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Tequila Mockingbird: Hello!
Lleu: And welcome to a bonus episode of Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about Anne McDCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but the only one by us.
Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird.
Lleu: And I’m Lleu.
Tequila Mockingbird: And today we’re talking about the short story “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” originally published in 1986. I read it as part of the collection with the same title of other McCaffrey short stories, but it was also published in A Gift of Dragons.
Lleu: Yeah, in 2003, so the same year as the last book that McCaffrey wrote by herself.
Tequila Mockingbird: Got it.
Lleu: So “The Girl Who Heard Dragons” is the story of Aramina, who is a young girl of somewhat indeterminate age, but probably early teens, mid-teens, I would say, who has the ability to hear all dragons. Her family was kicked out of their Hold — or, rather, fled from their Hold in order to avoid being either murdered or, in her mother’s case, taken as a concubine by Fax, the conqueror whose demise Lessa arranged at the beginning of Dragonflight. They have been, for the past long time —
Tequila Mockingbird: Her entire life, I think.
Lleu: They have been living Holdless, or rather they have been living on the generosity of a succession of Holders, because her father is a very talented joiner, carpenter. But Aramina’s ability to hear all dragons has recently come to the attention of Thella, who describes herself as the “Lady Holdless,” who is attempting to unite a group of Holdless behind her in order to challenge the established political authorities on the planet, and she believes that Aramina’s ability to hear dragons would be very useful, because it would let her better evade the notice of the Weyrs, who are assisting the Lord Holders who are trying to catch her. Aramina and her family do not want her to be pressed into the service of the Lady Holdless, so they flee again, and due to some circumstances, they end up stuck in the woods as Thread is incoming, and Aramina for the first time actively reaches out to one of the dragons that she has been listening in on and calls for help. And K’van, who we met in a previous bonus episode’s short story, “The Smallest Dragonboy,” comes to rescue her and her family, and they save Aramina from being kidnapped by Thella. And then the story ends with F’lar and Lessa telling Aramina that she is going to be taken to the Weyr.
Tequila Mockingbird: So Aramina is born halfway on their way through the mountains of Fort. I think that does add an interesting element, because she’s never been to Ruatha. She’s never been to their “home.” She’s only — and same with both of her younger siblings — known a nomadic life on the road.
Lleu: Yeah, but her parents are attempting to get home, and at the end are essentially guaranteed by Lessa in particular that they will find a place at Ruatha if they want it, or, alternately, are offered a place at Lemos Hold which is the area that they are in at that point.
Tequila Mockingbird: And I think it is very interesting that both of her parents think of themselves as displaced smallholders, not as Holdless people.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Because you see in the narrative a lot of disdain for Holdless people. The quote that I wrote down is, “Having no place to hold, they also had no pride of place.”[1]
Tequila Mockingbird: And this, like, “Oh, holdless people are all inherently messy and disrespectful, and they leave their stuff everywhere, and they don’t take care of the of their community.”
Lleu: Yeah. There’s also a — I thought interesting — Aramina is aware of the fact that functionally the wagon they travel with is their home. It’s not what her parents insist it is, namely, a Gather-wagon that you would bring into the main Hold area in order to set up your stall for a Gather, a market day. But she only acknowledges that implicitly when one of the dragonriders very politely refers to it as a Gather-wagon, and her parents are pleased that someone has recognized it for what it is supposed to be, even if it’s not in fact, what it has been serving as for the past 10-odd, 12, 15 years.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, however old Aramina is, which is a little bit ambiguous.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: The question that this poses to me is, how much of that disdain is coming from the characters and how much is coming from the narrative.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Because it’s very clear that Aramina’s parents feel that way. But I’m interested to see whether or not we think the text of the story itself feels that way. We do see, Aramina’s parents are also very, very resistant to the idea of accepting any kind of charity or not paying for any kind of kindness they receive. And I do think the narrative gently suggests that that’s extreme, or unnecessary, or a little ridiculous.
Lleu: Yeah, I would agree.
