A Toe-Hold on a Dragon

In the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons world my friends and I inhabited, there were monsters you had to avoid if you were too inexperienced. Goblins and orcs were fine for first or second-level adventurers, but you really wanted to avoid something like a beholder or minotaur until you were much better equipped to face such a challenge.

Above all else, you knew better than to face a dragon too early. In fact, it’s likely that you might never have a campaign where you’re able to contend with such a powerful creature—they’re just all the way at the top of the D&D monster pyramid.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug does an excellent job of showing just how powerful Smaug really is. The humans and hobbits are like fleas to him—just tiny toys for Smaug to manipulate, as he sees it.

In a similar vein, Game of Thrones centers around the rise of Daenerys Targaryen, one of many with a claim to the Iron Throne. It is her small fleet of dragons that ultimately makes the difference in her rise to power, with a single dragon capable of leveling literally any playing field, anywhere.

House of the Dragon shows Daenerys’s ancestors dominating the world with the help of dragons, and we get to see much more of the relationship between dragon and dragon-rider in this show.

Upon gaining trust (no small feat in the HotD universe), there’s still a steep learning curve once you’re even on the dragon. Whoever is unlucky enough to climb mount Drago is going to hold on for dear life as they soar way, way above lethal heights and with the wind ripping around them everywhere.

My mind keeps coming back to this idea of riding the dragon. I can’t think of a better metaphor for the way I feel right now, here in 2025.

When Daenerys first arrives on the scene, she only has dragon eggs. Nobody much believes they’ll even grow into dragons, and even when they hatch in a dramatic season-ending scene, they are just tiny babies with very limited power. However, they quickly grow into lethal teenagers before evolving into city-destroying adults. It all happens shockingly quickly.

That was November of 2022, when I was first exposed to ChatGPT. I saw those dragons hatch, and I knew big things were coming—but we are already well past the lethal adolescent phase, and we are moving into the city-destroying potential now.

There’s an important scene in HotD where Rhaenyra Targaryen (one of Daenerys’s ancestors) has people audition to be a new dragon rider. This doesn’t go great for most of these riders.

I can’t help but feel as though I’m one of those would-be dragon riders. Even though the dragon hasn’t turned me into toast and has allowed me to climb on, it seems like I just can’t quite get settled. That makes sense, since I’m atop a dragon—but I only just barely have a grip, like a toe hold.

Dragon riders everywhere are going to win wars and create new nation-states. They’re going to influence elections and public thought patterns everywhere, and I’m not sure there’s much we can do to prevent this from happening. Being aware that Daenerys has dragons simply is not enough to change the outcome of any of these wars.

Well, I have my own toe-hold on a dragon. It feels like I have virtually no control at the moment, but I am handling something incredibly powerful. A more familiar analogy might be handling a fire hose: you can put out any local fire with that thing, but you can also destroy a wall.

You know me, so you know I can’t possibly let such a great play on words go to waste. In jiu jitsu, a toe hold is a move you can hit where you grab and twist the person’s foot, so their ankle ligaments will be ruined. Fun, right?

I can’t help but want to take my verbiage all the way to the very end here. As such, here’s my best AI generated image of me doing a toe-hold on a dragon, illustrating just how far I’ve still got to climb: