Our April Fools Day prank is luring our friends who have actual STEM degrees into an episode on what may (or may not) actually be going on, astronomically speaking, in the Rukbat system!
In this episode, we put the Oort cloud in the Kuiper belt, propose that there might be up to 30 Red Stars, and determine that Rukbat doesn’t keep its room clean.
Thank you to special guests Roxie and Nazh, both for joining us and for knowing things about orbital mechanics!
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So for some reason when I got this book when I was twelve I read this book once, decided it was sort of boring, and never picked it up again. This is in dramatic contrast to most pern books, which I have been rereading regularly for MANY consecutive years. I think I was just too attached to my ninth pass blorbos or something, but oh well.
But everybody always says Moreta is one of the best (namely@dmmdipodcast, recently) so I decided it was finally time for a reread. And wow, it really is bizarrely good. Normally I post my reread thoughts as I go, but l already finished without posting anything so here they are all at once:
I really enjoyed seeing details of Moreta’s relationships, like her past relationships with B’lerion and D’say, her affection for her son M’ray, and even Orlith’s inexplicable and inconvenient fascination with the Benden Weyrleader’s bronze, and also that it would actually be fairly acceptable for her to have an ongoing affair with Alessan, as long as he also had a wife. It’s just interesting to see examples of the complicated sexual lives that weyrwomen lead, and that it’s clear that even someone as confident in herself as Moreta could end up with a weyrleader like Sh’gall. I do sort of wish that Sh’gall hadn’t ended up being such a complete loser, because I think the way that I thought their relationship was initially being set up—he’s an excellent weyrleader but their personal relationship just really does not work—is more interesting.
Oh my god canon queer characters who aren’t written super homophobically! I love K’lon risking his life to time it to see his long distance boyfriend. I’m also interested in Berchar, the weyr healer in a relationship with a rider. Do we think queer craftspeople seek out weyr postings?
I loved the sequence where Moreta goes and visits every weyr to recruit them for the vaccine delivery mission, we get to see so many fun snippets of weyr life! Mostly I get super excited whenever there are weyrwomen with actual personalities. The ninth pass weyrwomen don’t get to be real characters because then Lessa wouldn’t get to be the specialist!
Generally speaking I feel like this book has a lot of details about weyr life (accepted queer riders, weyrwomen with real friendships that actually support each other, regular weyrleader turnover, weyrlingmasters, weyr craftspeople, etc) that I definitely KNOW and are certainly present in fan discussion but that actually aren’t on page in most of the books. And now I can say ohhh, here they are!i
I’m a little baffled by the timeline here. According to the dates given for each chapter, all the main events of the book take place in just eleven days! I really don’t think this makes sense. The text TELLS us that the disease has a 2-4 day incubation period, and that most people are dying of longer term complications like pneumonia. And yet by nine days in the implication is that the most of the planet has either died or survived the plague already, because people aren’t super worried about contagion. This just doesn’t work. Honestly I think if the timeline had just been left vague it would have been fine.
My major pacing issue is with the very end. The last three days of the story take place over a hundred ish pages, but most of that time is spent on gathering needle thorns and visiting other weyrs. Moreta’s actual “ride” is like… two pages, and it’s just a montage of her doing a few deliveries with a couple of mentions of her and Holth being tired. The fact that she and Holth die just because they’re too tired to visualize their jump properly would need a lot more buildup to feel at all satisfying. Seeing as most readers are coming to this book having read dragonsinger, they KNOW exactly how it ends before they even begin it. This means there is soooo much potential for some tragic dramatic irony! I suppose that Moreta does think hopefully of the future throughout the book, but really there could be a lot more tragedy involved. I wish that this section had been longer, and spent time with her interactions with the holders she’s saving and maybe even give her a chance to reflect on her family and her childhood in Keroon. Like, if she’s only doing this because she’s the only rider who knows the Keroon plains this well, then show her knowing the Keroon plains and the people that live there! I also wish more time had been spent on her relationship with Holth and the implications of dying on someone else’s dragon, although we do get some emotional payoff for that in the following scene where K’lon is with Leri. My memory of the ballad in dragonsinger is that it spends a lot of time on the heroism of her delivering the vaccines and I think suggests that she dies of the disease itself because she hasn’t been vaccinated. It would be interesting if by pushing herself to exhaustion, interacting with hundreds of holders, and not administering the booster dose to herself she ended up dying of exactly what she just saved so many others from!
First of all — belovèd listeners, we want to thank you all again for listening! We meant to make a post about this at the end of season 1, but we just realized neither of us actually hit post, so it’s been sitting in our drafts. Whoops!
It has been a delight to get to share our thoughts and to see you all reacting and responding — we appreciate everyone who has followed, listened, and reblogged! <3
Second of all — you heard it here first, folks: season 2 of Dragons Made Me Do It is coming!
We have been stymied first by the problem of the blooper reel episode (which, alas, we could not find a satisfactory way to make work) and then by some unruly brainweasels, but we think we’ve hit on a way to get things moving, which is by Setting Some (Tentative) Deadlines. We’re hoping to have the first episode ready for the beginning of March — things are Moving again, slowly but surely. :-)
Season 2 will move at a more leisurely pace, but we have plenty of ideas still, from puzzling through McCaffrey’s scientific world-building to exploring the Fake Good Versions of Pern That Exist Only in Our Heads to looking more closely at some individual pieces of post-Pern media in order to grapple with the ongoing influence of the series.
If you have other thoughts about Pern-adjacent content that you think would be interesting, we’d love to hear about it!
Otherwise, keep your eyes on this page and on our website, and we’ll be back soon!
In this episode we look at Mercedes Lackey's Arrows of the Queen trilogy through the lens of Pern, discuss whether Talia is just Menolly in a trenchcoat, celebrate lesbians, and are perturbed by the amount of mind-wiping going on in Valdemar.
Transcript is available on our website (please do check it out; it includes a note about some crucial genre context we neglected to address when discussing Valdemar’s relationship to Pern)!
In this episode, we take it all the way back to the beginning, contemplate an ending, and address the burning question: why has no one ever tried to fight Toric with a knife?
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Bonus Episode #14: A Literary History of Dragon(rider)s
In this bonus episode, we discuss the origins and enormous influence of Pern from Beowulf to Baldur’s Gate 3, try to pin down McCaffrey’s specific contributions to the genre, ponder the logical next step from mating flights, and conclude that maybe recommending Pern for kids is fine, actually — it’s adults who are the problem.
In this episode, we take on Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing through the lens of Pern, consider the militarization of dragons, dig into the narrative problem of dragon horniness, and — to be fair — give Yarros credit where it’s due.
