Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #16: The Masterharper of Pern (1998)

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.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and my first exposure to this book was an abridged audiobook that cut it down to two cassettes.

Tequila Mockingbird: We did want to give the note that we will be discussing eugenics, as well as our usual warnings for sexual agency issues and some stuff about agency around childbirth.

Lleu: So, today, we’re talking about The Masterharper of Pern, published in 1998, which is, at least ostensibly, the life of Robinton. The first roughly third of the book is actually, mainly, the life of Robinton’s parents, Petiron, who we met back in Dragonsong and Dragonsinger as Menolly’s mentor, the only person in her Hold who believed in her, and Merelan, the “Mastersinger,” which seems to be both a reflection of her vocal skill and also possibly mean that she is in charge of vocal instruction at the Hall. Petiron and Merelan have a loving, happy relationship, until Robinton is born, which happens at the very beginning of the book, at which point Petiron gets jealous, basically, that his son is stealing his wife away from him.

Lleu: Very normal parent things. Very quickly, when Robinton is about three, Merelan and some of the other masters at the Hall discover that Robinton is, as they put it, “a musical genius,” and they decide to embark on a six-year gaslighting campaign to prevent Petiron from ever finding out about this. When Petiron does eventually find out about this, Merelan responds by taking Robinton with her to Benden Hold for a contract for a year, where he meets F’lon, or, at the time, Falloner, the son of the Weyrleader, and ultimately the Benden Weyrleader himself. Their relationship is an important part of the latter two-thirds of the book. Then there’s a little jump when Robinton gets back from Benden Hold to the beginning of his apprenticeship, and we get a quick panorama of his time as an apprentice.

Lleu: After the third year of his apprenticeship, he is promoted to journeyman a year early, at age 15. The Master Harper gives the same speech that Robinton gives about Menolly at the end of Dragonsinger, and then Robinton is posted to a series of Holds. First, High Reaches Hold, where he meets, among other people, an ambitious and mean-spirited young Holder named Fax, the nephew of Lord Faroguy. Then he has a contract at Benden Hold again, where he is present, the evening that the Weyrleader and the Lord Holder of Benden both die, because the Weyrleader has a heart attack while he and his dragon are between conveying the Lord Holder back to the Hold. He is dismissed from Benden Hold because of reasons. He goes to Tillek Hold, where he meets a woman, falls in love with her, gets married, she dies about two weeks after their honeymoon as a result of getting hypothermia. Then he has a series of short-term contracts in South Boll, in Keroon, in a range of other places around the planet, and he’s eventually told that the Masterharper has been essentially training him up to be his replacement by making sure he would be familiar with and be, in turn, familiar to much of the planet, even if he hadn’t spent a ton of time in any one place, so that he would be able to do all of the spy stuff that comes with being Masterharper.

Lleu: Against this backdrop, the Weyr been steadily becoming more and more isolated, its prestige declining. Both dragonriders and Harpers are finding themselves increasingly unwelcome as people are rejecting the idea that Thread will come back, and also Fax has a particular hatred for both Harpers and dragonriders, and ultimately arranges for F’lon to be assassinated in a “duel,” at a Gather at Telgar. Telgar Hold cannot catch a break. Then Fax is expanding; there’s a very fast final two chapters, basically, where Robinton is watching helplessly as Fax expands, and then the last chapter of the book is a reworking of the beginning of Dragonflight, but from Robinton’s perspective, because apparently he was there in disguise as a drudge, with one of his spies.

Tequila Mockingbird: I gotta say, I think that probably about half of the drudges at Ruatha must be spies —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because every time we come back to the scene, we learn about yet another person who is disguised as a drudge at Ruatha Hold.

Lleu: Also, I neglected to mention that in the intervening time, a bit after his wife died, Robinton and Silvina started hooking up, and Camo, who we met in Dragonsinger, is actually Robinton and Silvina’s son, we find out, and, oh, boy, there’s a lot to talk about there. It’s gonna be a long one. Sorry, folks.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, the first thing I would like to do is, I would like to move to officially strike this book from canon.

Lleu: I like some parts of this book, but that’s correct. The continuity is a disaster.

Tequila Mockingbird: It actively makes me like other books in the series less if I have to believe that this book is part of the same world as that those books.

Lleu: Some of it is the usual continuity stuff, although some of it is particularly bad here, like the part where Robinton learns that Fax doesn’t allow Harpers in his smallholding at High Reaches before he kills Lord Faroguy, stages a coup, and becomes Lord Holder, and then four pages later —

Lleu: — the senior Harper at High Reaches informs him that Fax hates Harpers, and Robinton’s like, “What? He doesn’t let Harpers teach his Holders?” Yeah, you found that out four pages ago! There have been continuity problems throughout the series, but in The White Dragon, for example, she does not begin the book by thanking people for being continuity readers for her, and in the acknowledgements for this book, she thanks multiple people for being continuity readers for her. So, they were phoning it in or lying to her. Something went wrong here.

Tequila Mockingbird: Clearly, if she had four people doing it, it was an eight-person job.

Tequila Mockingbird: No amount of continuity readers could keep this woman on a timeline.

Tequila Mockingbird: A question we’ve had about multiple books in this series, but, especially for this one, there’s a lot of different books that this book could have been that I would understand, and this book chooses to be none of them.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not the story of Fax’s rise to power, which I could plausibly believe, like, yeah, that’s worthy of a book. It’s not really the story of the way that the Long Interval changes the society of Pern. It’s not really a story about the Weyr over the Long Interval, and the decline of the Weyr, although that is also happening during this story.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s just the story of Robinton’s career that is happening at the same time as this.

Lleu: And it turns out Robinton’s career is not actually that interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: Fundamentally, he’s very clearly the protagonist, but it’s Bildungsroman without a lot of Bildung.

Tequila Mockingbird: He grows up, but I would say the big crises of the story are his relationship with his dad, which doesn’t really resolve and kind of just peters out into, “Well, we don’t like each other or respect each other,” and then his mom dies, and they’re like, “Well, I respect you more, but I still don’t like you, and I never want to see you again. Bye!” There’s no catharsis.

Lleu: Yeah, Petiron banishes himself to Half-Circle when Robinton becomes Masterharper, and it’s framed as, “Oh, I don’t want to be looming over you and making you doubt your decisions because you think I might disagree with them.” And Robinton’s like…

Tequila Mockingbird: So, okay, that’s happening. There’s also the death of Robinton’s wife, his one true love, but…

Lleu: Yes. I am not 100% sure of this, because I was nine, but I’m about 95% sure that the abridged audiobook I listened to cut Robinton’s wife entirely from the book, which, frankly, did not change much.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, she feels more like a placeholder — a reason to explain why Robinton is not in romantic relationships.

Lleu: Right — an explanation for why Robinton is not in a committed, monogamous, heterosexual relationship that’s not just “Robinton’s kind of slutty” — which also is the case; we do find that out in this book.

Tequila Mockingbird: It kind of feels like her existence and her death doesn’t do anything for the story. I guess Fax is also a problem of the story, but Robinton is extremely passive in…

Lleu: Right, all he can do, as he himself acknowledges, is tell the same people the same thing over and over again until they tune him out. Yeah, that’s true; that’s all you can do in this situation as Masterharper.

Tequila Mockingbird: And even the final scene, where Robinton is basically just watching the beginning of Dragonflight — he’s just standing there watching. He can’t do anything, because she already wrote that scene 30 years ago, and he wasn’t there, and he didn’t do anything.

Tequila Mockingbird: She could have made Robinton a lot more active in Fax’s downfall, and she chose not to do that.

Lleu: Or she could have continued on and had it not end with the first chapter of Dragonflight, F’lar and Lessa departing, and instead had it end with Robinton having to set up Lytol at Ruatha Hold, ’cause one assumes that that was not actually entirely a straightforward process. But it doesn’t do that.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, you’re kind of left with this book that doesn’t really have a problem? F’lon’s death — again, it’s very sad. But it’s not about Robinton.

Tequila Mockingbird: He’s the viewpoint character, but he doesn’t really have something to overcome. He doesn’t have a goal to strive for other than “be the best Harper he can be,” and that doesn’t really sustain an entire book.

