but his story helped the others to think. They took a seat along the campfire, threw some old stories by Ronaldo7 into the flames, so the fire burned high enough to scare the wild animals in the woods, and started to discuss the idea of Stu: “When we do nothing, we will all die. At least it’s an idea. We can try it. We can send some brave men and hope they’ll find the solution. Does anyone have a better idea?”

Nobody had a better idea, so they decided to go for the Dragon’s egg. Four strong young men went up the mountain. They travelled for a full week, fighting vultures, suffering severe cold, moving along the border of exhaustion, but… they succeeded. On Devils Peak, they found a Dragon’s nest, deserted, with one egg in it. Carefully they put the egg in a backpack and returned to the village.

The people were excited. Everybody helped to take care of the egg and one month later the miracle happened: a little Dragon was born. Everybody had his own opinion about a name for the Dragon, so they fought a while about it and finally decided to call him Dragon, just like that.

The Dragon was healthy, strong and above all he was wise. Dragons learn how to speak when they grow inside the egg. They speak Egglish when they are born. His first advice was: “If the forest and its animals scare you so much… Why don’t you start cutting trees? You can use the wood to build houses and bridges and tools, you can burn it in a big campfire to scare off the wild animals, and the wild forest will be further away with every tree you cut.”

The people were excited. This idea of getting a Dragon was the solution for everything. They spoke about it with the Dragon, and the Dragon said: “The problem is that you have lots of ideas, but you keep forgetting them. You should write them down. I will teach you how to make pencils and paper out of the wood of the trees, and I will teach you how to write and read too.”

The excitement of the people motivated them to do everything the Dragon said. They worked and learned and the dangers of the old days disappeared. In the old days, foxes robbed ten chickens per night and wild lions killed ten cows per day, but that hardly happened now. The wild animals smelled that there was a Dragon in the village and they started to pick other supermarkets for their everyday shopping. The people thought that it was a good gesture to prepare one chicken and one cow per day for the Dragon, so he would not be hungry and grow bigger.

Now the days of glory came to the village. The Dragon grew and therefore could help the people with more and more things. The village also grew and the dangers of the old days were soon forgotten. Until one day: the Dragon got sick. He turned green, pink, ugly blue, purple, his eyes turned red and he could hardly breathe. The people feared the Dragon might even die. One of them said: “We should ask Stu for advice. He is the only one who knows about Dragons. His grandfather told him…”

Stu answered: “The only thing I know from the stories of my grandpa is… Dragons eat virgins, beautiful innocent female virgins most of all. I’m not sure if it will work, but…”

So the people organised a beauty contest for female virgins and the first prize was… the honour to save the village. They sacrificed the winner to the Dragon and… the Dragon got better. His health did not only return, but he even got stronger than ever. He now was capable of healing sick people, he spoke justice in cases of disagreement, he took care of criminals (by eating them, a very efficient treatment that resulted in a criminal free village in no time), he invented traffic rules and he took care of the people who were too old to work. The people were so excited with all these new functions of the Dragon that all the young beautiful virgins stood in line to join the beauty contests and win the honour to be eaten by the Dragon. The people found out that the Dragon could not live on chickens and cows alone. He needed human flesh. And as the Dragon grew bigger, he needed more human flesh every time.

One day the Dragon announced a war. He called all the brave young men of the country to volunteer, so they could fight the danger that threatened the village. He went with them on a mission in the desert and when he returned, weeks later, alone, with all those horrible stories of blood and killing and sacrifice and heroes and the great thrill of the victory and the honour and everything it meant to him, the people were glad that they had this powerful Dragon to protect them. After the war peace returned to the village, but one year later there was another war, this time in the jungle, against Charlie, and one year later the Dragon had to fight in the desert again, to kill the evil Saddam. After each war, when the blood thirst of the Dragon was quenched, the people asked him why those wars were necessary. The people didn’t want those wars. But the Dragon said that wars were good for the Economy, that people had to trust him, that it was all better this way, that there was no alternative. So the people cried for their dead heroes and tried to forget about it. The Dragon did all those great things for them, so they had to trust the Dragon.

