Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #4: Dragonsinger (1977)

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

Lleu: And I’m Lleu. And today we’re talking about Dragonsinger, which is the immediate sequel to Dragonsong, and when I say immediate, I mean it begins approximately half an hour after the end of Dragonsong.

Tequila Mockingbird: If this was published today, I kind of suspect it would be one thicker book instead of two little ones.

Lleu: I’m not 100% sure I agree with that, just because the plots are so self-contained. I think Dragonsinger is in many ways the most cleanly plotted of any of the books in the series.

Lleu: Yes. So, Dragonsinger is the story of Mennolly’s first week at the Harper Hall, and it takes us through every single day, morning to evening, from the time she wakes up to the time she goes to sleep, and also sometimes with some things in between. When she wakes up in the middle of the night.

Tequila Mockingbird: We also don’t get any other character’s perspective, which is a little unusual. Often we’ve been sort of hopping around in third person, but here it’s very tightly on Mennolly.

Lleu: Menolly through a bunch of examinations, essentially, with the various masters at the Harper Hall.

Tequila Mockingbird: She also has some tension with the female students, who are not officially studying to be Harpers — they’re the daughters of Lord Holders who are just getting a musical education, and she initially is rooming with them, but then is separated out to live in more normal apprentice quarters. She also does make some friends.

Lleu: She does make some friends, some of whom go on to be major characters in the rest of the series, and some of whom do not. So we’ll talk a lot more about one of them in particular, Piemur, when we talk about Dragondrums. Oh, and she almost gets in a duel. She does challenge someone to a duel.

Tequila Mockingbird: She gets to do a duel, which is always fun. Normal behavior to engage in. And that is the culminating events of the book, is, there’s a Gather, which is basically a big social occasion for people to gather together, kind of like a festival day. And in the midst of that tensions come to a head. There is a duel and a fight, and this causes some concern for Menolly about whether or not she will be able to stay with the Harper Hall, or whether these girls will be able to in some way leverage their political and social power and standing against her.

Lleu: Fortunately for Menolly, they are not able to do this, because two days later she is officially made a journeyman Harper at the age of 15. This is unusually young, but, as we know, Menolly is extremely gifted as a musician. Being a journeyman gives her independent political status, such that she’s no longer vulnerable to intervention from any of the Lord Holders, even if some of her nemeses attempted to prejudice their uncles, grandfathers, etc. against her.

Tequila Mockingbird: We also do get to see Threadfall, and we get to get to the end of Dragonquest, plot-wise, with F’nor’s abortive attempt to go to the Red Star, and Brekke, and all the drama, and this is now seen from Menolly’s perspective, because her fire lizards are psychically connected to the general dragon pool of telepathy, whatever. I don’t really know what’s going on with that. But she hears and feels some of what’s going on.

Lleu: Yes. I want to talk a lot about fire lizards. But first I want to talk a little bit about some continuity errors, because there is one particularly glaring continuity error in these first two books, which is that, when Menolly first is out and about gathering herbs in Dragonsong and sees the fire lizards’ mating flight, she decides to compose a little song about this and goes back to Half-Circle and writes it down on a slate and leaves it tucked in behind some of the stuff in the Harper quarters where no one from the Hold will see it. And we’re told subsequently that Elgion, the new Harper, finds this and sends it to Master Robinton. In this book, we find out that “The Fire Lizard Song” —

Lleu: — yeah, has been circulated widely by Robinton in the past maybe month, or maybe month and a half, since Menolly wrote it.

Lleu: No, but the point is that Menolly wrote this about seeing the fire lizard mating flight. However, throughout even Dragonsong and most prominently in Dragonsinger, we are provided with the lyrics of “The Fire Lizard Song,” and the lyrics of “The Fire Lizard Song” are about Menolly saving the fire lizard’s eggs from the tide coming in to wash them away, something that happened only some weeks after she wrote the song.

Tequila Mockingbird: And pretty close to the point at which she ran away and was living in a cave, and presumably didn’t have a lot of time to sit around writing songs.