Lleu: Yeah. I will say, I find the narration of this book perfectly pleasant. Even when I was thinking, “Huh, objectively this is kind of boring,” there was no point, as I was reading this, where I was like, “Eh, I’ll just put it down.” I was like, “No, I’ll keep going.” It’s fine.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it feels, honestly, like the same problem she’s had before, where she’s not zoomed into character, and she’s just telling you about a lot of events happening, and there isn’t an emotional propulsion. But we are zoomed into character, and it’s still got that anodyne flatness.

Lleu: Yeah. Dragonseye, genuinely, stuff was happening, and the stuff that was happening was unhinged, but it felt like the characters that we were seeing the stuff happening through were people for whom the stuff that was happening actually mattered. It had personal stakes for them, so even though, sure, neither P’tero, nor Iantine, nor Debera, nor K’vin is, super well-developed — certainly, they’re not like Menolly or even like Readis — but it felt like it meant something to them in Dragonseye, I thought — as the peak book, where there’s not really an overarching plot, there’s just a lot of stuff that happens — it worked more there than it does here, I found.

Tequila Mockingbird: This one reminded me of All the Weyrs of Pern more than anything else.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not boring, but it’s also not super compelling.

Lleu: Except it has some very specific things that make me, personally, insane, so I would rank this higher than All the Weyrs of Pern for that reason, but only for that reason.

Tequila Mockingbird: Thinking about Dragonseye, in a lot of ways it felt like she couldn’t get over Dragonseye, reading this, because a lot of the things she’s talking about with the political economy and material culture of this book felt like they belonged more in the Second Pass than in the lead-up to the Ninth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that I couldn’t tell, is this an intentional retcon? Is this a genuine attempt to say that things shifted that drastically, that quickly, in Pernese society? Or is this just, she’d lost her place mentally with where Pernese society was at what specific time?

Lleu: Yeah. We’ll talk more about this later, but the I’m thinking in particular about the status of women, right? We had this very specific and also very conventional, in some ways —

Lleu: — vision of pseudo-medieval, feudal, sexist society in the lead-up to the Ninth Pass, and Dragonseye very specifically set out to explain how we got from the notionally enlightened space future of Dragonsdawn — although, as we discussed —

Lleu: — lot of caveats there — to something that looked more like pseudo-medieval feudal sexism, but here she jumps back to that.

Tequila Mockingbird: We’re back where we were in Dragonseye, ’cause we have a female Masterhealer. We have women involved in Crafts. We have the Mastersinger. We have all of this, and then we’re supposed to end up where we saw Dragonflight, and it’s a little confusing.

Lleu: Especially because, unlike Dragonseye, she doesn’t offer any material explanation for why this happens. Dragonseye has a very specific thesis: the rights of women declined because people wanted control of women’s reproduction in order to expand their feudal land holdings. That makes sense. Here, it’s just, “Well, there used to be women who had status, and now there aren’t —”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and it is possible that this is an intentional realignment, because, what I kind of realized as I was thinking about this is, that initial view that we get of Pernese culture is primarily coming through the lens of Lessa at Ruatha Hold under Fax and Menolly, growing up at Half-Circle Sea Hold with Yanus as the holder. I think it’s fair to say that both of those men are specifically sexist and specifically creating a Hold culture that is very dismissive of women. So, it’s possible that this is McCaffrey intentionally staking the claim of, “Actually, that wasn’t completely representative of all of Pern; those were just uniquely bad situations.” And those are kind of the Hold lives that we see, right? Because both Lessa and Menolly are removed from those situations and brought to the Weyr and Harper Hall, and everything else we see from the Ninth pass is either within the Weyr, with maybe a question mark about Ruatha under Lytol and Jaxom, or is happening as Pernese culture rapidly changes again —

Tequila Mockingbird: — with AIVAS and time travel and the Weyrs coming forward. All of that is going on, and so we are seeing, okay, things are shifting. So it’s possible that the starting point is not what we, the reader, and we, the podcasters, had thought it was at the beginning of this series.

Lleu: Yeah, the thing that sort of belies that for me is that this book, I think, wants us to see it as a decline that’s happening in this specific period. There’s a few particular moments, in particular about women at the Harper Hall, where the book seems to be flagging this as “This is a change that you should be paying attention to.” And it’s like, okay, I’m paying attention, but why is the change happening?

Tequila Mockingbird: The only reason that seems plausible for why is this change happening is the Long Interval, right? It’s gotten to the point where we really don’t know if Thread is ever going to come back. But I don’t really think that makes sense — why would that affect the status of women in the Harper Hall?

Lleu: Yeah, especially because what we’ve been told previously, in Dragonquest, for example, is that the Long Interval, in fact, made people more open-minded, less conservative. But what we see in this book is very much a retrenchment.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t think Fax’s political views are popular outside of his spheres of authority, so it doesn’t make sense that Fax is convincing other people to also become more regressive.

Lleu: Yeah. So, one of the two things about this book that makes me insane, in a good way is half of the way that it’s showing us decline in its focus on the institutional decline of the Harper Hall and Benden Weyr. F’lon and Robinton throughout the book are people who are part of institutions that they are conscious of as intended to be the bulwark that protects Pern against Thread, Benden Weyr by literally burning Thread out of the sky and the Harper Hall by preparing people to support the dragonriders in order to protect themselves from Thread. And both of them are conscious of the fact that, for reasons that are completely beyond their control and which they don’t necessarily entirely understand, neither of their institutions is capable of fulfilling its obligations anymore, and there’s nothing they can do about it, except watch it get worse and worse. I’m obsessed with this. It’s so good. The problem is, it’s in the background. It’s a thing that’s happening in the book, but it’s not what the book’s about. And if it were what the book’s about, I would love it. But as a thing in the background, it just makes me insane, because I want more of this!

Tequila Mockingbird: And the other burning question that this brought into our hearts as readers: is Robinton intentionally bisexual in this book? Because, if not, McCaffrey, you have so much explaining to do.

Lleu: Yeah. There are so many things going on here with Robinton, and the thing that is the most going on, I think, is his relationship with F’lon. They sleep in each other’s beds. F’lon walks into Robinton’s room without knocking.

Tequila Mockingbird: They gaze deeply into each other’s eyes and remark on the beautiful color of them.

Lleu: It’s the same kind of vibe in some ways as Readis and T’lion, except like ramped up way more, and I think for me the scene that — other than the absolutely unhinged wedding, where F’lon is out of control —

Tequila Mockingbird: He’s literally holding Kasia and Robinton’s heads and mushing their lips together to make them kiss.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is a very chill and normal way to behave when your best buddy gets married.

Lleu: So, apart from the wedding, the scene that I think most encapsulates this is after Robinton’s wife has died and he’s been sent down to South Boll to sub in for a Harper there who has broken his leg and really to be away from the Hall and recuperate in a place that will not constantly be reminding him of his dead wife. And partway through his time there, F’lon shows up out of nowhere and is like, “Robinton! Robinton! Larna!” And Robinton’s like, “Okay, Larna, that’s…I met her when she was a child at the Weyr, and F’lon didn’t like her, but now I think he’s in love with her, so, okay.” “Larna just gave birth! I have a son now!” And Robinton’s like, “Oh. Congrats.” Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, they’re talking; he has brought some wine to share with Robinton and the South Boll Harper who’s there. Here’s what we get:

Lleu: “It was a merry time, though all too short, because F’lon was anxious to return to Benden and his child.

Lleu: “‘I gather Larna did forgive you for pushing her into the midden, then?’ Robinton remarked after listening to F’lon’s ravings.

Lleu: “The dragonrider gave him a startled look. ‘I never pushed her into the midden. That was Rangul. R’gul, I should say. That isn’t where he’d’ve liked to push her, but I’—and he slapped his chest proudly—‘got her as weyrmate, not R’gul.’

Lleu: “‘I’m sure she’ll be happier with you,’ Robinton said, remembering what a stuffy child Rangul had been.

Lleu: “‘Of course she will,’ F’lon replied. Finishing his third or maybe fourth glass of wine, he decided he had best return to the Weyr, Larna, and his son. ‘I’ve named him Fallarnon.’

