Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #17: “Ever the Twain” (2001)

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.

Tequila Mockingbird: And today we are talking about an extremely nothing short story: “Ever the Twain.” I think it’s only claim to fame is that it’s the last one that McCaffrey wrote independently.

Tequila Mockingbird: Shut up. I refuse to acknowledge the existence of any other, subsequent short stories, and that is me going on the record. It was included in A Gift of Dragons, and I think it was the only new story in that collection.

Tequila Mockingbird: To me, it feels very much like she wrote it because she needed a new short story for the collection, rather than because she actually had anything to say.

Lleu: Yeah. It is hard to see what this story is adding to Pern that we haven’t already had, and easy to see what this story is fucking up about Pern that we thought we already understood. As a note, in today’s episode we will be talking about both human incest and the eugenics involved in dragon reproduction and dragon breeding and hatching.

Tequila Mockingbird: In “Ever the Twain,” the twins Neru and Nian are growing up on Ista. Neru is obsessed with dragons and desperate to become a dragonrider, and so when dragonriders show up to their rural fishing community on Search, he’s overjoyed, only for them to immediately select his twin sister and not him. He’s devastated, and Nian is like, “Hey, can he just come along? Please? My family would be allowed to come and watch me Impress anyway, can he please, please, please” — you know. The dragonriders are like, “Yeah, sure; that’s fine. It doesn’t hurt.” So they are both taken to the Weyr and given the, at this point, to the reader, very standard, “Wow, you’re a hatching candidate! This is how it’s gonna work.” They meet one obligatory bully character — because it wouldn’t be Pern if there wasn’t bullying going on —

Tequila Mockingbird: — a stuck-up young lady who’s confident she will impress the one golden egg. Then on the hatching, sure enough, Nian Impresses the queen, and Neru doesn’t Impress at first. There’s one egg left; it hasn’t hatched. And Nian decides, even though she’s told that if an egg doesn’t hatch by itself, that means, basically, that the dragon inside is not viable, instead of accepting that, she and her dragon pull off a little bit of slapstick and bump into the egg, shattering the shell and releasing the bronze dragonet, who does, in fact, Impress her brother. The other way around, right? The dragon doesn’t Impress, he does.

Lleu: No, that was one of the things that confused me about this story, is that they do say the dragon Impresses, and the candidates are Impressed.

Lleu: I mean, that is all that happens. Well — Nian and Neru have a little conversation, because part of what’s been going on is they’re really anxious about being separated, and they know they’re about to be, because they’ve reached the age of apprenticeships — which apparently everyone does —

Lleu: — and they’re not gonna have the same apprenticeship, probably. Nian, at the end, is like, “Hooray, now we can stay together!” And Neru is like, “No, they’re gonna send you to another Weyr, ’cause they don’t need another queen at Ista. Now we’re irrevocably separated, because also now we have our dragons instead of each other.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And there is a little moment when she Impresses where she feels, psychically, her dragon taking primacy over her psychic bond with her twin?

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that’s kind of interesting. And it, to be fair, is implied that Nian is very psychic.

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s part of why she is Searched. We do also note, as always, that the bully — don’t worry! — Impressed a green dragon. I feel like half of the green dragonriders we know are jerks!

Tequila Mockingbird: What about all those poor blue dragonriders who have to fall in love with them, whether they want to or not?

Lleu: Yeah. Clearly this is why everyone was so weird about Tai in Skies of Pern, because they’re like, “Well, she impressed a green, so she must be a jerk.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. “She must have been a huge bully as a child.” That’s the only person who Impresses a green dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: I mean, I feel like, though, there was a lot of subtext that implied that she should have, right? Didn’t we get somewhere, like, “Kylara, whose appetites were more akin to a green than a gold,” or something like that?[1]

Tequila Mockingbird: This narrative implication that “You’re kind of a mean slut; you clearly should have been a green dragonrider.”

Lleu: Yeah. We know from everywhere that the defining characteristic of green riders is “slutty,” so…

Lleu: Yes. So the big question right off the bat with this story is: what century are we in? Hello?