Lleu: Let alone sending them back to Half-Circle so that Elgion could send them to the Masterharper, who could then circulate them around the planet. Yeah. This is, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty minor continuity error, although it is funny that this is already present in Dragonsong, the book where she meets the fire lizards for the first time, and McCaffrey already got the timeline of things wrong. But this also is the beginning of a wide range of timeline confusions of different kinds. If you look around online, you’ll find a bunch of people attempting to make sense of the contradictory information we get about the age of Jaxom, who Impressed the little white dragon and who we’ll talk a lot more about when we talk about The White Dragon, the novel focused on Jaxom. I don’t know. There’s not really a lot more to say about this. It’s just very funny to me. I’m a little bit, like —

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s just a little... I mean, and to be fair, it is tough to write an interquel. She already set a series of events in Dragonquest, and now she’s trying to slot stuff in. She set a series of events in Dragonsong, and now she’s trying to work with it. But yeah, you do feel like these were published…a year apart? Is it not likely that you’ve had some time to, maybe, do some revisions on the previous one. If you really wanted to make that like plot-centric in this one?

Lleu: Yes. And in spite of that, I do think Dragonsinger is still a pretty good book. We’ll let that let that stand as a testament to it. That brings us to the fire lizards.

Tequila Mockingbird: This sheer wish fulfillment energy of fire lizards, like, yes, I, too, would like a magic psychic flying cat that loves me unconditionally.

Lleu: And screams at me to feed it and all of these other things. But also will do things like grab my pipes from the dorm that I’m staying in so that I don’t have to go in and encounter this group of people who hate me and have been actively attempting to sabotage me at every turn, because that sounds exhausting. So I can really appreciate the appeal.

Tequila Mockingbird: See, I would want my fire lizards to get things for me, just so that I don’t have to go up and down the stairs.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think the sheer energy of my laziness would actually be equal to or even greater than Menolly’s terror at being bullied and humiliated.

Lleu: Fair enough. Yeah. So the other, I think, really interesting function that the fire serve narratively in this book is as an external representation of Menolly emotions.

Lleu: And this is something that we see a little bit in Dragonsong, but it’s much less apparent just because — well, either she’s living alone or, when she’s at Benden Weyr, for the first half of the time that she’s at the Weyr she’s ordered the fire lizards to stay away and hide. So there’s not really as many opportunities to see this.

Tequila Mockingbird: I feel like in Dragonsong, Menolly’s emotions are more clear to her, because they’re so, “I am scared! Thread!” or, like, “I am nervous.” She’s being pretty self-aware, where in this we get a lot of places where the fire lizards are helping us understand her very unreliable narration, because she doesn’t know what’s going on with herself emotionally.

Lleu: — and consciously is acting in opposition to her emotions, but the fire lizards are responding to what she’s actually feeling. So, for example, not the first time but the second time that Menolly meets Master Domick, who’s the composition master. Essentially because he was teasing her a little bit when they first met, and because he’s got a fairly cynical and dour demeanor, Menolly has decided that Master Domic doesn’t like her. And after lunch, where she’s been eating at the table with all of these girls who hate her, Master Domick shows up and is like, “Why didn’t you come see me this morning? I left word that you were supposed to come and work with me.” And Menolly says, “Nobody told me.” And Domic says, “Look. I told the person who’s like the dorm mother of the dorm that you’re staying. I understand you’ve been living by yourself, but I expect to be obeyed when I leave an order.” And Menolly’s like, “I didn’t know,” and realizes that the other girls at the table knew, and then her fire lizards show up and start attacking the girls, and also Domick. And Menolly is standing there going, “No, no, no, no! Stop! Stop! Stop! He’s a Harper! Don’t do this!” And so, consciously, Menolly is mortified that this is happening, and is trying to defuse the situation, but unconsciously, clearly Menolly, is feeling —

Lleu: — extremely upset, both at the girls for concealing this information from her and at Domick, for what she not unfairly perceives as unfair —

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think we see the same thing in the kind of fight scene in the finale, where at first she’s like, “Oh, let’s not cause a fight.” And then Pona really crosses a line, and Menolly’s like, “Okay, we’re pulling out a knife. We’re dueling,” and the fire lizards wade in.