Tequila Mockingbird: I think some of it is coming from their negative experiences feeling like they’re living on charity in a Hold, or being judged for taking resources as a Holdless or displaced person when they have tried to seek shelter at various Holds. So I think that’s part of the reason that the narrative is sort of being a little gentle with that, but I also think the narrative does broadly suggest that it’s unnecessary and a little kind of contrived, the way they’re like, “Oh, we can’t possibly accept medical assistance after a serious injury until we offer them a wooden spoon in trade.”
Lleu: Yeah. I think Aramina’s perspective finds it a little bit absurd. Essentially, it seems to me that Aramina is like, “Under normal circumstances, sure, this is a fine approach to things.”
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: “But in an emergency this makes no sense, and the fact that my father was trapped under some portion of the weight of their wagon for a while and has, like, bruising all across his chest” — I’m a little bit like, I don’t know if he’s going to survive this injury.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I don’t think that numbweed, which makes you stop feeling pain, and fellis, which makes you sleep, is necessarily going to cure internal bleeding.
Lleu: Yeah. The story ends at a very weird moment where I’m like, I don’t feel like you’ve resolved, actually, anything about this situation. But anyway, it seems to me that Aramina thinks it’s ridiculous in this context to behave in this way, but it also seems to me that she doesn’t really question it, and she does perceive a difference between herself and her family and the other Holdless people that they interact with —
Tequila Mockingbird: Yes.
Lleu: — not just Thella and her minion, Giron, who is a man whose dragon died and so left the Weyr in order to be away from dragonriders and is described as creepy and soulless in a weird way —
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah!
Lleu: — considering that the other dragonless character that we’ve met is Lytol, who is…
Tequila Mockingbird: Very positive. Yeah.
Lleu: Certainly dour, but not creepy and soulless, and, in fact, capable of love and laughter.
Tequila Mockingbird: I think we are very clearly supposed to empathize with Lytol and feel bad for him but also proud that he’s rebuilt his life and support his paternal relationship with Jaxom.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Where here it’s — and to be fair, this is very much from Aramina and her family’s perspective — it does seem like a, “Oh, dragon died, automatically guy’s gonna be evil and weird. Nothing you can do about that.”
Lleu: I’m struggling to escape the implication that like oh, he should have just committed suicide rather than living this soulless life, and that there’s something weird and creepy —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.
Lleu: — about the fact that he is still alive to live this half life.
Tequila Mockingbird: Interesting.
Lleu: I don’t think that’s borne out by the rest of the series, but it kind of feels like that’s what you’re telling me here.
Tequila Mockingbird: It might be specifically that he is seeking power, where Lytol was very, “Oh, I must nobly suffer on. And I’m not gonna kind of come to the forefront. I’m just gonna quietly work in the Weaver Crafthall.” And he’s placed as the steward of Ruatha against his wishes.
Lleu: Hm.
Tequila Mockingbird: Rather than Giron, who’s seeking power or authority, which might be what is frowned upon narratively. I don’t know.
Lleu: It’s hard to know. It’s a weird choice.
Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also worth noting that Lytol is a green rider in Dragonflight, and then immediately becomes a brown rider in all subsequent books. And I don’t know that we know the color of Giron’s dragon. Yeah, well, I think the reason that Lytol becomes a brown rider has to do with the fact that Dragonquest begins with a green rider clearly in a sexual relationship with a man stabbing F’nor in the shoulder —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.
Lleu: Just at a time when Jaxom is about to start engaging in more adult things, and I think she maybe wanted to avoid the implication that Lytol might be gay.
Tequila Mockingbird: Interesting.
Lleu: Is my read of that retcon. You know, it’s McCaffrey, so it’s also possible that it was simply a continuity error and she just forgot.
Tequila Mockingbird: Can never can never overlook that possibility.
Lleu: There’s also some weirdness geographically in this book. They leave and they go west, and they’re in Tillek for a while, but when we meet them they’re in Igen, on the opposite side of the continent, and going north, for some reason to get to…
Tequila Mockingbird: To Lemos
Lleu: In order to get to Ruatha, which is west. So…
Tequila Mockingbird: Hm. Well.
