Regarding the size of dragons

[heavens-champion 1,905]

Have you noticed that dragons in the show have gotten... smaller?

Dragon in season 1

 

Sludge

[Lulaypp 2,555]

I magine it is the age and species of dragons. Because, at least from the examples you gave, they even have different spike designs and structure as a whole.

Simmilar to how ponies have Alicorns, which according to my observation is at least a little larger than other ponies. Even then, we have extra large ponies like Troubleshoes.

Edited June 9, 2019 by Lulaypp

[SharpWit 2,622]

I don't think the show set out originally with the intentions of creating an actual dragon society and culture but we ended up with one eventually. Spike was supposed to be the exception.

I think the way it works is as strong as dragons are they're much more vulnerable when they're young, so they band together for safety. Once you're old/big enough to fend off nearly an force that localized sentient species can, you kind of just bugger off and do your own thing until it's time to migrate.

In Dragonshy when Twilight says the sleeping dragon's smoke would blanket all of Equestria for a hundred years, I think she was exaggerating. We also have the dragon migration occurring only  about once a generation, so a substantial amount of time. So the life cycle is you hatch from your egg, that whole molting thing, you go along the dragon migration, leave when you're ready, raze some villages to obtain a hoard, then sleep on it till it's time to migrate again.

Dragons maybe just live so long and age so slowly, that when they're considered older children or teens among themselves, they're adults to everyone else. Spike should be like 10 years younger than Twilight at most right? So if he were a pony he'd be a young adult, but he's still regarded as a baby, even though he's smarter than half of those around him.

Edited June 9, 2019 by SharpWit

[Will Guide 21,360]

I think fully matured dragons come in all shapes and sizes! Some can get as large as mountains. Some remain the size of a pony. It's simple as that.

31 minutes ago, Lektra Bolt said:

Originally dragons other than Spike I believe we're meant to be not sentient (no more than animals like dogs anyway) nor have a society.

This was retconned

The larger dragon form from S1 was said to be what dragons become when they go crazy hoarding, which is what happened to Spike in an episode, the name of which I forget. This episode served as the initialization of the retcon

Season 2's Secret of My Excess is the episode you're thinking of.

[Goat-kun 2,527]

Cause there's hardly a conceivable way for those who cannot even handle a bunch of snake chickens to force friendship socialism onto a bunch of elder dragons without them using the arguments of strength and experience. Thus such creatures are better left to their own devices within the Unknown, never to be sullied by a half-arsed agenda of some white fence hipster mercenary.

[Cwanky 17,572]

On 6/9/2019 at 9:55 AM, Will Guide said:

I think fully matured dragons come in all shapes and sizes! Some can get as large as mountains. Some remain the size of a pony. It's simple as that.

Season 2's Secret of My Excess is the episode you're thinking of.

This could very well be a possibility. Even with Spike getting wings, I wouldn't necessarily rule out the possibility of wingless dragons either. After all, we have oddballs like Crackle. 

It's also notable that most of the dragons we saw since Gauntlet of Fire are much younger, including Ember, at most being young adults, by dragon standards at least. It may be that either larger dragons are rare like the one in Dragonshy or they take centuries to reach that size if they can. Truth of the matter is we don't know how long Dragon Lord Torch ruled for. It could have been for several centuries.

I wonder what that great big fella Torch is doing these days... 

[Lnx1ynight16 530]

Maybe older dragons are bigger than the younger dragons? Or maybe it could be a different species?

[Otaku-sempai 455]

On 2019-06-09 at 12:23 PM, Lektra Bolt said:

Originally dragons other than Spike I believe we're meant to be not sentient (no more than animals like dogs anyway) nor have a society.

This was retconned

The larger dragon form from S1 was said to be what dragons become when they go crazy hoarding, which is what happened to Spike in an episode, the name of which I forget. This episode served as the initialization of the retcon

From then on it has been said in episodes involving dragons that you can grow to that size unnaturally from hoarding at any age. The previous Dragon Lord is an example who is thousands of years old but sentient, the only way to retain sentience and not lose your intelligence is to not hoard things. Normal dragons have been retconned to be sentient all the time, except the ones that hoard. We have only seen one of these, and Spike became the rule, while that one with animal intelligence was made the exception with the retcon

Even the first dragon we meet in the show, other than Spike, could speak (Season 1, Episode 7 "Dragonshy"). So we already knew it that episode that dragons were intelligent. And we learned that dragons can grow very quickly if greed takes a hold of them. 

30 minutes ago, Lnx1ynight16 said:

Maybe older dragons are bigger than the younger dragons? Or maybe it could be a different species?

Spike seems to be the oldest dragon that we've seen (so far) in G5.