The *absence* of names for weekdays and months (and renaming 'week' to 'sevenday' when it's the exact same thing and two extra syllables) really irritates me actually. There's no reason they wouldn't have kept the convenience of calendar nomenclature. If they really wanted to consciously Pernise it then could have used the names of the OG queens, or some of them. Farday, Porday, Sigday etc.
I read the first „Dragonriders of Pern“ while on Vacation (for the first time, but i heard a lot about it over the years) and was wondering if i could get a „bronze“ color right, since i struggled with gold - and it‘s easy to slip into just brown. So i made a little texture study. Also my first pernese dragon ever, i have no clue if i got it right.
More Pern thoughts, tl;dr: Threadfall is probably not as exciting as people think, proper Wing formation is like goose flocks in flight, and I think writers who kill a bunch of dragons in every Threadfall and Weyrling class have things waaaaay wrong.
Honestly the most efficient way of fighting it is probably pretty boring to watch. It falls from a static height and the aim is to catch as much of it as possible as high up as can be done. To do that effectively, you really just need to have your Wings flying in a more or less steady formation that forms a line along that leading edge. I imagine it's a lot more like forest fire fighting than any sort of aerial combat.
Regarding how the Wings are structured, I have always assumed they fly in a V formation. The reason geese do this is so that the lead goose generates lift for all the geese behind. So you put a bronze and a few more bronzes or browns at the point of the V to fly most of the fall, with blues and greens fanned out to the side and staggered behind to take advantage of that lift. Your strongest, most agile, most successful dragons make up the topmost Wing with as many other Wings below them to catch anything that's been missed. Instead of high action flying, it's more like 6 - 8 hours of firefighter dispatch meets airport traffic control. Which I think is cool but I'm just Like That. :D
Also! There is no way in hell a Weyr looses a bunch of dragons in every training and every Fall. That would be a failed system in every way and unsustainable. Even one serious injury that puts a dragon out of action every Fall would decimate the ability of the Weyr to do its job. I think a lot of fan writers got too excited about the drama of loosing a fighting pair or a number of Weyrlings without really thinking things through. Todd McCaffrey absolutely did. If your max fighting force is 600 dragons (and I think that's an overestimate on how many one weyr can hold), you are going to need every one of them you can get to keep the spores that eat everything in a 200 foot radius upon landing from hitting the ground at all. Come to think of it, to really do the job well, there probably needs to be a few teams flying scout at a distance to send general reports to the riders on the front line.
Also I don't think a dragon is going to bond with someone who will get them both killed the first time they try to go between. If they can smell your gender pheromones and tangle their consciousnesses with an alien species via eye contact, I think we can assume they're cognizant enough to Impress someone who will maintain their survival when using one of their most basic, innate abilities.
No one ever dies in Fall in the books because Anne can't bear to kill anyone (C'gan doesn't even die of being Threaded, he clearly has a heart attack). It does just negate the whole 'dangers dragon-braved' thing when no one actually gets killed. And causes a major population problem when you have 20 queens dropping clutches of 20+ twice a year. That's why fandom goes in the direction of offing riders both in training and in Fall - to try to balance the books. The books can't BE balanced, though.
And Fall has its own myriad issues, such as: the front that's 50km wide (and supposedly one flight, 100 dragons, is enough to cover this); the totally predictable schedule it falls on, in a neat, tidy strip; and the fact that retconning the Long Intervals to have been caused by antimatter explosions implies that said explosions popped the Red Star out of its orbit for one cycle, after which it magically popped itself back into its normal cycle. Twice.
used the Chris S. Baily design as the base since Dragonchoice was my introduction to Dragonriders of Pern. the wings and tail are loosely based on @/ranticore awesome designs, it's still somewhat insect-based but with the frequent usage of the word "wingsail" across Pern-related writing I decided to give it a bit of an Age of Sail twist inspired by a fore-and-aft sail rig
the third eye is rather primitive and doesn't change color based on the dragon's mood, it always has sort of a rainbow opal appearance
kinda tempted to make a physical model of the dragon at least to see what the wing folding would look like
Transcript of the notes under Read More
Transcript of the notes, starting with the title in the top right corner:
Pernese dragon. Model - average brown.
