#pern

[ranticore]

I wanted to keep drawing some pern dragon stuff because I'm now writing a full AU set in weyr but I didn't want to put this stuff on my main blog or patreon due to it being basically for my own reference, though i felt others would like it too! so here is My Take On Dragon Wings By Type...

It's no secret I love drawing bird wings and prefer them a lot over traditional dragon wings. Growing up, I read the pern books featuring cover art of dragonfly-like wings with lots of little translucent panels, which I always loved. So I thought I'd try to nail down some wing shapes & structures by blending those two things i like together. I am aware dragons fly by telekinesis but I prefer a more realistic type of creature design so I will be choosing to ignore that fact. I do not care about strict canon compliance but I do like to keep some of that framework there as well, for fun.

The wing is made up of three main sails, as well as a propatagium sail (in front of the elbow). They are relatively polymorphic and can expand or contract to an extent to change the shape of the wing in response to flight demands, like the wing of an airliner. The trailing edge can expand and the slots between the spars of the 1st wingsail can deepen or become shallower (where those are a feature). The main structural matrix is opaque, while the membranous 'sails' are translucent and let light through like stained glass. These are a bilayer of membrane with air sandwiched between, which forms part of the air sac & respiratory system.

It makes sense for the original engineers of dragons to diversify dragon wing types by colour so that when fighting Thread, there's a dragon for every conceivable aerial job.

[individual descriptions under the cut]

Queens have the longest wings, though the largest bronzes can rival them for surface area. Gold wings are high endurance - a queen can fly further than any other dragon in active level flight, leaving even the swiftest bronzes behind if they can't muster up the energy reserves to catch her. She is an effective flier at all elevations and can pass very low over terrain without issue as well; she is an expert at taking advantage of the ground effect, where extra lift is generated within one half of a wingspan above land. This way, she can pass low below the main wings fighting Thread to catch any stragglers without expending too much energy. However, she is not very agile and may need a bit of a run-up or cliff-edge to get airborne.

Bronzes are suited for command positions during Threadfall, rising highest and maintaining that altitude effortlessly by soaring on thermals. From this vantage point they can easily survey the wings of riders below and make tactical decisions to direct the tide of battle. They have the size and stamina to chase queens, but might find it difficult to keep up on the flat, so they continually select for fitter hatchlings as only the best manage to mate. It takes a very clever and agile bronze to catch a green, if they are so inclined.

Browns are swift, highly agile, and the fastest vertical fliers, ideal for diving through the Thread mass from top to bottom while the other types pass horizontally. During earlier Passes, browns were capable of using their speed to catch queens, but as queen & bronze endurance gradually increased, browns struggle to keep up if they haven't managed to immediately catch their mate in the starting scrum, which is unlikely due to the bulkier bronze dragons being able to shove the browns aside.

Blues are fast on the flat and nicely manoeuvrable, with enough endurance to last a full Threadfall. Good all-rounders with a characteristic vertical take-off, they work best in the horizontal plane in battle but really they can do a little bit of everything. They often beat browns to catch greens, being very precise in flight and almost as manoeuvrable as their green mates.

Greens make up for their low stamina with their extreme manoeuvrability. Their short and elliptical wings let them turn on a dime, hover, and even fly backwards if they are sufficiently skilled. They have the fastest wingbeats, flying with a distinct thrumming sound. Of all the types they are least likely to be hit by a stray Thread, but they tire easily on the flat and have no soaring ability at all, often tapping out midway through battle in favour of replacements. In battle, greens excel at catching odd and skewed clumps of Thread that don't fall as predicted, or ones that are missed by the other riders. Green mating flights are a whole different beast to gold mating flights, where extreme aerial acrobatics are favoured instead of endurance and altitude, and these flights may be over within seconds. You need to be able to withstand a Lot of G-force to be a green rider.

[mzminola]

Dragonflight was published in 1968.

The Environmental Protection Agency, tasked with such things as making rivers in the US stop catching on fire, clearing up smog, and so on, was not formed until 1970, and they had a lot of work ahead of them.

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which finally let women open lines of credit in their own name, was passed in 1974.

Roe v. Wade was 1973.

Pern is a fascinating look at how speculative fiction is shaped, both in the constraints and rebellions, of the time it's written.

[lilystrations]

"Weyr of the White" Loosely inspired by one of my favorite book series' growing up, the Dragonriders of Pern by Anne (And now Todd) McCaffrey. If you're not familiar, I can't possibly recommend it enough for a unique dash of 90s/00s sci-fi/fantasy. 

