Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #13: “The Second Weyr” (1993)

Lleu: And welcome to Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but the only one by us.

equila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and this was the story that my tween self really fixated on.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, “The Second Weyr,” the last story chronologically[1] in Chronicles of Pern: First Fall, takes place about 30 years after the initial landing on Pern and about 20 years after they have moved to the Northern Continent, and it involves, as the title might suggest, the founding of the second and, in fact, third and fourth Weyrs, as the dragonriders become too populous and crowd out of Fort Weyr and also as the colonists spread out across Pern, in a way that means having multiple Weyrs also spread across the Northern Continent is helpful. The last remnants of the Southern settlement are now coming north — the Ierne Islanders — and they end up wanting to settle on the east coast. We’ve got Ongola on the west coast with the newly named Tillek Hold. We have Telgar being settled towards the north. It’s time. We focus in on Torene Ostrovsky, who is a gold dragonrider, and she is really invested in this eastern Weyr possibility. Her parents are both parents are mining surveyors, so she understands the possibilities there. She’s taken a look. She is thrilled to learn that Sean has officially decided it’s time, and she ends up getting sent to the now named Benden Weyr. And the decision has been made that the new Weyrwoman and Weyrleader will be determined by chance: it will be whichever dragon first rises to mate, and that turns out to be Torene’s dragon. The dragonrider whose dragon flies Alaranth is Sean and Sorka’s son, who’s technically named “Michael,” but called “M’hall” at this point, and it turns out, in a shocking twist ending, that he has been in love with her for years and pining from afar, so we get the tidy happy ending. They are going to be the Weyrleader and Weyrwoman of Benden Weyr, and all has been laid in place for the next 2,500 years or so of Pernese history.

Lleu: I was pleasantly surprised by this, in part because I had been primed to expect more stalking than I feel like we see on the page. I think, all things considered, this is probably my favorite story in Chronicles of Pern: First Fall.

Tequila Mockingbird: My 14-year-old self would be thrilled to hear that. I’m very fond of it; I can’t tell how much of that is nostalgia and how much of that is a more rational evaluation, but I think Torene is charming, it’s fun to see all these dragonriders, and what I do think this story is really about is showing us Weyr culture beginning to establish itself: having us get to know a bunch of dragonriders, see that very first generation of dragonriders passing the torch to a new generation, a younger generation, some of whom were born on Pern, although still I think most of these dragonriders in Torene’s cohort were very young children when they were first came to Pern. But M’hall was born there. And also, of course, Benden has to be the specialest Weyr and the specialest Hold, so we get the little groundwork laid of, “Wow, it’s just better than all the other Weyrs. And those two caverns are just absolutely perfect. And there’s so many natural caves for weyrs!”

Lleu: Yeah, and of course that Benden is where the last bold pioneers who were holding out on the Southern Continent have finally deigned to come north, and Benden is where they end up. So it’s just, like, okay, we have the story about how Ruatha is the specialest. Now we get the story about how Bendon is also the specialest.

Tequila Mockingbird: They do also name drop specifically that the wine is coming.

Tequila Mockingbird: They have these south-facing slopes that Rene Mallibeau has been searching for and the shale that he needs for the perfect wine.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it will be exactly the same, and everyone will like it best. Ugh. They even — I don’t think it’s actually about that, but there is a little moment where they’re like, “Ugh, ale is kind of mid and quikal sucks.” Just wait — the wine is coming, baby!

Lleu: Which is, again: no one else could make wine anywhere else previously? We know from the book that there is wine at wine production at Tillek.

Tequila Mockingbird: The Weyr culture that we see getting established is in some ways, as we pointed out with previous stories in this, a little too tidily aligned with what we get in the Ninth Pass. I don’t think we need to have the first headwoman show up and be like, “Ah, yes, I’m just naturally interested in the domestic management of the Weyr.” Okay. That could have evolved gradually. We don’t need it to be right now, but okay, sure. If you insist.

Lleu: Yeah. At the very least, it seems like it’s become a Position at this point, in a way that didn’t need to be the case, even if it was clear that there’s already someone who’s particularly interested in and good at this, so we delegate a lot of the things to her.

Tequila Mockingbird: There are just natural stage managers. They will rise to the occasion. But particularly, we are seeing the rise in the distinction between Weyr and Hold culture and the way that dragonriders clearly feel that Weyr culture is better. We get a few little catty comments about, like, “Ugh, at least I’m not living in a Hold.” And “There’s no reason we should have to crowd in the way Holders do.”

Lleu: As with everything on Pearne, it all comes back to one guy, and the one guy is Sean, and Sean thinks dragons are the greatest things that ever lived and that everyone else should regard them as such also, and so any privilege he can get, he’ll take. You could make a case for, like, yes, it’s true that the dragonriders don’t really have time for agricultural labor. That’s factually accurate. But as we’ve discussed in the past and will discuss again in the future, undoubtedly, there are plenty of things that dragons and dragonriders could do that are not agricultural labor and that would not be like excessively taxing — to ferry some people back and forth periodically, the way we see them do in the Ninth Pass. That’s not hard work.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s clearly not about effort. It’s about dignity, right? ’Cause there’s the scene where the dragons start helping to dig out the tunnel at Benden Weyr and David Catarel is like, “No! They can’t!”

Lleu: “‘You're fighting dragons, not digging dragons,’ he said, scowling at his own Polenth. ‘Torene, Uloa, Jean, speak to your queens.’”

Lleu: The thing about this that bugs me is that everyone else in the narrative treats it as if it is natural and entirely “Of course, this just makes sense!” when it’s so obviously just a Sean thing. And the only thing that other people are internalizing through association with Sean, and the only indication that we get of anyone like interrogating this or pushing back on it, is Paul Benden telling Tillek over the radio in “The Dolphins’ Bell,” “And can you believe it? They wanted to take care of their dragons before they would even come talk to me!” Which makes it seem like it’s Paul Benden being unreasonable, because of course they should take care of their dragons first. It’s all just very silly.

Tequila Mockingbird: I have two thoughts for this. The first being: why is Sean less obnoxious to me than F’lar? Is it just that I had a crush on him when I was 13? Is he objectively as much of a twerp as F’lar is?

