Weyr Oh Weyr - A Nicer Pern (Planning/OOC)

Where mating flights are not guaranteed to result in rape, the economic system will hopefully make more sense, and we have a fix-it rp.

First order of business:

1. I'm assuming we're making an AU, because limiting oneself to the events in canon can be frustrating even if we play in the passes not touched in the stories.
2. What parts of canon are we throwing away (like, women impressing male dragons, transwomen impressing gold dragons, etc) and what parts are we furthering?
3. Do you want to use an already existing weyr, or make up a new one?
4. Southern Continent??

So basically pile in and vociferously share what you want and we can cobble something together :P

The Big Hoard of Documents

 

I'm down with anything, though I haven't read this in a while.
I want less gender based mental linking, gold's aren't sterile from chewing Firestone, and trans characters Are A Thing

 

One thing that needs to be settled quickly: How seriously to take what happens during a mating flight? McCaffrey glosses it over and turns it into a dubcon ravishment, but she also hints at it being basically rape. The humans are pretty much taken over by their dragons in heat and do lots of things they would not otherwise do. I can see this getting beyond NSFW to NSFL for some folks. Some people like to rp that kind of stuff; some don't.

I could go either way. It's just something that I think needs to be settled and agreed upon up front.

 

I'm leaning more towards existing Weyr (because we can do pretty much anything in an AU anyways, and I'm partial to using the locations already established) but ambivalent on anything involving the Southern Continent.

I'd like to throw away most of the gender fitting to dragons-- maybe there's a strong tendency for women to impress golds (trans or cis) and men to impress bronzes (trans or cis) but it's not set in stone. I do like the rarity meter from canon though-- having a couple queens in a Weyr is sensible, but having a Weyr that's got as many queens as it does greens seems like a good way to have brutal power struggles.

(Oh, it just occured to me another reason why Kitty Ping bred firestone sterility into female dragons: population control. It's a dumb way of doing it, since if you want the greens to be sterile I'm pretty sure you could tweak the specific presentation genes to collude with the fertility genes if you want to use SF/Fantasy handwavium, but WHATEVER. Though I do wonder if blues could mate too? HM. I don't really care one way or another though, and given the size and power of golds, it seems like a tactical advantage to have them breathing fire too.)

Someone better at economy and politics than me should take a gander at the Hold/Weyr/Hall system. If we consider Holds as less "castle with surrounding serfdom" and more "small city states" and restructure it that way, it could work better. Also more Weyrs actually having their own farmers and providing their own structure, maybe even using dragons as messengers at a price to Holds/Halls-- less tithing, except during Falls where self-sufficiency is going to fail, more proper integration with society and the economy as a whole.

(And yeah, Rigs has a point. I'm okay with heat dubcon, but I know a fair few people aren't. I'm inclined to say 'remove the dubcon entirely, maybe bomp up the arousal but otherwise do nothing to the human halves' just for the easier time of making the rp less dead dove but. Again! Ambivalent for the most part.)

edit: IT CAN BE XMEN CROSSOVER IN MY DREAMS

 

I'm a bit leery of removing the dubcon element, especially after the anti campaigns in tumblr, and because so many people enjoy exploring those things. The biggest thing I would personally change would be Weyr culture around mating flights. A lot of the books go "it is a wonderful experience and you are joined and chosen and it is exhilarating" whereas reality is way more "nope". But if weyr culture is specifically prepared to instill a greater understanding and preparations for mating flights, and to avoid dubcon and noncon as much as possible, it would make it easier to have flights that don't end up with the dubcon, but rather with someone locking themselves in their room early in the flight. If someone is caught unawares by the flight, or already altered by exhaustion or alcohol or general emotional turmoil, it can provide a venue for anyone who wants to explore that in RP. In character, this provides more reason to be very aware of one's dragon state and whether they will be rising soon, to make sure their preparations are ready, and it also emphasizes why the weyrs have to live isolated from craft and hall to avoid worse fallout from mating flights, and form their own standards of sexuality separate from general hold and craft tendencies.

But again, it is open to everyone so we can decide straight out. If we keep it, then any thread with dubcon and the like will need warnings in the first post or maybe the thread title, like any rp forum.

 

I'd boost that. Make it more like being intoxicated, rather than compulsion.

Kitti Ping, iirc, made the golds unable to chew firestone because of her idea of gender roles. She basically wanted to make the golds be stay at home moms. They can't use it at all, unlike the greens. If they try, they puke up the sludge. I forget if it's Ramoth who tries or not.

 

Cool xover, but not canon. ;)

 

If the nsfw stuff is kept, which I get, I may duck out entirely for another year.
I'll just watch for the world building then.

 

Thing is, the nsfw can be kept in separate threads, all with a warning that it contains NSFW/no minors. That is pretty standard rp forum protocol, if I recall correctly! We would probably end up needing a subforum to keep our rp stuff separate, and if a thread ends up getting a bit heavy, then it will end up needing a warning in the title or in the first post. I'd have to go look at a few rp forums to refresh my memory on how they manage stuff like this.