The Dragon became bigger and bigger, and so did his hunger. For every two persons he cured, he ate one. He taught the children, but he gave them also video games and TV and Facebook to become famous and forget what they learned. Parents encouraged their children to have sex before their tenth birthday, to avoid them being one of the virgins the Dragon ate for breakfast every day. The Dragon found a way: he started to eat children too, two for every virgin, because children were smaller.

The people became desperate. This Dragon did no longer protect them; it only protected itself. That little baby Dragon that they cherished and wanted so much, that Dragon had grown and didn’t care anymore about the people. That Dragon told the people what to do, instead of listening to them and do what was important for them.

Some of the people suggested asking Stu for advice, but others blamed Stu for being the cause of everything. In the old days the Dragon protected them from the danger that came from the woods, but now they didn’t even have woods anymore: they cut all the trees for the campfires to keep the Dragon warm at night, because that heat created the flames in the throat of the Dragon that he used to heat the houses of the people. The people did nothing but argue and fight, blaming Stu and blaming each other.

One old woman spoke: “We should not fight about who to blame. We should think about a solution. Perhaps we should kill the Dragon.”

The people started to argue again, this time about being it a good idea or not to kill the Dragon. The old woman spoke again: “This is not something to argue about, this is about finding a solution. As long as we don’t know HOW to kill this Dragon, we will never have that alternative. And as long as we don’t have the alternative, we will not have a choice; we will not have a democracy where we can choose because the only alternative is to feed the Dragon. Do you understand what I am trying to say?”

Most people didn’t understand, but some did. They translated the words of the old lady for the others: “What she is trying to say is… We should not only think of a way of how to kill the Dragon, but we should also think about a way to undo the damage that we cause when we kill him. We should think how to organise everything that the Dragon does for us. When we don’t think first, when we try to change things without thinking, in one big revolution, in one big war against the Dragon, there are two possible outcomes: we win, or we lose. When we lose, we are all dead and without us the Dragon will die too. End of story. When we win… we will not have the Dragon anymore, so we’ll have to organise by ourselves all the things the Dragon does for us now.

That last part, take over the work that the Dragon does for us, is something we can handle. We can take care of the old ourselves, without eating them as the only solution. We can take care of criminals, judge them, punish them, educate them and show them that you can achieve more with working than with stealing. We can educate our children ourselves. We can try to live and eat healthily to avoid sickness, so the Dragon has nothing to cure, and we can try to accept that people die. We can live without all those wars, by defending ourselves instead of attacking others. There is so much that we can do. If we focus on that, we’ll worry about how to kill the Dragon later.”

The old lady was happy. The people had learned something important. They had learned to listen to each other and think about it, instead of listening to some Stu Pitt with his strange stories. But she was not at ease yet. This Dragon was a strong and ferocious monster that could do what he wanted. The Dragon had only to call her a communist, or a terrorist, or an anarchist or an antichrist and he would have reason enough to eat her. The old lady didn’t want to be eaten. She decided to visit Stu, in secret, during the night, for a chat about Dragons and for some advice.

Stu sat in his chair. He was an old man now, having grandchildren of his own, telling them stories about Dragons every night before they went to bed. The old lady smiled, took a seat between the children and listened to Stu’s latest story, about a hobbit and a treasure and a giant fierce Dragon that protected it. Then a hero came up, a strong and honest, hardworking man who wanted to sacrifice everything for his children. He had this special weapon to kill the Dragon and… when the Dragon attacked the village, burned it with his breath, the hero shot the weapon and killed the Dragon.

When the children went to bed, the old lady asked Stu: “Is that the way to kill a Dragon? All you need is a special weapon and a hero to do the job?”

Stu smiled: “No, that’s just a story of fiction. I’ve made that up myself. Violence leads to nothing, or perhaps only to more violence. If you want to kill a Dragon, there’s only one way: you should stop feeding him. Without food, every Dragon dies sooner or later. When you try to fight him, the Dragon will always win, but the Dragon is not smart enough to realise that he also needs the people to survive. With all the people dead, the Dragon will not be fed and he’ll die. That’s the only way to kill a Dragon: stop feeding him.”

The old lady smiled and thanked Stu for his story. She was happy that she’d learned a lot about Dragons. Her grandchildren would be thrilled to hear this new story before they went to bed…