Lleu: She literally does draw her belt and be like, “Pona. I challenge you to a duel.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s also pretty clear that that’s normal, right? We’ve seen duels before, and the only note we’ve gotten is, well, dragonriders aren’t supposed to duel. And indeed, the social response from those around her is like, “Yeah, you stood up for yourself. That’s totally normal and socially appropriate.”

Lleu: Yeah, which is fascinating, considering that she’s a 15-year-old girl.

Tequila Mockingbird: And much like the kind of other job of the fire lizards, it builds out the world of Pern, where we’re like, okay, like teenagers fighting with knives. That’s a thing that everyone thinks is fine and normal.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also interesting to get another peek at the way that fire lizards are being used to make non-dragonrider more sympathetic to dragonriders —

Tequila Mockingbird: — or feel like they understand the dragonrider perspective better, because we do get to see Lord Groghe, the lord of Fort Hold, with his golden fire lizard, and kind of also Sebell and Robinton’s fire lizards, and the way that this is a very new experience in this society.

Lleu: And it’s something that the book explicitly points us towards, because one of the points of political contention that arose in Dragonquest, and that we saw from Menolly’s perspective in Dragonsong, was Jaxom, the —

Lleu: — question mark-years-old Lord Holder-to-be of Ruatha Hold, Impress a dragon. And, granted, it’s a runt white dragon, and no one at this point is sure whether Ruth is going to survive, but this has created something of a political crisis, because in principle you’re not supposed to be able to be both a dragonrider and a Lord Holder.

Tequila Mockingbird: Specifically, the get-around that they use is, “Well, Ruth is more like a fire lizard, really, because he’s small, and because he might not be able to chew firestone, and things like that.”

Lleu: But also one of the initial responses from some of the more conservative Lords is, “Well, we should just take Ruth away. He shouldn’t get to keep this dragon.”

Lleu: And on the one level everyone knows this is impossible, but it’s still one of the political stances that’s adopted. And here, when Robinton’s fire lizard eggs hatch and Robinton impresses, he says to Lord Groghe, “Now I understand why Jaxom has to keep Ruth.”

Lleu: And Groghe is like, “Mmm…” in a way that’s like, “This is politically inconvenient, but unfortunately I do also understand this.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Unfortunately, from my lived experience, I’m forced to agree with you.”

Lleu: We can see already, even though it has been not very long, that fire lizards are beginning to change some of the more conservative political attitudes, as people come to have a better grasp of the relationship between dragon and dragonrider.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is also interesting, because they are still setting the scene, too, of, “What are dragon riders going to do if we do eliminate Thread?” in Dragonquest, and we start to get the picture more of a society on the edge of upheaval, and this way that suddenly things are changing on Pern faster than they have been in a very long time.

Lleu: Yeah. This book is really interesting, I think, in part because it’s completely disconnected from dragonriders. There is one dragonrider character in the whole book who says words —

Lleu: — and he appears in the first 15 pages and the last five pages, approximately. Otherwise, we see one dragonrider at a distance, but, yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: So we’re really getting a picture of Hold life — well, Crafthall life. But the way that Crafthall life is much more tightly connected to Hold life than it is to Weyr life.

Lleu: Yeah. And maybe it makes sense to talk a little bit about what the book shows us about Crafts versus Holds versus Weyrs, and also some of the internal tensions between Holds —

Tequila Mockingbird: Which I thought was really interesting, ’cause we’ve gotten the picture, right, that Menolly’s home, Half-Circle Sea Hold, is very isolationist. It’s very conservative. They don’t like anybody, but they especially don’t like people who aren’t also Sea Holders. But I hadn’t realized that there was a widespread, I guess, disaffection between Sea Hold vs. land Hold, until this book, where you see both that Robinton is actively trying to combat that by spreading like land songs in Sea Holds, and sea songs in land Holds, and trying to bridge that gap. But also, in the final fight scene, one of the more sympathetic girls tries to and does get her gentleman caller to join the fight on Menolly’s side by telling him that she’s from a Sea Hold. And it’s a very clear, like, “Hey, land Hold girls are picking on a Sea Hold girl; it’s your job to join the fray,” and he very cheerfully does. And the fact that his girlfriend is suggesting this to him probably helps, but she’s not “Do it for my sake.” She’s like, “Hey, this is, sea versus land,” and Viderian jumps right in.