Wing shape and tail fork size varies greatly between colors
(Next to the first wing diagram) Normal flight
(Next to left side wing diagram) High-speed gliding
(Next to right side wing diagram) Braking
Thin muscle strips in the wing membrane for micro-adjustments
Cartilaginous mobile "boom" along the bottom edge of the wing allows for precise wing sail adjustment
Same cartilage controls tail fork width
The boom gets tucked into the wing "palm" when folded
Diet - primarily carnivorous, some dragons will eat literally anything tho
Notes for the face and body details:
"Balloon" on top of the snout enhances sound, allows for loud bugling
Fleshy "scales" along the neck indicate mood alongside eye color + threat or mating display
Third eye evolved in fire lizard ancestors against flying predators, now detects falling Thread
Head knobs - a dragon's personal rádio tower. Secondary head knobs guard the ears
Can turn the head some 120 degrees
Tall, inspired by the John Schoenherr drawings
(Next to the front view drawing of the head) Goofy ass face
4 digits, only forelimbs have them separated
(I'm aware the notes are pretty chaotic, I was writing them in a rush, but I'm planning to redraw the whole thing with better descriptions and more details)
Reading Pern fic and realizing that it's always queen riders or future queen rider Mary Sue type characters who here all dragons and I am now desperate for a green rider with the ability. I know in canon it's rare and has to do with bloodlines and is a women only talent that's maybe twice in a generation. We got Lessa and Ariana (? the gal in Renegades who has such a bad time she avoids dragons) and maaaaybe Moreta (it's been a long time since I read that one). But if it's going to crop up in fanfic and RP constantly, I want to see someone that everybody pins all these expectations onto and they end up riding green to the dismay of all but them. (I love greens, second best dragons to me, only topped by blues which seem to be the only dragon an ace person can ride, but the culture around them and the way their riders are treated is fascinating.) If the green rider in question was a trans man maybe no problems there or nothing would change (though that's a story I'd be interested to read in general, a trans man in canon Pern society riding green, which had to have happened at least twice in their 2k year history). But if you had someone who was being brought up and expected to ride gold and she gets a "crappy" green, the political fallout alone would be fascinating.
Man I wish I had the stamina to write longer fics. I have so many ideas for Pern stuff (most of them horrible; I am somewhat disappointed that purity culture in fandom spaces has kept people from exploring and digging down into the real canon implications that were always present in the books; I understand not wanting to do that on a personal level, but it's disappointing that a lot of writers will avoid it solely for fear of purity assholes coming after them). If Anne herself was allowed to write really shitty attempts at confronting some of this stuff (looking at you, Skies of Pern, ugh) why aren't fans allowed to tackle it honestly and better instead of just pretending it doesn't happen? But on the flip side, where's the exploration of queerness in it’s entirety from fan writers? I've seen trans women green riders and of course lots of gay men, but where my ace blue riders and lesbians and trans men and so many others be at? Aaaanyway....
This became a tangent. tleadr: it's been like 60 years of fanfic and I'm bored of the same old runaway rich girl who hears all dragons becoming a queen rider stories. XD Nothing against that sort of self indulgence, everyone gets to write that kind of wish fulfillment. :) I'm just bored and I wanna read something new but don't have the energy to write it, alas.
There are unfortunate implications in canon that are likely why Anne never wrote a weyrling-centric story, even though it would have been an excellent YA gateway drug for even more teenagers.
Those ten-year-old candidates in Dragonflight (the ones that didn't get mauled by the Early Instalment Weirdness murderhatchlings)? 4 or 5 of the ten non Ramoth eggs would have been greens. 10yo green riders when greens, as per RSR, are sexually mature in under two years.
And whose dragons are flying those now 11 or 12yo green riders' dragons? Either the 4 or 5 blue and brown riders (no bronzes) who were their classmates, or, best case scenario, the riders from the clutch before that one. Ten *years* before that one. The 20-28 year old riders from the clutch before that one.
Pern has to be so fucking loud. Because we're told that firelizards hum at births. Firelizard hatchings, dragon hatchings, human births, horse births, doesn't fucking matter. And we're given no reason to believe this was engineered out of them, given Sorka was warned of her starting labor by loud humming and dragon hatchlings watching through the window.
If there are dragonkin in the immediate area, you know when someone or thing is giving birth, and may damn well know who or what. Especially in the fucking Weyrs, where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one.
Dragonsdawn says otherwise, at least regarding the firelizards. They're described as 'never missing a birth', keeping people all over up at night- though no one can begrudge them it- and as being used to monitor how far labor is progressed by doctors and midwives since they more intense the closer the birth itself is. They're also shown doing such for livestock as well.
