Take a scroll through Reddit’s most active horny nerd subreddit, and you’ll find a few recurring motifs. In addition to the prerequisite geeky glasses, gaming controllers and anime plushies, there’s a handful of fantasy-themed, technicolor dildos — their soft flesh covered in makeshift lizard scales or hyper-realistic tentacles.

These are just some of the signature sex toys created by Bad Dragon, a brand with such a monopoly on the nerd and furry worlds that subreddit mods name-check them in their rules. Their fandom is immense; r/BadDragon has a gigantic membership of 670,000 “dildo-wielding deviants,” whereas r/BadDragonGirls has another 226,000 members, all happy to post lubed-up photos and videos of the reptile dick dildos in action.

Well, they finally arrived and... Oh dear sweet Jesus Christ, I can feel myself being torn in half
byu/obantheking inBadDragon

It’s an impressive cult following, but how did it happen?

Furries weren’t exactly a new concept in the early aughts (there’s online footage of a sexy deer lady prancing around in thigh-high PVC boots taken at the first-ever furry convention in 1989), but digital art tools were steadily improving. Kinksters had a growing range of furry art options at their fingertips, and yet very few places to safely post them. In 2005, a guy named Varka capitalized on this gap in the market by launching a forum called Herpy Image Archive. While aimed specifically at reptile fanatics, the board attracted furry kinksters more broadly.

Varka announced plans to create his own range of reptilian sex toys back in 2007, but Bad Dragon as we now know it was officially founded in June 2008, according to the brand’s website. “At the time there was a very poor selection of fantasy-themed toys available,” it reads, “and so the focus of enthusiasm and talent went towards filling that niche.”

The unique selling point of Bad Dragon is simple: It’s nerd shit, unabashedly. At one point, toys came with their own mythical bios and lusty legends, fantasy fables crafted to heighten the allure of their scaly, sea dragon dicks. Online attention slowly trickled in. Comedy forum Something Awful featured the Bad Dragon website as its “link of the day” back in 2010; in 2011, VICE published an interview with Varka in which the interviewer asked, “Do you wish dragons existed so they could fuck you with their massive scaly dongs?” Varka replied that his main sexual interest is in “world-building,” name-checking role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Mass Effect.

Soon after conquering the furry fandom, Red Dragon’s growing affiliation with games like D&D attracted nerds en masse. “You’d be surprised how many [buyers] find us through the darker side of World of Warcraft,” he explained. “But the common denominator between our buyers is that they find fantasy and nonhuman sex really hot.”

In addition to putting neon dolphin dicks and amphibian fleshlights on the map, Bad Dragon was an early pioneer of lube designed to look like cum — a trusty favorite on porn sets. Varka was inspired by deliciously over-the-top works of fantasy fan art, which features “buckets of spunk everywhere, cocks as big as thighs, and screaming. … I have a photo of a cum arc shooting out of a toy that must be five or six feet high.”

The brand’s witty creativity didn’t stop at cum lube either. In 2015, to mark the release of Fallout 4, Bad Dragon released a “deathclaw dildo” based on the game’s hulking reptilian villains, and commissioned furry musician Pepper Coyote — best-known for his hit song “No Cock Like Horse Cock” — to record a Fallout-themed song, still beloved by the internet a decade later.

This die-hard commitment to the bit made Bad Dragon one of the more tongue-in-cheek (sometimes literally) sex toy brands out there. And even within the massive adult toy market today, their dragon dildos are still pretty unique. The products are largely customizable in terms of size and firmness, and they’re undeniably beautiful — like miniature works of horny, fantasy-themed art.

Whether or not you dream of being railed by an actual dragon, the additions of scales, suckers and weird, twisted protrusions add a level of sensory novelty that most sex toys still can’t touch. It’s no wonder nerds and furries still can’t get enough of that good dragon dick.