Lleu: It’s a little a little perplexing as a route, I would say, in ways that the story doesn’t comment on, as far as I can remember.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I sort of assumed that they start at Igen because we’ve had, in Moreta, at least, a whole discussion about how there’s a lot more Holdless people there, because the climate is warmer and because there are those big cave systems, and that it’s a known, “Oh, yeah, that’s where the Holdless people tend to collect.” So, here, they’re Holdless; they’re starting out there. I was like, “Yeah, that makes sense.” I didn’t really think about their path across the continent.
Lleu: Well, I think this ties into some of the broader questions that have come up repeatedly as we’ve been talking about the series about the political structure of Pern, that are, I think, related to the charity question.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.
Lleu: So, over the past few books of the main series, we’ve gotten increasing reminders that there is a large population of people in the present, in the Ninth Pass, who are “Holdless,” quote-unquote. Sometimes this means younger sons of Lord Holders who are not going to inherit the Hold, and who there is less and less land available to subdivide and assign to, and sometimes it means people who have been, for one reason or another, kicked out of their Hold and so are living Holdless. And as we find out in Dragondrums, I think, a lot of them do congregate at Igen, because, in addition to the Hold, there are a bunch of large natural cave complexes near enough to the Hold that people can kind of commute to the Hold and work as day laborers. Even if they can’t actually live in the Hold, um, in formal accommodations at the Hold.
Tequila Mockingbird: Although if they’re so desperate for new Holds for new Holders, why are those caves available? Why hasn’t some younger son snapped that up? Maybe insufficient for their consequence. And I guess there’s also, Igen is more desert-y, right?
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: So there might not be enough arable land to support a permanent population there.
Lleu: That would be my assumption, that there’s some environmental restriction that makes this not viable for a —
Tequila Mockingbird: Traditional.
Lleu: — formal holding but does work as, not to be a Marxist on the podcast, but, like lumpenproletariat housing.
Tequila Mockingbird: Be a Marxist on the podcast. Who can stop you?
Lleu: In order, I think, to understand the charity thing from Aramina’s parents, we also have to think about the structure of feudalism. So, the way that feudalism works conventionally is, there is a lord and the lord has multiple clients who swear or commit themselves in some way to perform certain obligations for the Lord — could be military service, it could just be providing a certain amount of their crops, it could be doing corvée labor for the for their lord, something that Jaxom’s perspective reflects on. So it’s assumed that both parties are getting something out of this relationship and that this will be a long-term relationship. And I think the fact that Aramina’s parents see themselves not as Holdless but as displaced Ruathan smallholders —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: — is part of why they’re so resistant to accepting charity if it comes from someone of higher status, because to them that reads as committing themselves to a new Lord, but what they want is to go back to Ruatha and reestablish themselves there.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.
Lleu: So they’re trying to avoid getting themselves into a new lord-client relationship —
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: — that it would be more difficult for them to get out of.
Tequila Mockingbird: Right, and in support of that we do learn that they had previously been ready to go back to Ruatha, and then they had lost their “draybeasts” in Threadfall, and so they had to go back to I think Keroon, and basically commit her father’s labor for a year in order to buy new draybeasts.
Lleu: Yeah. But that is very explicitly, he’s signed a contract for a year of labor —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: — and the payment is enough money to buy these animals, rather than he’s settling into a job in this place. But also it is interesting because the way it’s described is, he’s selling himself as an indentured laborer for a year. He’s described, I believe, as a bondsman.
Tequila Mockingbird: Here:
Tequila Mockingbird: “[To] hire his skill at a hard-bargained price for the next Turn, then trudge all the way back with the new team to where his family had waited, fearful of marauding holdless men and women and Threadfall.
Tequila Mockingbird: “The indenture over, Dowell had once again turned team and wagon westward.”
Lleu: Yeah. So he is, in fact, an indentured laborer, which…we don’t actually know a lot about the conditions or the extent of unfree labor on Pern. There’s references in Dragonquest to Lord Groghe’s…
Tequila Mockingbird: “Chattel.”