Lleu: Hm. That’s a good question, ’cause I also feel more positively about Sean than I do about F’lar.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s the similar sort of autocrat obsessed with dragons

Tequila Mockingbird: I do think it does help to have seen Sean from a child and to know that a lot of Sean’s like prickliness is that he was deeply othered and doesn’t get along well with people ’cause he doesn’t know how to get along well with people and a lot of that was a defensive posture from this little 12-year-old who didn’t really understand how to make friends and was dumped on this new planet. So I feel like maybe some of that gives us more empathy for the man he grows to be, where we’re presented with F’lar as this authoritative force that Lessa is attempting to kind of circumvent or thwart

Lleu: Yeah. The one thing that like the one thing that’s supposed to humanize F’lar in Dragonflight is when he goes back and looks down at himself on the night of the first mating flight after F’lon died. But the way that it’s framed, because it’s about the mating flight and not about his grief at having lost his father, it comes off as…

Lleu: “Ugh; oh, my god. Even when he was a 17-year-old he was this power hungry little fascist.” Instead of coming off as, “Ah, yes, there was this poor grieving child who couldn’t do anything to save the community he cares so much about,” which is clearly how it’s meant to be read.

Tequila Mockingbird: He clearly doesn’t always agree with her, he does not defer to her opinion. I don’t think he automatically expects her to always agree with him, but she generally does. So some of it is, she’s not pushing back against him in the way that Lessa pushes back against F’lar. They are generally more harmonious. And Sorka’s attitude is mostly like, “Yeah, Sean is right. And I’m going to work to help him achieve his goals.” But I also think that, if Sorka felt strongly about something, Sean would listen, and he is definitely invested in her feeling happy, safe, secure, and capable, in a way that I don’t know that F’lar is invested in Lessa. But also, Lessa’s more of a chainsaw of a person. I don’t think anyone needs to worry about Lessa’s self-esteem.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. McCaffrey clearly thinks that that’s cute, and…I don't.

Lleu: Yeah. It pairs with the other thing that got me here, which is: what is up with the boots!? In “The Ford of Red Hanrahan,” we get Red Hanrahan flopping into bed and sticking his legs out so that his wife, Mairi, can remove his boots for him. “Long habit had accustomed him to this. He didn’t even think about it.”[2] And it’s like, okay, that’s a little weird, but sure. But then, here, Sean does the exact same thing with Sorka, and I’m like, where is this coming from? Why this so specific weird behavior? It would be one thing if Sean were Red’s son, then I’d be like, okay, I guess he learned it from his father…?

Tequila Mockingbird: This is a universal male behavior, Lleu. You don’t do this?

Lleu: It’s just so obviously a little patriarchal power trip, and it passes completely without comment, in a way that makes me think that McCaffrey was not conscious that that was what it was and thought it was just a cute little thing.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the second thing that I think it reflects is a fundamental disrespect for labor, that I do think ties into the feudalism of it all, this idea that carrying things or digging is less honorable or less worthy of praise than fighting things and destroying things.

Tequila Mockingbird: “You’re a knight. You have a dragon. You shouldn’t be doing manual labor.” And I think there is a direct through-line there to drudges.

Tequila Mockingbird: This idea of, “Dragonriders obviously shouldn’t be doing manual labor, and Lord Holders obviously shouldn’t be doing manual labor, and skilled craftspeople shouldn’t be doing manual labor…” Who does that fucking leave?

Tequila Mockingbird: We clearly need an entire community of unfree laborers to do all of this shit that's beneath us.

Lleu: Yeah, that really seems like the trajectory. I mean, it’s interesting that you mentioned the skilled craftspeople, because already we can see the beginnings of the Craft system, even though we know — because we, by which I mean I, have read Dragonseye — that it will not be formally established for another 200 years,. But in that, as we saw in “The Ford of Red Hanrahan,” the medics all have taken over this little corner of the caves next to the main Fort Hold complex, so that they’re a little closer to the Weyr, also, and, likewise, Torene’s parents are professionals and seemed to be a little higher status, maybe.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because you do have a limited number of skilled craftspeople, and apparently people are fucking dying like flies with the plague, because they can’t set up any hygiene in Fort Hold. It is highly valuable to have a skilled trade. You learn that from your parents, and if you Impress a dragon, your parents are like, “Well, fuck, you know, Fulmar Stone, jr.” It’s like, “I trained this kid as a mechanic and now he’s off to be a dragonrider. Okay; I guess he has to be the mechanic for the dragonriders. Shit.” So I think that is laying the groundwork for the Craft system as well. So we’re seeing the way Weyr culture is established. We do also have some questions about the way Weyr culture is establishing itself, such as, are they getting paid? Is anyone getting paid? We’ve never had currency.

Lleu: Red in “The Ford of Red Hanrahan” specifically says he’d used “the last of his credits” on this, which presumably is his, sort of, access to shared storage —

Lleu: — but functionally, this is a resource that he is hoarding to use in exchange for other things.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause everyone has rights to a certain amount of the communally-held stores, and that was deliberately planned like at the very beginning, everyone just has completely free access and then eventually as they get more established, and as the stores dwindle, it starts to be in some way allocated based on, presumably, your initial stake and relative to your stake.

Tequila Mockingbird: But we don’t have marks yet, and that doesn’t seem to transfer in any way to dragonriders getting a stipend, because they’re being fed by the Holds.

Lleu: Right. So my question is, how does Lessa pay for the dress that she commissions from Masterweaver Zerg in the Ninth Pass? Is it accepted that any dragonrider can request a reasonable bespoke luxury good production as tithe? Or does the Weyr have access to currency that it is using to pay for this?

Lleu: And I think that the groundwork for that question is laid here because tithing is becoming formalized here for real. Already at the end of “The Ford of Red Hanrahan,” Red is like, “Yeah, and obviously we will tithe directly to the Weyr.” It’s like, okay, Irish Catholic. And then this seems to be the time when it ceases to be sort of informally, “Yeah, of course the Holds provide some food to the Weyrs” and becomes formally like a formal, almost contractual, arrangement that Benden Hold will provide goods and services to Benden Weyr in exchange for the service of protection from Threadfall.

