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.

* * *

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.

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?"