Dragon Ancestry

Their lineage will drag on forever.^note Until a certain someone toes the Moral Event Horizon, that is.

"Dragonborn, huh? Was it your ma or your pa that was the dragon?"

— Hadvar, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

In fiction, different races can often interbreed. Some are more likely to interbreed than others.

Dragons have gained a bit of a reputation for being able and willing to breed with just about anything, if not everything, leading to some interesting mixes (a reputation they often share with humans). This is often because the dragon is capable of transforming into a human form for reproductive purposes. Sometimes you can get a Draconic Humanoid, other times you get someone who is otherwise normal, except for maybe a few off traits.

This is often the result of an Interspecies Romance where one partner is a dragon. See also Weredragon, which is a common ability for those who are part dragon.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Half is about Mink, a half-dragon, half-human hybrid. Her mother is a dragon, her father a dragonslayer.
• High School D×D: Issei Hyoudo starts off only having a dragon sealed into his Sacred Gear, but after dying and being resurrected, he becomes a dragon/devil hybrid. Due to Time Travel, it's confirmed that he will have multiple children by his haremettes: each of them part-dragon from their father's side while the other half would be an assortment of vampire, devil, fallen angel and Valkyrie depending on their mother.
• Maken-ki!: Himegami is the daughter of the Yamata no Orochi of legend and Oosuo no Mikoto, who was the first prince of the Yamato Court. Thus, she's half dragon, though it only becomes apparent when she's angry. During which, her eyes turns amber and her pupils become slitted.
• Overlord (2012): The Dragon Kingdom was founded by a dragon/human couple, meaning the descendant royal family have the ability to use Wild Magic.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime:
  • Lizardmen claim to be descended from dragons. The Dragon Faithful who worship Milim Nava are in fact descended of humans who mated with dragons that took human form and are effectively another branch of Lizardmen from the ones of the Jura Forest, and while most of them can no longer manifest dragon characteristics, they're all still incredibly powerful.
  • Milim Nava herself is the daughter of True Dragon Veldanava and the human Lucia and thus is a "Dragonoid". She doesn't have many draconic features at first glance save her Hellish Pupils Glowing Eyes of Doom when she's angry or using her Milim Eye, but when she gets serious she grows a set of draconic wings and a horn out of her forehead.
• The titular character of RuriDragon finds out that her Disappeared Dad is actually a dragon that lives deep in the mountains of Japan. During the events of the oneshot, she ends up growing horns, breathing fire, and has a Healing Factor that allows her to recover from serious injuries within mere days.

Comic Books

• Firebreather: Duncan is the son of a human woman and a male dragon. He's understandably not eager to learn how that happened.

Fan Works

• Casey Steele: Rebecca Clause is descended from dragons, and possesses wings as a result.
• The Crystal and the Mirage: Rarity's great-great-great-grandfather is a blue dragon, from whom she inherited the ability to eat gemstones.
• Embers (Vathara): Most of the Fire Nation has dragon ancestry to some degree or another; for most its distant enough that the only non-human traits they have are Supernatural Gold Eyes, but Zuko and Azula (whose grandfather is a dragon) have claw-like nails that can only be filed with obsidian, more powerful firebending than is usual, and No Social Skills due to the conflict between their draconic and human instincts on how to interact with others. The reason that it isn't widely known is that the Fire Nation keeps its draconic heritage a secret from the other nations, out of fear of being seen as animals or less than human because of it.
• Faerie Tales: The Gentry present in the harsh North all possess dragon-traits, explained by the fact they all possess dragons blood within their veins.
• Greg Veder VS The World: While Greg wasn't born with draconic ancestry, by twice emerging victorious over Lung, he gained the Dragon King's Blood Trait, granting him an increase to strength, speed, and durability while also blessing him with the blood of dragons and kings now coursing through his veins.
  Touch my skin, feel the pattern of my scales. Look into my eyes.
  Feel the magic of my being. Know that I am dragonblood.

Films — Live-Action

• The Golden Child. Kala, whose lower body is snakelike, is the librarian of the Pao Shin Repository. She is flown in to provide information about the Golden Child. She is over 300 years old: her body shape and long life are due to the fact that one of her ancestors was raped by a dragon.