Tequila Mockingbird: Some of that comes with the decentralization. Previously, everyone was in Fort Hold, everyone was in Fort Weyr, and so there were supplies—

Tequila Mockingbird: — right, and now as they’re spreading out across the continent, it's like, okay, Tillek Hold and High Reaches Weyr and Boll Hold is going to — because you’re thinking about which dragonriders are going to be protecting which areas of the continent from Thread, ergo, which communities are going to owe which dragonriders their goods and labor in exchange.

Tequila Mockingbird: But yeah, it is unclear. It is stated in Moreta that dragonriders can and should learn some type of craft for the Interval, so that they can support themselves, which I do think suggests that dragonriders have the capacity to earn, at that point, marks in exchange for some form of skilled craftsmanship or labor or something.

Lleu: Which makes me wonder if in fact — to bring back to a question that I think you posed In our texting about this — that possibly the Weyrs do, during Intervals, generate their own marks.

Tequila Mockingbird: And do we officially know that only Crafthalls can make marks?

Tequila Mockingbird: Can Holds generate their own marks? I don’t know if it counts as minting when you’re carving them out of wood.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. Because I think that would be in some ways a logical way to set this up, where the Crafts control the money, because that gives them a counterweight against the Holds, in some sense.

Lleu: Yeah. Clearly some kind of monetary system already exists, but I don’t know where it comes from.

Lleu: And it seems like, based on the minimal evidence that we get in the Ninth Pass — for some reason, she wasn’t really interested in monetary policy —

Lleu: — marks come exclusively from Crafts. That has to be a change, because Crafts don’t exist at the beginning of Dragonseye, but some kind of currency already does.

Tequila Mockingbird: And continuing on this question of dragonrider labor rights, it seems like the only time off that dragonriders get is maternity leave. So do bronze dragon riders just never get time off?

Lleu: That seems to be the implication. Which is interesting because it seems like Holders do in fact get time off.

Tequila Mockingbird: Obviously there is, in a certain sense, the exigency of Thread. Like, you can’t say, “Actually, I don’t want to fight Thread today, so we’re going to let it destroy the planet.” That’s really not an option. So I do think there’s a possible implication here that the reason that there is no time off has been that they've been short-staffed and they’ve had a lot of injuries recently, and that as the dragon population grows and stabilizes there will be more of a time off built in. Moreta is really the only time we see

Tequila Mockingbird: Dragonriders in a normal kind of sense, because at the beginning of the Ninth Pass, right, it’s just been Benden Weyr for so long, and then it’s not really…

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. And then they're immediately like, and we're destroying thread. And like, you're kind of not interested in the quotidian fighting thread energy by the end of the Ninth Pass books. And in Moreta, she goes to the Gather, right? It seems like, “Well, Thread’s not falling over Fort right now, so I’m fine, and then when it does, I’m fighting it.” But it doesn’t seem like a non-injured dragonrider is ever deliberately sitting out a Threadfall over the area they are responsible for.

Lleu: Yeah. In some ways it seems like a problem that will become less relevant once there are more Weyrs, ’cause while there’s one Weyr, everyone at that Weyr is responsible for every Threadfall.

Lleu: When there are six Weyrs, then everyone at every Weyr is responsible for one Threadfall every three-ish days.

Lleu: So that probably does mean that, effectively, you have one workday and then two days off and then one workday and two days off. Which isn’t that bad.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause you have to fit the orgies in at some point, lLEU.

Lleu: Well, you also have to fit in the training and the. Functionally the dragonriders are a military force.

Lleu: As we see in the Ninth Pass, even with one day of work, two days of not fighting Thread, but also doing other preparation and work, it does seem like that’s a high workload still.

Lleu: But we did also discuss the possibility that they’re — if you have a full Weyr, maybe you don’t need every single wing for every single Fall. So, if you have ten wings, maybe you take nine of them per Fall and one wing gets to rest.

Tequila Mockingbird: And/or one wing is on standby, or swapping out injured people, or, etc., etc.

Tequila Mockingbird: I would find that perfectly plausible, and, as we have mentioned in various demographic explorations and things, it’s not like the population of dragons is a strain in terms of feeding the dragons. There isn’t really any reason not to have slightly more dragons than you quote-unquote “need” in order to provide people with some relief shifts.

Tequila Mockingbird: In terms of sheer cave space, you probably can’t pack in more than — like, we talked about 500. But they’re not running out of cows. So we do see at this point that the green riders are still overwhelmingly female and that a lot of them are in fact on semi-maternity leave, in that there is a period where you cannot go between without risking miscarriage, and so, at that point, pregnant green riders will fly with the queens’ wing using flamethrowers, instead of with their regular wing.

Lleu: I thought it was interesting that we were told specifically that it’s during the first and third trimesters that that’s a problem, and not the second for some reason. Okay, sure.

Lleu: Well, I am wondering if there’s like a little bit of fetal personhood going on. I can imagine that, during the first trimester the fetus is extra-fragile because it’s new, sure.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, yeah — a massive number of just natural miscarriages in the first trimester, yeah.

Lleu: By the second trimester it’s more settled in. And then by the third trimester, it’s like a person, and since dragons travel telekinetically, presumably in some way that involves telepathy, maybe by the third trimester a fetus is like enough of an individual person that it registers separately —

Lleu: I don’t know. This is entirely my speculation; I don’t like that explanation, but it’s the explanation that came to mind.

Tequila Mockingbird: Where I went was that it might be that you risk inducing labor from the jolt of like going between in a way that’s not ideal.

Lleu: Also would totally make sense. Probably makes more sense, and I hate it less as an explanation, so…

Tequila Mockingbird: We’ll take that. So we are seeing in some senses a tension between “We need dragonriders, and we need as many dragonriders as we can get. We’re still actively increasing the population of dragonriders” and “We need babies.” They are still on this wild manifest destiny, go forth and multiply kick, where they’re trying to have truly worrying numbers of children and terrifying rates of population growth on Pern, and so the result is that you frequently have pregnant dragonriders who are, perhaps, less effective as dragonriders for a year or so. We also do get that undercurrent of, like, “Aha, the fostering system,” of all of these dragonriders who are just like, “I cannot raise my baby. I am simply too busy. Someone else has to deal with this.”

