DragonFlight -- Colors & Eggs

Dande:
So anything else people wanted to talk about with the book?

Walle:
I wanted to talk about the entire dragon heirarchy, where green is the lowest, and then blue, and then brown, then bronze, and then gold. So there were no gold males, or something?

Dande:
No, golds were just queens.

Wvskier:
Golds are always female, bronzes are always male, blues and browns are always male, and greens are female. Though greens don't normally mate, and they can't if they breathe firestone.

Lasagna:
So they're color-coded?

Newhope:
Color-coded for your convenience, yes.

* * *

Walle:
So it takes two years for a queen dragon to mature?

Dande:
I think she was growing even faster than usual because she's so awesome.

Walle:
But then why did they send them back ten years—or Turns—if it only takes two years?

Dande:
I think that they weren't supposed to be there the whole ten years. I think they were supposed to be there for a couple years, and then come back.

Newhope:
No, no no no. It wasn't that they just wanted her to mature. They wanted to keep pumping out the eggs.

Dande:
Pumping?

[laughs]

Dande:
Yeah, okay.

Newhope:
They needed to be fully mature enough to fly, the hatchlings.

DragonFlight -- Thread & Title

Dande:
When you read about the world in the rest of the series, it definitely seems like a good place. You get to care about Pern as a world.

Wvskier:
You understand more. You understand why they're there, how they deal with their problems, and how other people, the antagonists, try to stop them, but the protagonists always pull through.

Dande:
Mm-hmm. And I like the idea—the Threads were really so dangerous. If one little Thread got in the ground it would destroy a whole area. And so everything was so important, they really had to work together so well. During that fifty years when it was a Pass, every single day, every single time they went out, was so important.

Wvskier:
Yeah, but it's just a daily job, just like a firefighter or something. They go out to fire's all the time, and it is really dangerous.

* * *

Newhope:
What do you think about the title? DragonFlight? Why do you think she chose it?

Dande:
I don't know. Because there are dragons?

Lasagna:
And they're flying?

Newhope:
It's a pretty bad title.

Walle:
I think the idea of flying between was so important, it comes to do with the main plot of what happens and allows them to save their land, so that's why I think she chose the flight part of DragonFlight.

DragonFlight -- Lessa and F’lar & Power

Dande:
When you're talking about Lessa and F'lar—I remember when I first read it, I was totally into it and everything. But when I was rereading it, I just didn't get their relationship at all.

Smiley:
Yeah, it was somewhat weird. There was this part in the middle of the novel when they were having dinner together or whatever, and—I kind of didn't get it, in the beginning. Are they together, or are they not? Do they like each other?

Walle:
It felt like they were forced together because of their dragons.

Dande:
It's amazing, because I remembered it making so much sense— laughs

Dande:
—but as I was reading it, it was like, what in the world is going on here? The characters, I got them as individual characters, but how they related to each other followed no logic whatsoever. No development at all.

Wvskier:
Their relationship is sort of tough in the beginning, because they both obviously have a station of power, and they both want to control each other. That's sort of how they come together, because they understand that with each other they can become more powerful than when they're separate.

Dande:
I mean, she's riding the golden dragon, the most important dragon in the Weyr, but the person that her dragon mates with is the leader of the Weyr? How does that make any sense? It was written in 1968, so I guess feminism wasn't important then? Maybe that was part of it. There were just a lot of things that seemed strange to me.

Walle:
I didn't understand whether Weyrwoman or Weyrleader was the higher post.

Dande:
Exactly!

Wvskier:
Weyrleader is the highest. It's sort of like, not dictator—

[laughs]

Wvskier:
—but he basically is the president.

Newhope:
It's a monarchy.

Dande:
Well, if you put it in that way, it makes more sense to me. I guess I can't really compare it to this world and what makes sense here.

DragonFlight -- Middle Muddle (Part 2)

Newhope:
I actually have some questions about the lapses in the storyline, where the action stopped and it felt like nothing would happen. It was after Fax died, and that little track right there, with the impression. After that, it kinda fell flat, there was nothing really to do.

Walle:
I think they skipped two years.

Newhope:
It was just a description of daily life, and I was like, "What am I reading?" After that, it started to pick up with the Threads, but it didn't really start until the battle of Nerat. It was flat for the entire middle of the book. I was kinda depressed.

Dande:
When I was first reading the book, I think you're right that there was no real conflict in that little bit, but I was so interested in the world and the life of this character that I just kept going through it. I wanted to find out what happened next.

