Knights Dragon

[Raina Giorno]

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For my first topic post, I wanted to share my opinion of the long-going dispute of whether the Black Knights and the Dragon Masters are the same. Now, as a huge Black Knights fan, I am going to be biased. There, you were warned!

So... I'm not sure why the Dragon Masters and the Black Knights would attack each other if they were on the same team? Also, If you take a closer look at the top of the second image, the symbols for the two factions are different not just in color but in design as well.

Besides, the first catalogs states: "Here ye, Here ye, The Dragon Masters have arrived! Led by Majisto the Wizard and his glow-in-the-dark wand, they control the fierce flying dragons. Can the powerful Black Knights and the cunning Wolfpack stop their reign?"

Now, I'm open to the idea that the Dragon Master's soldiers and 'generals' (the guys with the ostentatious helm and plumes) are disgruntled Black Knights who were fed up with a boring job or low wages and were found by Majisto and offered a job, but I don't like the fact that some people just combine the two and pretend they are one faction.

I don't think they are the same faction as lego has made similar looking factions that are not the same faction in the past. I think the fact that they have different helms and builds show that they are different factions. Also the fact that the dragon masters are led by a wizard. I don't have many of my dragon master torso's left. I liked both factions and still have some of both. Although they are on custom figs now.

In my headcanon, Dragon Masters were the successors of Black Knights, hence the similar coat of arms. And the ghost of Black Monarch Castle is Black Monarch himself, who died and left a power vacuum, which was filled by Majisto and his Dragons. As of Dragon Masters and Black Knights fighting eachother, well those are renegade Black Knights, who revolted against Majisto's rule, they kept their old faction's name and heraldry.

Well, that's were I disagree. I say that the power vacuum was filled by the Black Monarch's son, the guy with the white plumes in 6086 Black Knight's Castle, which, one an interesting side note, is the only Black Knight with the visored helm to not have a mustache. Further evidence he is the late king's young son. Maybe I didn't make it clear in my first post, but I think that the Dragon Master's soldiers and 'generals' could have been disgruntled Black Knights who were fed up with a boring job or low wages and were found by Majisto and offered a job, which explains the similarities in the shields. Becoming Majisto's loyal cronies, they would have no problem attacking their former brethren. And... in the second poster it clearly shows the new young king of the Black Knights leading an army to dislodge Majisto, but they failed.

Wonderful essay, @John Cromwell. I appreciate your well cited arguments. You've certainly convinced me that TLG treated them as different factions and I agree that "Lego was just being lazy and re-used the same shield print with different colors." Dragon Masters are my favorite LEGO faction (of any theme) and I enjoyed your post.

"In my headcanon, Dragon Masters were the successors of Black Knights" - @Eggyslav I like this idea, though @John Cromwell response is also well reasoned - they both seems like they are in the same wheelhouse.

This is something I've pondered in my head and have mostly settled on the idea that it is ok to equip Black Knights with Dragon Masters together if I'm not trying to represent the official LEGO factions. If I were doing a true Dragon Masters or Black Knights build, I would keep those parts separate. In Guilds of Historica, I'm slowly working towards a contingent of soldiers that defend a region. They will use both DM and BK shields/flags/etc. but will also have different arm colors (no blues). They are definitely not Dragon Master or Black Knights but rather citizens of this part of the world who fly under a dragon banner. I'm hoping to make some good progress for the CCC XVIII and will have some MOCs posted in the next couple months.

Yeah, I like that idea, they complement each other nicely. See, my problem is that TLG never gave the Black Knights a torso strictly their own, they instead just used the generic chainmail and breastplate printings. For my humble little collection of Black Knights, I went through all the different designs Lego gave them and picked my favorite color scheme for what I thought would fill that roll best. I'll post a picture of them once I can get a picture with a smaller file size.

As a kid, while the similarity of their heraldry was immediately noticeable, I never really thought of them as the same faction. Even looking back at them today, the color schemes, types of build, and armor/helmets associated with them are different enough that even when they show up side by side like on the catalog pages in the first post, the differences stand out more to me than the similarities.

I don't have any really vivid memories of what interpretations or headcanons I might've developed to explain those similarities, since the only Black Knights figures or parts I really had to use in MOCs or play scenarios back then were ones my parents got in yard sale lots (I would've been a little too young to collect those sets when they were "brand new").

But it's not as though different factions/subthemes using the same logo or variations on the same logo was all that unusual at the time. I remember that I typically thought of Classic Space and Futuron as earlier and later versions of the same faction, sort of like the relationship between "Star Trek: The Original Series" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation". Whereas I think I always tended to envision Imperial Soldiers and Imperial Guards as separate military divisions within the same faction, though I since learned that many other builders prefer to treat the "redcoats" and "bluecoats" as the navies of two different colonial powers. The Forestmen and Dark Forest subthemes also used the same heraldry on their shields, and in that case I HAVE generally interpreted both of those subthemes as one faction, even back when the Dark Forest sets first came out.

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