duress
fear » disgust
The Dragon Slayer relies on the development of personal skills (or knowledge of the world) and self-perfection to overcome big problems.
The Dragon Slayer's best traits: Imagination and independence. The Dragon Slayer's worst traits: Imagination and independence.
Analytical and discerning— but analytical first— the Dragon Slayer is driven by fear, but balances it with disgust.
Emotions are arguments, each arguing for survival in one of three arenas:
●
Self
The self argument argues for the extended self: You, your family, close friends and valued possessions.
●●
World
The world argument argues for survival in the physical environment, making the feeler confront danger.
●●●
Society
The society argument navigates the complexities of human society, arguing for survival in the tribe.
The arguments have an order of priority, called the eristic order.
Eristic order describes the usual order of an archetype's emotional arguments. There's always a self, world and society argument, but the order and expression differs between archetypes.
Your eristic order goes like this:
●●
world
●
self
The energy-order-breaking world-self argument, unique to the Dragon Slayer, allows a feeler to view the world from a unique perspective, but at a high energy cost.
Feelers with a first-place world argument have a great feel for what's going on in the most concrete sense.
Logical and rational, they tend to trust what's measurable in the world.
Eristic orders lacking a society argument can result in a feeler who's bad with time. This can impact everything from feeling the passage of time to being on time to events.
These types of feelers are the most likely to need a calendar and the least likely to use it.
Emotions are dualities, having one of two forms that can be felt at a time:
●
Love & disgust
Love argues to add to or nurture the extended self, while disgust argues to remove from the extended self.
●●
Fear & anger
Fear argues to model and understand the world, while anger argues to modify or destroy the world.
●●●
Guilt & pride
Guilt argues to do work for society, while pride argues to be a high-quality member of society.
Your archetype is characterized by a combination of these two forms:
Your first argument is the world argument, expressing in the fear form.
●●
fear
The second most common first argument behind love, fear connects the feeler to the real world. First-slot feelers are rational, cognitive feelers.
Benefits: Intelligent, creative, observant
Drawbacks: Anxious, fawning, avoidant
Your second argument is the self argument, expressing as disgust.
●
disgust
As the second argument, disgust is discerning, critical and often overrules the first argument, abbreviating the emotional loop completely. Disgust in this position can work like a reset button on the eristic beat. This results in a quick-thinking, witty feeler.
Benefits: Well-groomed, constructively critical
Drawbacks: Perfectionistic, irritable, abrasive
Emotions are felt in beats, like heartbeats, with each argument being voiced each beat.
All the combinations of base emotions possible in a beat.
The order and expression of the arguments depends on the situation, but defaults to your archetype's characteristic emotion.
Duress is the eristic one-two of fear and disgust. It's a quick, smart, incisive emotion.
Duress goes from fear to disgust, abbreviating guilt.
Duress's world-self order is rare. Attachment for example is a self-world emotion. That's the normal order. Duress hacks this with the self argument of disgust. The Dragon Slayer thinks and feels in this disgust-powered world-self order by default.
Duress in its strongest forms feels like being tortured or being trapped. Dragon Slayers are resilient, tough-minded people, except when it comes to social situations. There, they may have to depend on their weak third argument, the argument of society.
Emotions have energy costs, depending on complexity and expression:
In a beat, the lower energy emotion is felt first. Eristic diagrams organize emotions in this love-to-pride emotional energy spectrum.
The Dragon Slayer is named for his/her tendency to daydream. Their imaginative capabilities and lack of societal rewards mean that daydreaming is pretty close to the real thing, at least in terms of emotional feedback.
The Dragon Slayer's daydreams are usually focused on satisfying anger and pride.
Their best and worst ability is being able to access anger rewards with their rich imaginations. In other words, a typical feeler will punch another person when angered, but a Dragon Slayer can simply imagine doing it and get the same reward.
Because of this, the archetype may seek bigger and bigger targets in the real world to satiate their anger— targets that may sometimes even still be objects of fantasy, worldbuilding or storytelling (hence the name).
Groups, cultures and societies need to satisfy all six base emotions for their members.
They'll typically do this in one of three patterns:
Attachment/envy/zeal cultures are typically family- or individualism-oriented and hardworking.
Devotion/contempt cultures have strict rules, devoted followers and a disdain for outsiders.
Satisfaction works for smaller groups which focus on avoiding fear, guilt, disgust and anger.
All cultures are characterized by one of these three patterns.
The Dragon Slayer is the most individualistic archetype. The key for this type of feeler is either embracing that or trying to overcome it.