Newhope:
The one conflict that you could argue would be the Hold army coming up, but that was resolved in seconds, literally. It was almost thrown in there just to have something to keep your attention. I thought that that was kind of shady story writing.

DragonFlight -- Middle Muddle (Part 1)

Walle:
I think also that who the antagonist was was sort of unclear in the middle of the book.

Newhope:
Yeah, because in the beginning it was Fax, so I thought, "Oh, he's probably the antagonist. Oh, he's dead!"

Walle:
Yeah!

[laughs]

Walle:
And then the Threads. So I was kind of confused about who the antagonist was. Who are they fighting against?

Newhope:
The entire intro of the book with Fax seemed like it could be left out.

Wvskier:
Well the point of an antagonist in this book, it's really different than most books we've probably read, because the point of antagonist always changes. First Fax, then the Lords of the Holds who don't believe in Thread, then it's not really anything after that because Thread is falling and it's just a point of emergency.

Dande:
I know we're probably going to learn this year in English about this stuff, but I think it ends up being Man vs. Nature as a theme. And not all the books are about that. This trilogy is mostly about fighting the Thread, but other books have people as the antagonists, or even disease. But even in that one, I think there were people that were the problem too. Her writing style changed, and is more what we think of as normal in the later books.

DragonFlight -- Firestone & Games

Dande:
But what things did people like about the book?

Smiley:
I liked the plot. The storyline was definitely good. I know dragons are very repetitive in fantasy, but I thought the storyline was somewhat unique.

Dande:
Yeah, and she definitely was pioneering a lot of those dragon things that we think of as so cliché now, but she was the first.

Walle:
I liked the fact that her dragons weren't usual mythological dragons. Like, with the entire eye thing, she tried to go for something different, so I liked that a lot.

Dande:
I remember when first read it being so interested by the fact that they couldn't just breathe fire, they had to eat rock and belch out fire.

Newhope:
I'm wondering how they learned that.

Dande:
Well, it's explained in later books.

Newhope:
That's what I would expect.

Wvskier:
It was genetically engineered.

* * *

Dande:
I did like the fact that she explained—there are little things in the book that explain questions I hadn't even asked yet. Like the thing about how they do the games. They never really even focus on it or talk about it, but then you get it. "Oh, they must do those game things every year to keep the dragons in shape between two Passes!"

Newhope:
Practice.

Dande:
Yeah, keep them practicing, keep them still able to fly and do maneuvers and stuff. They must have invented that just to keep them doing stuff. And then people got into it, I guess, and made it important.

Walle:
It said that some dragon died because of firestone. Does that mean that they feed them firestone in the games?

Newhope:
Yes.

Walle:
But isn't that dangerous?

Newhope:
Yes.

[laughs]

Wvskier:
It is, but it keeps them trained, even though they don't understand it at this point.

Newhope:
During a Thread attack shouldn't be the first time they try it out.

Walle:
But breathing flame at each other?

Wvskier:
That was an accident.

Walle:
Oh, okay. I was scared. I was like, "Do they want to kill each other?"

DragonFlight -- Thrown In & Style (Part 2) & Threadfall

Walle:
It said that the Thread eats or whatever, burns up, any organic thing it finds, so if there was a Threadfall in the beginning, how did anything survive at all?

Newhope:

That's what I want to know. How did this whole thing start?

Wvskier:
When humans came, they were in the middle of an Interval.

Dande:

The reason there was an ecosystem at all was because they thought it was a planet that was mostly barren, but had a few good spots. They didn't realize that there was Thread.

Walle:
But if it kills everything that's organic then the humans should have died out too.

Wvskier:

Well, they almost did. They managed to find shelter under stone. That's what the holds are made of, they're made of stone in cliff faces in the north. Thread does not go through stone.

Lasagna:
Oh, that's what they were talking about in the beginning of the book! I get it now. She's like, "They don't even make their things out of stone anymore." I'm like, "So? Why does that matter?"

Walle:

Yeah, in the beginning they spent so much time focusing on how there was so much greenery growing everywhere, and I wasn't sure what that meant because it seemed so random to notice weeds.

Dande:
I kind of like that. I didn't like that because it was confusing, but at the end of the book, once you understand it, it makes sense. She just threw you into the world, and she didn't try to talk down to you. So it's confusing but once you get it, everything falls into place, and all their little pieces of conversation have a place. 

Lasagna:

But I just don't think it's good for a book to just start out throwing you into it, all these weird names, stuff you don't get.

Wvskier:
That's what's unique about her style.