Lleu: Also, part of the reason that she’s not “Do it for my sake” is because Audiva doesn’t have a stake in this. Her father is a Masterweaver —

Lleu: — so she’s the one student who’s not connected with a Lord in some way. So she can kind of be the impartial observer. Sort of.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, but also, presumably before Menolly showed up she was the lowest on the social hierarchy of these girls.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so she was probably the one getting picked on, ’cause the thing about a bully is, they don’t wait for the perfect victim to show up. Pona was probably picking on Audiva before Menolly got there.

Lleu: Speaking of that, however, one of the important things to note, which we had no consciousness of whatsoever in Dragonsong, is that actually, when Menolly arrives, part of the problem is that she arrives and immediately is the highest-status person staying with the paying students, because the fact that her father is the Sea Holder of Half-Circle means that she is higher-status than Pona, whose grandfather is a Lord Holder, and Briala, whose uncle is the Lord Holder of Tillek, and things like that. So part of what seems to attract their negative attention to Menolly is the fact that she has nine fire lizards, which is —

Lleu: To be — yeah, to be fair, it’s not her fault, but also, I can see why people would be jealous. And the fact she is higher-status than them, on top of having nine fire lizards, but also she seems to be completely unconscious of this. She doesn’t have any nice clothes. She barely understands what it means that she outranks them. People tell her this multiple times. She’s like, “I don’t know what that means.” And then the girls have a discussion about this, and Menolly is like, “Huh! This literally never occurred to me!” Because she’s the traumatized, abused youngest daughter of Yanus Sea Holder, so she doesn’t think of herself as having this kind of status, because she didn’t feel it growing up.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. And I think really the reason that these girls are so angry, or that they have this resentment is that Melanie’s[1] not competing with them, in a way that makes it feel like she doesn’t think what they’re competing for matters, right? She’s walking in, and she’s not interested in their internal hierarchy, and she’s not interested in their political games. She’s just there to be about the music, and I think that’s something that the petty stuff — they don’t appreciate it when someone wanders in and is like, “Oh, all of this drama that you’re engaging with, all of the stuff that you think is so important, I don’t even pay attention to that.” I think that definitely adds to the viciousness of what we see.

Lleu: Which also makes some aspects of Mennolly’s character more interesting. Something that we were talking about before we started recording is that in many ways, Menolly is kind of a Mary Sue. She’s incredibly gifted. She has this encyclopedic knowledge of music. You can explain to her how to make a drum in theory, once, possibly, and she will then remember how to do this, and be able to perfectly produce a drum despite having never actually done this.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s also got a trauma backstory and all of the kind of sad, abandoned life. And then she triumphantly succeeds and rubs everyone’s face in it in a certain way.

Lleu: And she has these nine fire lizards. So she’s got all of these things that mark her as Special. But, distinct from the canonical Mary Sue, Menolly, is not like, “Oh, I’m just this poor, simple girl, and I have all of these gifts, and everyone loves me. But I don’t know why…” Menolly truly, genuinely, does not understand any of that, because she fundamentally, as a result of her childhood, believes that she is worthless, that her music isn’t worth anything, that her music is bad. She at one point, when she’s doing her kind of testing exams with the various masters, she’s doing one with the composition master,[2] who we’re told hates women and so is extremely rude to her. Eventually he says something that indicates to her that, “Oh, he’s mad that I’ve been answering correctly,” but what she actually thinks is like, “Ah, so I have been answering correctly the whole time, and that’s why he’s mad at me” — indicating that she, on some level, even though she has this encyclopedic knowledge of music theory, didn’t believe that she was capable of giving the correct answers in this situation. Which is absurd, but also like that’s how Menolly is. And the result is someone who has all of the characteristics of a Mary Sue but to me does not actually in any way feel like a Mary Sue.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I also think some of this is just a, very much a testament to McCaffrey’s ability to really put you in the character’s shoes, and make you empathize with the character, even when their personality is not yours.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I feel like Lessa is also a really good example of this. If I met Lessa in person… She’s awful. But when I’m reading the books I’m like, “Yes, Lessa! Murder somebody! Get your revenge!” I’m completely on her side. Because I think I have read the “this character should be a Mary Sue, but they’re so insecure” attempt at a workaround, and most authors can’t pull it off. It’s usually annoying. You’re sitting there going like, “Okay. Why do you hate yourself so much? Oh, my God” — you know, it doesn’t read authentically. And Menolly’s shame and fear does, and I think you do have a point where, we do get the kind of back story and her childhood and a context for that, but I also think a lot of it is just McCaffrey’s ability to make Menolly’s fear vivid and her feelings come right off the page in a way that is compelling.