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, I read this, and I was like, I guess we’re in the really late Ninth Pass, because we’ve got female green dragonriders again.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think both of the green dragonriders who come on Search —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and then we have another young woman Impressing a green.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t think we get any male green dragon riders name-dropped, at least.

Lleu: I don’t think so. We, in fact, have two new female green riders, ’cause Orla also Impresses.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, yes, yes. So, I was like, that’s a big shift, but you were like, “Oh, well, this is clearly the Second Pass.”

Lleu: Yeah. I don’t think it can be the Ninth Pass, for a couple reasons, the biggest of which is, in order for it to be late enough in the Ninth Pass that there are lots of female green riders and for there not to have been any comment about that, it would have to be, like, Turn 40 of the Ninth Pass.

Lleu: In which case I think we would almost certainly get some comment on the fact that Thread is ending, especially because Neru is so obsessed with dragonriders and wants to lead a fighting wing. Thread’s gonna be done in 5 years, so…sorry.

Lleu: Yeah, so I think it has to be relatively early, or in the middle of the Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that does make sense when I thought about it.

Lleu: Which would mean it can’t be the Ninth Pass. So then I was like, okay, we know there are female green riders, so it can’t be between the Sixth and Ninth Passes, at least —

Tequila Mockingbird: I would say before the Fifth Pass, because by the time we’re in the Sixth Pass people aren’t even considering it.

Lleu: Yeah. The wiki also thinks it’s the Second Pass, but for me — if it’s the Second Pass, that means computers are within living memory, and that does not seem to me like it lines up with the level of technology or anything else about the social stuff that we see in this story. So I think it has to be sometime later.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, there’s also the fact that they refer to “the Harper Hall.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And if it’s the Second Pass, it would have been the College that is transitioning to a musical structure —

Lleu: So, if it were the Second Pass, it would have to be the end of the Second Pass, and, again, computers would still be within living memory.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I think I’m gonna put my money on early Third Pass?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because that gives it 200 years for the Harpers to be established, but the other thing we noticed is there’s still maybe some wobbliness about the Crafthall systems.

Tequila Mockingbird: We have “Artists,” still, which is something that either hasn’t come up at any point in the Ninth Pass or isn’t a thing anymore in the Ninth Pass.

Lleu: Right — specifically, we have “Artists” as something separate from “Harpers” —

Lleu: — because we do see an artist in the Ninth Pass, but he is a journeyman Harper, and that seems to be standard.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it would make sense to me if that eventually melded together, because you had this idea of people who do artistic stuff, and then you were like, “Oh, also, the College is gonna do a bunch of music,” and, over a thousand years, I can see how people with artistic talents would end up folded into the Harper Hall —

Lleu: It might be the kind of thing where, oh, you do your art training at artist-specific facility, but when you achieve rank in the Craft, it’s as a journeyman Harper for legal purposes, rather than having Artists as an independent Craft. But also then we were thinking about —

Tequila Mockingbird: The fake, good version of Pern that only exists in our heads!

Lleu: Well, because I was thinking about Artists, and I was thinking, “Well, there are other Crafts that are explicitly described as having journeymen or masters but who aren’t, among other things, invited to the meeting at Benden Weyr that even the Masterweaver is invited to in Dragonflight.” So, of all of the Craftmasters, the Mastervintner is not there, for example, and by the same token, in Dragonsinger, when they’re at the Gather, the person they buy the bubbly pies from is described as a “journeyman” Baker. Which could mean that he’s a journeyman in some random other Craft who happens to bake but really sounds like he is a journeyman and his Craft is Baking.

Tequila Mockingbird: It is also possible — I don’t insist upon it — that, because the Craft system is so established, “journeyman” there is just standing in for “a young person who is not yet especially established in their skill.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Right? Menolly might just be assuming that any young person without a master’s knot is a journeyman, because that’s so default to her.

Lleu: Maybe, but she’s from a context where there aren’t that many Crafters. Like, she grew up in Half-Circle.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. Perhaps there’s enough specificity around “journeymen” as a legal term that it wouldn’t just be used casually in that way, but that’s the only other thing I can think of.