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern Cover Art by Michael Whelan

[razzek]

Reading Pern fic and realizing that it's always queen riders or future queen rider Mary Sue type characters who here all dragons and I am now desperate for a green rider with the ability. I know in canon it's rare and has to do with bloodlines and is a women only talent that's maybe twice in a generation. We got Lessa and Ariana (? the gal in Renegades who has such a bad time she avoids dragons) and maaaaybe Moreta (it's been a long time since I read that one). But if it's going to crop up in fanfic and RP constantly, I want to see someone that everybody pins all these expectations onto and they end up riding green to the dismay of all but them. (I love greens, second best dragons to me, only topped by blues which seem to be the only dragon an ace person can ride, but the culture around them and the way their riders are treated is fascinating.) If the green rider in question was a trans man maybe no problems there or nothing would change (though that's a story I'd be interested to read in general, a trans man in canon Pern society riding green, which had to have happened at least twice in their 2k year history). But if you had someone who was being brought up and expected to ride gold and she gets a "crappy" green, the political fallout alone would be fascinating.

Man I wish I had the stamina to write longer fics. I have so many ideas for Pern stuff (most of them horrible; I am somewhat disappointed that purity culture in fandom spaces has kept people from exploring and digging down into the real canon implications that were always present in the books; I understand not wanting to do that on a personal level, but it's disappointing that a lot of writers will avoid it solely for fear of purity assholes coming after them). If Anne herself was allowed to write really shitty attempts at confronting some of this stuff (looking at you, Skies of Pern, ugh) why aren't fans allowed to tackle it honestly and better instead of just pretending it doesn't happen? But on the flip side, where's the exploration of queerness in it’s entirety from fan writers? I've seen trans women green riders and of course lots of gay men, but where my ace blue riders and lesbians and trans men and so many others be at? Aaaanyway....

This became a tangent. tleadr: it's been like 60 years of fanfic and I'm bored of the same old runaway rich girl who hears all dragons becoming a queen rider stories. XD Nothing against that sort of self indulgence, everyone gets to write that kind of wish fulfillment. :) I'm just bored and I wanna read something new but don't have the energy to write it, alas.

[auntieoneandauntietwo]

When a Pern fan procrastinates…

8th/9th pass Weyr leadership

Between the red lines every cell is one year, otherwise they’re just roughly proportional. I have no clue who this helps, but I had fun with it!

[grirnoires]

harperhall protagonists my darlings

[faundlydreaming]

Take this sketchadoodle of Fi and Astarion as dragonriders from the Dragonriders of Pern series. I have no idea how this crack crossover came to be but here we are lol. Just one of those 1am thoughts that couldn't get out of my head until I drew it.

For those who know the series: If we go by the original dragon ranking system (wiggle room for Fi being a she/they rider) of the books, I feel that Astarion suits a green very well while Fi would suit a blue. For the green, I feel her name would be Lestath because I am "clever" :B For the blue, I couldn't think of a name for him that suits Fi, so he is unnamed. If anyone has any ideas feel free to tell me! As long as it ends in "th", as that is what the series' naming conventions are. I love this series' worldbuilding and I have frequently in the past rp'd in various forums with my personal riders and their dragons, mostly semi-canon to non-canon. Where my Pern peeps at? D: Also, I love my bestie. Never has anything been so accurate:

Some extra lineart details under the cut!

[dksartz]

Waiting room doodles pages, Pernese dragons (and a Rider).

[murderbotwritingprompts]

A crossover with The Dragonriders of Pern writing prompt.

Murderbot somehow winds up in a crashing escape pod above a planet no one has ever recorded contact with, and crash lands, with no idea how it's going to get back into space, and no idea where its humans have gotten to in all the chaos before the crash.

It loses consciousness during the impact with the ground, and regains awareness to find itself in a cave, surrounded by humans, which is weird enough on its own, because this planet was supposedly never colonized. But it gets weirder. Because there are also dragons. Telepathic dragons that are crowding its feed and it can't get them to shut up. It can hear every conversation every one of them is having, and they can all apparently hear it too.

And.

Its escape pod apparently crashed near the cave system where these humans and dragons live while a nest was hatching, and one of the baby dragons wandered all the way out of "the hatching grounds" and walked all the way to its crashed lifepod, and demanded that the humans and other dragons rescue it.

This baby dragon has bronze scales, which is apparently significant, and has apparently named herself Tilmuth. And for some reason all the humans are being being hostile about her pronouns, even though they don't blink twice at a supposed infant not only naming herself, but being able to speak in full sentences just hours after hatching.

