Tenacious DL
Next year will mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, at least according to my beat-up copy. Since the first volume of Chronicles came out, a lot of water's gone under the bridge, to put it mildly. Dragonlance's legal ownership has changed hands a few times and many authors, artists and game designers have come and gone in the past two decades. It's gone from two trilogies about a handful of characters to over 100 novels spanning an entire world. The central storyline that began with a group of friends meeting in an inn has developed and changed in ways many of us who were there at the beginning couldn't have imagined (and maybe wouldn't have wanted to…but I digress). All along the way, the world of Krynn has managed to attract new readers - some who just wanted to spend a few hours peeking into a fascinating place, and some who stuck around and became hardcore fans of everything DL.
Whether you're happy or unhappy with the current state of Dragonlance, and whether you're a dino, a newbie, or somewhere in between, you can't argue the fact that whatever flaws or problems there have been, it's pretty cool that Krynn is still alive today, if only because people still discuss it, sometimes even bringing up issues that go all the way back to the first few novels. For some of us, it's a brand new world after the drastic changes of the War of Souls. Others would rather remember it as Fourth Age, or Fifth Age, or some combination thereof. People might claim that the arguments within online fandom concerning Dragonlance's past, present and future are a waste of time, and I have to admit, from what I've seen, dead horses often get beaten into a pulp…but overall, it's probably better than silence.
So many books in the fantasy genre disappear without a trace after their first run. I own a few forgettable novels that came and went and are now out of print (mostly with good reason; those I keep hidden from the eyes of all). The Dragonlance novels could have easily done that, too, and yet, for a number of reasons, they didn't, despite having some less than great material here and there. Whether you love or hate Dragonlance now, you have to admit, the fact that people still have opinions about it at all is pretty remarkable.
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