I totally agree that the dragons are what have kept Pern from fading into obscurity, but I don't think it's so much their personalities as it is just their presence? like, when I was nine I didn't give a fuck about how interestingly alien the dragons' perspective was; I was just going, "DRAGONS. DRAGONS YOU CAN RIDE AND TAKE CARE OF AND WHO WILL LOVE YOU SPECIFICALLY. I WANT ONE." not a terrific lot of nuance there.
But these dragons aren't fierce and fighty. They're kind of mellow and half-stoned all the time. "Goin' back in time 400 years? Sounds cool, Lessa! Wanna get some pizza rolls later?"
definitely, yeah. that might be why I pretty much ignored what they were actually like as sentient beings. I didn't really care if they were fierce and noble or whatever; I just wanted a big ol' cool flying friend. :P but yeah. dragons. well done, Anne McCaffrey, you found something appealing enough that people ignore your questionable worldbuilding and characterization.
I think, a little more importantly, the dragons are characters. Like, I know Ramoth's personality about as well as Lessa's. She's a force in the story and one of the players in it. There's a lot of dragon rider fiction which basically treats them as really shiny horses that don't require research, which is a hell of a lot more boring than the chillax dragons in Pern.
I mean, they can be as flat as McCaffrey's other characters, and their universal chillness makes them seem very alike sometimes, but yeah, they're characters with some measure of agency, which is definitely appealing if you're interested in dragons as anything more than window dressing.
They're terribly indulgent even just as worldbuilding. Soul bonding, fire-breathing, flight and teleportation, telepathy, telekinesis, meaningfully multicolored, European-dragon shaped, plus weird alien minds, weird alien physiology and weird sexual dynamics. Why can dragons hold their breath for fifteen minutes at a time when it only takes like 8 seconds to get anywhere on Pern? The only thing they don't do is hoard stuff. They did kidnap some "princesses". They're super indulgent as a species, even without the personalities and character roles.
The later books when things go to shit and TODD (I've never liked anyone named Todd) started messing with stuff.
I have to disagree with you a bit there. I don't think the dragons are developed much as characters, and that's a good thing. I think McCaffrey is much better at her background characters than at her main characters. Early Robinton, when he is just a sketch, is better than he is in the book where he is the star.
Yeah, that's a fair assessment. Probably why Ramoth, even when she's being a spoiled brat, is much more appealing than F'lar.
The Spirit of Todd was there. I have decided to arbitrarily blame TODD for everything I don't like in Pern books. Thanks, Todd!
I recently came up with the headcanon that because of their constant telepathy, no individual dragon was truly sentient. They are all facets of of one long-lived entity, "The Dragons of Pern". And that entity listened to a lot of Bob Marley.
Nope. Here's the thing. Anne McCaffrey managed to get some really goddam weird kinky shit into mainstream SF in 1968. In 1968, no one had yet landed on the moon and Lyndon Johnson was still the president of the United States. She managed to get that published in John W. Campbell's Analog.
