Pern thread is my favorite thing right now, glad it continues to blow up Literally that's such a good encapsulation of the feeling. You're fully aware of how weird it is but you deliberately slam down the five fiction books you've got as reference and crack your knuckles and bang it out anyway. I love seeing someone do that like 'good god man, it was bugging you so much you wrote a 12 page spontaneous essay on this unbelievably unimportant thing I LOVE it' You know what? Fuck it. Jaxom was ace. Fuck! I love it! I'm whiting out all the canon sex he has in my copy because fuck it!! This is better. Jaxom was a small weird ace kid who had a hard time relating to his peers about this and worried constantly about how it would be perceived. LET'S IGNORE PERN CANON GUYS it has already proven to be fun. Yeah the funny thing is McCaffery just said that awul tent peg thing to explain the homosexual green riders but when you do her the favor of trying to extend that logic to like, every other canon detail of her human/dragon sexuality scheme... you just keep finding inexplicable weird shit. Could have just had women riding female dragons, Anne. Well, both? Which is to say it's introduced in the end of the first book. The climax of the novel is Lessa learning how to go back in time to retrieve the Oldtimers so they don't choke on Thread and die. Lessa's constant anger was why I liked her, but I guess I was an angry girl myself. I related with committing a mental rage murder in like, chapter one and going from there. Seconded. The trailblazers are usually a little cringey in hindsight because they literally don't know what movement they're starting or what change they're trying to make. It was probably hard to imagine what a feminine/ist fantasy would look like in that time. I imagine. / young It looks like Marion Zimmer Bradley's Renunciates trilogy withing the Darkover 'verse that one ends in queer polyamory among sister sorceress nuns thank me later
So I set aside my attempt to re-read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* and picked up Dragonflight. A couple things: 1. Damn McCaffrey talks about cloth a lot. Tapestries, clothes, bedding, rags. Cloth, cloth, cloth! 2. McCaffrey knows a tiny amount about stone buildings--mainly that they are cold and echoey and you want cloth hangings. 3. But McCaffrey doesn't know shit about medieval production. She makes weaving a Craft and only Weavers seem to do it. That does not produce nearly enough cloth for her society. 4. Bitter old L'tol/Lytol is a Weaver at High Reaches Hold at the beginning of Dragonflight. * I keep trying to read PKD and keep failing because no matter how "awesome" his ideas are, he is a shitty writer. There, I said it and there is no unsaying it.
People wanting more worldbuilding might check out the Altas of Pern by Karen Fonstad and the Dragonlover's Guide to Pern by Jody Lyne Nye. I read it years ago, but I think the second book actually says that dragon genetic material comes in triple helix, rather than the double helix that our DNA uses. Upon further thought I'm not sure this makes any sense except as extra protection against errors when transcribing or copying, but unless Pern's really radioactive for some reason this shouldn't be necessary.
my thoughts exactly. I love unapologetically nerdy things and unapologetically nerdy people. somewhere around here I have a 4,000-word treatise on troll sex, gender, and reproduction that I never posted... oddly this makes me like Jaxom way more. like, my hazy impression of him is that he was kind of an entitled asshole, but apparently my brain has connected his assholishness to his rampant heterosexuality somehow, because thinking of him as a "small weird ace kid" has endeared him to me immensely. I'm glad you enjoy it as a headcanon too! :) you know, I haven't read that much PKD, but I gotta say I agree with you. take The Man in the High Castle, for instance. decent book, if you enjoy an inch-thick coating of racism everywhere, but terribly written. I kind of got the impression that PKD was trying to create a, like, creole with the language of his characters that grew up speaking English and Japanese? but I'm not sure if he actually was. it might have just been terrible writing. and whether it was intentional or not, it was extremely grating and got in the way of the story. also I tried to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a while back and just gave up (which is not something I do lightly). I think part of that was the writing, and also the fact that I got the distinct impression that the concepts would have been much more interesting if someone else were writing about them.
Well, lack of mutations/transcription errors might help explain how in the pluperfect hell dragons are even still alive after several hundred years of incredibly intense inbreeding.