Lleu: One gay person is back. We don’t actually see any male green riders in this story, as far as I can remember. We see one blue rider, who is described as preferring boys to girls, and so one of the things that happens is, the dragons tell Sean that this rider is lonely and that it would be good to have more riders “of his persuasion.” Very funny, first of all, that the dragons are thinking about this, and second of all, Torene’s response to this is like, “Okay. Any gay people in the prospective candidates?”

Tequila Mockingbird: But the dragons are just like, “Oh, yeah, three.” I love the fact that the dragons know.

Tequila Mockingbird: Is this dragon telepathy? Are the dragons asking? Are the dragons gossiping?

Lleu: It has to be dragon telepathy, because they seem to know at the moment of Impression, already, right? Even when the person is, like, 12. It’s all just very silly and, again, raises the question: did Kitti Ping Yung program this in? Why?

Tequila Mockingbird: If you’re having questions about your sexuality in your early tween years, find your nearest dragon and inquire.

Tequila Mockingbird: There are probably easier ways than Impressing a whole dragon.

Lleu: But it’s weird, because it kind of makes it sound like male green riders are a novelty, but they all seem to be completely aware of the possibility, ’cause on the one hand, we get, like, “Yeah, this guy’s lonely.” Okay, so are there no male green riders? Do they all hate him? What’s the deal here?

Tequila Mockingbird: “Sean would prefer to have fewer of the speedy little green dragons out of action because their riders [are] taking maternity leave.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So it’s an anti-labor movement: they specifically hate maternity leave. Workers’ rights!

Lleu: So I thought that was really interesting because of the most homophobic scene in Dragonseye, which is where K’vin, who’s the Weyrleader at Telgar at the beginning of the Second Pass, is like, “Yeah, I read a treatise once about male green riders versus female green riders, and male green riders have all these disadvantages. They’re hysterical and they are prone to committing suicide when their lovers break up with them, and they are overly emotional, and they show off and put themselves in their dragons in danger, blah, blah, blah, blah. Female green riders are way more stable, but there’s the pregnancy problem. Ultimately, K’vin came down on the side of preferring female green dragon riders whenever he could get them.” Okay, that's a really interesting contrast to Sean apparently being like, “Pregnancy is inconvenient. Only men, please.” Alongside the green riders question and the ways that sexuality is playing out there, there’s also, of course, the heterosexuality of Weyr leadership, on two levels. One is that basically all of the other queen riders, including Torene, are like looking at Sorka and Sean’s relationship and they’re like, “Ah, that would be nice!” We literally are told:

Lleu: “Torene was scarcely the only female in the Weyr who envied them their double bonding.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Is it that they envy the monogamy? Is there this implication that, although dragonrider life is becoming increasingly casual — flings, mating flights, they’re whatever — that there is this feminine urge for a monogamous romantic partnership and that that’s the ideal? And that definitely seems to be borne out in the broad structure of the series, where that is kind of the happy ending that the female protagonists get.

Lleu: Yeah. Also, already at this point, that’s how they're conceiving of all future Weyrs as being structured, right?

Lleu: Fundamentally, it is, in-world, a coincidence that Sean and Sorka are the first Weyrleaders. It’s not an official position; Sean is just a natural leader, and Sorka…

Lleu: Their relationship then sets the model, for some reason, for what all Weyrleaders “should” be —

Lleu: — to the point where, when Sean is announcing that there’s going to be these three new Weyrs, he says, “And rather than assigning Weyrsleaders to each of them, we’re going to leave it up to chance. Whatever queen rises to mate first, that’ll be the Weyrwoman, and whoever’s dragon flies that queen that will be the Weyrleader.” To me, that makes no sense. There’s absolutely no logical reason why this particular social structure should be automatic. It seems to me that whoever is the best leader should be the Weyrleader —

Lleu: — and coincidentally, at Fort Hold,, that happens to be Sean, but at another Weyr, it could be someone else.

Tequila Mockingbird: My first instinct was that this is her overexplaining again, in terms of trying to establish what she had already established in the Ninth Pass and trying to justify it immediately, as soon as we get out the gate with dragons.

Lleu: Yeah. I see where that read comes from. To me, it didn’t feel like an attempt to explain; it felt like she was taking it as just unquestionably natural and automatic, that this is obviously what the structure of Weyr social life would be. There’s no interrogation of it. Even before they find out about the random arrangement, no one is like, “Hm, I wonder which of all of the dragonriders is going to be Weyrleader.” No, no: “I wonder which of the bronze riders is going to be Weyrleader.”

Lleu: They’re already taking it as given that it’s going to be a bronze rider.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, but I do think there’s more underpinning that. Extradiegetically, she is making that decision and seems to think that it is the natural decision, but diegetically, at least, Sean and Sorka are talking about it, and part of what they say is, “Every single bronze rider is capable of being a Weyrleader,” or almost all of them. They say, “Anyone who is leading a wing could lead a Weyr.” And so I think part of that “and we’ll just leave it up to chance” is not, “And naturally whoever fucks the first Weyrwoman is going to be a natural leader”; it’s, “They're all going to be good at this. So we’re just rolling a dice because we can’t choose.”

Lleu: Right, but that still raises questions. Why are the wingleaders only bronze riders?

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, yes, absolutely. And I think that is logically, textually, in-universe prejudice. The fact that they have only put bronze riders in charge of wings is them preferring bronze riders or assuming bronze riders are better. I also do think they place a lot of stock in, “Well, their dragons are bigger, ergo, both they are more likely to be able to fly a queen dragon and they are in some way a better military leader because their dragon is larger.”

Lleu: Yeah. This is connected, maybe, to a question that I have had recurring throughout the series and which I had hoped that maybe this story would explain, and it does not.