Lleu: “‘Bronze, of course,’ F’lon added as he waved a cheerful goodbye to Karenchok.

Lleu: “‘He came all the way from Benden Weyr to tell you that?’ Karenchok asked, hobbling to the doorway to watch the dragonrider depart.

Lleu: “‘Good friends.’ Karenchok lifted his wine glass appreciatively. ‘You don’t get good Benden often in South Boll.’”

Lleu: The fact that the other Harper there is like, “Okay…” feels to me like she’s doing this intentionally, or at least she knows that she’s raising this possibility and is intentionally pointing us towards it. This is followed by maybe the most insane thing about this whole scene.

Lleu: “Nine days later, a runner brought Robinton a short message from F’lon: Larna had died two days after Fallarnon’s birth. Robinton sent back a message by the same messenger, expressing his condolences. In his heart, though, Robinton envied F’lon, who had a son to remember his love by.”

Lleu: So, this means that F’lon left Larna’s bedside immediately after she gave birth to travel halfway across the planet, first to the Harper Hall, where people told him, “No, Robinton’s not here; he’s in South Boll,” and then to South Boll — to get drunk. With Robinton. About having a son.

Tequila Mockingbird: While his partner is actively dying of postnatal hemorrhage.

Tequila Mockingbird: For me, the scene at the wedding is the biggest one. It’s at Robinton’s wedding, right, and F’lon is like, “You’re not gonna have time for your friends anymore?” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Lleu: And Robinton’s like, “Yes, ’cause I’m having a lot of casual sex with women when I’m traveling around!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Also the fact that Robinton has to specifically cite that F’lon isn’t allowed into their bedroom on their wedding night.

Lleu: Uh-huh! Also that F’lon has been really weird and kind of annoying the whole day, and Kasia’s like, “I think he’s in love.” And Robinton’s like, “Huh,” and talks to Simanith, F’lon’s dragon, and Simanith’s like, “Well, he thinks about Larna a lot?” And Robinton’s like, “Ah, he must be in love with Larna!” I’m like, well, I don’t know that that was the correct conclusion there, actually.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s a lot. And if it was just that, fine. But Robinton also has a lot of very flirty energy with Nip, who is the Harper spy who is involved in Fax’s downfall, after Kasia’s dead, after F’lon is dead — and before F’lon is dead, I think.

Lleu: Yes, the scene in particular that jumped out to both of us, especially in light of our discussion of boot-removal in “The Second Weyr” and “The Ford of Red Hanrahan,” where removing boots is presented as a sign of how married two people are, is, we get a scene where Nip has returned to the Harper Hall. And, first of all, whenever he’s at the Hall, he just wanders into Robinton’s room, crashes on Robinton’s spare bed, and uses his private bath.

Lleu: So that’s something. But then also, specifically, in this instance, when Nip has come back and is looking particularly exhausted and road-bedraggled, Robinton’s like, “Here, let me take off your boots for you.” And Nip’s response is:

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘You’re the only man I’d allow such a privilege,’ the irrepressible Nip replied as he lifted his left leg and then placed his right boot on Robinson’s butt. ‘I know many people who’d love to have the MasterHarper of Pern on the end of their boot!’ he added, chuckling. He gave Rob a hefty push—all to help remove his boot, of course.”

Lleu: There is a lot to unpack here — I say facetiously. It’s very obvious what there is to unpack here, which is that this is extremely flirtatious.

Tequila Mockingbird: I feel like the only people who call Robinton “Rob,” as opposed to “Robbie,” are men he’s flirting with.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s F’lon, the person who introduces Rob as a nickname, and then Nip and Kasia, sometimes.

Lleu: One thing that’s connected to this, perhaps, is the constant refrain through this book of “Robinton could have been a dragon rider.” Robinton can proactively speak to dragons, although, unlike Aramina, Lessa, Torene, etc., he does not hear all dragons, and they don’t necessarily respond to him. But he can apparently make himself heard and understood by any dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we do know that in The White Dragon, when he has the first heart attack, the dragons somehow psychically prevent him from dying, and, like, hold him alive. So it has been pre-established that one of the many ways in which Robinton is the specialist boy is that the dragons like him.

Lleu: And there are repeated mentions of the fact, or allusions to the fact, that Robenton could have Impressed a dragon. He is told this by multiple people. His mother gets to have a brief kind of fantasy about, like, “Oh, what if you did become a dragon rider?” Robinton desperately wishes that he could be both a dragonrider and a Harper at the same time.

Tequila Mockingbird: And when he learns that C’gan is going to be the Harper of the Weyr, because he is both, he is very, like, “Oh, wow. I didn’t know it was possible to do both at the same time” — and then they just don’t do a Search for male candidates at the times when he is the right age to Impress.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause it’s part of the Weyr being a little more reclusive at that point and not wanting to instigate a Search.

Lleu: They have “enough,” quote-unquote, candidates from the Weyr itself, so they don’t need to go elsewhere for them. This possibility that Robinton could have been a dragonrider haunts the rest of the narrative. Among other things, in his relationship with F’lon, who at several points is like, “Man, if only you were a dragonrider.” And there’s sort of lip-service to the idea that, well, obviously Robinton would have Impressed a bronze. But I don’t necessarily think it’s a coincidence that the dragon on the cover of this book is a blue dragon, associated with bisexuality. There’s really no reason for the dragon on the cover to be Tagath, ’cause that’s the only blue dragon…

Lleu: But also, if we’re trying to link it with the content of the book, then that means it’s C’gan, Robinton’s blue rider — so bisexual or gay — informant-slash-friend-slash-person who comes to vent to him about how annoyed he is about R’gul and the other Weyr leadership after F’lon’s death. Is this another is this C’gan and Tagath who we’re seeing on the cover, or is this Robinton’s hypothetical dragon that we’re seeing on the cover, or what? So the specter of dragonrider Robinton and, as I’m reading this, the specter of “lower” color dragonrider Robinton looms over this, and F’lon’s “If only you were a dragonrider” starts to sound a little bit less like “If only we could share the same social space all the time” and a little more like “If only we could share the same sexual space all of the time” — or both at the same time.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we are explicitly told in the narrative that like that bronze riders do sometimes fly green dragons — that there is this flexibility of sexuality within the Weyr, even if what we are kind of given for a protagonist is overwhelmingly this very heterosexual bronze dragonrider energy.

Lleu: Yeah. There’s also — on this note, gay people are back. And this is, I believe — other than the passing reference to “‘lads,’” quote-unquote, who’ve displayed “homosexual preferences,” quote-unquote, in Dragonseye, prior to being chosen as candidates for the Weyr — this is the only book in connection with the Ninth Pass where we have any indication of queerness among commoners, or an awareness of queerness among commoners, and it comes when, in the Search before Robinton is of the appropriate age, two people from Fort are Searched, one Harper and one person from the Hold. We do eventually find out more details about the Harper, but the first person that we get information about is the person from Fort Hold. They find out that the person from Fort Hold Impressed a green dragon, meaning that he’s gay. And Petiron’s response to this is:

Lleu: Which can only mean that this person from the Hold was so obviously gay — and presumably that has to mean, in particular, so obviously effeminate — that even Petiron, who is unaware that his own son is a musical genius, was aware that this candidate was gay.

Tequila Mockingbird: So how does Petiron know this random teenage boy from Fort Hold? Presumably he’s given him musical instruction? Or he’s known in the community to such a degree that Petiron’s like, “Oh, yeah, that gay kid.”

Lleu: Yeah, it’s wild. And there’s a cryptic, like, “Robinton didn’t understand what his father meant,” indicating that we as the reader are supposed to understand what his father means, and perhaps to read something into it. I don’t know. There’s just so much in here that, on the one hand, some of it is within the realm of plausible deniability, this could be just weird, charged banter between two straight men. But there’re enough things in this book that are pointing at it that I felt more and more, as I was going on, that she must have meant us to at least be thinking about this, even if she wanted us to discount this possibility, because otherwise, why would she write it this way?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I don’t insist upon this, but it’s interesting then to juxtapose that with Robinton’s relationship with his parents, because I do feel like there is a narrative cliché, or a narrative pattern, of “young queer guy whose dad is very dismissive and withholding and whose mom is very accepting but also not willing to confront her husband about it” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that does parallel the relationship we see in this family, where Merelan is very loving towards Robinton and very clearly invested in, like, emotionally supporting him and making sure he gets what he wants —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but is not in any way willing to actually, directly talk to her husband about this.