Lleu: Well, my other suggestion was that there may be decentralized crafts, maybe like the Runners. The runners are clearly, explicitly described as a Craft. Tenna is attempting to be certified as a journeyman. But we don’t get any indication that there is a single “Masterrunner.” It seems like there are a bunch of Stationmasters, and when you are promoting someone, you do it by bringing someone in from another station to validate them against the Craft standards, but not like there is a central Runner administration. And so it occurred to me that that might also be the case for the Vintners and Bakers and maybe Artists, conceivably, that there are sort of “Masterartists” who hold that rank as Artists in their own right, rather than as Harpers, but without there being a kind of centralized Artist administration. You just bring in an external examiner from a different Hall to validate someone’s credentials, or maybe multiple examiners if they’re pursuing mastery rather than journeymanship.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s not too different from the way that, for example, early modern Holland handled artistic “mastery.” You made something that you were like, “Hey, I think I’m good,” and it was usually a Bible scene, and then a credentialed and well-known artist from your community or a nearby community would come and be like, “Yep, this kid’s got it. He’s in the guild.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it wasn’t like there was one Artist of Holland who was in charge of making sure that, ’cause that would be ridiculous.

Tequila Mockingbird: I also personally think that trying to anoint one person as the Masterartist for all of Pern would be such a shitshow that I can understand that they decided not to go with that plan.

Lleu: The upside is that “Artist” appears to mean exclusively painting and drawing, right? There’s no indication that there’s sculptors on Pern. There’s references to carvings; we know there are stonemasons —

Lleu: — but we also know that the stonemasons are not an independent Craft; it’s just Miners who dabble.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, similarly, I feel like any textile arts would be in the Weavers Guild.

Lleu: There’s not a bust of Master Tirone at the Harper Hall or anything like that.

Tequila Mockingbird: No. Which is odd, because especially in a society where you can’t write a lot of things down, I would think that sculpture would be great.

Lleu: Among other things, it seems like the kind of thing that would be ideal for ensuring that the Charter is remembered.

Lleu: That’s a classic use of sculptures. You put up an obelisk or a stela, and you inscribe it with the text of your peace treaty or tribute agreement or whatever else.

Tequila Mockingbird: And they do have the Finger Rock and whatever, but they just don’t inscribe anything on it —

Tequila Mockingbird: — which seems like it would have been easy to be like, “Hey! Thread! Arrow!”

Lleu: Yeah. Crucially, all of this is entirely our speculation as we attempt to make sense of the timeline in this story. The other problem with the timeline in this story is that we do get one reference to currency, but it’s “credits.” Which is a problem because we know from Dragonseye that by the Second Pass they’re already called “marks.” I think she’d completely lost the thread of where in the timeline anything was, is kind of what I think about this story.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Our attempt to make it make sense is that “credits” is an Istan regionalism —

Lleu: Much like “husband” and “wife” are a High Reaches regionalism.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, so when AIVAS shows up, the Istans are gonna be feeling extremely vindicated —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because everyone’s been making fun of them for 2,000 years.

Lleu: Baffling. That’s really the big thing that there is to talk about about this story. Plot-wise, there’s not really anything here that we haven’t already seen in the many Impression scenes and descriptions of Impressions that we’ve had over the course of the series. The one, I guess, not novelty but thing we haven’t had in a while — the first time since Dragonflight that we’ve had it[2] from the perspective of a female candidate. So that is mildly novel.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, wow. Yeah. And I could see her going back to her roots.

Tequila Mockingbird: Hm…what does it all mean… And I do think it brings up something that we’ve discussed, most extensively in “The Smallest Dragonboy,” which, this very much reminds me of “The Smallest Dragonboy.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And, similarly, sort of feels like she wrote a short story, she didn’t really have anything to say, and she was like, “Yeah, let’s have ’em Impress a dragon. That’s good.” We’re presented again with the question of: how Calvinist are we? Is Impressing a dragon your destiny from the moment you’re born? Are there categories of people, people who are always gonna Impress, people who are never gonna Impress, and people for whom it’s situational? How much is it about just being the person who happens to be standing there on the sand when the baby dragon shows up? And I don’t think this directly contradicts anything we’ve learned before —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but I do think it complicates a few things, because we had settled — and this is us; we’re not in charge — on, when the dragon comes out of the egg, they head for the best candidate in proximity, with perhaps an emphasis on people who are young and anticipating Impression or dreaming of Impression, or who want to Impress.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we have never seen anyone over the age of, like, 20 Impress, even when people who are not supposed to be hatching candidates suddenly get yoinked onto the sand by a baby dragon they’re usually teens or tweens.