Lleu: What the fuck is a wing second? Because she’s used the term consistently across the series in two ways that do not align whatsoever. One, the wingsecond is the assistant to a wingleader, so the wingleader is the one who is sort of in charge of drilling the wing and everything else, and the wingsecond is what F’nor is to F’lar, his backup, the person who sort of deals with interpersonal stuff before it gets out of hand, the person who, as we see in this story, in one of its instances of usage, takes charge if the wingleader is out of commission for whatever reason — the wingsecond takes over being in charge of the wing. She’s also used it, in a different sense, and actually two different senses, now that I’m thinking about it. One, in some of the Ninth Pass books, it seems like “wingsecond” is being used to refer to “the person who is second-in-command at the Weyr as a whole.” And in this, it seems like wingsecond is being used to mean…something else, also, because we’re told that every wing has a wingleader and a wingsecond, and then we’re also told that there are only, what, is it two or three wingseconds?

Tequila Mockingbird: “[...] wings of thirty-three dragons, each with a Wingleader and two Wingseconds so that, even if the Wingleader and his dragon had to drop out because of injuries, there would be a second rider prepared to take charge.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So I think that aligns more with that first interpretation of the backup.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s just we have two backups instead of one backup.

Lleu: “Any one of those who were currently Wingleaders could manage a Weyr: —”

Lleu: “— they’d been thoroughly indoctrinated by Sean, with emphasis on safety and tactics. Even the Wingseconds would make good leaders. Too bad the blues simply hadn’t the stamina to keep up with a queen. At that, there were only two Wingseconds, and she didn’t see either Frank Bonneau or Ashok Kung as Weyrleaders. Nice enough young men, but better as subordinates than leaders.”[3]

Lleu: So what does that mean? How can every wing have two wingseconds and also there are only two wingseconds of the whole Weyr?

Tequila Mockingbird: I do think the interpretation you supposed, meaning there are only two bronze wingseconds, does make sense, ’cause she’s like, “The blues can’t keep up and therefore, and, at that, there are only two bronze rider wingseconds who would be in the running to become Weyrleaders.”

Lleu: — but I accept that McCaffrey uses these things a little idiosyncratically sometimes. But then I have more questions now, though. If a blue rider can be a wingsecond, why can’t a blue rider be a wingleader?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. It seems to suggest that you have: all of your wingleaders are bronze riders, and then you run out of bronze riders. We can have two wingseconds be bronze riders, but then there just aren’t any bronze writers left, so you have to put up with brown and blue riders for the rest of the wingseconds. Oh, well.

Lleu: But we’re also told, back on [page] 143, that they currently are disproportionately bronze and brown.

Lleu: “[...] even if the Wingleader and his dragon had to drop out because of injuries, there would be a secondary rider prepared to take charge. This was especially necessary, he felt, when the numbers of the smaller dragons, the blues and greens, increased.”

Lleu: We’re back to why is being able to mate with a queen dragon a prerequisite for being Weyrleader?

Lleu: It makes no sense, except insofar as both the characters and also McCaffrey seem to be taking it as given that the Weyrleaders should be a more or less monogamous heterosexual couple.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, you're not wrong. And there's something to the extradiegetic structure of, like, yes, that’s what these books are. These books are the books where girls get to have a dragon and also be the special fancy queen of the dragons, and also they get to have a special fancy man who is in love with them and is kind of a jerk, but not to them.

Tequila Mockingbird: The romance novel tropes of it all are baked in. Well, why are these books that are about mostly heterosexual romance building all of this heterosexual romance into the world-building? Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

Lleu: Yeah; one thing I had said when I got to the end of the story — first thing I said was, “What a goofy ending.” And the second thing I said was, “You can tell that she had written several romance novels between Dragonquest and now.”

Lleu: I stand by that assessment. Obviously, as we’ve talked about, Dragonflight and Dragonquest are doing romance stuff, drawing on romance tropes or possibly sort of establishing romance tropes, or helping establish romance tropes, but I would say that Torene and M’hall’s relationship, while clearly rooted in romance stuff, is maybe rooted in better romance tropes, or at least less bad romance tropes.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s also, I think, better at laying groundwork for a relationship that the reader is supporting.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s both, I think, showing us more of Torene and M’hall’s interactions leading up to the revelation of romance, and she’s setting up the way that they feel about each other in a way that means the “Surprise, it’s a romance!” both doesn’t feel as surprising and is more like, “Oh, yay, that was what I wanted all along!” rather than “What the fuck?”

Tequila Mockingbird: Because you could describe this romance as very similar to Lessa and F’lar. Torene has also never had sex before the first meeting flight.

Lleu: Oh, also, we forgot a crucial Torene detail, which is, of course, Torene can hear all the dragons.

Tequila Mockingbird: Of course! And you get a very similar — it is physically painful and it’s in the meeting flight and everything’s a little out of control, but it does not read like a rape scene in the way that Lessa and F’lar’s first sexual experience does.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think a lot of that is, as you said, skill. It’s 30 years of writing heterosexual romance and being able to do it with better craft.

Tequila Mockingbird: We do see a lot of that same emotional beat, too, that she likes of…not quite forced desire but surprised desire? Where her female protagonist can’t be intentionally planning on a romance or have her eye on someone — it has to be like, “What? Huh? Romance and sex is happening to me? Wow. Okay!” rather than anything she seeks out, where the male character can be obsessed with Torene from a distance in the background.

Lleu: Yeah, it’s funny you say that, ’cause the two exceptions are Moreta, who dies, and everything about Moreta is atypical for the series —

Tequila Mockingbird: But even Nerilka — she’s like, “Alessan, you can’t kill yourself.” And he’s like, “Fine, then fuck me about it!” It’s not like she walks in there thinking, “Ah, this is the man I’m going to marry.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And frankly, it would have been a better book if she had.

Tequila Mockingbird: One could make the argument, actually, that a willingness to allow Nerilka to have desires and act upon them is what’s missing from that narrative being satisfying.

Lleu: If only, yeah. But that would have required, I think, a more thorough engagement with her feelings about Suriana, which —

Tequila Mockingbird: Because, as much as so much of the Pern books is about women striving for agency that is being denied to them and, in many cases, achieving that agency, in very conditional ways, that is never applied to the romance. They get to deny partners that they don’t want, or they get to reluctantly endure partners that they don’t want, but they don’t generally seek out a partner that they do want. Sorka is honestly the only exception?