Lleu: Referring to people who are at the Hold. This makes it clear that there is a system of indenture that exists, but it’s not entirely clear how all of that works. But I must say I think as we will talk a lot more about when we get to Dragonsdawn, all of this follows very naturally from the colonists’ original libertarianism. Everyone gets their one Hold, but, oh, no, we’re running out of land, so now, as there’s less and less land available, more and more people are instead forced into various kinds of either wage labor or unfree labor —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: — in order to, especially in the context of Pern, survive, because living Holdless is very dangerous, especially during a Pass, but also even not during a Pass. It’s a lot safer to have an established place to live.
Tequila Mockingbird: Two things — one, even in Dragonsdawn you have charterers and contractors, where the contractors are literally writing a contract for x years of labor in exchange for x acres of land, so indentured labor is built in from the very beginning, although they don’t really see themselves that way. And, secondly, I think part of the reason that there’s a new focus on the Holdless population and that that has been a political tension in the Ninth Pass is, they’re coming off of a Long Interval. So there’s been 400 years with no Threadfall, where, while it certainly wasn’t ideal, you could live Holdless —
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: — in a lot more functional way than you can now that there’s random Thread, and if you don’t have a skill like Aramina’s you really are fully risking your life trying to live Holdless.
Lleu: Yeah. And it’s exacerbated by the fact that the Ninth Pass begins with the re-exploration of the Southern Continent, and now, in addition to this rapid change in the political circumstances, everyone is acutely aware of the fact that there is a whole lot of unclaimed fertile land down south, that is largely protected from thread, and this will go on to be probably one of the two most significant tension in the remainder of the series.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: We should also maybe note that this book is a kind of prequel or companion text or —
Tequila Mockingbird: Interquel.
Lleu: — test run of The Renegades of Pern, the next main series — not the next, sorry, Dragonsdawn’s next. So, Renegades of Pern —
Tequila Mockingbird: An upcoming main series book.
Lleu: — yeah, in any case — alludes to the plot of this book; I think possibly it from Thella’s perspective. So, Thella goes on to be one of the main characters, and the main antagonist, of that book, which I must say, this story, and Renegades, in ways that we’ll talk about when we get there —
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: — is classic anti-communism. Thella is evangelizing among the Holdless and being like, “We need to unite and then we can make a place for ourselves.”
Tequila Mockingbird: “Share all of our property.”
Lleu: Especially that — “We need to share things, hold stuff in common.” But also Thella’s clearly set up as a villain. She’s ready to kidnap Aramina; she attempts to kidnap Aramina. She’s got this unpleasant dragonless man as her minion. And also, as we discover in Renegades, there’s some more complicated political status going on here. Thella turns out to be the sister of Larad, one of the Lord Holders, and her goal is just to amass power for herself and be confirmed as a Holder.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.
Lleu: She’s mad that Larad was confirmed over her, even though she is, I believe, older than him. And so she tried to get the Lord Holders to confirm her instead, and they refused. So she’s bitter about it, ran away and started this whole plot. So it’s a classic “these people have a legitimate grievance against the political system that they’re in, and instead of addressing that grievance, we’re gonna give them a figurehead leader who will use, in this case, specifically the language of communist organizing, except that really she’s just there to get power for herself.”
Tequila Mockingbird: And also she wants to threaten children.
Lleu: And she wants to threaten children. And, fundamentally, the whole series has a certain amount of this in that their main adversary is the Red Star which threatens the property of our hardworking libertarian, feudal landowners. It’s such a Cold War series in many ways.
Tequila Mockingbird: You can tell it was written in the ’80s in America.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s interesting to me how many pieces of American media from that period fall into the same trap right? Like, “Magneto was right — it’s clear that a lot of American writers felt like they had to in some way address communism, or that communism was sort of looming narratively and emotionally — fair. But they also had to demonize it, and they also couldn’t come up with a really good way to demonize it. So you fall back on the, “...and also their leader is just evil or wants to blow up the whole world or murders children,” to get you out of actually having to grapple with it in any serious way.