 

Kicks the worldbuilding in the shin. Kitty why. The other would actually make sense given what we know of green clutches in fire lizards, but weird gender shit strikes again.

You're breakin my heart here.

Also yeah, if we do NSFW it probably should be in a separate thread, but it'd be good to get an idea of general consensus on the dubcon elements/how far to take it even with that in mind. Fade to black would probably be better for plot reasons too.

 

yes to:

• keeping the nsfw separate and tagged for stuff like noncon/dubcon
• removing gender/sex/sexuality restrictions
• better awareness of dragon mating cycles in the weyrs + better control over circumstances during mating flight (ie. birth control, STI control, partner choice)

no to:

• keeping the noncon/dubcon premise behind the mating flights for everyone (by which i mean, if you want it you can still have the whole MUST MATE NOW thing, if you don't then maybe its not as strong in your characters or whatever. i put this separate from the nsfw because even if its not described it will still affect the weyr culture, and for some people even that is too much to handle.)

other thoughts:

• non-canon colors? yes/no? im up for either. if we're changing some of canon anyway why not change everything we want. but we'd need to figure out what kind of "role" the extra colors would have. i'd suggest not messing with the Golds = main egg-layers and general Boss of Weyrs, though
• where do the watchweyrs fit in? because they were pretty cool too and could have a lot more value than just overgrown watchdogs if we're talking about the economics of the surrounding Holds and Halls

...and im out of ideas for now

 

I love love love watchweyrs. We get some more exploration of them in Todd's stuff, which thrilled the hell out of me. Instead of being mistakes, they were actually designed to fly thread at night. And for some reason they decided that they should pretend thread only fell during the day and not tell anyone what they were up to. :/

For other colours, if we don't want to totally drag in purple and red dragons, there could be blending of the five canon colours/variations thereof. A heavily mottled, teal-looking blue-green, for instance, or a piebald brown. I think markings, at least wing edge patterns, are canon already, so you could easily justify say a green with gold edges and/or points. Silver could come from a dilute blue, black from melanistic anything. It'd be great if there were some dragons so ambiguous between colours that nobody, not even the dragons, can reliably declare them to be one or another.

 

i...what?
why???
that is so stupid
we could have had NOCTURNAL DRAGONS being all badass at night too but noooo
why, Anne, why
why do you hate fun

*edit* just realized you prolly meant that the weyrs themselves decided to pretend Thread fell only during the day. my bad
(also anyone know how to do strikethrough text on this? nvm found it elsewhere)

oh i like these thoughts
and it fits with what canon gave us with Ruth

and i did finally have another thought: how much of canon are we keeping and how much are we fixing? because thats gonna be really confusing if everyone is on different pages

...which now that i type out i realize is the point of this thread
nevermind :|

 

okay rethinking what i was trying to say and i think i've got it:

are we changing all the things that we were unhappy with in the other thread, or are we just changing a few of the worst things and going from there?

like, is this basically a rewrite of the premise of the series or just a small tweaking after-the-fact?

are we starting from the settlers first experiencing thread and setting up the Weyr, Hold, and Hall system and fixing it from the ground up? or are we picking up somewhere in the middle of the plot and handwaving away the worst shit?

cause i know in situations like these some people want to alter as little as possible while others want to rework it from the ground up. and if we don't know who all wants how much change that's gonna make it hard to figure out how to set up the rest of the worldbuilding so everyone is at least sort of okay with it

heck, it might be a good idea to have the RP take place during the time the settlers were just setting everything up. that way each group could have access to separate ways of handling the story while keeping certain key features the same between sub-threads. like one group is more the way the canon played out with the dubcon and shit, while another set up a different way more like how it seemed we wanted to fix the story in the other thread.

would make it easier to figure out the worldbuilding anyway. like less sexism in the genetic engineering of the dragons, more watchweyrs, less sexism in general in the Halls and Holds. i mean ffs these are people who traveled between star systems, and had head geneticists who were all ladies. you'd think they'd be slightly less assholes of the same flavor we have today. especially since they were basically space hippies and outcasts anyway.

also less racism, that would be nice too. got so effing mad when read that atlas thing for Pern and it was all "oh yeah the settlers were made up of all these people who were part of groups that get shit on today but they (all the non-white-passing) all died out when they got to Pern." like wtf???

...and i got off tanget a little. woops.

i think what im trying to get at is: what is set in stone and prolly unchangeable and what's up for negotiation?

 

Hm. I... probably would not enjoy 'settlers setting everything up', partially because while I really enjoy the SF aspects of the Pern, the fantasy is what drew me to it in the first place, partially because I like doing my worldbuilding in the background, not having to actively play characters building the world.

I mean, while restructuring the Hall/Hold/Weyr system would be fun, I actually want to play in that system. You can't really work with headcanon established Harper Tales or Pernese embroirdery ft. different styles in differing Holds when none of that exists, you know? Which isn't to say that we can't break down what the settlers did and rework it from the ground up, but iirc in canon Fort Hold/Weyr was the first and the only for a long time, so inter-Hold and Weyr conflict and politics wouldn't be something we could explore during the settler period.

