#oh also i really didn't wanna fucking bother with working out transness in the setting so I'm ignoring it

[ranticore]

How does the gender of the rider factor into what colour dragon a person impresses in your AU? In the original books I remember girls for golds and greens, and guys for everyone else, but Senca is a bronze rider (a detail which I adore btw). Is it just that one's sexuality has to line up with their dragon's?

Also I LOOOOVE the time travel shenanigans. The closed loops are wonderfully satisfying. I'm really enjoying this AU it feels like it was made for me specifically, I hadn't realized how much I missed Pern as a setting.

Originally (in the early novels) there were no female green riders actually! The only women riders were gold riders and there was a culture of misogynist repression where these gold riders didn't even get to fly or fight Thread. It took until four or five books in before the green dragon Path was impressed by Mirrim (iirc), who just happened to be in the crowd at a hatching and Path tried to climb up into the stands to get her. After that there were more female green riders but they were by far in the minority and not treated especially well by the narrative but I mean.. neither were the male green riders either. The only thing canon ever really had to say about green dragons was 'they are dumb and horny lol anyway let's get back to the bronzes and golds', until some retcons in later books after I stopped reading so idk

Post-Path, the 'canon' rules for gender and sexuality were:

Gold: heterosexual woman

Bronze: heterosexual man OR lesbian (this was confirmed by Anne McCaffrey's son I think, basically anyone who's exclusively into women)

Brown: straight (heroic) or bisexual men

Blue: gay/bi men

Green: any other women or gay/bi men (derogatory)

In my story the only rules I wilfully broke is having an exclusively homosexual guy as a bronze rider, aand a bisexual gold rider. for the drama of it all lmaoo. But in general I like the categories, I like the idea of what is essentially a tiered hierarchy baked into society and what it means for the politics in-universe even if they have a very different form of heterosexism than we do

Also yay thank you 🧡, normally I can't stand time travel plots but I'm vibing with closed loops surprisingly.. because although the outcome is known, it's less about what the result will be and more about how the result is achieved, what information is missing, what can be discovered. I'm excited to write more of them 🧡