Tequila Mockingbird: Sorka gets her man. Sorka’s like, “By the way, we’re getting married,” and Sean is the one who’s like, “What? We’ve been in a romantic relationship?” And she’s like, “Yes, have been this whole time. Thank you for noticing!” And maybe that’s part of what I was so into when I was 13. Mm. Well, things to ponder. But the Sean and Sorka in many ways like reverses that dynamic.

Lleu: Well, and also, if your reading of M’hall as a stalker is accurate, that’s interesting because it suggests that normally it’s the kind of thing where like, “Oh, yeah. Patriarchal values.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I mean, the more you say it, the more I’m like, yeah. This is — and we'll get into this now — a disagreement that we were having. Because I very much remember interpreting this — and maybe less now than when I was 14, but — I think M’hall has stalkery vibes here, and I think that M’hall is it partly or mostly responsible for manipulating the random draw so that he ends up at the same Weyr as Torene and that Torene is the Weyrwoman at that Weyr.

Lleu: Yeah. I can see why you would read it that way, but I did not read it that way. And I don’t think that it’s the only reading. It hinges in part on how you read M’hall being told by Sean to stay away from the queen riders.

Tequila Mockingbird: We know, textually, that M’hall says that he has been interested in Torene — and the quote is:

Tequila Mockingbird: (Read: speaking of Alaranth being able to escape Brianth during the mating flight, or being able to evade him.)

Tequila Mockingbird: And then she says, “Oh, but, like, you said you were going to be Weyrleader.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Oh, I’d have been that one way or another sooner or later,’ he said in a blithe tone.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “It was always you I ached to have [...] From the moment I saw you Impress Alaranth. But my father had warned me off the queen riders. I had to shadow Admiral Benden in order to get anywhere near you then without having my backside flayed.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s referring to — he’s 14 and she’s 19 when she Impresses, and Paul Benden comes to congratulate her and M’hall helps escort him, because at that point he’s elderly and having difficulty with mobility. So, we know that he impressed at 12, and we know that starting at age 14 he apparently was having sexual relationships with a number of different queen riders and was then restrained by his father and told to confine his attentions to greens or people who don’t ride dragons.

Tequila Mockingbird: We also know that the decision of which dragonrider ends up at which Weyr is nominally random. They pick names out of a hat, basically, but that when Torene pulls the eastern Weyr, she is convinced that it is not a coincidence.

Lleu: Yeah, we are not explicitly told but effectively told that Sean and Sorka manipulated the selection in some way such that Torene would end up Benden, where she wanted to be.

Tequila Mockingbird: “She was suddenly very sure that somehow the draw had been arranged so that she and Alaranth would go east. [da-da-da-da-da] She shot a quick glance at the Weyrleaders, but they were not looking in her direction.

Tequila Mockingbird: “Am I right, Faranth? Torene asked, breaking her self imposed never to initiate a conversation with another’s dragon.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “You c[ould] hear all of us, Faranth said. It would be wise to have you over there. You will be a very good Weyrwoman. Sorka thinks so, and so do Carenath and Sean. Be easy!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Which I think does imply that, yeah, there was some manipulation of the randomness there.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s phrased with some plausible deniability, but that fundamentally, to me, just comes down to you know dragons don’t really understand these things. Faranth doesn’t have any idea what drawing names out of a hat means.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s just like, “Yeah, you’re obviously a good choice for Weyrwoman. It’s all good.”

Lleu: So, I think the crucial piece here is that the reason M’hall was warned off the queen riders is because Brianth was too good at mating flights and it was going to potentially affect the gene pool. So I don’t think that he was warned specifically off Torene — I think he was warned off all queen riders, period.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t disagree, but this is where, perhaps, genre expectations, or our personal relationships to reading in genre come into play, because I do think, for me, I am being influenced by the long tradition of romance novels where the reason that the male protagonist is promiscuous is almost always that he hasn’t met the female protagonist yet or that he believes that the female protagonist is in some way inaccessible to him. “If I couldn’t have you, then I didn’t care and I’m going to have a lot of meaningless sex.” And it’s very rarely — I can think of one or two examples, and I have read a lot of romance novels — where it’s, “No, I just enjoy having sex, and it’s recreational and fun, and now that I’m in a relationship with you, I’m going to be monogamous, but I wasn’t tortured about it or anything.” And so I was definitely coming to that with this assumption that M’hall was in some way fixated on Torene. ’Cause he says, right, he was obsessed with her since he was 15, and so, to me, that implies that he was only having all of this meaningless recreational sex —

Tequila Mockingbird: — in some way because he couldn’t just ask Torene out at 15. And maybe it’s just that he was 15 and she was 19 and he didn’t think she’d go for it.

Lleu: Well, plus, that he’d been told to stay away from queen riders generally.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which also just does say some stuff. So he was having a lot of sex with — question mark — adult(?) women? And he was 14?

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m going to think a little bit about it, actually. Yikes!

Lleu: — well, (a) that, but (b) it’s clear already by Dragonsdawn that certain aspects of cultural understandings about sex and romance and relationships and marriage are different.

Lleu: We’e told in Dragonsdawn that marriage as such is purely a contractual arrangement, and that there are multiple kinds of marriage, some of which are not permanent.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And of course, religion is over, we’ve established.

Lleu: Yeah. So marriage as such is exclusively a civil property arrangement, and anything around marriage is unrelated to that contractual arrangement. But that to me suggests that there are also maybe more general differences in attitudes around sex and sexuality, and especially given the ways that dragon sexuality works, it’s possible that this is not as shocking in the future as it would be now. But also,it is shocking now, but also she spends so little time on it? It’s only there if you put the pieces together and go, “Wait a minute, wasn’t he like 15 at this point?” Certainly she didn’t want it to be shocking, and so perhaps suggests to me that she didn’t really think about it that much.

Tequila Mockingbird: They say that Torene is 22. They don’t, I think, explicitly say that Mahal is 18. We are just backdating that from “he was born in Dragonsdawn.” There's a timeline at the beginning of the book that lays out when he was born and when she was born and that she’s four years older than him.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also, they’re acting like Sean’s old, and Sean’s in his early 40s.