Lleu: Yeah, absolutely. Again, especially as the series goes on, I find that increasingly it gets less interested in characters and more and more interested in the kind of overarching plot.

Lleu: Here we’re still interested in characters, and Menolly in particular, I think, is the most well-drawn character in the whole series by a wide margin.

Tequila Mockingbird: And she doesn’t vanish after this book. She has more to do. But yeah, we and we don’t linger as much in the future of the series.

Lleu: Unfortunately, yeah. Okay, something else I want to talk about, and then we can finally move on to some other things, is Menolly’s childhood, because this was something that we disagreed on a little bit in our discussion of Dragonsong.

Lleu: And I think, for me, perhaps the thing that’s most telling is how much everyone around Menolly in this book struggles to grasp just how bad her childhood really was.

Lleu: Even Robinton, who we get these hints that he had a complicated relationship, shall we say, with Petiron —

Lleu: — Menolly’s instructor, who was his father, and in the later prequel that she writes about him we see this in much more detail. And there’s all of these people around who are sympathetic. They want to understand. And they just don’t get it, even when they’re kind of aware on some level — certainly Robinton is like aware in theory that Menolly had this difficult childhood that led her to run away. But none of them actually get it until basically someone asks, “Oh, when can I hear your new song?” And that’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back and she has a breakdown at the Gather and is sobbing and is like, “You know what used to happen when I wrote songs. They would beat me.” In a way that, suddenly, after that, everyone’s like, “Ohhhh. That’s why this was all such a problem, huh.”

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s something to the fact that this is normal for them — life at Harper Hall is their normal, and so it’s hard for them all to realize how much of a transition it is for her and how completely different this is from her normal life, because I definitely don’t think we’re supposed to see Half-Circle Sea Hold as normal. It is supposed to be a noticeably conservative or outdated or isolationist community, and Yanus is supposed to be not a great person, not a great father, and not doing a great job at the not-catching-fish parts of his job. It’s clear that he’s very good at catching a lot of fish. But it seems like everything else about leadership in a community he is falling down on.

Lleu: Yes, I believe Elgion in Dragonsong says something to the effect of, “Yanus is very good at Hold administration and catching fish, and very good at leeching all of the joy out of every other aspect of life.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. It is always interesting seeing the way a culture is painted in individual places, because we’re getting individual interpretations of what is socially appropriate on Pern. And we see that, yes, on one hand, there’s never been a female Harper before. On the other hand, these aristocratic granddaughters of Holders are being sent to Harper Hall to learn music. So it’s not universally horrible and shameful for girls to sing and make music. And so we kind of get to see, “Oh, okay, Yanus’s perspective was not normal by the standards of this society.”

Lleu: Yeah. When they first go to the Gather, Menolly’s friend is attempting to make some money by selling some instruments. And one of the ways that he advertises the tambourine that he’s trying to sell is like, “It’s the perfect size for like a lady’s hand as she’s playing the tambourine along” — along with what? Who knows. But —

Tequila Mockingbird: I would also just like to pause and take a moment to imagine the musical landscape of Pern, where ladies are just going wild with tambourines while other music is happening, and I like that for them.

Lleu: And then the person that he’s talking to is like, “Hmm, but I would have to transport the tambourine,” and then, Menolly’s friend is like, “Ah, but maybe you’ll sell the tambourine today!” as they’re back-and-forth bargaining. Why is there, like vigorous global market for tambourines?

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause everyone loves a tambourine. Another thing that I think jumped out to both of us immediately on reading and we knew we wanted to talk about is the depiction of disability in this book, specifically in the character of Camo, who is a member of the kitchen crew of the Harper Hall and is very clearly being presented as someone with an intellectual disability And, uh, there’s a lot going on.

