Funny. Where you see trivialising, I see an opening scene which, in retrospect, is rather heavy handed in its symbolism, but which as a mood-setter did a fine job of making me expect a certain setting, only to yank the rug from under my feet later on. It didn’t seem such an important scene in respect to the main theme, either - not compared to the final bedroom scene, and the previous scene in the hallway.
It’s bugging me a bit that no-one seems to talk much about their first experience of the game - where the main theme isn’t made clear. Of course the game would be much better, artistically, if it could stand that sort of analysis as well as it stands the first impressions - that goes without saying. Yes, once you’ve played it through you may feel a certain heavy-handedness. But when I played it first I didn’t assign any meaning to the dragon other than seeing it’s a fight scene between a protagonist and an antagonist, a powerful antagonist. It’s very possible that that’s all it’s meant to do - set a scene.
I’m perfectly happy with letting a certain symbol be less meaningful if it’s to communicate something to me as a player/reader. Yes, it’s better if I can later dissect the symbol and see how rich it is, but if it worked the first time around, I’m happy.