Literature

• The Black Witch Chronicles: Every single species in the setting has some wyvern-shifter ancestry, with it mainly manifesting in the form of Icarals, Winged Humanoids with power over fire. The Icarals get large amounts of Fantastic Racism, especially from the species which are obsessed with racial purity and don't want to realize that none of Erthia's sentient species are "pure".
• Cygnet: The Cygnet and the Firebird has Draken Saphier and his son Brand Saphier, descendants of a nameless desert dragon. They don't get anything cool from it other than the name; the sorcery comes from Draken's human mother's side.
• Elcenia: Almost everyone has dragon ancestry if you go far back enough, but all the interesting traits breed out in a generation or two. The supplementary pages go into great detail on probabilities and such, but only the most obvious cases end up actually explored.
• The Elminster Series: The protagonist of Elminster's Daughter, Narnra Shalace, turns out to be the love-child of the archmage Elminster of Shadowdale and a shapeshifted song dragon.
• In The Elric Saga Heart Of The Dragon spinoff by Nancy A. Collins says Melniboéans are descended from dragons.
• Fengshen Yanyi features several animals who can claim this, with a specific example given by the four monstrous mounts of the Four Saints of Nine Dragons Island, who according to Yuanshi Tianzun are all hybrid of a dragon and another animal ^note  (two of them being the Suanni, half-lion, and the Bian, half-tiger) and thus can terrify all mundane animals into submission, making the entire cavalry force of Xiqi useless. The character of Longxuhu is a dragon-like one-legged humanoid monster who's described as the (sentient) offspring of a dragon and a leopard.
• In Hurog it's eventually revealed that not only is Oreg one-quarter dragon and able to take dragon form, but the entire Hurog line are descended from a dragon ancestor, though by this point in the lineage the only real effect is a slight predisposition for magic.
• In Seraphina the Ityasaari are a race of half human half dragon hybrids. They usually have silver scales on some part of their body, and have varying Psychic Powers.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: The dragonlords of Valyria — including the only one surviving to the present day, the Targaryens — claim that they are part-dragon. Their historical bond with dragons, some members' immunity to fire, and cases of half-reptilian stillborn children among the Targaryens, lend the credence that they are genetically connected to dragons, though it's unknown to what extent.
• Wrong Time for Dragons: Victor is eventually revealed to have both dragon and human blood in him: his grandmother was pregnant with a child of a dragon when the latter was killed and she, raped by his killer and banished from Middle World. This becomes a plot point late in the novel, when he must decide whether to become a full Dragon or a Dragonslayer — a human with the power to kill dragons for good.

Myths & Religion

• Emperor Jimmu, the mythical first Emperor of Japan in Japanese Mythology, was the grandson of Otohime, the daughter of the dragon god of the sea Ryujin. By extension, this would also apply to all emperors who came afterwards, as all Emperors of Japan have been part of a single dynastic line.
• Lạc Long Quân, a semi-mythical emperor of ancient Vietnam, was the child of a dragon goddess of the sky and sea. This eventually forced him to part ways with his wife, Âu Cơ, as she was descended from fairies and dragons and fairies could not live together.
• This article list several examples of people with dragon ancestry in myth and folklore.
• In Chinese folklore, dragons can often breed with other animals to give birth to fantastic ones. The so-called Nine Children of Dragons are recurring figures in art (for example the Pulao, a toad-dragon hybrid who loves to bellow and sing, is portrayed as a decoration on bells).