Lleu: Yeah. As I said, I’m of like four different minds about the portrayal of Camo, because, on the one hand, in many ways it’s quite bad, I think.

Lleu: On the other hand, we’re supposed to like Camo. We’re supposed to think he’s a sympathetic character; he’s one of Menolly’s friends; when people are mean to him, the text is clearly like, “This is bad. People should like and be friendly to Camo, and not take advantage of him.” At one point someone is trying to calm Camo down and offers him something, and he’s like, “Promise? Promise?” And Menolly’s perspective is like, “It was clear from this that many people made promises to Camo, and then ‘coincidentally’ forgot about them later on,” and that Camo’s aware of this but kind of can’t do anything about it. So there’s aspects of it that I think are trying to do something good, and especially considering that this was published in 1977…

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. This is clearly in a book for children, intended to indicate that you should treat others kindly and with respect, and I think McCaffrey’s heart was in the right place. But it’s just a deeply, deeply condescending portrayal.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that you also do get a pretty clear kind of understanding that broader Pernese society is pretty ableist.

Tequila Mockingbird: The language that is specifically used to describe him is not particularly kind.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think it is interesting in contrast with something that you brought up that I hadn’t really thought about reading this book: you were reading Menolly as autistic —

Tequila Mockingbird: — on this read, and I think it’s interesting to ask the question of whether that is a better and more nuanced and interesting portrayal of disability because the author was not intending it.

Lleu: Yeah. The key thing to keep in mind is, this is my reading of it. I don’t think Anne McCaffrey intended this.

Lleu: It does maybe raise some questions about Anne herself, ’cause Menolly is clearly her projection character.

Tequila Mockingbird: But at least in my experience you see neurodiversity in fiction accidentally more often, because authors know people like that, and they’re like, “Oh, this is a type of person. Sure, I know people who have these traits,” and they’re not thinking of it as, “Oh, and these people are on the spectrum,” or, “Oh, and these people have ADHD.” That’s just happening —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because, people on the spectrum, with ADHD, exist, and many are nerdy and hang out with the people who write books. But, yeah, you definitely do see Menolly’s intense obsession with music or interest in it, the way that she’s very good at it and feels very unskilled at other things.

Lleu: And in particular, the thing that jumped out at me is Menolly’s difficulty with social cues, which is something that we see also in Dragonsong. And some of it in Dragonsong I do think is maybe, she’s a teenage girl —

Lleu: — but some of it is not just that. And when she’s at the Weyr, as I was just saying to you earlier, ’cause I’m relistening to Dragonsong, it’s a constant series of “Menolly misinterprets a social cue, Menolly completely misunderstands her position at the Weyr, Menolly misreads another social cue —”

Lleu: “— Menolly realizes, ‘Oh, fuck! I misread a social cue five minutes ago!’” Just over and over and over again, and it’s very much the same thing in Dragonsinger. And some of that, sure, is that she’s being transported into this different context, where she…

Lleu: But also some of it to me, especially because mainly she realizes things when she’s like, “Oh, I fucked that up again.” It feels very… I don’t know, I’m recognizing aspects of my own, like, “Hmm, I messed up that social interaction, huh!”

Lleu: And also that she clearly develops ways of approaching social situations, and especially dealing with specific people. At one point you can see her, in her interactions with Domick, things sort of click, and she’s like, “Oh, now I know that he just (a) likes to tease and (b) is kind of cynical and sarcastic, so he’s probably not actually being mean to me intentionally now —”

Lleu: “— this is probably just sarcasm.” But it’s her walking herself through that process, in a way that to me was like, “Hmm. This could mean nothing.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah; yup. Whatever McCaffrey was or wasn’t trying to do, she is trying to sort of show a wider variety of personality types and people and the broader world of Pern. We do get some of that. And some of it ends up very bad. We get a little more fatphobia, but we also get what might be the only positive portrayal of a fat character in the entire book series, with Shonagar.

Tequila Mockingbird: Who — and I don’t know that all of his portrayal is great — but he’s maybe the only not cartoonishly villainous fat character we’ve met so far in these books.