Actually, it might also explain why firelizards apparently don't show signs of aging once they hit maturity. Or at least, in Dragonsdawn they didn't.
completely irrelevant to the current discussion, but I love this phrase. may I use it the next time I want to be extra nerdy about my emphasis?
Google is telling me that's an author/reviewer person; is that who you're talking about? also, does that phrase... actually make any sense to you? because personally I can't quite figure out what the Latin verb tense for "had been" has to do with hell, exactly.
Yup, that's him. He reviews mostly bad comic books, and uses oddball circumlocutions sometimes because he avoids most serious profanity in his videos (a lot of the most prominent people in the comedy-review genre swear a lot and he wanted to prove he could be funny without it). I use it mostly because it sounds funny, because yeah, it makes very little literal sense. :::PPP
I do kind of want to defend myself by explaining that it wasn't Lessa's anger *per se* that made me feel depressed, it was the way people kept giving her *reasons* to be angry by being jerks to her for no good reason. I had (continue to have) a low tolerance for books in which people are petty and cruel to each other on a regular basis. It just makes me feel bad. (On the flip side I ADORE books where characters are kind and generous for "no good reason," which is why I stuck with Acorna waaaay longer than I ever did with Pern, even though I've always been apeshit bananas over dragons and mostly just "eh, neat" about unicorns.)
I love Pern. I have never read a single page of Pern, but I love watching people tear apart the crazy worldbuilding, so please continue.
I'm trying to work out what I didn't like about the later books and I think it's because of the attempts to fix things in the setting broke my suspension of disbelief.
It's amazing how many sex scenes in these books I managed to block out. I literally remembered one of these--the Lessa/F'lar one in the first book, because I bought a copy of that and read it more than once. But I completely missed the dubcon orgy stuff; if I'd noticed, teenage me would have put down the book like it was on fire. For the record, I read the series in fits and starts, but I think I read all the Harper Hall books, I know I read Masterharper, and I read at least most of the main series. The only ones I'm sure I didn't read are the dolphin book and the white dragon book; both of them were bridges too far for me, somehow (not sure how, after everything else, those were what was too much, but there you go). The worldbuilding in this thread is wonderful, though. I really wish McCaffrey had been more interested in coherent economic systems, especially. Also, re: Pernese embroidery: there's gotta be some really cool motifs based on not just dragons and dragonscale, but also Thread. The descriptions in the books indicate that Threadfalls are visually stunning, and we embroider images of stuff like lightning, so...
Lessa, darling, crazy homicidal Lessa plotting and scheming and suffering, but then suddenly dragons. (I have always been slightly peeved that Lessa was never really allowed to be the vicious scheming queen she was always meant to be. No, she had to go be "tamed" by F'lar, who apparently didn't actually appreciate those qualities. Goddammit McCaffrey.) Also: I was really horrified by the entire F'nor/Brekke more or less noncon at the tender age of ten or twelve. Ditto for the one scene with Jaxom and the farmer girl. Just. WHY.
AU where Lessa gets to keep and use her initial characterization/motives instead of having them largely eclipsed by dragons ALMOST ENTIRELY UNRELATED: shit, what would happen in a dragonriders/black jewels AU? sex pollen AND soulbonding AND dragons, with a large sack of dead doves to boot. (and lbr, the landens get such a raw deal as the non-magic underclass that I would also be way into anything that explores landen/Blood culture clashes)
My Outlined Feelings for Dragonflight. A snippet: LESSA: *Has a premonition! Talks to her Only Friend in the World, the Hold watch-wher* Um. Is anything going on? ONLY FRIEND IN THE WORLD: *There is nothing wrong, except he wants cuddles.* LESSA: *is more than happy to oblige!* ONLY FRIEND: <3 LESSA: <3
My head would explode from two entire universes worth of gender essentialism, that's what would happen. Reject the gender binary!
Jesus this would be an absolute mess of instincts and social norms conflicting and interacting. I want it so bad.