Lleu: The — there’s so much to talk about in terms of Petiron and Merelan’s relationship. This book is so emphatic about the fact that Petiron is the Bad Dad, and Merelan is the good, saintly mom. And I agree, Petiron is a neglectful father. He’s not very good at it. He’s emotionally distant, at best.

Tequila Mockingbird: He clearly has an ego and is challenged by his son being better than him at anything, in a way that is just like would be unpleasant in a interpersonal relationship of any kind, but in a parental relationship is really unpleasant.

Lleu: The problem is that Merelan’s response to this is to get everyone in Petiron’s personal and professional circles to collaborate on a multi-year scheme to prevent him from ever discovering that his son is a musical genius.

Tequila Mockingbird: And not just prevent him from discovering, but, when he does start to find out, lie to him about what he is seeing.

Lleu: He notices an instrument around, and Merelan’s like, “Oh, you know…he just was playing around with it,” and hes whistling and it’s like, “Oh, yeah, they’ve been practicing it in classes.” It’s just sort of thing after thing of Petiron almost noticing it and Merelan and other people around him are intentionally diverting him from it. So it’s not even just “we’re hiding it,” it’s that we are actively lying to him about it. I don’t think this is particularly hinged spousal behavior or parental behavior.

Lleu: And the fact that Merelan’s response when Petiron does, in fact, find out is to effectively kidnap her son, with the collaboration of everyone else in the Harper Hall, and take him away to Benden Hold for a year.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also to get mad at Petiron for not realizing that his son is a musical genius. Well, hun, you’ve been actively lying to him about that for six years.

Lleu: Yeah, that’s the thing that is the most gaslighty, is that she’s like, “We hid nothing from you! You just weren’t paying attention!” It’s like, well…

Lleu: That’s not true, actually. You were hiding things, and when he paid attention, you told him he shouldn’t be paying attention.

Tequila Mockingbird: Merelan notices a flaw in Petiron, and then instead of trying to engage with him to correct it or express that she doesn’t like it, she preemptively assumes that it’s unfixable —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and starts doing damage control on something that isn’t damaged, thereby damaging it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, he’s a neglectful parent, but, honestly, I think a lot of the problems between Petiron and Robinton are things Merelan created.

Tequila Mockingbird: She spends the first part of this book being so passive in her own relationship with him — because we do get a lot of her point of view, and it’s just her being like, “Ugh, I hate it when he does this. Ugh, it’s so frustrating when he does that. Ugh, it’s terrible that he does the other thing.” But she doesn’t do anything about that, and just silently sitting there racking up lists of crimes that her spouse is committing, without ever expressing to him that she doesn’t like that or that that behavior isn’t good, is not actually a healthy relationship dynamic.

Lleu: And actively enabling him about some things. Shortly after Robinton is born, or when he’s, like, a year old, ish, Merelan has been not well since giving birth, and she and Petiron are effectively shipped off, but notionally with consent, back to not the Hold that Merelan grew up in but the Hold next door to the hold Merelan grew up in in South Boll. And on their way they keep meeting people who are anti-Harper, and Merelan is in fact verbally assaulted by a man who calls her a “harlot” who’s “stealing children away,” etc. She is really shaken by this and very explicitly, consciously is like, “Well, obviously I can’t tell Petiron about any of this. ’Cause he wouldn’t get it.” Sure, that’s true, maybe, but that’s true because you and everyone around him are sheltering him from having to deal with any of the political realities of the world he lives in. And if you didn’t do that, then he would be able to deal with it.

Tequila Mockingbird: The death of the author, fair, but it makes me wonder about McCaffrey’s divorce, because Merelan is very, like, “Well, I can’t talk about that, can’t talk about that,” for a decade and then is just like, “Great, I’m taking my child, and I’m leaving, and we’re done.” Obviously that is her prerogative, to a certain degree, to end a relationship unilaterally, but maybe try talking about your needs and desires ever. Literally once? Perhaps?

Tequila Mockingbird: So we get that trash fire of a relationship. We get Robinton’s very flirty relationship with F’lon and Nip and his very emotionally disengaged relationship with Kasia, where we’re told that they’re in love — and there’s some flirting; it’s fun — but it doesn’t feel as emotionally meaningful as I think it’s supposed to.

Lleu: The whole relationship happens over the course of about two chapters —

Tequila Mockingbird: And then we get Silvina. We’re sort of signposted as, like, okay, she had a crush on him at one point, and then they have this casual sexual relationship. But I’m not sure if we’re supposed to think that Silvina is like tragically pining for him, or that she’s genuinely chill with that.

Lleu: I think it’s possible that, if Robinton’s emotional state and romantic history were different, that maybe they would have gotten married, but I also don’t feel like she’s pining for him. I feel like she’s genuinely like, “You’re not as emotionally available as I would want you to be if we were going to get married. And that’s okay. We don’t need to get married.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So that is fun, and this is, again, a very interesting peek at a very non-monogamous kind of a vibe, not in the Weyr —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but in the Harper Hall instead that does maybe speak to the cultural alignment of the Harper Hall less with the other Crafthalls and more with the Weyr.

Tequila Mockingbird: And Silvina’s relationship with Robinton I would love. I would be like, “Cool. This is a fun, non-monogamous energy.” She gets to have a job. Her job isn’t not the same job that all Masterharpers’ partners have, which is running the administrative side of the Harper Hall and also having sex with the Masterharper, but, you know, okay. Except that Robinton and Silvina have a child, Camo, and because he has some oxygen deprivation at birth, because he’s caught in the umbilical cord, he has an intellectual disability, and…uh…it’s bad, folks.

Lleu: I think it’s fair to say that this is probably the worst portrayal of disability in the whole series by a wide margin.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we truly just get these two parents who realize that their child has an intellectual disability and are just like, “Okay. Such a shame he’s not a real person.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Let’s move on completely and emotionally from this.”

Lleu: Robinton very explicitly is like, “Well, I guess I’ll never have a son who loves me, except I have many sons who love me, and they’re my students, and that’s better than having a child with a developmental disability who cannot play music.” That’s the sticking point, is that Camo doesn’t respond to musical instruments.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s bad in and of itself, but it’s also such a strange contrast when the first third of this book was, over and over, hammering in this idea of “Petiron is a bad father because he can’t celebrate Robinson as someone different from himself” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because he’s emotionally neglectful and not present in Robinton’s life as a parent. And then Robinton does exactly the same thing, and it doesn’t seem like the narrative notices or cares.

Lleu: Yeah. Does exactly the same thing and also condemns his child to a life of menial servitude.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not actually better to be an absent parent because your child is quote-unquote “too dumb” than because your child is “too smart.”

Tequila Mockingbird: The neglect is actually exactly the same neglect, and it’s just very clear the narrative, i.e., McCaffrey, doesn’t think that that neglect is bad when the person being neglected has a disability.

Tequila Mockingbird: And there’s really nothing else to say about that, other than that that’s shitty.

Tequila Mockingbird: I was really hoping when I spoke into being this, like, “Drudges are so weird because who looks at their kid and is like, ‘Welp, you’re just going to be a servant forever.’” And then that’s literally what happens. And I’m just like, uh…

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay? I guess that McCaffrey’s kids are lucky that they were abled.

Lleu: That’s kind of the takeaway. Yeah. And it’s an interesting contrast with F’lon and Larna, and then later F’lon and Manora, because, while Larna dies immediately and the structure of parenting in the Weyr is different, F’lon does quote-unquote “get” to be this proud father who has these extremely talented children — F’nor Impresses like two years earlier than he’s supposed to be, because F’lon’s like, “He can be a candidate now.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Because he’s afraid that if F’nor doesn’t impress at 10, by the next time Jora clutches, he will be too old.

Lleu: So we get to see these moments of F’lon being the proud parent, and while this is happening, Robinton’s like, “Man. Too bad about my son.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Buddy! It’s also just a weird narrative beat, where he’s like, “Ah, and I can never have children.” Well, why?