Podcasts

• Serinepth Sinderman of Trials & Trebuchets is a draconic bloodline sorcerer, and in addition to her magical abilities her dragon heritage has also given her small patches of blue scales on her body.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Dragons are known to interbreed so much that it looks as though many sorcerers had a dragon ancestor. The Half-Dragon Template can also be added to almost anything that can breed.
  • Members of the Sorcerer class are usually said to receive their powers from draconic blood, though a number of other supernatural ancestors are also possible. The Dragon Disciple Prestige Class allows a Sorcerer to tap deeper into their bloodline to gradually transform themselves into a Half-Dragon.
  • 3rd Edition D&D eventually added a whole creature subtype for beings descended from dragons — the dragonblooded — with access to unique dragon-themed feats and Prestige Classes (including wings and Breath Weapons). While Sorcerers are not automatically dragonblooded, they can trade away some of their normal abilities in order to count as such.
  • The Draconomicon has draconic creatures, beings descended from dragons at a greater remove than half-dragons but who retain more obvious signs of their ancestry than dragon-blooded sorcerers do. Their greater removal from their draconic ancestors means that they don't gain breath weapons or energy-based abilities like half-dragons do, instead sporting strictly physical traits of their background such as claws, scaly hides, and reptilian eyes.
  • The Unearthed Arcana 3.5th splatbook adds the bloodline rules describing creatures with various ancestries, among which all the chromatic and metallic dragons are possible. They share some traits of the dragon variety they're descended from (like Breath Weapon and other supernatural powers), but fewer and later in life than a true half-dragon. Presumably, the various degrees of bloodline falls in-between the diluted ancestry of most sorcerers and the direct ascendance of half-dragons (thus, second, third or fourth generations removed from the full-blooded dragon).
  • Kobolds from 3rd edition onwards are depicted as tiny reptilian servants of dragons, with a tendency to become Sorcerers. Occasionally their draconic blood manifests particularly true in the form of a Dragonwrought Kobold, whose scales shine in the colour of their ancestor. While no inherently stronger than a normal Kobold, they are usually higher level and more likely to possess dragon-themed abilities. In addition they are biologically closer to Dragons than Humanoids, making them immune to certain spells and preventing their bodies from weakening as they age (the latter of which makes them extremely popular among spellcaster players, since old age provides bonuses to spellcasting-related stats that are normally Awesome, but Impractical).
  • A Downplayed Trope in second edition, which didn't have sorcerers to explain. Half-dragons were introduced in the Council Of Wyrms setting, and a Dragon article subsequently considered them in other settings. The article noted that most dragons can't take human or demihuman form and that for the most powerful dragon breeds to fall in love with a human would be like Zeus falling in love with a hamster, which basically restricted it to Gold (close to the Zeus issue), Silver, Bronze (Realms only), and Steel (Realms and Greyhawk only). Dragonlance canonically had it that a dragon falling in love with a human or elf was not only almost unthinkable but a romantic tragedy even if it did happen (cf. Huma and Gwyneth) and if such a couple did children would be the result of a silver dragon taking humanoid form permenantly and would just be a mortal with silver hair and a talent for languages^note The Dragons of Chaos would subsequently reveal that Huma and Gwyneth did have a son, who is seemingly human. And even though Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms were more open-minded and had a lot of dragons in human form around, the article claimed half-dragons were still very rare.
• Pathfinder: Dragons — especially blue dragons — are know to both interbreed with other species thanks to their Voluntary Shapeshifting and to magically influence other creatures to give them draconic traits. The result is that a lot of beings can claim a bit of dragon in their ancestry at some point or another; in gameplay terms, this translates to the Draconic bloodline available to sorcerers and bloodragers, who gain their magical abilities through quirks in their ancestry and genes, and to the dragon-blooded template available to almost every species in the game.
• Exalted: The Terrestrial Exalted are a complicated example. They are also called the Dragon-Blooded and not without reason but they are not the result of dragons breeding directly with humans. Rather the Five Elemental Dragons imbued the blood of chosen mortals with their power which could pass on to their offspring in order to serve as the soldiers of the more powerful Celestial Exalted in their war to overthrow the creators of the world. On a smaller scale there are people who are the result of dalliances between the worlds' lesser dragons and mortals but given that Dragons Are Divine in the world of Exalted these are more properly called God-Touched.

