Western dragons are a chronicle of yawnful infamy: Beowulf- which I read in the original, I shall mention, to indicate my bona fides. Beowulf's dragon wasn't a patch on Grendel. Siegfried's dragon- argh, Germanic heroes. The Hobbit, which I found twee. Anne McCaffrey. Hicks and Weisman. Barbara Hambly. Paolini. Others too numerous to mention, whom I have cruised in bookstores and put back on the shelf, because they were always 550 page part ones of trilogies or tetralogies or heptologies, and I read slowly.
Leguin's dragons were the most intriguing of the lot, I suppose, but no western dragon ever grabbed me the way Haku or Jiip or Goujun or Karin's Yao Kuan or even the mist-wreathed snub-nosed dragons of Japanese art did and do. You will point out that most of these have human forms. Yes, true, and that's part of the appeal. But then so do the ones in The Last Dragonlord, and I found that unfinishable.