Lleu: There’s no indication that this was genetic, insofar as they understand genetics, which they seem to.

Tequila Mockingbird: And they know that the problem was that he was caught in the umbilical cord at birth, so…even from a eugenicist standpoint, it doesn’t seem like there’s any reason Robinton couldn’t just have other children. That’s just another weird little beat there.

Tequila Mockingbird: I also do have to register disappointment. I was really hoping that F’lon and Larna and Manora were going to be fun Weyr non-monogamy, and instead it is #yet another dead wife.

Lleu: And then she dies. Off-screen. We never hear her say words, I don’t think. Manora does at least get to be present when S’loner and Lord Madir die. She’s the last person who saw them, so she gets to come give testimony to the Lord Holders at the Conclave before they confirm Raid as the new Lord Holder of Benden.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this scene centered, to me, the one question that I had coming in that this book failed to answer, which was: what the fuck was going on with Jora? Why is Jora the person who Impressed a queen dragon when Manora is right there? We’ve been told repeatedly both, I think, by the narrative and the world building, but also literally by characters talking, that queen dragons seek out strong personalities. You’re not always a nice person. You’re frequently kind of a bitch. But you have a force of personality, and that’s the difference between girls who Impress and girls who don’t.

Lleu: And we’re also told repeatedly, specifically, in the books prior to this one that Jora was an unsuitable Weyrwoman, so not just that Manora would have been better, but that Jora was flat-out not a good candidate in the first place.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that that’s part of what led to the decline of the Weyr is this weakness in the Weyrwoman. I was curious about that! I was like, “Okay, if we’re going to get this prequel, how did that happen? Why did that happen? Was it that Jora was good at some stuff but not at other stuff? Was it that she presented in some way differently than she ended up being? Did something happen to change her? Was there some extreme paucity of available candidates?”

Lleu: There is, in fact, a vague implication, I think, in Dragonflight that part of the problem was that Jora was sad about F’lon dying.

Tequila Mockingbird: That happened much later in her life. We’ve talked before about this idea of, the dragon chooses quote-unquote the “right person.” We’ve seen multiple scenes where the dragon goes for someone who’s not supposed to be on the hatching ground as a candidate but is in the vicinity.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we’ve agreed it seems to make sense that the dragon finds the best person within a certain radius, a certain distance, and goes for that person. So, if Jora is the person who Impresses, the narrative feels like it’s saying she was the best candidate in physical proximity. Maybe she was the only person they had…?

Tequila Mockingbird: But, again, Manora is right there. Being competent. Having a level head on her shoulders. Is she too young when Jora Impresses? It doesn’t seem like she’s that much younger than Jora is.

Tequila Mockingbird: Do you have to have achieved sexual maturity to Impress a queen? I guess we don’t really see any queen dragonriders impress younger than the age of their first menstrual period.

Tequila Mockingbird: We see boys impress at like 10, but I don’t think we ever see a girl do that.

Lleu: I don’t know. Frankly, my response to all of the Jora stuff in this book — such as there was; there wasn’t a ton of it — was, Jora did nothing wrong! She didn’t ask for this. She’s afraid of heights, apparently, which you might think would have been something that they should have flagged in advance, but they didn’t, and so she has a dragon. And presumably she loves her dragon, and she likes to eat; she gets fat as a result. And that is what is identified as her “failing,” that Jora likes to eat too much, and she’s too fat and that has made Nemorth also too fat to fly.

Tequila Mockingbird: And she doesn’t have a sense of control, with this very clearly very fatphobic linking of thinness with self-control.

Tequila Mockingbird: I guess there’s a vague implication that S’loner really wanted to fuck her, and that’s why she Impressed a queen dragon?

Tequila Mockingbird: That would make sense for why he Searched her, but not for why she impressed.

Lleu: Well, yeah, since that’s what we see in Dragonfight. But, yeah, it doesn’t explain why she Impressed. There’s not really a good explanation for it, I don’t think. It’s just more of the same kind of tired, sexist, fatphobic tropes that we’ve already had throughout the series. And, it’s a disappointment.

Tequila Mockingbird: I also think we see a lot of very interesting stuff about marriage? Question mark?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we don’t actually see the word “marriage” in this book. We have the verb “marry” one time, when the Lady of Benden is talking about “marrying off” daughters. And we see husband and wife used a couple of times between Lobirn and Lotricia, the Harper that is at High Reaches when Robinton is journeyman there, and Fax is described as having “wives.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, but mostly what we see is “spouse” and “espousal” and “spouse” as a verb. And that’s over and over and over again.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which does kind of make you curious about what legal relationship this is or isn’t.

Lleu: Yes. The answer is, if it’s a legal relationship, its legal basis is exclusively in customary law, because we’re explicitly told that the Charter (which they know about, apparently, and in fact have and copy and circulate to people. No, they don’t do that, actually.), we’re told that the Charter doesn’t actually say anything about interpersonal relationships. The penal code aspect of the Charter says things about rape, sexual violence, but there’s no affirmative element of legally regulating relationships in the Charter, apparently. So, what legal force does “espousal” have? Who knows!

Tequila Mockingbird: Thinking about my discussion about retconning, it seems like Fax having multiple quote-unquote “wives” or women in his household is not a cultural norm, but maybe something that he pioneered that other Lord Holders started doing because they saw Fax doing it?

Tequila Mockingbird: It definitely seems like a lot of Lord Holders — and we’ve talked about this historically — have had like serial monogamy, with many wives dying because childbirth and then being replaced with a new, young wife immediately.

Tequila Mockingbird: But we’ve also been a little confused by the idea of infidelity and this drama about it, when it didn’t seem like fidelity was expected from Lord Holders.

Lleu: We’re specifically told that fidelity is not expected from Lord Holders, in fact.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so here we see here (a) the fact that Fax is maybe supposed to be illegitimate and that this is a drama. So, okay, is fidelity expected or not? And then Fax rocks up with all of these women, and we see people reacting to it and being like, “Oh, my gosh, ugh, is he allowed to do that?”

Lleu: Yeah. One thing I’ve noticed is that people use the word “mate” to refer to their effectively-spouses; “wife” appears to be restricted to Lord Holders.

Lleu: Which was also something that I’ve been wondering about. There was a reference in one of the other books —

Lleu: “Manora had seen twice the turns that, for instance, Lord Sifer of Bitra’s latest wife had, yet Manora looked younger.”[1] Which, at the time, we ultimately settled on a reading of that as essentially just replacing with a new, younger wife when the old wife dies in childbirth. But now I am thinking, okay, no, maybe Sifer of Bitra literally has multiple wives and this is just his —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And so much of this has been linked to this fact that women are dying in childbirth left, right, and center.

Tequila Mockingbird: It seems constant. It seems a fact of the world of Pern that McCaffrey is intentionally including this world-building to emphasize, the way that the social role of women has changed and the way that women’s opportunities are restricted, but it really conflicts with a detail we are given in this book and in no other book, which is that apparently the elusive magical tea that prevents pregnancy with no other side effects or consequences does exist on Pern, but only for Robinton’s family? Because Merelan gets this magical tea, and this is why she and Petiron are able to continue having a sexual relationship even though Robinton’s birth is really dangerous for her health and she can’t safely get pregnant again. And it’s just a very weird contrast — and, again, part of why I want to strike this book from continuity — because we’ve repeatedly been shown that this is not a thing that is available on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t believe that it’s a thing that’s available for commoners and not Hold women. I can see why Hold women would be incentivized to have a lot of kids, even perhaps beyond the bounds of their own health, but it does not make sense to me that if you had this option, you wouldn’t at least just space out your pregnancies more. Because, overwhelmingly, every single place on Earth, as soon as people who can get pregnant get access to contraception, they space their pregnancies out farther.

Tequila Mockingbird: Nobody ever, I think, has been like, “Mm, yeah, there’s a significant risk of my death and I’m having really deleterious health effects, but it’s all fine.”

Lleu: “I’ll have another child less than a year after my first child was born,” which is something that happens in this book to someone who’s not related to Robinton.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. So it feels like she wasn’t thinking about it from a broader world-building of Pern standpoint and more just trying to like trying to overwrite a problem.

