DragonFlight -- Politics (Part 1)

Dande:
Something I really liked, and I just want to know if anybody is thinking about this too, is the way she described the political systems of Pern, how they interact and stuff. It really made sense to me. If for four hundred years, people had to support these dragons who did nothing, I could really understand how they could end up not caring about them anymore. They used to care about them so much they would die for them and they had these rules to help them, but over time they could grow to resent them. It really made sense to me, and I loved that, because it's such an interesting idea, because you never see anything like that in real life. It was totally unique, out of her head, but it makes sense.

Wvskier:
I think that's also really cool because they actually lasted four hundred years with these people believing they are something, even though two hundred years have already gone by, no Thread has fallen. There's this huge break, Long Interval I think it's called? But what's really cool about this Thread is that in the first book, it's like a cliffhanger, what is going to happen now? And it's just interesting how the plot progresses and how Thread is always in the background, but more important things always seem to come up.

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Walle:
You mentioned about the politcal system? There was a part of that that I didn't get. Technically, the job of the dragonriders was to protect the land from Thread, but the Thread came every two hundred years, so in the middle, the Weyrpeople demanded food from the Holds to sustain themselves, yet they did nothing? I don't get it.

Dande:
I think they were more happy to do that when it was just two hundred years and they remembered how bad the Thread was. The dragons had to be kept alive, and the generations had to be kept going, between that, and they kept having to have that many dragons or else when the Thread would come they wouldn't have enough dragons. So they probably didn't have to give every scrap and morsel they could to the Weyr, because the Weyr didn't need to be at such high capacity and deal with injuries and all that stuff, but they needed to keep feeding the dragons, and keep people living in the Weyr, and keep the knowledge and the skills up or else they would be lost for the next time. So they had to give the food, even though they'd never see anything good out of it, but so their great-grandchildren could live through the Pass.