There's something that, as a complete dragon geek, lover and aficionado, really annoys me about dragons in movies and television series: people calling their FOUR limbed beasts DRAGONS. There are many movies and television series guilty of it: Reign of Fire, Harry Potter, How to Train Your Dragon and Game of Thrones to name a few. Oh, and the television show, Merlin got the dragon correct but their wyverns wrong: they gave their wyverns six limbs, just like a dragon. Every fantasy fan worth their salt knows that a dragon has SIX limbs (four legs and two wings respectively), whereas a 'dragon' with only four limbs is a wyvern. It really is not difficult to learn: four limbs, wyvern. Six limbs, dragon. So why they constantly make this ridiculously stupid mistake I have no idea. In fact, there are only a few that actually make actual dragons: Dragonheart, Maleficent, Dragon Wars and Avatar: The Last Airbender (live action). This is why I respect those movies.

Yes, I know the wyvern is a subspecies of dragon, but you don't actually call a wyvern a dragon. The wyvern is a 'pseudo-dragon', if you will, a 'lesser dragon'. Yet the television shows and movies I mentioned above are treating their four limbed wyverns as fully fledged dragons. Take the Hungarian Horntail from the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie. This beast is the very description of a wyvern: birdlike appearance (she even has a beak-like snout), two legs, two wings and a barbed tail, and yet they insist on calling and treating her as a proper dragon. This is wrong. You wouldn't call a domesticated house cat a lion, or a domesticated house dog a wolf, so why call a wyvern a dragon?

This has just been something that has annoyed me for a very long time now.

Perhaps they refer to dragons as lizardlike firebreathing flying creatures.  And your six limbed "dragon" is actually a drake, just as a four legged no winged version would be a wyrm.  While I wouldn't call a house cat a lion, I would call a lion a cat.  Just have to open your mind.

Dragon_soul's description(s) tend toward the western cultures' interpretations from the High Middle ages - i.e. your typical "fantasy tale" dragons... But then you've got those from the eastern cultures (and some meso-american types) that have no wings and may even be feathered...

I dunno... dragon, to me, is sort of a "catch-all" term for a vareity of species that share similar if not identical traits and/or roles in their particular mythologies. Like crowe said, you may not call a house cat a lion but you wouldn't be wrong to call a lion a cat... *shrugs*

I agree.  To me, if you are doing Western Fantasy, then your dragon shouldn't have feathers or whatnot.  But with fantasy/mythology in general, there is a lot of room for interpretation. 

To be honest, I just want to see well executed dragons - powerful, terrifying, intelligent.  I'm not as fussed for the specifics of the anatomy.

I guess I'm just a stickler for calling things what they are.

I'm kind of the same way with "shape shifters," in some respects. There are a lot of shows, movies, etc, in which a werewolf (or other lycanthropic type) will transform into their beast-shape, run amok, then transform back with all of their clothes, gear, etc still on... Unless you're an Odo-like being (wherein even your clothing is an creation of your abilities) how does that even happen?

Anyhoo, like I said, I think you've got to employ a little "suspension of disbelief" and have some appreciation of (not necessarily agreement with) the mythos established for the partiuclar setting in order to really enjoy it as presented. If you can't do that, you're kind of hemming in your own imagination, I think.

That's just my opinion... I could be wrong.

In the tv show Supernatural, it's more realistic. The shape-shifter strips and then transforms. Same with the skin-walkers. In one episode, called 'All Dogs Go to Heaven', there's a pack of skin-walkers who transform into dogs and they are completely naked when they transform back into their human form and, as I said, they take all their clothes off before they change into their animal form.

I get confused between werewolf and lycans. Is there a difference other than just their name? Like in the Underworld movies (the best vampire/werewolf movies ever in my opinion. They're SO bad-ass!) the werewolves are called lycans, and in Supernatural and Buffy the Vampire Slayer they're called werewolves. And in Twilight. Well, The Twilight Saga is a terrible set of movies so I don't really count them.

Anyway, as for the dragon/wyvern thing, I see dragons as superior creatures to wyverns: vastly more intelligent, stronger, less 'beastly'. So it's not fair (if that's the correct term) for a wyvern to be called a dragon when the wyvern is the lesser being. Does that make sense?

All of these are dragons

Yeah, but technically you don't call a wyvern a dragon. It's called a wyvern. As your picture proves.

You don't call a rectangle a square, but it's still a square.

I'm finding it really hard to explain what I mean... :/