Lleu: Well, again, she wants Robinton to be able to have casual sex without the risk of pregnancy.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, frankly, if Merelan and Petiron couldn’t have sex, that would an interesting narrative thread of, “Okay, maybe this is part of the problem.” Do you risk Merelan’s safety or not?

Lleu: Well, it would be something that Petiron could, like, blame Robinton for that still wouldn’t be fair to Robinton but also wouldn’t be entirely about Petiron’s ego and could be something that Merelan could maybe have some conflicted feelings about, instead of being the perfect, saintly mother all the time. Ostensibly.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right! It’s also weird that, universally, every single other character, when they interact with Petiron and Robinton, tells Robinton, like, “Hey, this isn’t on you. Your dad’s just kind of a dick.” When I think it would have been a lot more emotionally effective and given us more of a meaningful problem to overcome in the story if other people thought Petiron was great and Robinton was having this weird emotional disconnect of, like, “He’s so talented. Everyone thinks he’s such a great mentor and teacher. Why am I the only person he hates?” Instead, everyone’s just like, “Yeah, he’s just like that, kid. Don’t sweat it.” Including Merelan!

Lleu: Yeah. This was something that bugged me — some of the things that Petiron is being criticized for in this book are not, I think, reasonable criticisms, actually. Some of it’s totally fair, right? He is a neglectful father. But some of it is things where the only reason people around Petiron are seeing this negatively is because they have already all decided that they love Robinton and think he’s a genius but haven’t let Petiron know this. The thing that specifically jumped out to me is the time — when they get back from Benden Hold, the previous boy treble soloist has just had his voice start changing, and so they’re like, “We need a new soloist for the concert that’s coming up,” and Robinton’s like, “I could do it.” Merelan’s like, “Yeah, he could do it.” And Petiron’s like, “Well, of course, he’d have to audition for all the masters.” And Merelan’s like, “What? No, he wouldn’t. That’s never been a thing before.” And Petiron’s like, “Well, surely you can see that we have to go through all of the procedures as normal. We can’t play favorites with this child.” Which I think is actually an extremely reasonable thing to be concerned about!

Lleu: The problem is that the only reason Petiron is concerned about this is because he doesn’t know everyone around him already loves Robinton. Everyone else around him has already decided that Robinton is the specialest little boy, and, as a result, they all think this is a ridiculous request. So it’s a fake problem, a problem that’s created by Merelan and company not communicating with Petiron, because if they did, then he would recognize that no one is going to be concerned about the optics of favoritism. Which seems to be a non-trivial part of what’s driving his concern about Robinton and his strictness with Robinton, is this concern that he doesn’t want to be seen to be playing favorites because he thinks that’s bad. But everyone around him wants to play favorites — they just don’t communicate that to him.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is weird because so much of this book is about the education system on Pern.

Lleu: Yeah. First of all, there’s a weird tension that runs through this — that’s been present in other places in the series, as well — between the emphasis on formal musical education and specifically formal musical education in this Western classical music style. They’re using the Western 12-tone scale as the basis of all of their music — there’s no indication that there’s any alternate kinds of music theory circulating on Pern. Petiron is all-in on this. He thinks the Harper Hall is the best: everyone who can play music or sing should not only want to go to the Harper Hall, but should feel obligated to go to the Harper Hall in order to fully develop their talent.

Lleu: The problem with this is that not everyone wants to do that, something that becomes a point of contention between Merelan and Petiron when they meet someone in South Boll, a 20-something with a family who is a “musical genius,” and Petiron’s like, “He needs to come to the Hold.” And the guy’s like, “I don’t really want to. I like being a forester. I have kids. It’s fine. Teach me more music by rote, by ear, because I’m not interested in learning to read music That’ll be fine.” And Petiron is enraged by this, and Merelan has to talk him down and be like, “This guy has a professional life already. He’s got a family. It’s not reasonable to expect him to go to the Hall, and also not everyone wants to, and not everyone has to want to, and that’s fine.”

Lleu: The problem is that the rest of the book keeps keeps insisting that actually, no, everyone who knows music should be trained in this specific, formal, Western classical musical style, even as it is simultaneously telling us repeatedly that Petiron’s art music is garbage and no one cares about it. It’s too technical. What matters is songs anyone can sing. Which is it? Do you want music that anyone can sing? Do you want music that is not necessarily observing all of the classical musical forms, that is being performed and written and composed in informal contexts, or do you want people who are sitting down and writing art music and drawing out a staff and writing in the chords? You kind of can’t have it both ways. Well, you can, but —

Tequila Mockingbird: You can’t privilege both over the other simultaneously.

Lleu: Yeah. That has been bugging me for a while, and in this book especially — we’ve seen it before, in Dragonsinger, for example, everyone except Menolly thinks that Domick’s compositions are torturous and horrible, but Menolly describes playing Domick’s music as being “like flying on a dragon.” So there are people who appreciate this, or at least Menolly can appreciate this and find this music not just enjoyable but liberating. But here, every time anyone mentions Petiron’s music, including Robinton, and Merelan, both of whom have an intellectual appreciation for Petiron as a composer, but both of whom also are like, “Yeah. No one needs this. It would be better if he would willingly write different music than this.” The few times when he diverges from his typical style, people’re like, “This is the best piece of music you’ve ever written.” But also, of course, we can’t tell him that it was the best piece of music he’s ever written, because it expressed emotions, and if we talk to him about his emotions that would be bad for some reason.

Tequila Mockingbird: The criticizing and enabling at the same time — a really healthy relationship.

Lleu: One of the things that this book does really interestingly is show us that there are musicians all over the place. Music is not, in fact, the sole purview of the Harper Hall. If you go anywhere, there will be people who can sing. There will be people who can play instruments. There will be people who can play instruments well, even, and sing well.

Tequila Mockingbird: We’ve gotten that impression before, that music is culturally pervasive on Pern, both in the context of, it’s the way that their mandatory education is carried out, and also there’s not a lot of other recreation, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: They don’t seem to read books. They don’t seem to have oral narrative. They’re not on Netflix.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s questionable even whether they have the kind of home-processed handwork that was typical in low-industry societies, because a lot of that seems to have been outsourced to the Crafts.

Tequila Mockingbird: So what are a smallholder’s family supposed to do at night after it’s too dark to farm, or in the winter when there aren’t as many farming chores? They can’t just sit there and stare at each other for months.

Lleu: So it seems like the answer is: sing, dance, play music — or sit at home in the quiet and the dark and be miserable, which is something that we see happening in this book.

Lleu: We’ll get back to the outsourcing stuff to crafts and apprenticeships and the distribution of labor in a second, but, first, I do want to talk specifically about pedagogy at the Harper Hall because, oh, my god, it’s so bad!

Lleu: There’s a whole chapter of this book entirely about a young woman named Hallana, from Igen, who has the potential to have a good voice, who is sent to the Harper Hall in order to receive formal vocal instruction. The problem is that Hallana is a teenage girl from an aristocratic family, and she’s tired of everyone telling her what to do, and she doesn’t really necessarily actually want to learn to sing all that much. It seems like she came to the Harper Hall because she thought it would get her away from her family. And their solution to this quote-unquote “problem” is…beating her. First, Petiron hits her once, because he loses his temper during a rehearsal where she’s being particularly quote-unquote “intransigent.” Then she writes a letter to her family asking them basically to come retrieve her from a situation that she doesn’t want to be in. Her father and several of her brothers show up, and after they talk it over with the hall administrators, her father goes and beats her some more. Fully just like spends the day beating her, apparently. And then they take a few days for her to recover, and then she’s meek and subdued and learns to sing. Then, later on, of course, she’s like, “Ah, yeah, I was a nightmare as a child. But now I still sing in my Hold, even though I’m married and don’t want to come be a professional singer.” So, first of all, that’s horrible. Second of all, Hallana did nothing wrong. Free her. And third of all, why is this in this book? This chapter adds nothing and it makes the Harper Hall look so bad!

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s this weird discursion that seems to be designed to make us sympathize with Petiron, maybe? Because it doesn’t seem to be positioning physically abusing this teenager as bad, so I think we’re supposed to be on his side, and it’s supposed to get him some of our sympathy?