Lleu: Yeah. The one question mark is Tai, who I think was probably around 20 and may have been a little bit older, but not much older.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Often, those people who randomly get pulled into Impression — T’lion, Mirrim, Tai, Jaxom — are people who have been around dragons, or are interested in dragons, or are eager to Impress. I don’t think we get a lot of unwilling candidates.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and we don’t see her Impression; we just hear about it later.

Tequila Mockingbird: So there’s a lot that we’re guessing. And they often go past other candidates who are standing there, right? So it’s not a pure proximity thing.

Tequila Mockingbird: But we do sometimes see, sort of broadly unwilling candidates, in that the girls who are Searched are often very scared or freaking out, fainting or running away, or whatever, and usually those girls don’t Impress.

Lleu: Yeah, and Jora. But we don’t know what happened at Jora’s Impression.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. So, I think it seems like dragons don’t go for someone who’s genuinely, really, truly unwilling? But also, as soon as they make that psychic connection with you, how much agency do you have —

Tequila Mockingbird: — slash, are you getting brain-drenched in psychic love and companionship and affection that’s gonna make you go like, “Yeah! This is great!” even if you might have, given a more rational decision-making process, decided you didn’t want to be a dragonrider.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, this is all the soup that we’re swimming in here, where, as Lleu pointed out, Nian doesn’t really want to Impress. She is standing there on the hatching ground being like, “Let my brother Impress. Let my brother Impress.” And her dragon takes her by surprise.

Lleu: Literally — her dragon jumps on her back and pushes her to the ground because she’s ignoring her dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: But then is very like, “Oh, you don’t want me…” and immediately, Nian’s like, “Oh, wait, no, I do want you! Quinth, it’s okay; I love you!”

Tequila Mockingbird: “You don’t like me? the dragon asked, her head drooping with disappointment and her wings sagging to the sand.

Tequila Mockingbird: “It’s not a question of liking you, Quinth, Nian replied. [...] It’s just that I shouldn’t Impress unless my brother does, too.

Tequila Mockingbird: “While we wait for that to happen, the little queen said imperiously, you may feed me, Nian. I’m starving.”

Tequila Mockingbird: She immediately is like, “Oh, okay, yeah, this is my dragon.” And I think we get the implication that Nian is an incredibly good candidate and incredibly psychic.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, and, when they’re Searching, the dragonriders on Search are like, “Oh, wow, this kid, absolutely.” And Oswith, a green dragon says:

Tequila Mockingbird: “The boy is strong, but his twin shields him from me, Oswith said to her rider. I cannot see his potential clearly. It is strange. Perhaps he should come along as a candidate, too.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So, I don’t think we’re supposed to think that Neru isn’t capable of being a dragonrider, or doesn’t have that dragonrider potential, it’s just less obvious than Nian’s.

Lleu: Yeah, well, and one of the things that they do as part of their 24 hours of hatchling training is help change the bandages on an injured dragon.

Lleu: And after they have finished doing that, the injured dragon, I believe, tells his rider that both of them will be strong candidates, and to me it felt like the dragons being like, “Ah, now that we can see him clearly, of course he was a good candidate.”

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s a degree to which this feels like a clear attempt to introduce a little bit of narrative tension, right? She wanted something a little more emotionally engaging than just, they go to the weir, they Impress a dragon, the story is over. And so we have this “Oh, no! Will Neru be able to Impress or won’t he? Ahh!” kind of tension introduced.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t think it’s a bad form of tension, because, yeah, if your sibling has something that’s been their dream their whole life, and suddenly it looks like you might get it and they won’t, that would be emotionally complicated, especially when it is a high-prestige thing that many people do want.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think it’s interesting, the idea that the hatchling decides — because I think that’s true — but we also have, nobody was gonna help this little dragon hatch, right? Larinth — all of the people at the Weyr are like, “Oh, if they don’t hatch on their own, it’s not gonna happen.” So the implication, narratively, is that if Nian and Quinth had not interceded, then Larinth would just have died in the shell, and Neru would not have Impressed and would just have been one of the many people who hypothetically have the capacity to be a good dragonrider, but just don’t end up impressing, like Robinton, like Alessan.