The Dragon Slayer is great at tackling big, deep-dive problems that require focused thought. Unfortunately, big problems are best tackled by groups. The Dragon Slayer often can't get into a position of power to lead such a group, and even if he or she could, it probably wouldn't work out well.
The most important tool in embracing individualism for the Dragon Slayer is self-compassion, or moderating any disgust that's pointed inward by instead acting out of love.
Honor is vital to the Dragon Slayer to govern anger. A Dragon Slayer's sense of honor will usually see them behaving well in society. When the sense of honor clashes with society's rules, however, the Dragon Slayer can run into trouble. You should note the difference in your internal rules and society's external rules.
Humans are inherently social creatures and dragons don't exist. These are the Dragon Slayer's two biggest problems.
The Dragon Slayer's most common issue in this regard is working on projects that don't benefit others. The archetype's weak guilt argument can make it difficult to identify society's needs. Unlike the Scientist, the Dragon Slayer isn't naturally adept at zeal, mostly because of this misplaced society argument.
The Dragon Slayer only has any hope of fitting one societal pattern, attachment/envy/zeal:
The Dragon Slayer almost fits well into the attachment/envy/zeal cultural pattern.
The biggest gap in the Dragon Slayer's emotional toolbox is in feeling envy, the combination of guilt and disgust. The Dragon Slayer will tend to substitute duress for this emotion, missing the subtle nuance of the differences in the world and society arguments. Survival is the ultimate emotional truth, but world survival and society survival are very different things. The farther a society is from real-world survival needs, the worse the Dragon Slayer will do in it.
The Dragon Slayer has almost no hope of fitting into a devotion/contempt culture:
The Dragon Slayer will step on lots of toes in a devotion/contempt society.
In short, the satisfaction of disgust through duress makes contempt seem pointless to the Dragon Slayer, who would rather practice zeal (anger and pride). Contempt is ultimately an abbreviation of anger, which the Dragon Slayer needs to satisfy the full emotional spectrum.
The base emotions are dualities, with one form felt at a time:
When they team up in a complex emotion, their dual nature is preserved:
The opposite of an archetype's characteristic emotion is its coping emotion.
Since the coping emotion has the same arguments (self/world/society), but in opposite form, it effectively "turns off" the characteristic emotion, giving you a way out of overwhelming feelings.
The coping emotion serves as a sort of shadow archetype, characterizing you in times of extreme emotion.
The Dragon Slayer copes using frustration, the combination of love and anger.
Frustration can be impulsive and uncontrolled, especially in the Dragon Slayer, who won't tend to be great at either base emotion of love or anger.
Coping using frustration may look like:
The Dragon Slayer's coping emotion is the Hero's characteristic emotion, making them complementary archetypes.
Emotions can become addictive, like a drug that's made in your head. The addictions usually involve the emotions that make up your archetype's characteristic emotion:
Addiction to fear looks like depression and anxiety, with duress as depression.
Addiction to disgust results in narcissism.
Your archetype has a particular weakness too:
The Dragon Slayer will weakly feel the emotions starting or landing on guilt: Shame, anxiety, envy, devotion, remorse and exhilaration. This is because duress abbreviates guilt, the Dragon Slayer's weakest argument.
Weakly feeling an emotion means not feeling it strongly. But it also means not handling it well when it is felt strongly. Since the Dragon Slayer likes challenges, this may present as a paradoxical focus on overcoming the discomfort associated with these emotions. The base weaknesses look like this:
In general, a weak sense of guilt makes for a weak connection to society. The Dragon Slayer feels as strongly as anyone else, but may not make an effort to show it to others. As a result, they may be seen as having a blunted affect. They may be seen as being hard to work with.
All emotions argue for our survival. They're all good and when deployed right, healthy and useful.
This applies to complex emotions too. With names like hatred, envy and contempt, they might come off as harsh or wrong. But each combination is useful to every feeler as a matter of survival.
Every emotion can be mastered and healthy.
Ensures family survival
Ensures direct survival
Ensures tribal survival
Virtues help a feeler avoid the negative effects of an emotion by consciously producing the results of its opposite emotion. It's like coping but conscious and intentional. Here are your archetype's virtues:
Subverting anger with fear, or thinking when struck with the impulse to act.
honor is your operating virtue or highest virtue. It's the virtue you need to get by.
Withstanding or overcoming fear. Acting as anger (the 'do something' emotion) would when feeling fear.
Sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. When you act out of love when feeling disgust.
Read the other archetype descriptions here:
The people most similar to you will be your own archetype:
Archetypes who share your first argument:
Archetypes who share your second argument:
Archetypes with the same missing/third argument:
This archetype is the inversion of yours:
Want to read more?
Buy the book for $10 on the Gumroad store.