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause it doesn’t really seem plot-relevant. Part of the issue is that Merelan is the one who’s originally trying to teach her to sing, and she’s refusing. And Merelan is like, “Hey, she’s not cooperating. This is really rough.” And Petiron’s really dismissive to Merelan — “Don’t be ridiculous; you’re just not teaching her well. I’ll take over.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And then is outraged and ends up slapping her. So I think it’s supposed to be like vindicating Merelan.

Tequila Mockingbird: All it does for me is — and to your point — make me respect everyone at Harper Hall a lot less.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yet another example of like institutionalized child abuse on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I don’t really know that I have anything to say other than like, yikes!

Lleu: Yeah. (Hiii! Sorry, my cat looked at me.) It speaks very poorly of education on Pern in general, which maybe lets us segue into another question that we had, which is: who’s doing education on Pern in general? Because there’s a really perplexing moment when Marilyn and Robinton are at Benden Hold, where, after they’ve gotten settled in, we’re told that, of course, there are other teachers to help out with teaching basic reading, writing —

Tequila Mockingbird: And she is the only harper here. We’re very clearly told that, because she’s replacing a Harper who is no longer able to do his job, and it mentions specifically that these other teachers are taking them for the reading, writing, ’rithmetic, and she has them for musical instruction.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. She has all the kids for musical instruction, which really makes it seem like these other teachers are not Harpers, even journeymen.

Lleu: Yeah. And we know that there are contexts where non-Harpers are doing the teaching, because we see later that there’s a woman at the Weyr who’s responsible for —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. It’s also a weird juxtaposition with the anxiety that we frequently hear of like, “Oh, no, there aren’t enough Harpers to provide basic education to the children!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, if other people can do that, which does seem to be the case, then why is that such a big deal? Frankly, to me, it gives me a little bit more of, like, okay, is the issue that these children are not going to be propagandized sufficiently if they’re taught by people who aren’t Harpers? Does it in some way legitimate the anti-Harper prejudice that we see of like, “You’re indoctrinating our children,” that I think we’re supposed to see as ridiculous or regressive instead of plausible?

Lleu: Yeah. If the issue is not that Harpers are teaching their children music, necessarily, but that their Harpers are using music to teach their children a very specific model of civics.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is also loops back around to my question of, okay, apparently Robinton wrote all of the teaching ballads?

Tequila Mockingbird: So, were all of the previous teaching ballads just shit? Do they periodically refresh them? Is this how you lose things like the Ballad of Landing and knowledge of the Charter, because every 30 or 50 or whatever years you just completely rewrite your education curriculum?

Lleu: Well, no, ’cause we’re explicitly told that they’re still teaching people the Charter song that we see them write in Dragonseye.

Tequila Mockingbird: Has all education for 2,450 years been terrible until finally Robinton is born?

Lleu: My way of making it make sense that I suggested is that actually other Crafts are also involved in certain parts of basic education, because presumably a journeyman Smith, a journeyman Weaver, even a journeyman in the Beastcraft or a journeyman Farmer, also are literate and know math and things like that, so conceivably there are Smiths, for example, whose contract includes “and also you’ll teach a math class twice a week,” or something like that, who are maybe less working Smiths and more doing teaching and research rather than doing actual blacksmithing or tinsmithing or whatever else. But we don’t know that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And just in general, right, there’s this question of, how much — how much are journeymen journeying versus working under the auspices of a master versus staying in their Crafthall? Presumably the journeyman part comes from the fact that they’re traveling around, which would suggest that there are maybe journeymen from a bunch of different Crafthalls at every major Hold and even some minor ones.

Lleu: So, Fandarel and later the other Mastercraftsmen withdraw all of their masters from all of Fax’s holds, but they don’t necessarily withdraw the journeymen, although many journeymen, we’re told, choose to leave of their own accord. So, journeymen by virtue of being lower rank and not necessarily as skilled, they don’t matter as much as masters.

Tequila Mockingbird: Many of the masters are at the Crafthall. When are the apprentices not at the Crafthall?

Lleu: This is something that I wanted to talk about, is the way that this book talks about apprenticeships. In other books, we got the impression that, basically, at least in the Harpercraft and probably in the Smiths, if you’re an apprentice, you go and study formally at the Smithcraft Hall or the Harpercraft Hall, etc.

Lleu: You do whatever you need to do to get certified as a journeyman, and then you are assigned somewhere, and often you are assigned back to the Hold that you came from. We’re told in Dragonsinger that Robinton sending journeymen every which way is an innovation, and that people often used to go back and take contracts at their home hold. I suspect that’s probably connected with what we saw in Dragonseye, where Iantine has been sponsored by the Lord Holders of Benden to learn to be an artist, and so he feels an obligation to work for them for a while in order to pay off his student loan debt, effectively.

Lleu: It wouldn’t surprise me if that was something that happened also with the Beastcraft —

Lleu: — you send a couple kids off every year from your Hold to learn to be vets.

Lleu: Yeah. But: we also are told in Dragonsinger — and we see apprentices outside of the Hall here — that it is possible to serve an apprenticeship outside the Hall if you’re trained by a competent instructor.

Lleu: We also know from Renegades that in order to actually, fully become a journeyman Piemur did have to go back to the Hall —

Lleu: — and formally walk the tables. So it seems like in order to be certified as a journeyman, you have to go to the Hall and satisfy the masters at the Hall.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which makes sense, ’cause you don’t want some random maverick being like, “Yeah, yeah, this kid’s a journeyman” when no other master in the Craft has had a chance to evaluate that.

Lleu: Exactly. But it does seem like you can serve a full apprenticeship outside of the Hall. So then there’s a question there of like how common are apprenticeships, ’cause this book also kind of implies that they’re normal and everyone does one — but that can’t be right because most people, surely, are doing kind of menial labor — either domestic labor within a household or agricultural labor of some kind or other kind of non-professional labor. One assumes that not everyone who is actually in a mine is necessarily a trained, capital-M Miner.

Lleu: Because you don’t have to be a geologist to break rocks with a pickaxe.

Tequila Mockingbird: And when we talked about this in our human demographic bonus episode, we kind of settled on, okay, maybe 75% of the population is devoted to agricultural labor. At this point, the percentage of the population in the Weyr is artificially smaller —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but that’s still only 20%, 25% at absolute most are in the Crafthall. And that doesn’t align with “every kid gets an apprenticeship.”

Lleu: Yeah. And it also raises questions about the distribution of goods and services on this planet.

Tequila Mockingbird: To my earlier thought of, how much of the work that was traditionally done in the home in pre-industrial societies has been outsourced to Crafthalls on Pern?

Tequila Mockingbird: Right! So much of the day-to-day labor of medieval European women was textile production, and if that’s all happening at the Weaver Crafthall, first of all, you’ve imposed an additional artificial burden: okay, so now you have to get all of flax and the wool to them, and then get it back, so, like, there’s a burden of transportation and there’s a lot more money exchanging hands. Where is that liquid currency entering circulation from? Because if the Weavercraft Hall are the ones quote-unquote “minting” it, carving it out of wood, is the Weavercraft Hall paying for the raw materials and then selling the goods back? How are they making money on that?

Lleu: Yeah, I think that must be it in some way. I would also say, in fairness, we do know that, even if the Weavercraft has a monopoly on textile production, not all textile production is happening at the Weavercraft Hall.

Lleu: Many Holds, certainly any larger Hold, will have at least one trained Weaver on staff. My question is, how is textile production happening in Half-Circle? Are they importing all of their cloth from Ista or Nerat and then making clothes locally?

Tequila Mockingbird: And to be fair, this kind of specialization just wasn’t something that happened a lot in pre-industrial societies on Earth, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: It doesn’t really make sense that Half-Circle Sea Hold, all they do is fishing. It’s like, okay, man cannot live by fish alone.

Tequila Mockingbird: So presumably, yeah, they’re trading that fish in bulk with Nerat and getting textiles in exchange, or maybe —

Lleu: Well, and fruits and vegetables and other things that you need to eat, ’cause —

Lleu: — yeah, they gather some things, but when we see them gathering things, it’s like, “Yeah, and then Menolly went off to gather salad greens.” You can’t feed a Hold on fish plus one 14-year-old girl going out to gather salad greens.

