Apparently a really strong one? I wouldn't count on it, to be honest, from seeing how fast and easy it is for the dragons to overtake their humans in that part. You'd have to be really fast in shutting yourself in a room? I don't know. I'd like that as an option, with perhaps a back up partner if you don't manage it? Hard to know :/ I'd like it for there to be options, but the flights give the impression of "even the best laid plans go into disarray". We actually do get reasons for the fostering in several of the books. Groghe mentions that it keeps the sons on their toes and learning from different holds how to manage and lead for when one of them inherits. The Lord Holders ensured that the fosterlings got educated, in turn for their own children who are fostered out for a few years to get trained and gain experience. In turn, the fosterlings meet a wider circle of their peers, which increases the opportunity for friendships or at least for collaboration, and gives opportunities to find appropriate spouses. Similarly, the girls generally also need to learn several skills and management, as can be seen in Nerilka's story where the Lady Holder has many responsibilities within the hold and in ensuring it works smoothly, from resource allocation, to domestic affairs (which is harder than we give it credit for. The fostering also gives the Lord Holders who vote in the conclave the opportunity to see first hand the candidates for succession and form their own opinions on who is more suitable for the role when succession comes up.
I think it is the weyr that fosters out for genetic diversity, especially since they can't always be sure of who the father is. This comes up in Moreta.
i never did get why queens went sterile from that. i distinctly remember the queen firelizard in the Menolly books breathing fire to protect her eggs from Thread. the implication being that it didn't make her sterile otherwise that would have been her last clutch of eggs. which, considering how they flew off into it anyway when they hatched, made it a dumb idea if it WAS her last a-fucking-men to that it prolly also cut down on inter-hold disputes, or at least stopped it from turning into outright war. its a bad idea to attack someone who's raising your kids. especially when it's where you can't get to them before they can. at least that was a real-world thing.
basically the reason behind most of the problems we've identified in this thread well that and the...questionable ideas she had on sex and gender #woops forgot one
This is all very upper class and for older children. What reason was there for Piemur--a canonically pre-adolescent child of a beast-herder--to have been fostered? Oh, that's right, Anne McCaffrey! The working class exists only to provide background, labor, and local color. <<MARXISM INTENSIFIES>>
you're totally right, fire lizard queens can chew firestone and produce flame. I suspect Kitty Ping (the genetic engineer chiefly responsible for turning fire lizards into dragons) deliberately prevented dragon queens from being able to chew firestone, because this is the same lady who thought it was a good idea to have only queens bond with women because ~women should stay home and raise families instead of fighting.~ gendered bonding is also not a trait fire lizards exhibit. thanks, Kitty Ping. :/ edit: an AU where somebody who wasn't wildly sexist created dragons would fix so many problems, tbh.
Wait, when was Piemur fostered? He got sent to the Harper Hall as an apprentice since he had the talent, but not as a foster?
He does reference his foster mother during the Gather I think? She would let him play for money and keep some of his earnings, iirc.
Hmm I googled it and found the throwaway references to his foster mother, and confirmed that this was before the Harper Hall. I have no idea. Perhaps sometimes a mother dies, and if her husband doesn't remarry, the kids might get fostered/looked after by one of the other women in the hold? I frankly feel like fostering for necessity probably happens at the lower social classes, because everyone relies on everyone's effort to get the harvest in, etc.
It's hard to tell, especially in an earlier book like this. It seems to me that McCaffrey's worldbuilding is more intuitive than systematic, and she tossed things in that sounded neat without thinking them through and then ended up retconning them.
This is definitely the case. There are so many things in Dragonflight that get retconned as she develops the series, it is a bit ridiculous. Still, it's fun to think about how it would all work. Ok folks, I officially want to rp. Who wants to have a DroP RP in the forums?
I am grinning foolishly in excitement at this. I'll get to making a thread for planning in a bit, when my dogs are fed and walked.