Video Games

• Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits: Kharg and Darc are the twin sons of a forbidden union between Nafia, a human woman, and Windalf, a member of the Drakyr, a race of Draconic Humanoids. Kharg is able to pass as a human (though a pair of wings sprout from his back at one point, terrifying everyone around him) while Darc has a small pair of horns and his skin is partially covered in scales.
• Dark Souls: Crossbreed Priscilla is a half-dragon (the only one known in the setting) and, as such, is of giant size and has a dragon tail. Dark Souls III implies the other half is Anor Londo god — specifically that her father is Gwyn's eldest son, who betrayed his family to side with the dragons.
  • In Dark Souls II, the Emerald Herald/Shanalotte states that she was "born of dragons, contrived by men" and that she was raised by a dragon. Although the specifics are somewhat ambiguous, it's most likely that she was created by Aldia and Vendrick using a dragon soul in an attempt to create something that was free of the Curse of Undeath, which was also used to create the false Ancient Dragon in the Dragon Shrine that raised her.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: The Lizards believe themselves to be descended from dragons who lost their size and power due to mingling with "lesser" races. This is at least partly true; they are in fact descended from ancient red dragons who lost their wings and shrunk to their current sizes due to unknown causes.
• Dragon Age:
  • The unnamed race of Horned Humanoids commonly called the Qunari (or Vashoth) are stated to have draconic features. Their horns, for example, are dragon horns. One member of the race, Iron Bull, says he has some sort of unidentifiable connection with a dragon he fought. Further, there's a warrior class known as the Reavers who drink dragon blood to gain new abilities but over time develop dragon-like features. Whether there's some sort of connection between the Qunari and Reavers is unknown, but Iron Bull is himself a Reaver, and states directly that he never drank dragon blood, instead stumbling upon his abilities during training. Comments made by both Kieran and Corypheus if you're playing a Vashoth character support this. Kieran says that your blood "doesn't belong to your people" and Corypheus states that Qunari blood is "engorged with decay" and that as a whole the race is "a mistake".
  • Supplemental material has suggested that the descendants of Calenhad, who have ruled Ferelden for centuries, are also dragonblooded. They aren't biologically descended from dragons (as far as we know) but it's believed that Calenhad may have consumed dragon blood and passed certain attributes on to his descendants as a result. At the time of Dragon Age: Origins, the only known living descendant still remaining is party member Alistair, so this has yet to really show up in the games themselves.
• Dragon: Marked for Death: The Dragonblood Clan — to which the main characters belong — imbibed the blood of the dying Astral Dragon Atruum, gaining superhuman abilities and a stigmata called the Dragon Scar.
• In Duolingo's Welsh language course, it's implied that the speaker has this. One of the first sentences taught in the first level of the course is Draig dw i, which literally translates as "I am a dragon."
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • There is some confusion in-universe as to what it means to be "Dragonborn" - to be blessed with the soul of a dragon by Akatosh, the Dragon God of Time. There are some suggestions that it can be passed down genetically, but other suggestions that one must be judged worthy or otherwise chosen by Akatosh to gain the blessing.
  • Certain bits of lore imply that some Imperials have distant Tsaesci ancestry. The Tsaesci are one of the Akaviri races and attempted to invade Tamriel in the late 1st Era. They were defeated and the survivors incorporated into the Empire of the Reman Dynasty. They had significant influence on Imperial culture, especially the creation of the Blades (who were based on the Akaviri Dragonguard and use Akaviri styled weapons and armor), as well as some of the vague Wuxia elements of it. They were also said to have left behind cross-bred descendants, who are said to be "beautiful, if frightening". The Tsaesci also have a Multiple-Choice Past, with various conflicting descriptions of them in the lore. Some sources don't mention them being snake-like at all, essentially being humans with some East Asian physical features, while others say that they were snake-people who couldn't even wear humanoid armor. It is implied that, like the Empire itself, the Tsaesci might have been a mixed-race polity.
• Fire Emblem: Dragons, particularly divine ones, are a recurring element of games in the series. A good number of main or otherwise playable characters are descended from dragons, and their ancestry often gives them special abilities, most prominently either Were Dragon-flavored Voluntary Shapeshifting, or divine, plot-driving blood:
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War: Dragon Blood is synonymous with Royal Blood, with the twelve main noble bloodlines of the setting being descended from a group of heroes who were each infused with the blood of a different dragon. Those in whom the blood flows strong bear a distinctive Brand on their bodies, granting them increased combat prowess and the ability to wield the holy weapons that contain some of that dragon's power. The same goes for those descended from the line of Galle, who blood bonded with the evil Earth Dragon Loptous.
  • Soren from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is the Branded son of King Ashnard of Daein and the black dragon laguz Almedha.
  • Ninian and Nils from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade are half ice dragon, and this time the fact is kept a secret for a good chunk of the story not just because it makes a good Reveal, but also because it wouldn't be good for them if word got out. Subsequently, getting Ninian married to Eliwood in that game lets his son, Roy, the hero of Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, be quarter ice dragon, but the choice doesn't affect much mostly since Roy's game came first.
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening:
    • Some time after her blood bond with Baldur of Jugdral's Twelve Crusaders (see above), the leader of the Divine Dragon tribe, Naga formed a second blood bond with the founder of Ylisse. As a result, members of the Ylisse royal family can also manifest the Brand of Naga. Jugdral's holy weapons are still around, but due to either extreme age or magical tampering, most of them no longer require draconic blood to use.
    • The Avatar is revealed to be the result of a descendant of a man who was blood bonded with the evil Dragon Grima to gain his mark and the result of a breeding program to get a child with enough of the mark for the dragon to pull a Grand Theft Me. Their father is also a descendant of the original mark holder, as are any potential kids Robin has. With Grima's death, the mark disappears.
    • Nowi's daughter Nah, and Morgan if she, Nah, or Tiki S-Supported with the male Avatar, are directly half/quarter dragon rather than being descended from a human who merely blood bonded with one.
  • In Fire Emblem Fates both the Hoshidan and Nohrian royal families have the blood of the First Dragons, which allows them to use Dragon Veins, and the Avatar in particular is capable of transforming into a dragon as a result of Anankos, a big-name First Dragon, being their birth father. Kana, being the Avatar's child, has the same ability.
  • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, there are multiple Crests carried in noble bloodlines throughout the continent, in much the same way as the Holy Blood of Jugdral. They even come in major and minor types, and either allows the use of various extremely powerful weapons. Only a few of the Crests are actually a result of draconic ancestry, and those are all carried by actual dragons. The reason there are so many Crest bloodlines is due instead to blood transfusion, like Naga's (see above). But the Ten Elites and their leader Nemesis didn't get theirs peacefully — they murdered the Goddess and as many of her children as they could find to infuse themselves with their blood, and make corresponding weapons from their corpses.
• League of Legends: Shyvana is part human and dragon. Her humanoid form has bluish, scaly skin with claws. She can also turn herself into a wyvern.
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom shows us that the Hylian royal family (and possibly Link's bloodline as well) has Zonai ancestry from the union of the first king of Hyrule who was a Zonai and his Hylian wife. While it's hard to nail down exactly what Zonai are, since they look like a mix of goats, rabbits and dragons, there's still enough visible dragon in their biology to count for this trope.
• Them's Fightin' Herds: The longmas are descended from the union of a horse and a dragon in the very distant past, and consequently resemble reptilian horses with manes, tails and wings made out of fire.