Lleu: Also, though, we do know from later books that you can stay at the Weyr and try at least a couple more times, or until you’re a certain age — it is a little vague depending on the book. But it’s not mentioned here.

Lleu: Yeah… I think we get an age limit, and I think it’s later, but I could be making that up.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. And there’s also the question of which Pass we’re in, because I could absolutely believe that early, when you have a glut of candidates, you’re like, “Eh, one or two and done,” and if you’re running a little low, you might be like, “Yeah, kids, stay at the Weyr; see what happens.”

Tequila Mockingbird: It also depends how many queens you have producing eggs at any given time. It was interesting to me, this very automatic, like, “Well, of course you’ll leave Ista Weyr.” ’Cause we’ve seen Weyrs have multiple queen dragons before.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s not explicit; I assume that the implication is that Ista has a lot of queens?

Lleu: But there’s also — frankly, I was expecting this story to have a much stronger implication of incest than it actually did, based on the summary that I had seen on the wiki —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, because that is hypothetically, right, the other reason that you might separate siblings who have both Impressed.

Lleu: Especially if one has Impressed a queen and one has impressed a bronze.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because you don’t want Larinth flying Quinth. What we have seen in the past is, when one queen goes into a mating flight, or seems like she’s about to, they clear all of the other queens out of the Weyr. Hop on your dragon; fly off. That’s what we see in Dragonquest.

Lleu: It’s dealt with explicitly in “The Ford of Red Hanrahan,” right? Because they —

Tequila Mockingbird: And so now they know. So, presumably, if you’re doing that “Oop, Quinth is getting proddy — evacuate all the other queens!” you could also evacuate Larinth and Neru and anybody who is too closely related, and presumably in a situation, especially over the Long Interval, when Benden’s down to the only Weyr and you don’t have another Weyr to send dragonriders to, that’s what you would do with children of someone whose dragon is going into mate.

Lleu: Yeah. If F’lon and Jora had had a child, presumably that child would have been excluded from Jora’s mating flights.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. And I can’t help but think that there’s a certain utility in the Weyr naming conventions that way, because if you’re having a bunch of kids with a bunch of different people, and you’re not raising those kids, so kind of loosey-goosey, it would be convenient to have a very efficient way to be like, “Okay. This dragon is going up for mating flight. Who should be evacuated?”

Lleu: Yeah. Well, and we know from Moretta that that’s one of the Weyroman’s jobs, is to track interpersonal relationships and genealogies within the Weyr for that reason.

Tequila Mockingbird: So there’s a little bit of the specter of that. But it could also be that maybe Ista has a lot of queen dragons, or that they’re expanding another Weyr, or that another Weyr is low and there’s a need to shuffle things around.

Lleu: — and was shuffled around to Fort. So there’s precedent in other books.

Lleu: We’re explicitly told that incest between dragons is not a problem; Kylara’s perspective tells us that, although maybe we should take it with a grain of salt —

Lleu: — but it does seem like moving queens around and, here, the question of “what do you do with unhatched eggs?” does suggest that they are dragon riders are, to some extent, engaged in active husbandry of dragons as a species, that there is an active breeding and eugenics program to ensure that only the “best” dragons survive and to produce the “best” dragons. So shuffling queens around makes sense to diversify the gene pool in any given Weyr, and, by the same token, the evidence that we get — namely, Ruth and here Larinth — suggests that, actually, plenty of unhatched dragonets would be fine —

Lleu: — even if they can’t break their shells themselves, but the Weyrs have decided, collectively, that dragonets that can’t break their shells are too weak to live. That’s a eugenic progam.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Well, and especially given that dragons hatch fully able to communicate and knowing their name and all of that.