I was hoping for somewhere along the lines of 'regular Pass, probably no major discoveries of Space Shit' for a starting point, though if we did want to play with finding AIVAS I'm down. There've been a couple books set around those periods which have their own conflicts-- refugees, plague, political bullshit-- that can still be viable even with Pern But Better.

(And if we do bring in differently colored dragons, I'd like some idea of where they would sit in the flight ranks and/or whether they'd be common or rare throwoffs like Ruth. Mostly because my brain cries if I lose the structure I was going to rely on for working around character building. Piebald browns tho.)

 

see, this is good to know
now we have a time frame to work with

good point
which brings up another question: how many weyrs do we want to play with?
more would mean more opportunities for queen riders/weyr leaders, but also more work
less would be more cohesive but less room for leadership and variety

same
any ideas?
we'd have to choose if we wanted to go the full on New Colors route or the Subtle Mix route first, then figure out what effect the changes would have
new colors would have to mean either new castes or certain rare forms like ruth (and some agreement on rarity)
subtle would make the structure of the weyrs a bit more flexible but also less predictable

so overall: Structure Good, but what structure?

 

It could be fun to start in the established, canon 'verse, and have a weyr, maybe a new baby weyr, go 'okay hold, but what if we weren't assholes?' On that same vein, their queen could be a carrier for a colour mutation. If they suddenly started hatching out dragons with red factors, that could be the impetus to start re-evaluating their traditional systems. And once you get started with something like that, it's gonna make the other problems more obvious.

 

To summarize so far

• Not set during colonizing/settling era, or immediately after.
• Probably set in a regular pass, which probably eliminates right after a long interval.
• NSFW is kept separate, and we tag noncon/dubcon to warn anyone.
• No gender/sex/sexuality restrictions to impressing a dragon color.
• Weyr culture has adapted to dragon mating cycles to prepare and predict when a mating cycle will occur, and in turn has helped improve circumstances during mating flights to allow for birth control, STI control, and partners (I vote for some herb that is used for tea to be birth control). However, we leave it open so that if you want to, you can have the dubcon/noncon as a case of natural variation in how strongly the mating urge will affect different people.
• Start expanding the colors available, but maintain structure and roles with the new colors/variations.
• Explore watchwhers and their roles and own particular foibles.
• Reworking/restructuring the Hold, Hall, and Weyr economic system to something more logical, but still resembling canon.
• AIVAS and any such plots are on hold.

I... personally am going "UUH" at the "pretend thread only fell at day" and "whers fight it" because it would be impossible to keep secret. Literally impossible. But I sure would love to develop whers :)

I suggest we start with one weyr at first, and expand to others if we find we want to play with more ranking positions. I also like the idea that over time, subtle mixes have become established in the colours, so that we can already have those liminal spaces to play with, and then introduce the new colour mutation in a queen, and the re-evaluation of traditional systems and any cascading effects it might have :3 First we would have to agree on a base way for genetics, perhaps, to be able to calculate population proportions in the new color distributions. I also recall someone suggesting city-state structures for the large holds, rather than a more feudal lord system, which seems pretty interesting and worth exploring.

Questions:
Are we removing the "golds can't flame via genetic engineering" limit? It might not limit the role of the golden queens as they would still be crucial components of the fighting force as the only clutching dragons, and probably still fly in the lower levels of the fall to catch patches where it is less dangerous, but it does at least remove the purposeful sexism from Kitti's decision.
Do we want to add new crafthalls?
Are we going to maintain the tithe system? In a Pass it makes sense, but perhaps we can add a plan and Weyr lands that are cultivated in the interval by weyrfolk.
What other functions can dragons serve, other than messengers, cargo carrying, etc, that we want to incorporate?
Are we going to have fire lizards?

 

Well, for a lot of those, the meta question I'd ask is, do we want to make the entire setting less fucked, or do we want to play folks actively unfucking it?
What can dragons do... well, they can teleport, obvs, and there's tons of applications for 'move this thing there'. There's also telepathic communication, so riders could function as instant messengers for important people. Dragons can herd cattle similar to a helicopter (This is a very cool way of driving cattle) as well as protect herds. They can, I presume, swim pretty deep, even if they don't teleport down a ways to start, so there's oceanic resource gathering that they might not get from the dolphins. Dragons could provide manual power to drive machinery, letting larger, industrial goods production take place. They could transport cold material to hot places to allow for refrigeration beyond what being inside a stone structure provides. Construction work would go a lot faster with a dragon to lift beams or teleport materials, even letting them build with larger blocks than is otherwise practical, by just porting them into place. Really, any labour that would traditionally be performed by large livestock could be worked by dragons. It could even be good strength and endurance building expercises.

Of fucking COURSE fire lizards, is that really a question?!

 

[sits in corner, not canon familiar enough to contribute but liking where this is going]