Basic Trope: Heroic knights slay monstrous dragons.
- Played Straight: Sir Percival the knight fights and slays the wicked dragon Flarghus to stop its destructive rampages.
- Exaggerated: Sir Percival the Dragonslayer is a heroic knight who specializes entirely in slaying dragons and will not take on any other type of quest.
- Downplayed:
- Percival, a regular if good-hearted warrior, battles and drives off a reptilian monster that's preying on local livestock.
- There are rival sports teams named The Knights and The Dragons, respectively.
- Backfired: Sir Percival and his knightly peers slay many wicked dragons over their adventures. However, it only then becomes clear that the dragons had also kept the populations of many other monsters at bay by eating them or driving them out, and the countryside soon becomes overwhelmed by packs of manticores, trolls, harpies and worse that are much greater threats than a few sedentary dragons.
- Justified:
- Knights' societal duties require them to defend the peasantry from threats, and dragons are common and frequently attack villages and travelers. As a result, knights often end up needing to battle the creatures.
- The bylaws and initiations of the local knightly orders require members to seek out and slay a dragon in order to attain high ranks.
- Inverted:
- The noble dragon Flarghus the Resplendent battles the Black Knight Percival the Butcher in order to defend innocent villagers.
- Sir Percival and Flarghus are steadfast allies, and the latter often bears the former on his back in battle.
- Subverted:
- Local legends often play up the motif of a knight riding out against dragons, but once young Percy becomes a squire it turns out that this rarely happens — dragons mostly live in the middle of the wilderness and rarely need to be confronted, especially since knights need to spend most of their time supporting their kingdoms' militaries and wars.
- Sir Percival sets out to slay a vicious dragon...but when he confronts the dragon, he sees that it's simply in pain from a sharp object in its side. Once he removes it, the dragon calms down and is no longer a threat.
- Double Subverted: ... until a major migration drives the dragons into settled lands, and the knights are the best-equipped people to do something about this sudden threat.
- Zig-Zagged: Local farmers think that Sir Percival is heading out to slay a dragon, but he's only doing a routine patrol through his lands. On his way, he comes across a smoke-shrouded cave reeking of sulphur and littered with bones, and warily heads in with weapon drawn... but it turns out that it's just a natural volcanic fissure that some animals fell and died in. However, the combination of a cave, volcanic heat and free food from clumsy animals is very attractive to dragons, and when a serpent soon moves in Percival needs to head over again to do something about it before it starts eating farmers.
- Implied: Sir Percival is never stated to have fought dragons, but there aren't very many other candidates for having provided the cape of red, scaly leather he usually wears.
- Parodied: The rivalry between knights and dragons is treated as more of a petty feud than anything else; Sir Percival and Flarghus spend more time bickering in legal squabbles than actually fighting.
- Enforced: The studio financing The Adventures of Sir Percival stipulates that he must battle a dragon at some point, since viewers will expect this to happen in a fantasy show about a heroic knight.
- Lampshaded: "Of course, once Sir Percival came along that was the end of our dragon trouble. Heh — ever heard of a dragon that wasn't dealt with proper by a knight? Yeah, me neither."
- Invoked: After the dragon Flarghus devastates his village, Percy runs away to the capital to become a squire, train as a knight, and come back once he's an experienced warrior to have revenge on the beast.
- Exploited:
- Percival is simply a mercenary, but when he's hired to confront a local dragon he dresses himself in fancy armor, has a banner sewed and hires some actors to imitate a knight's followers and squire; he knows that knights have a well-earned reputation as dragonslayers, and hopes to use this to intimidate and cow the beast.
- Percival and a dragon team up to form a Monster Protection Racket from which they can bilk kings and split the proceeds.
- Defied: "Go slay a dragon? Screw that! I don't wanna die!"
- Discussed: "Unlike what you may have heard in stories, a single warrior dueling the beast one-on-one isn't a very good way to deal with a dragon. No, we'll want to approach this more like we would a small-scale siege."
- Conversed: "I have to say I'm a touch surprised that Percival didn't get around to battling a dragon until the end of season 2; you'd think that that would be basic stuff for a show about a fantasy knight. Still, having Flarghus parlay his way out of his predicament was a clever touch, and it did also work well with the show's theme about violence not being a good way to deal with every problem."