Lleu: I think I would say probably that it’s a problem that she created unintentionally for herself out of her desire to have M’hall, be Sean and Sorka’s son.

Lleu: He couldn’t just be some random bronze rider. He had to be Sean and Sorka’s son, specifically —

Lleu: — results in this age implication, because we know when Michael Connell was born. Or, well, actually given the pronunciation of his name as “M’hall,” I think it’s probably meant to be read as Irish Micheál.

Lleu: But anyway: I don’t think the story wants us to think about it, and I suspect that that means that she didn’t really think about it that much, either.

Lleu: But, in any case, I have not read many Romance novels with a capital R, so I don’t have this particular genre expectation going in, and so to me, this did not read as that kind of relationship. It read to me as read as much more…”normal” is not the right word, but much less stalkery.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah; we also just get a lot of his intensity in the mating flight. The line of —

Tequila Mockingbird: “The cry of her name produced mild astonishment in her: the tone held more than triumph, more than surprise, more than intense pleasure.”

Tequila Mockingbird: It seems very clear that he is very obsessed with her.

Lleu: Oh, yeah! But from my perspective, having been primed to expect stalking —

Lleu: — to me, up until the very end of the story, considering that he’s apparently been madly in love with Torene for the last three years, M’hall’s behavior is admirably restrained and very normal, actually. He mostly stays out of her way. He’s nice and polite. He’s helpful. Looking back, it’s like, okay, yeah, he’s like arranging to be near her, but he’s clearly not like intruding into her space. He just is nearby her and so when she needs help, he’s the one who’s there, but not in a way where he’s imposing himself on her.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think, for me, what it is is that he knows the whole time that her queen is going to go into a mating flight and intends the whole time to be the one who flies her.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it’s the combination of “I have been loving you from afar for many years” and “I have a specific and concrete plan for the fact that I’m going to fuck you and functionally end up in a monogamous long-term relationship with you kind of whether you like that or not” and “I’m not in any way making a romantic overture because I think that might scare you off; I’m instead pretending not to care so that you are not forewarned about my intention to fuck you.”

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s, I think, where the creepy energy is coming from for me.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s “creepy (not entirely derogatory).” I am admitting this about myself. But that’s where the “mm, ehh, uh-uh-uh” is coming from, for me.

Lleu: Right, but I also do think it’s slightly undercut by the extent to which obviously mating flights are not random, but they’re not not random, either. There is no there is no absolute way that he could know, except that there’s an implication at the end that the dragons are already into each other.

Lleu: But I do think that it makes him creepy, and I do you think that you’re right — that is stalker behavior.

Tequila Mockingbird: Also, a lot of the other bronze riders are clearly into Torene. She’s hot. We were being told this over and over. The narrative insists on telling us how long and elegantly leather-clad her legs are. The narrative tells us that Sean calls her “the sexy one,” which, we don’t even have time to unpack that. So she’s being approached and flirted with by a bunch of bronze riders, and they’re like, “Hey, you might become a Weyrwoman! Hey, somebody is going to have sex with you eventually, because we all know this, because that’s how the dragon thing is established,” and he is very deliberately making a choice not to do that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think if he was making the choice not to do that because he didn’t want to pressure her, that would be classy.

Tequila Mockingbird: But he’s making the choice not to do that, as I said, because he doesn’t want her to know ahead of time that he has an intentional tactic for catching her queen in the mating flight and doesn’t want her to know so that she cannot in any way evade that tactic.

Tequila Mockingbird: And again, there’s the world-building logic of like queens are trying not to get caught, even though they know they’re going to get caught, but that’s where I’m like, “Mm. Sus.”

Lleu: Yeah. It’s probably a good thing, as I’m thinking about it, that we never get to see Path’s mating flight on the page.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah; I don’t disagree. I do, also, though, have to end this conversation by saying I did not not have a crush on Mahal as well at 14. So my taste, as we know, is bad.

Lleu: I will say whatever, however, creepy and stalkery M’hall is in this story, Torene at least knows what to expect, which is more than we can say for Lessa, where F’lar did in fact have a plan.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s true. And did fully recruit her to the Weyr without discussing the whole “and also mating flights” thing.

Tequila Mockingbird: Where Torene has had an instructional lecture from M’hall’s mom, which isn’t weird at all.

Lleu: Yeah. Okay, so the last two things we have here are pretty small things. One is about the grubs. So, they know about the Tubberman grubs. Here’s what we’re told:

Lleu: “Everyone knew that it would take several hundred years for grubs—the anti-Thread organism that Ted Tubberman had bioengineered—to spread across the Southern Continent in sufficient density to make ordinary vegetation less vulnerable to destruction by those deadly spores.”

Lleu: “And only once the new life-form was well-enough established in the south could colonies of it be transferred north.”

Lleu: And this is another thing that we disagreed on, because, to me, this is such an artificial, fake problem. There’s absolutely no reason they can’t take some grubs from Southern, since they’ve now had 15 years to spread a little bit out from Tubberman’s house, and start seeding parts of the Northern Continent with them. The way this passage is phrased, to me, reads like they have to wait until all of Southern, or at least most of Southern is grubbed before they can start moving grubs north. That makes no sense at all.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it’s not entirely that we disagree, it’s just that I am hardwired to try and find diegetic explanations for things that are clearly extradiegetically motivated; this just is who I am as a person. I’m an unpaid defense lawyer for bad authors around the world. So, the more generous interpretation of that I would give is that they need a sufficiently large colony of grubs to be established in the south so that if they, say, take a chunk of grubs out of the south and move them north and they all die; they haven’t fucked up the long-term viability of the species. If you currently have a thousand grubs, you don’t want to take half of the grubs, because something could still go wrong, versus if you wait a couple of decades or a couple of centuries until you have 100,000 grubs, then taking a thousand or 2,000 grubs is nothing you need to worry about. So it’s more the quibbling on, what do they mean by “established”?