Lleu: Yeah, because then we can drive Thella away or defeat Thella in some way, and now we’ve solved the problem. Except that we haven’t actually addressed any of the underlying material conditions that people were mad about that made them go to Thella.
Tequila Mockingbird: So picky, oh, my gosh! You want everything to be tied up in a little bow.
Lleu: I know, imagine. So, speaking of kidnapping and villains.
Tequila Mockingbird: As, in fact, we were. Yeah, I came to the end of this short story, and I was a little bit perturbed, because they’re being told, like, “Wow, you can go back to Ruatha!” And Aramina, who’s never been there, is like, “Yes, I’ll finally get to see this home that my parents have told me about all my life,” and then Lessa’s like, “No, you’re coming to Benden Weyr.” And Aramina’s like, “But I don’t…I don’t want to go to Benden Weyr. I want to stay with my family.” And Lessa’s like, “Oh, haha! That’s what everyone says.” And it’s like, is this a kidnapping? I kind of think that this is a kidnapping.
Lleu: Yeah, this is the weirdest “Search,” quote-unquote, that we see by a wide margin. So Aramina can talk to all dragons, and the Weyrs are always looking out for people, because they’ve found two already, so they’ll probably find some more. And that’s just in the last ten years. And, lo and behold, here’s a third one, so this ability that we thought was rare is, in fact, very common.
Tequila Mockingbird: But only when narratively necessary or interesting.
Lleu: So, yeah, as soon as they find out that Aramina can hear all dragons, Lessa and F’lar are like, “Oh, Thella wanted to steal what belongs to the Weyr,” before they’ve even really met her or talked to her. As soon as they find out the situation they’re like, “Yeah, she belongs to us.” Which is…
Tequila Mockingbird: The literal line’s:
Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Of course, Aramina is for Benden Weyr,’ Lesa went on.”
Tequila Mockingbird: And then Aramina says, like, “No, I want to go home to Ruatha.” And her mom is like, “Well, a girl who hears dragons belongs to the Weyr.” And then:
Tequila Mockingbird: “‘It’s not as if you can’t visit anytime you want to,’ Lessa said lightly. ‘I do, though we of Ruatha serve our Weyr whenever we are called to.’”
Tequila Mockingbird: And then she gets emotionally manipulated by the dragons being like, “Please come to us! Oh, we want to hang out with you!” And then Lessa says,
Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Benden needs a girl who can hear dragons.’”
Tequila Mockingbird: And Aramita says,
Tequila Mockingbird: “‘More than my family needs me?’
Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Far more as you’ll discover,’ said Lessa, holding her hand out to Aramina. ‘Coming?’”
Tequila Mockingbird: “‘I don’t have a choice, do I?’ But Aramina smiled.
Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Not when Lessa, and Benden’s dragons have made up your mind for you,’ said F’lar with a laugh.”
Tequila Mockingbird: And I’m like, I’m not laughing, actually.
Lleu: Yeah. It’s troubling.
Tequila Mockingbird: Truly it’s supposed to be like, “Oh, haha!” Reluctant but it’s gonna be an adventure. But it doesn’t quite achieve that for me.
Lleu: Yeah. The one thing that I will say is that Aramina’s mother, Barla, is, like, second cousin to Lord Kale, Lessa’s father, who was murdered with all of his family except Lessa. Jaxom the current titular Lord Holder of Ruatha — although it’s a little ambiguous when this is set, but I don’t think he’s been confirmed yet — his mother was like a third cousin, something like that.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: So it strikes me that it is also perhaps possible that part of this is to…
Tequila Mockingbird: Prevent that from being a political complication?
Lleu: Right?
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: Because in the same way that Lessa’s son had to be a dragonrider, because otherwise he would have a much stronger blood claim to Ruatha than Jaxom does. You got to do something to keep Aramina’s whole family politically marginalized or safe on the edges of things.
Tequila Mockingbird: To be fair, it has been clear before that there’s no automatic inheritance.
Lleu: Oh, yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: The conclave of Lord Holders has to officially convene and confirm you, and it seems like it is less about necessarily a biological relationship than it is about, are you ready? Do you seem like you’re gonna be good at this? Because Lord Holders frequently have, like, 10 or 15 kids, and they don’t all inherit.