Visual Novels

• Nasuverse:
  • Fate/stay night: Saber has dragon's blood thanks to Merlin's tampering. While she doesn't have any draconic features, this does give her a massive mana reserve. It also gives her a weakness against anti-dragon weapons.
  • Fate/EXTRA CCC: Lancer aka Elizabeth Bathory has dragon blood due to the legends of her family supposedly having it and their family crest, which manifests on her as a Servant as gaining dragon horns, tail, wings (though she can hide the last at will), and a powerful sonic Breath Weapon.
  • Fate/Apocrypha: The Sabers of Black and Red both have dragon's blood. In Saber of Black's case, it's because he's Siegfried, who bathed in the dragon Fafnir's blood after killing him, which paradoxically gave him the defenses of a dragon along with increased effectiveness against dragons. While he doesn't have draconic traits normally, Fate/Grand Order shows he can grow them with time if he taps into them. As for Saber of Red, she's Mordred, the child/clone of King Arthur/Fate's Saber, which means she inherited the same dragon blood of her "father". Later on, the homunculus Sieg also gains dragon's blood due to incorporating the heart of Siegfried into his body, and he can take the "dragon features" to the point he becomes the dragon Fafnir.
  • Fate/Grand Order, in addition to all of the above, adds several others like Shuten douji, who is the daughter of Orochi, the most famous Japanese dragon.

Webcomics

• In Darken, Mink and her brothers are Demihumans with the blue dragon Silvador for a mother. It gives them patches of blue scales, Cape Wings, lightning breath, and, for the youngest brother, an often-mocked case of Fantastic Racism against mere humans. Mink has a daughter by Gort in the epilogue, adding some archdevil blood to the mix.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • The Draketooth illusionist clan has a black dragon in a distant point in their ancestry. This is revealed when the Order arrives at their stronghold to find the entire clan dropped dead, and Vaarsuvius realizes it's because they themself had once cast the "Familicide" arch-spell on a black dragon that killed off a large chunk of the black dragon species alongside anybody else descended from them.
  • Enor the bounty hunter is the son of an ogre (or of a half-ogre, it's ambiguous) and a blue dragon.
  • Played for laughs with the Snail, which, as a joke on the template system for Dungeons & Dragons third edition, is a half-dragon... as well as being half-troll, fiendish, lycanthropic, and vampiric. All of this, since templates add to a monster's effective level, makes it Challenge Rating 14, putting it on par with a full-grown black dragon and superior to a purple worm, despite it still being a snail.

Western Animation

• American Dragon: Jake Long: The title character is a dragon on his mother's side. In the show, dragons are shapeshifters between dragon and human form, and protect magical creatures while living among humans. His maternal grandfather and little sister are dragons as well. His mother is not — the Superpowerful Genetics skips a generation in their family.
• Monkie Kid: Genki Girl and Badass Biker Mei is from a family of dragons. Specifically, she is the descendent of the Dragon of the West and Ao Lie, the steed of Tang Sanzang from Journey to the West.
• Ninjago: The entire Garmadon family has not only dragon blood, but oni blood as well. Wu and his nephew Lloyd take more after the dragon side, whereas Garmadon himself (Wu's brother and Lloyd's father) has more oni tendencies.