We don't get the same level of detail regarding how greater dragonkin handle shit, but we also don't get a lot of births described and it's exactly the sort of thing a McCaffrey would throw in and then never touch on again.
Hehe I like this. It makes sense that they would hum for dragon and human births, and then maybe a few “honorable” others like when Mnementh keens for the Ruatha watch wher.
Mostly unrelated but @dragonchoice has a great scene that acknowledges dragons freaking out when their riders are in labor. I remember a particular detail about scores worn into the rock from anxious green dragons. (I can’t remember if this comes up in canon with Sorka or Lessa but it would certainly be more of an occurrence with more female riders)
Sorka's pregnant when she Impresses Faranth, so Faranth's pretty young when Sorka gives birth near the end of DDawn. (And for all the pearl-clutching in RSR/D'Eye about not letting riders have sex too young because think of the dragonets, you really think Sean and Sorka weren't still boffing when their dragons were babies?)
But yes, Schanna's Etymonth gets quite agitated in Dragonchoice 3 when her rider's giving birth, even though it's not the first time - because, especially as a green, Etymonth doesn't remember.
Dragonchoice: Weyrling - Chapter One is well into production. It's not ready yet - we're still busy creating the puzzles, stories and artwork that will knock your socks off!
But as we now have over 500 members in our dedicated Facebook group, we wanted to mark the occasion!
So we're delighted to present the cover art for Dragonchoice: Weyrling - Chapter One, a magnificent original piece by @mhudsonillustration, whose amazing Pern fanart and original work you may well have enjoyed over the years!
And any Dragonchoice players who sign up to any level of Melissa's Patreon - starting at just $1 per month and featuring her amazing original art, including the wonderful Wildskies graphic novel - will be entered into a draw to win a custom portrait of a Dragonchoice weyrling and dragonet of their choice!
You can find all the details at https://www.dragonchoice.com/dragonchoice-weyrling.../
There should be multiple species of plants on Pern that evolved to spit water up into the air and then eat the Thread that it hits. There's real life fish who spit water to shoot insects and fruit out of the air. Pern should have threadivore plants.
Specializing in eating thread should be a whole giant fucking evolutionary niche.
I just forgot what those trees are called but they live so fucking long and they only produce seeds one time? Yeah Pern should have plants like that they literally grow for like hundreds of years and photosynthesize most of the time and then when it's a fall they eat the thread and use the boost of energy to reproduce, taking over all the spots of the plants who did not evolve to eat thread that thread killed for them oh so conveniently.
There should be literally so many species on Pern that look at threadfall and go it's free real estate
Including species that parasitize thread burrows or just straight up eat them besides the fire lizards.
Pern is the main planet in the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey, which could be epic but unfortunately is very badly written and bigoted. The first....three books I think are on the web archive (starting with Dragonflight <- link to the book if you want to borrow it).
If you're looking for cool alien plant biology unfortunately you won't find it in this series unless you make it up yourself :( Anne McCaffrey did not do any research or have even the most basic understanding of how ecosystems work.
Thread is an alien organism that falls on the planet Pern in a semi-regular cycle, and has been doing so for probably millions of years if not billion. It dissolves and "eats" any organic matter it touches on its way down, and if it lands on the ground it'll form a "burrow" that never actually gets described, but it will then spread from there in a pretty big circle "eating" plants and animals for probably a few decades (we don't actually know because the world building for this series is almost nonexistant, and when it does exist, it's constantly contradiced) before it dies.
Water kills it instantly, as does fire. Even if it's not a lot of water. Water-dwelling species on the planet eat the Thread after it's died, and one of the like, three species of land-dwelling animal (and I'm not even exaggerating) on the planet also eats it after its burrowed.
But other than that, Anne McCaffrey had no idea how ecosystems work or evolution or anything like that, so the actual canon worldbuilding is just a mess.
If you can get through the first book without metaphorically throwing it into a volcano you can try reading the rest of the series, but oh my gods be prepared for so much misogyny, ableism, and racism. And so much bad writing. I can't believe this woman won awards.
Dragonsdawn gives us the nearest thing to a timescale for how long Thread’s been falling on Pern, and it’s *recent* - they estimate ten cycles, so about 2500 years before Landing. Long enough for Thread to have eradicated most of the diversity, leaving only flora and fauna with pre-existing adaptations (tunnel-snakes living in caves, fire-lizards teleporting, plants with naturally resistant bark). Otherwise there WOULD be native species filling every niche with a variety of well-honed adaptations to Thread, when actually we have....pretty much wherries, fire-lizards and snakes.