Lleu: Yes.
Tequila Mockingbird: I think you could make an argument that even were Aramina and Jaxom and, I don’t know, Aramina’s mom all presented to the conclave, they’d be like, “Yeah, we’d rather have Jaxom.”
Lleu: Oh, absolutely! But I can imagine Lessa in particular thinking ahead and being like, Let’s just avoid a situation where that happens in the first place.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: And we do that by, essentially, on the one hand, kidnapping Aramina, and, on the other hand, bribing her family with, like, “Yeah, we’ve got all this great stuff for you. Wouldn’t it be nice if you just stayed in Lemos? And also we’ll take your daughter to the Weyr, where she’ll be a dragonrider. Won’t that be fun and good?” It’s all a little bit like, huh. There’s maybe more going on here.
Tequila Mockingbird: Hm. Although, to be fair, I think if that was their concern, her younger brother would probably be more politically important in this context.
Lleu: Well, yeah, I mean, I don’t think they would be worried that Aramina is going to.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: But I think that having Aramina in the Weyr is a convenient way of essentially putting her family in the Weyr’s deb.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: ’Cause, being a dragonrider is good, and everyone wants to be a dragon rider.
Tequila Mockingbird: Interesting. I also — complete sidebar, but if F’lessan had not Impressed, you bet Lessa would have been disinheriting Jaxom for him in a heartbeat.
Lleu: Oh, yeah. God, and F’lessan would have been a terrible Lord Holder.
Tequila Mockingbird: Terrible! This boy is not good at wielding power. Should anybody wield feudal power? Debatable. But specifically this boy should never do that. I do have to bring up that Aramina instantly recognizes by name on site, and in this world that does not have YouTube, I gotta be asking…uh, how?
Lleu: How?
Tequila Mockingbird: How?
Lleu: And the only answer that we have been provided is that at the Holds the Harpers teach children the “Name Song,” and the “Name Song” tells them the names of all of the bronze riders and the Weyrleader and Weyrwoman at the Weyr that they’re beholden to.
Tequila Mockingbird: But (a) Aramina is not beholden to a Weyr and has not grown up with any kind of formal Harper education, because she’s lived on the road, and the places where they’ve stopped before would not necessarily have been beholden to Benden Weyr.
Lleu: Well, in fact, some of them we know were not.
Tequila Mockingbird: And (b) are you telling me that this song includes a detailed description of every single dragon rider, accurate enough that a random 12-year-old is like, “That’s who that is.”
Lleu: I mean, here’s the thing. In Dragonflight, when F’lar goes to High Reaches Hold on Search. Fax pretends — it’s implied — not to recognize him, not to know his name, and Gemma immediately recognized him, and F’lar’s like, “He noticed that she had no trouble naming him and his dragon,” in a way that implies that the perhaps people are, in fact, taught a detailed description of all of the bronze writers at their Weyr.
Tequila Mockingbird: I also love that it’s an ongoing plot point that the Pernese have struggled desperately to retain technological or cultural history, and they just simply haven’t been able to do it; there’s too much of it. But we can definitely devote a lot of time and energy to specific physical descriptions of all of the dragon riders.
Lleu: Yeah, it’s…Anne.
Tequila Mockingbird: Heck with calculus.
Lleu: Literally, yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, I’m coming up with this on the spot, but in the spirit of trying to defend the world-building, what if it’s the fact that she knows who their dragons are? She’s been eavesdropping on all these dragon conversations. So what if the reason Aramina is so confident about who’s F’lar and who’s F’nor is, she knows, oh, that’s Mnementh, that’s Canth.
Lleu: Maybe. That is the one thing that would make sense. She does kind of know K’van, at least by name, because she knows Heth, his dragon.
Tequila Mockingbird: Right.
Lleu: I don’t know. I guess I could buy that. And then you could also maybe explain Gemma’s thing as, someone ran back from Fax meeting F’lar outside, and was like, “It’s F’lar!”