This, apparently, is perfectly normal. But a bronze dragon using she/her pronouns is apparently crossing the line.

The humans are quickly becoming more and more agitated about this fact, and are blaming Murderbot, insisting it’s somehow “corrupted” the baby dragon, despite Tilmuth’s instance otherwise, and the very loud agreement of her mother, who is the queen of the dragons in these caves.

But despite many of the dragons siding with Tilmuth and a bewildered Murderbot, the humans keep insisting that Murderbot’s committed some sort of crime that it, and the baby dragon, need to be killed for.

Murderbot barely has time to process the fact that Tilmuth is psychically linked with it even more than the rest of the dragons are before things come to a very abrupt head when one of the humans, who has an older bronze dragon as a partner, attacks Tilmuth, slicing one of her fragile wings clean through the membrane, and in the ensuing chaos of screaming and battling dragons and humans, Murderbot has no choice but to grab her and run as fast and as far as it can, even though it was seriously damaged in the crash and hasn’t been able to receive any repairs besides a woefully basic splint for its broken arm, and its vision constantly fading out with flashes of agony from shrapnel literally bouncing around inside its head.

Right when Murderbot thinks they won’t be able to get away alive, the whole world suddenly goes as black and cold as space, and the next thing it knows, it’s falling facedown onto black sands and almost crushing Tilmuth under it, with a grey ocean behind them, stormclouds swirling above, and a wall of alien, and most likely hostile vegetation in front of it.

Lost on an alien planet with no company except this strange baby dragon that is apparently ravenous and constantly on the verge of starvation, Murderbot has to figure out how to keep them both alive, and figure out where the hell its humans are and how to get back to them, and get all of them, Tilmuth included, off the planet alive.

[sholindreantales]

If you grew up on Tamora Pierce’s amazing characters, Christopher Paolini’s epic stakes, or Anne McCaffrey’s dragonriders and their expanded world—you might enjoy Lecarian’s Fang. It is the first book set in the fantasy world of Sholindrea, which will only get bigger with each book and every new cast of characters. Lecarian’s Fang features shapeshifters, elves, dragons, necromancers, and more, with multiple cultures and magic systems, plus inner conflicts and subplots that deepen the epic fantasy conflicts.

[artofgeist]

Finally finished her! Get a copy here !

[vesperstardust]

My best boy (he flew back to get ready for bed)

[blistermonster]

Been meaning to get back into the Pern series for awhile now! I want to do more fanart!

[dukeofriven]

Rereading Pern as an adult is a complex experience because Anne McCaffrey filled her books with strong female characters but boy howdy does Anne McCaffrey seem to hate women. Anne McCaffrey builds a world in which the weyrs, the home of dragons and their human riders, are promiscuous and sexually uninhibited places, and then proceeded to shame any and every woman in them who is the slightest bit promiscuous as the sluttiest slut slut who ever slutted, how dare she, what a vain and stupid whore. Every female protagonist is rigidly monogamous, bitterly jealous, resentful, and suspicious of any woman who isn't sufficiently meek towards her, and full of loathing and contempt for expansive female sexual desire. Not the men: the men get around and do so with, at most, a boys-will-be-boys eye-roll and chuckle over their multiple-partner virility, but not the women. If you are a woman and you enter the sexually promiscuous weyr culture and enjoy it, you're evil, which in McCaffrey's lens means that your are both vain and stupid, the one indivisible from the other. I'm going to out on a limb here for a moment. I've seen a lot of this in genre fiction: a particular type of woman whose beauty and vanity are so all-encompassing that it's the totality of their self. I've met plenty of vain, attractive people in my life but never once garnered the impression that, when left alone, they—like Narcissus—did nothing but stare at themselves in the mirror and think about how beautiful they are and what that does for them. And here's the out-on-a-limb part because I wasn't Anne McCaffrey and can't speak for her but—does this come out of insecurity? Did women of a certain era—the ones who wrote protagonists who were 'strangely' pretty despite not being written as resembling classic bombshells—was this their revenge fantasy? Because it always reads as personal, like they're all thinking of Debbie Fitzluder in grade 11 who was the 'prettiest' girl in school and this was what they imagined the object of their hatred did all day instead of being the tangled mess of adolescent anxieties and fears she likely was. Sure she's hot but that's all she is, she isn't clever and resourceful and cooler to hang with like me. It always feels painfully insecure, and yet I've seen male authors run with the same theme until genre fiction becomes this long exercise in insisting that women primarily do nothing but busy themselves hating and resenting other women.