Lleu: Yeah, presumably they also know their name and all of that while they are trying to get out of the shell. It doesn’t come to them fully formed in the instant they break through the shell.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. So that’s a bit rough, but also fully in keeping with what we’ve seen about eugenics on Pern all along.

Lleu: Yeah, it makes sense that it extends to dragons, even if it hasn’t been the focus of the narrative in any other text — other than with Ruth, but Ruth is a special case, because he’s a weird dragon to begin with. This suggests that some of the dragon eggs that don’t hatch…

Tequila Mockingbird: Could have just been very (quote-unquote) “normal” dragons.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And I think we see this even in Dragonsdawn, where, after Kitti Ping Yung dies and her daughter, Windblossom, is trying to continue the dragon program, what she produces are the watch-whers.

Tequila Mockingbird: And there’s this huge animosity, like, “Oh, they’re gross. They’re not as good as regular dragons. They’re sports. They’re freaks.” You literally had your first set of “normal” (quote-unquote) dragons ten minutes ago. What you mean, these are “bad” dragons? You don’t know that yet!

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah! It’s okay, guys, and, okay, they’re photophobic. And?

Tequila Mockingbird: Anyway. As I understand it, Todd did engage more with the watch-whers as a concept —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but we don’t read those, so I’ll never know what he decided to do. And the other question, I guess, that I have about shuffling queens around and breeding programs is, maybe this is early enough that it’s still an active project to increase the size of the dragons, because if we’re early in the Third Pass, we’re only 700, 800 years into the program. Although that’s a lot of time, so it feels like the dragons should have been full-sized by then, but I don’t actually know. I do think the implication is that they continue to get larger for the entire history of Pern, but I believe the what we’re told by extra-canonical information is that they achieve “full” (quote-unquote) size pretty quickly and then just keep growing incrementally after that, because the very first dragons are only a little bit bigger than a horse. And we go from “a little bit bigger than a horse” to “the size of a 747.” There’s quite a lot of growing to do.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it doesn’t seem implausible to me that at some point over this 2,000 years they decided, “Oh, if they don’t hatch, they’re not viable.” How would they know?

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause we are told in Dragonsdawn that they do autopsies on the eggs that don’t hatch, and that there are a number of eggs that don’t hatch, because, again, they’re bioengineering these dragons from the ground up. They’re very pleased, like, “Wow, we got 18! That’s really good! That’s more than we thought we would get out of the total number of eggs, which is greater than 18.”

Lleu: “There were also cases where an egg did not hatch. In the early days, when the technology had still been available, necropsies had been performed to establish cause. In most of the recorded instances, there had been obvious yolk problems, or the creature had been malformed and would not have survived Hatching. Three times, however, the cause of death could not be established, as the fetus had been perfect with no apparent deficiency or disability. The message was handed down to dispose of such unhatched eggs between immediately: a duty performed on such rare occasions by the Weyrleader and his bronze.”

Lleu: So, that suggests that sometimes dragons are fine, and they don’t hatch, for reasons that they don’t understand, and they have just given up on those dragons, because they’ve decided that not hatching is, in and of itself, evidence of a…

Tequila Mockingbird: Lack of viability, yeah. And I think, yet again, we are being told, “There’s no superstition on Pern!” And I’m like, that kind of sounds like a superstition right there.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I personally believe that humans are just predisposed to superstition. If you don’t give us one, we’ll make them up. Every community of small children I have known, both as a child and as an adult who works with small children, have come up independently with brand new and exciting superstitions.

Lleu: Hm. Well, something to look forward to when we get to “Beyond Between”!

Tequila Mockingbird: No, no, there isn’t, because we won’t. You can’t make me no matter what kind of poll results you get.

Lleu: By way of recommendation to go with this story — it’s quite out there. My recommendation is Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which is a story about a society that’s built on putting all of your expectations and weight and offloading everything onto children, which is not exactly what happens with dragonriders, but maybe there’s some resonance there to explore, and, in any case, I think it’s a better story than this and a story that often either goes unread or goes badly misread, and it’s always worth encouraging people to go back to it and really sit down with the thought experiment that it is posing.

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] In Dragonflight: “Aside from having the amorous tendencies of a green dragon, Kylara was quick and ambitious.”