Tequila Mockingbird: I would also believe that Gemma, who is in a miserable marriage and bored to tears, has more time to memorize the specific appearance of all of the dragon riders, and also at that point Benden Weyr’s the only Weyr.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: She’s bored. She doesn’t have anything else to do with her time.
Lleu: My one other thought, I guess about Gemma is that it’s possible that she recognizes them because she saw F’lon before he died? But that seems a little more dubious, ’cause that was a while ago.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And that wouldn’t necessarily tell her it’s F’lar, not F’nor. I guess it’s the bronze dragonrider, not the brown dragonrider.
Lleu: Yeah. Anyway. We’ll get there when we talk about Masterharper of Pern eventually.
Tequila Mockingbird: Indeed. To our regret.
Lleu: So we’ve talked a little bit about the sudden explosion of people who can coincidentally talk to every dragon. The one last thing that I think I wanted to talk about is the series position of this, and in particular its relationship to all of the romance in the main series. Because this story is about Aramina, but the first dragonrider that she meets, and the dragonrider with whom she forms the strongest connection, is K’van. We met K’van in “The Smallest Dragonboy,” which was published 13 years previously, but…
Tequila Mockingbird: It seems to take place pretty close, because K’van is still a weyrling; he’s not an adult yet.
Lleu: Yeah. Aramina can immediately recognize that Heth is undersized, so not fully grown, and that K’van is still short. Looks like the smallest dragonboy.
Tequila Mockingbird: He has not hit his growth spurt.
Lleu: Yeah. So I’m interested in the way that these two stories set them up as parallel to each other in a way that suggests, “Oh, yeah, obviously K’van and Aramina are gonna end up together.” But of course — spoiler alert for Renegades of Pern — they don’t, which I think is a fascinating choice. And I wonder why she made that choice, because it kind of seems like the logical follow-up after “The Girl Who Heard Dragons.”
Tequila Mockingbird: Uh, actually, it’s very clear why that’s not the case. Aramina is taller than K’van, and you cannot possibly have a heterosexual relationship in which the woman is taller than the man, or they both instantly die.
Lleu: That’s so true. You’re right. I’d forgotten that well known fact about the universe. Never mind. Problem solved — mystery resolved.
Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also possible that she was kind of thinking about that and then decided to take Renegades in a different direction.
Lleu: Yeah. Renegades goes in many different directions.
Tequila Mockingbird: So few of them good.
Lleu: It’s not a very well-structured book. Anyway, it’s just something that I thought was interesting, especially since we’re coming off of our episode on Moreta, where there is obviously romance, but it’s very much not the kind of standard monogamous, heterosexual relationship romance that we’ve seen in the series thus far. And so it’s interesting that here it seems like she’s setting that up again.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.
Lleu: But then we get to Renegades, and Aramina still ends up in a long-term monogamous, heterosexual relationship, but it swerves away from what seemed like the obvious one.
Tequila Mockingbird: She’s trying to be creative here.
Lleu: So, if you for some reason are listening to us talk about this episode and thinking, “Hm, I should read ‘The Girl Who Heard Dragons’” —
Tequila Mockingbird: Don’t!
Lleu: — you should not read “The Girl Who Heard Dragons.” It’s just fundamentally kind of boring.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: I would, however, recommend an alternate short story, which is Elaine Cuyegkeng’s “These Constellations Will Be Yours.” If you’re interested in stories about a young person being kidnapped into an organization that they are told it’s an honor to join, where they’re reshaped from the ground up — we’re told at the end of Moreta, that when you Impress it’s like your life begins anew — and also this person has complicated feelings about it, and ends up becoming involved in a rebellion against that system, you might like this story. All of Elaine Cuyegkeng’s stories that I have read are incredible. This was the first one I read, and it’s really good. Published in Strange Horizons. There’ll a link on the Neocities page, and also perhaps on tumblr.
Tequila Mockingbird: 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.tumblr.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.neocities.org — N E O cities.
[1] Paraphrased; actual quote: “Having no hold to be proud of, the holdless residing in Igen cavern had no pride of place either [...].”