Lleu: Yeah. So, in “The Ford of Red Hanrahan,” when Ezra Keroon is dying of the fever, he’s obsessed with the AIVAS connection.

Tequila Mockingbird: “When Ezra Keroon had been fretful with the fever that racked him, Sean had very willingly gone back to Landing on Carenath. Sean had returned—almost as soon as he’d left, Sorka had remarked—to reassure the old captain that the Aivas building, which Ezra had so carefully shielded with shuttle tiles against Garben’s eruption, remained intact and unscathed. Later Sean had reported more fully to Paul that the old settlement was just so many mounds under a thick carpet of gray volcanic ash.”

Lleu: Right. And again, my question is: why don’t they just dig up Landing? And the answer is, they can’t because they didn’t. To me, this grub thing is a similar artificial problem that she is trying to give an explanation for, whereas if she had just ignored it — especially because in Dragonsdawn they notice that the area around Tubberman’s house is un-Threaded, but I feel like they don’t really totally know why that is.

Lleu: And they have his notes, so I guess it’s implied that they then go through his notes and are like, “Ah, now I understand.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Two problems, and I think her two problems are bouncing off against each other. She seems so she seems to want to make it clear that after, basically, this story, no-one has gone back to the Southern Continent. Dragonriders haven’t gone, nobody’s gone to the Southern Continent. But she does also make it clear that the grubs did make it to the Northern Continent at some point before the Ninth Pass. So she’s tied herself in knots there a little bit, where it’s like, okay, how is that possible that the grubs did make it to the north but that the grubs haven’t covered the north? It’s a little murky.

Lleu: As usual. The last thing, which I thought was just kind of fun, and also weird, is: Torene’s parents are not native English-speakers! And, unlike every other non-native English-speaker — like we know Tarvi’s first language is not English, it’s Pashto — Torene’s parents speak with a marked accent and also with marked non-standard grammar, which I think is the only instance in any of these prequel books where I can think of that happening?

Lleu: And I don’t really know what to do with that, but I thought it was worth noting, that of everyone it’s specifically Torene’s parents.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and they’re specifically Russian too. The post-Cold War —

Tequila Mockingbird: — we get positive depiction of Russian characters, which we haven’t seen previously.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and she’s calling her dushka, which I thought was Russian.

Lleu: I think we can safely assume that they are, in fact, probably Russian speakers.

Tequila Mockingbird: And a very nice couple who seemed thrilled that their daughter is going to be the Benden Weyrleader. We don’t get any of the “Oh, no, Hold-born, Weyr-born,” because there’s no such thing. I guess M’hall is technically Weyr-born, in a sense. He was born in Landing.

Tequila Mockingbird: Some of his younger siblings were technically born in the Weyr, but they were all raised, as you point out, in the Hold. Even though we are establishing this separate culture, Weyr versus Hold, at this point we’re seeing it’s aspirational to have your child selected to be a dragonrider, both because there does seem to be some prestige attached to it, but also because they cite that the Weyrs are getting fed. The Weyrs have enough food, and they have good food, which is not the case in a lot of the Holds right now.

Tequila Mockingbird: And presumably that is also linked to the overcrowding in Fort Hold.

Lleu: It’s an interesting distinction from the later books, because the Weyrs are established as a community, but it’s entirely a community of adults. There are no Weyrlings at the Weyr. There are no Weyr children.

Lleu: It’s entirely a community of adults who have voluntarily opted to be part of this community.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also we’re not seeing some of the pressures that will later develop about feudal inheritance.

Tequila Mockingbird: Fulmar Stone is like, “Ugh, I trained my son as a mechanic and now he’s a dragonrider,” but it isn’t the “We are losing access to political power and to land rights and to our property —”

Tequila Mockingbird: “— because you have decided to go be a dragonrider,” in the same way.

Lleu: Whereas by the time we get to Dragonseye, very explicitly, we are told that Debera’s family tried to prevent her from answering Search because they had a marriage arranged for her, and if she broke off the engagement they would lose some of the land that they had claimed or lose their claim to some land that they wanted. Which. Mm. So many questions, again, from “The Ford of Red Hanrahan” about how land tenure and land distribution works because that implies that it’s family-based rather than individual. But we will talk about that quite soon, in fact, because our next episode will be The Dolphins of Pern and then Dragonseye slash Red Star Rising.

Tequila Mockingbird: Like it or not. I don’t think there's any real reason for you to read “The Second Weyr” you haven’t been reading the rest of the Pern series, especially, but I don’t think I actually specifically counsel you not to read this short story.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s up to you whether or not you read the short story; I’m not invested in your choices here. But I would like to bring to your attention and recommend In the Vanisher’s Palace by Aliette de Bodard, which is a “Beauty and the Beast” retelling in which the beast is a dragon — very on theme — that maybe leans into more of that “was M’hall a Stalker,” slightly creepy romance energy. And they’re lesbians.

Lleu: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It. If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast dot tumblr dot com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast dot neocities — N E O cities — dot org.

[1] Misspoke — “Rescue Run” is later chronologically, but we talked about it first because it was the first story in the collection to be published.

[2] Lleu delivers this as if it were a quotation, but it doesn’t align with the text in either the US or UK editions of Chronicles (which in this case are the same), so as far as we can tell it’s just wrong. The actual text of the passage in “The Ford of Red Hanrahan” is: “Out of a marriage-long habit, [Red] lifted one leg so [Mairi] could remove first one, then the other boot as he managed with fumbling fingers to undo his belt and trousers.” In both the US and UK editions, the corresponding boot-removal passage in “The Second Weyr” reads: “[Sean] shrugged again and, taking a seat, held up his right leg. Sorka straddled the leg, braced herself for his push, and hauled the boot off; automatically, she repeated the process for the left boot while they talked.”

[3] On further consideration, Lleu thinks that there’s an implicit but omitted word here “two blue Wingseconds” — i.e., Sorka is in fact imagining the possibility of non-bronze rider Weyrleaders (and blue riders, at that, despite all the anti-blue rider propaganda!). This is still weird, though, because it completely ignores brown riders, and we know browns have a significant enough size range that the idea of Canth mating with Wirenth is not beyond the realm of possibility.