The Elder Dragons Saga

The tale I have to tell is a rather strange one though it is true. It is a story of power, deception, creativity, and much douchebaggery. On that note, there isn’t really a hero to this story and nobody comes out looking very good in the end, and that includes myself who played a key role in these events. Unfortunately, I have an incomplete picture of everything that occurred, so I shall try only to tell what I know and limit speculation. Also certain names have been changed to minimalize potential embarrassment for certain peoples. With that disclaimer out of the way, I now present to you the story of The Elder Dragons.

Our story begins when I was about halfway through my high school career. I was sitting in class one day when an acquaintance of mine, Jason McAvoy, began showing me some conceptual drawings he’d been working on for something he called “The Elder Dragons.” This would be the first time I’d hear of his little pet project, but certainly not the last. The drawings were of your generic high fantasy stuff: castles, swords, and of course dragons. He then told me that he planned to turn his idea into a movie. And not just a private, for fun kind of home movie, but an actual big-budget, full-fledged, feature film. I didn’t take him all that seriously mostly because he was half my size and a bit of a wiener, but I by no means disliked him. I just thought he was eccentric. Anyway, he continued to work on his drawings and I continued to not pay him any heed.

A while later he began to organize people together to help him work on his dream project and turn it into a reality. He approached me to get in on this, but I refused for a number of reasons. One, the whole movie seemed like a lame ripoff of Lord of the Rings. Two, the whole idea of a bunch of high school students trying to make a fantasy film seemed utterly ridiculous. And three, I didn’t really trust Jason all that much and didn’t want to be working for him under any circumstances. I had discovered that he was something of a compulsive liar, and he seemed to have something of a Napoleonic complex. He wanted to be big, not in terms of physical size, but in terms of being powerful, popular, and respected. This whole film project just seemed to be another attempt to accomplish this goal. Of course, I didn’t say any of this too him. I just said, “No thanks,” and walked away, but several of my friends went along with it and they tried to convince me to join a couple more times, but I refused and eventually they left me alone.

For some time thereafter, I didn’t hear of or have much to with anything involving The Elder Dragons. Every now and then a story about freaks and geeks running around outside Jason’s house swinging cardboard swords about would reach my ears, but otherwise I had no idea what was going on. But then I received tantalizing information from an unlikely source: my younger sister. Through one of her close friends she had discovered The Elder Dragons forum where people working on the film discussed meeting times and ideas for the movie. It also housed most of the lore and work they had done so far. A section dedicated to nomenclature, the script that they had written so far, and the background history of the world were all there for all to see and they were all quite entertaining and silly. But by far the best part was the message board itself. It started off innocently enough, but as you scrolled through the posts, it became increasingly apparent that Jason was beginning to lose it. At this point my sister told me a rather creepy story of how Jason was having trouble with some young female members in his group (a popular joke at the time amoungst his detractors that off of his size and preference in women was “Why does Jason McAvoy like grade eight girls so much? Because he’s eye level with their breast.”), one of whom was the sister of my sister’s friend who told her about the forum. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I do know that there was a rather large falling out that ended with a bizarre phone call directed to the mother of my sister’s friend telling her how horrible her daughters were on the answering machine. At the end of the message he said, “Think about it.” We are yet to decipher exactly what he meant by that. Rather than keeping this private however, Jason took it to the forums where he said many strange things the most memorable of which was when he banned anybody involved with the film from speaking to any of the girls or else they would be kicked off the production. As the days went by, we also noticed that he’d go through and edit or remove any posts that made him look bad, including those he wrote himself. As if to cement his Big Brother-like behaviour, instead of being labeled the director or producer, he had taken to calling himself “Project Manager.”

I found this all very amusing and decided to share it with some of my friends. One day I was at the computer lab at lunch with my friend, Zach, and we decided to have a little fun and began posting our own messages on the forum. We wanted to create a fake identity to be the author of all our posts and that this identity should be a parody of Jason, his odd behaviour, and his pretentions to power. Thus, in an astounding act of refinement and maturity, we called our character The King of Poop. Our first post was a parody of his post where he banned people from speaking to the girls. It went something to the effect of, “We hereby forbid anybody from speaking to the Project Manager on account of he is a douchebag. Failure to comply will result in immediate banishment. – The King of Poop. P.S. Think about it.” We followed up this comedic gem with two pages worth of posts where we simply repeated, “I’m a raging pedophile. Think about it. – The King of Poop,” over and over again. Truly we were comic geniuses. Actually, that’s a horrible lie. We were trolls, plain and simple. Cruel, vindictive trolls. But we were getting lols out of it so we didn’t care.

Over the next couple days we began working on an epic story for The King of Poop where he set off on an adventure to find the Elder Dragons and molest children. Sadly, only two or three installments in, the forum was taken down entirely and replaced with a lengthy message from the Project Manager where he denounced our behaviour and was in general a massive hypocrite. It was also apparent in the message that he thought the minds behind the King of Poop were the girls he had ostracized, which I suppose is natural assumption for why should he suspect me, but I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. The whole piece was incredibly hilarious and it is one of greatest regrets in life that I did not print off a hard copy. A few days later he took down the message, and the next day at school I was to discover why. That day, Jason McAvoy followed me around pretty much wherever I went. Whenever I got out of class, there he was. He’d stand close to me, glowering, and say “Hello, Tristan,” in what I believe was an attempt to appear intimidating, but as I’ve said earlier, he’s rather small so it didn’t really work. It was obvious he had found out the truth behind The King of Poop, but I didn’t say anything to acknowledge that fact until the end of the day when I essentially told him it was all a joke, no hard feelings. He left me alone after that, though I doubt he shared my sense of humour. A brief investigation revealed that my friend, Damian, had told him the truth for which I was mildly disappointed in him before realizing that I didn’t care at all.

A few months later I asked my friend Kevin, who was involved with the project, what had happened on the inside. He didn’t have anything to say involving the girls, but he did say that Jason had behaved more and more peculiar as the project went on to the point where he was effectively not working on it at all. He made such bizarre contributions as suggesting that they put the climax at the start of the film and have the rest be denouement because, “It had never been done before.” My trolling and his response did not improve matters and eventually he lost the faith and respect of everybody. They gave up on actually filming their movie and decided just to write the script with the intention of maybe sending it off to an actual producer or something. Eventually, even that died out. Nowadays, the only thing I regret more than not printing off that diatribe, was not just being contemptuous of their creative efforts, but actively trying to shut it down. Sure, Jason was an egomaniac who needed to be taken down a peg, but everybody else working on the project was just trying to have fun. I may not have been the cause of the downfall of The Elder Dragons, but I was certainly a catalyst. But that being said, it was pretty funny.

Bonus points to whoever can come up with a good joke about short people.