Tequila Mockingbird: So clearly there is a greater degree of trade happening in day-to-day life across the Holds and the Crafts and all of this, but I also think it isn’t at all implausible to me that you have a journeyman Weaver posted at a Hold who is maybe instructing random Hold kids in the actual mechanics — they’re the ones pulling the shuttle as day labor in exchange for their own cloth happening sort of closer to home.

Lleu: Maybe we’re at sort of the question of, is it that the Weavercraft has the monopoly on the means of textile production? The Weavercraft owns the looms and people who are not necessarily Weavers may sometimes use the looms and that’s maybe another way that the Weavercraft gets money.

Tequila Mockingbird: But similarly to your thought about the Beastcraft, you got to have a farrier. Is every farrier a journeyman in the Beastcraft? Are they constantly journeying to every single even remote and isolated Holds? Because if you have animals who need shoeing and who get problems with their feet, you’re not just going to kill all of those runner beasts for want of some very basic intervention.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, this separation is kind of an artificial one, and I suspect that means that Hold and Craft life are more integrated than they might seem on the surface.

Lleu: I think that is almost certainly correct. And we see aspects of this, especially in terms of medicine, right? Half-Circle doesn’t seem to have a capital-H Healer; they have Mavi and some other women who have a certain amount of basic medical skills and familiarity with specific local ailments and how to deal with them, like the packtail slime. I wanted also to talk just briefly, maybe, about how this book is thinking about inheritance in general. This was something that you had flagged re the Weyr, because we’re told that Falloner-F’lon is really proud of the fact that S’loner, the current Weyrleader, is his father and there are many Weyrleaders in his lineage. This is something that we’ve seen elsewhere, also…

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s a little annoying. Why do you have to make this a dynasty? It’s not an inherited authority, and it’s a little frustrating that she feels the need to make it, like, “Oh, well, they’re just naturally happen to be born to be the right person for the job, over and over again.”

Lleu: Oh, so every single one of your ancestors was a straight man? Thanks. Good to know.

Lleu: It’s interesting to both compare and contrast this with the Harper Hall, specifically, since that’s so much the focus of the book, because the Harpers, seemingly in contrast to many of the other Crafts, which seem to be basically hereditary, are not. It’s emphasized repeatedly that, while children who grew up in the Harper Hall are likely to have some familiarity with music, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re gonna be good musicians, let alone Harpers, specifically. The fact that Robinton is is presented as, in some ways, of course, well, his parents are both great musicians, so it’s inevitable that he would be a musical genius, but also, in some ways, it’s presented as a coincidence. And this marks the Harper Hall as different from other Crafts and other communities on Pern, because the only way that it can reproduce is the same way the Weyr does, by searching people out in other communities. This is a major element of what journeymen in the Harpercraft do when they’re out in the field, is identify potential candidates and convince them and their families to send them to the Harper Hall to get training. Which maybe ties into some of the anti-Harper prejudice stuff, in a way that I hadn’t considered until you pointed it out before the episode.

Tequila Mockingbird: Hm, yeah, because, like dragonriders, Harpers are identifying a special talent in a child and taking them away, sometimes against the will of their family, to become a Harper, and that there’s also, perhaps, this impression that this is going to lead to a sexual promiscuity or a sexual flexibility that is not appropriate in Holds.

Lleu: Yeah, and we see that Robinton’s off having casual sex with girls in the Holds he visits. So it’s not, in fact, an unreasonable thing to think might happen.

Lleu: So there’s an element of it that can make sense from an in-world perspective, but also, I think, the largest part of what’s going on here is probably just the fact that she was writing in the ’90s against the backdrop of the ’90s culture wars, and a lot of the debates surrounding Harpers and Harper education and all of these things, while there are in-world aspects of them, seem to me pretty clearly to be “really” about things like, should we be teaching evolution, or should we be teaching intelligent design, or should we just be avoiding mentioning whatever at all? In a very ’90s way.

Tequila Mockingbird: Also, I think, a lot of the ’90s was having a crisis of literacy in America, or the way we were teaching literacy.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this idea that we needed to worry about the American education system, not in the early ’90s, but by the late ’90s, I think, was present..

Lleu: 1998, so… I think it would be productive, and we extremely do not have time, to dig into the ways this book is situated specifically in the political context of the ’90s around education, around social change. Anyway.

Tequila Mockingbird: The other thing that I really wanted from this book was to see, how did Fax happen? How was this possible? And I do think she succeeds there, because I think it’s really interesting that he doesn’t officially take over. There’s a lot of just willful blindness from the part of the Lord Holders —

Tequila Mockingbird: — where Faroguy is AWOL, and they’re not hearing a lot, but they’re like, “Well, autonomy; autonomy.” And Fax leverages that to expand his borders to the point where he has a militia that is the equal of anybody else, and so you can’t argue with him. And we kind of got that vague sketch in some previous books, but I think it’s another example of the very laissez-faire legal structure, such as it is, on Pern, and the way that it allows bad actors to take advantage, because no one is willing to step in, and there isn’t a framework for stepping in until it’s too late.

Lleu: Yeah, the thing that really, I think, encapsulates that, for me, is the fact, as we are told in this book, that when a Lord Holder dies, a conclave to confirm the new Lord Holder is not called automatically — an heir has to call for a Conclave, and then the Lord Holders will meet to confirm the new Lord Holder. So Fax is never officially confirmed, and also, there’s no opportunity to potentially confirm anyone else, because Fax killed one heir; the other heir, Bargen, is hiding out at High Reaches Weyr doing guerrilla warfare; and Fax, obviously, isn’t gonna call a conclave and have to deal legally with his actions. So he’s just in legal limbo. High Reaches legally doesn’t have a Lord Holder, but also, by not doing anything about it, he’s effectively recognized as Lord Holder.

Tequila Mockingbird: On one hand, it’s very stupid, on the other hand, again, I think this is sort of Pern reaping what it has sown. When you set up a situation like this, this is what happens.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s frankly just surprising that it took 2,450 years for it to happen.

Lleu: Or did it? Because we’re also told at one point that there have been men like Fax in the past and there will be men like Fax again in the future.

Lleu: Which made me go, “Were there? When was that exactly? What happened?”

Lleu: Because, yeah, that has been my feeling throughout the whole series, is that in the context of the way Pern’s political situation is set up, the most surprising thing about Fax is that it took 2,500 years for someone to be like, “Well, we’ve already got lords; we might as well have a king.”

Lleu: So, the Charter, which they know about, apparently, is broken. Fax is allowed to run wild because Pern has no mechanisms for dealing with bad actors, and that brings us to the end of the episode. This book is a mess. It does make me insane; that’s not a good reason for anyone else to read it, but if you can find the two-cassette abridged version, maybe it’s worth it, because it does still have a bunch of the good F’lon stuff. My recommendation to go with this book is C.L. Moore’s Doomsday Morning, which is a science fiction novel from the ’50s, in a dystopian post-war and sort of, maybe, post-nuclear apocalypse U.S., where the dystopian government attempts to enlist a theater performer to direct a propaganda play that will help them root out rebels in, I think, California. And this goes off the rails. So, if you’re interested in a story about the performing arts, and tyranny, and the possibility of revolution, this might be of interest to you. I found it enjoyable as a person who did a lot of theater in high school.

Tequila Mockingbird: And my recommendation is two-thirds of a trilogy — which is not to say that I don’t recommend the first book, but that I don’t think it as closely parallels what’s going on in Masterharper. It is Andrea Hairston’s Will Do Magic for Small Change and Archangels of Funk, which follow Cinnamon Jones, in the first book through her teens, and in the second book in her 50s, as she exists in a sort of post-apocalyptic world of Black magic and techno-futurism, in which she is communicating with and being supported by her grandparents, who are now AI, as she attempts to build community and create art in times of great upheaval. So, I think, you get the sort of Bildungsroman, you get to follow an artist over the course of different phases of their life, and you get an incredibly dense, rich, overwhelming world that is really fully realized and a delight to read.

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.