That's assuming these characters have any idea what they're talking about, which is a benefit I am not willing to give them considering they're shocked out of their minds that plants regrow.
I also don't remember them saying that, do you happen to remember the quote? I can search the keywords lol.
More pertinently it assumes *Anne* knew what she was talking about...but in the absence of any other intel, and with Pern as we see it - hugely undiverse (and yes, Doylistically that’s because Anne didn’t want to worldbuild, who needs more than three native fauna species anyway when there are hetero monogamous romances involving dubious consent to write amirite?) and with little evidence that this is a planet that’s had eons to adapt to Thread.
Anyway, the quote is: ... "Kenjo shook his head. 'That has been ruled out.' He typed out another sequence which shifted the diagram on the screen to another projection. In a few seconds, equations overlaid the system diagram. 'Look at the odds against that,' and he pointed to the blinking nine-figure probability, 'it would have to be a cometary-type orbit, right into the system. It's not.' His long, bony fingers reset the screen and reported equations. 'I can't find a harmonic with the other planets. Ah, Captain Keroon registers the opinion that it might have been captured by Rukbat about ten of its cycles ago.'
There should be multiple species of plants on Pern that evolved to spit water up into the air and then eat the Thread that it hits. There's real life fish who spit water to shoot insects and fruit out of the air. Pern should have threadivore plants.
Specializing in eating thread should be a whole giant fucking evolutionary niche.
I just forgot what those trees are called but they live so fucking long and they only produce seeds one time? Yeah Pern should have plants like that they literally grow for like hundreds of years and photosynthesize most of the time and then when it's a fall they eat the thread and use the boost of energy to reproduce, taking over all the spots of the plants who did not evolve to eat thread that thread killed for them oh so conveniently.
There should be literally so many species on Pern that look at threadfall and go it's free real estate
Including species that parasitize thread burrows or just straight up eat them besides the fire lizards.
Pern is the main planet in the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey, which could be epic but unfortunately is very badly written and bigoted. The first....three books I think are on the web archive (starting with Dragonflight <- link to the book if you want to borrow it).
If you're looking for cool alien plant biology unfortunately you won't find it in this series unless you make it up yourself :( Anne McCaffrey did not do any research or have even the most basic understanding of how ecosystems work.
Thread is an alien organism that falls on the planet Pern in a semi-regular cycle, and has been doing so for probably millions of years if not billion. It dissolves and "eats" any organic matter it touches on its way down, and if it lands on the ground it'll form a "burrow" that never actually gets described, but it will then spread from there in a pretty big circle "eating" plants and animals for probably a few decades (we don't actually know because the world building for this series is almost nonexistant, and when it does exist, it's constantly contradiced) before it dies.
Water kills it instantly, as does fire. Even if it's not a lot of water. Water-dwelling species on the planet eat the Thread after it's died, and one of the like, three species of land-dwelling animal (and I'm not even exaggerating) on the planet also eats it after its burrowed.
But other than that, Anne McCaffrey had no idea how ecosystems work or evolution or anything like that, so the actual canon worldbuilding is just a mess.
If you can get through the first book without metaphorically throwing it into a volcano you can try reading the rest of the series, but oh my gods be prepared for so much misogyny, ableism, and racism. And so much bad writing. I can't believe this woman won awards.
Dragonsdawn gives us the nearest thing to a timescale for how long Thread’s been falling on Pern, and it’s *recent* - they estimate ten cycles, so about 2500 years before Landing. Long enough for Thread to have eradicated most of the diversity, leaving only flora and fauna with pre-existing adaptations (tunnel-snakes living in caves, fire-lizards teleporting, plants with naturally resistant bark). Otherwise there WOULD be native species filling every niche with a variety of well-honed adaptations to Thread, when actually we have....pretty much wherries, fire-lizards and snakes.
This is gonna sound wild and completely left field (and maybe a bit drunken cuz I had some wine) but after reading some of my old faves recently, I'm actually considering after all these years writing a Dragonriders of Pern fanfiction.
Idk what the conflict is or where I'd go with it. But all I know is it will involve a Brown Dragonrider and possibly an isekai because I'm just a bit predictable. But hey, it'd still be interesting to me and that's what matters
genuinely forgot t’kamen isnt the weyrleader in the dragonchoice game and when i went back to replay it and it mentioned that t’gat was in charge i was ????
no wait actually now that i think about it it’s not that i forgot it’s that like. my brain saw a name that started with t’ and autocorrected t’gat to t’kamen because i really do remember it being t’kamen
Rereading Pern as an adult is a complex experience because Anne McCaffrey filled her books with strong female characters but boy howdy does Anne McCaffrey seem to hate women. Anne McCaffrey builds a world in which the weyrs, the home of dragons and their human riders, are promiscuous and sexually uninhibited places, and then proceeded to shame any and every woman in them who is the slightest bit promiscuous as the sluttiest slut slut who ever slutted, how dare she, what a vain and stupid whore. Every female protagonist is rigidly monogamous, bitterly jealous, resentful, and suspicious of any woman who isn't sufficiently meek towards her, and full of loathing and contempt for expansive female sexual desire. Not the men: the men get around and do so with, at most, a boys-will-be-boys eye-roll and chuckle over their multiple-partner virility, but not the women. If you are a woman and you enter the sexually promiscuous weyr culture and enjoy it, you're evil, which in McCaffrey's lens means that your are both vain and stupid, the one indivisible from the other.
I'm going to out on a limb here for a moment. I've seen a lot of this in genre fiction: a particular type of woman whose beauty and vanity are so all-encompassing that it's the totality of their self. I've met plenty of vain, attractive people in my life but never once garnered the impression that, when left alone, they—like Narcissus—did nothing but stare at themselves in the mirror and think about how beautiful they are and what that does for them.
And here's the out-on-a-limb part because I wasn't Anne McCaffrey and can't speak for her but—does this come out of insecurity? Did women of a certain era—the ones who wrote protagonists who were 'strangely' pretty despite not being written as resembling classic bombshells—was this their revenge fantasy? Because it always reads as personal, like they're all thinking of Debbie Fitzluder in grade 11 who was the 'prettiest' girl in school and this was what they imagined the object of their hatred did all day instead of being the tangled mess of adolescent anxieties and fears she likely was. Sure she's hot but that's all she is, she isn't clever and resourceful and cooler to hang with like me. It always feels painfully insecure, and yet I've seen male authors run with the same theme until genre fiction becomes this long exercise in insisting that women primarily do nothing but busy themselves hating and resenting other women.
It’s supported in the text. It’s specifically stated that Kylara and Prideth are far enough away to be safe. The only reason there was a problem was because Wirenth- likely through pure chance- chose the one direction that was Bad News Bears. The text also tells us straight up, multiple times throughout the series, including in that portion, that it’s not safe to have any golds around when a gold is Rising, no matter how close they are to rising themselves (otherwise you wouldn’t have to throw all of them out of the Weyr for the afternoon). Add on, even if the risk was specifically golds close to rising, Prideth's noted to have been in that category anyway. The queen fight was nothing more than bad luck on everyone’s part.
Which makes it all the more aggravating that the narrative and characters lift up this idea that Kylara caused the fight by getting laid, when it would’ve happened no matter what she’d been doing at the time. Again, promiscuity, non-monogamy, two great evils in the Pern works that are only actively engaged in by ‘bad’ characters. Which wouldn’t be quite so glaring if Anne hadn’t made ‘non-monogamy is legal and expected and in the Weyrs part and partial to life’ a major facet of the worldbuilding. You see it in DragonsDawn even, where everyone is expected to have multiple short marriages in order to spread the genetic information around but we never actually see it because our main focus is on Good People who of course are only ever with one person ever. When we do see characters who have multiple sexual partners, it’s normally either their defining character flaw or something they had no choice in, the latter of which essentially just goes ‘well yeah but she had no choice so it doesn’t count’. Fuck, even Bitra’s first indication of evilness is that she’s sexy.
And this isn’t even touching on the recurring thing of female characters, strong or no, heroines or no, being treated in a ‘*rolls eyes* women’ manner. Including by other women. The ‘not like other girls’ is strong in this series, whether it be a male character going ‘yeah my woman is X but at least she’s not like those other women’ or a female character going ‘can you believe what those other women are like’. Or that the strong female characters often end up playing second fiddle to the men around them, at best. Fuck, even Sorka- from the time period before Pern turned sexist, is introduced to us as the second main character, first Weyrwoman of Pern- ends up being functionally Sean’s Wife, Rider of Carenath’s Mate by the end of the book.