Lleu: Yeah. I mean, there’s also… I don’t know. Groghe is described as “heavy-set,” and I think we’re supposed to read him as kind of like a football player, but also not actually —

Lleu: — a football player. So there’s some… I don’t know. But yeah, definitely Shonagar is the one who’s most obvious and also the one who’s most obviously like, “Oh, we’re supposed to like this character.” Most of the time.

Lleu: Except again when he’s yelling at Menolly for something that she didn’t realize that she’d done wrong, because no one told her. Something that happens repeatedly during this book, so if you can’t handle that kind of situation, this might not be the book for you.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Yeah, again, this combination of, I do think Menolly is genuinely not great at picking up social interactions or reading the mood of the people she’s talking to, but also she’s not being given any help picking up social cues, because people are being contradictory and incoherent and saying one thing, and then a different thing happens, and it’s rough. I sympathize a lot with her experiences in this very new place, treading water frantically, trying to be like, “This is fine. This is all fine.” And the one place that I get angry on her behalf is, she’s being told not to walk on her feet or not to stand much, ’cause they’re still recovering. And then, repeatedly, these adults are just like, “You’re not allowed to sit down. Stand up.” And for me specifically this is pushing the button, from a working-with-children-professionally context, of, you need to be less worried about, “This is the way that we do things arbitrarily to establish my authority as an adult over you,” and more responsive to specific actual need, where sitting down or standing up to take an assessment is not Inherently gonna give you a different assessment. And…ahhhh.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s just bad administrative practice. There are two people with significant authority at the Harper Hall: Masterharper Robinton and Silvina, the “Headwoman,” quote-unquote, both of whom know that Menolly has this current accommodation need, and none of them apparently communicate this need, or at least communicate this need as strenuously as it needs to be communicated, to any of the people that Menolly works with.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s also really no structure — and, to be fair, Menolly’s an unusual case, right? You don’t usually get people coming in and being tested and all of this. But, yeah, there just seems no broader administrative structure to support this, or allow this to go well. The messages are just being randomly sent, and it’s all happening at the last minute, and…euh. I get that Silvina’s very busy, but I think she needs a personal assistant who just does admin and scheduling.

Lleu: Yes, this is something that will definitely come up again in Dragondrums. Oh, my god.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. So, reading this book as a kid, I very definitely always imagined Sebell as Black. And I think some of that is, there’s a particular actor, Ryan Quinn, who I had a crush on at the same period that I was reading these books, and I, now that I think about it, was imagining him. But I am interested in the question of whether we are (a) meant to read them as characters of color and (b), whether or not we are meant to do that by McCaffrey, whether that is interesting or profitable.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because — and I do want to shout out, I was talking about this with Sophia Babai (apologies, as always for being unable to pronounce your last name correctly, my dear), and they were saying that their litmus test with white mid-century authors is, unless there’s awkward racialized comments, they do not assume that “brown skin” is supposed to mean a character of color, because usually, they said, if a white author is trying to write characters of color, they will be so obvious and awkward about it. And I did definitely notice, I was also flipping through another book in the series, where McCaffrey is very definitely writing what she thinks and knows are characters of color. And, yeah, she’s being really awkward and obvious about it. She’s not being subtle. It’s very cringy.

Lleu: Yeah. So I think that’s the key difference. I think that we are probably meant to read Sebell and Briala as characters of color. Sebell is referred to once as “the brown man” and Briala as the “brown girl” —

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, no! Briala is called “dark-complexioned” and then, repeatedly, the “dark girl.” And Sebell is called “brown,” but he’s also called “tanned.”

Lleu: In any case, I don’t think that we’re necessarily supposed to read Sebell as Black. But I think I think I want to give Anne Mccaffrey credit for this as something that she was thinking about, the extent to which this is a society that was settled by a presumably-liberal future multiracial community, which is more or less what we see in Dragonsdawn, although she’s weird about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Ugh. In Dragonsdawn we get a lot of, like, “Asiatic” and “Indic,” and…interesting adjectives and descriptors. And also just some pretty ridiculous and awful, “Oh, you know, he sounds just like a Japanese fighter pilot,” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — somehow, and that’s relevant, or Avril is sexy in a specifically South Asian feminine way.

Lleu: Yeah. However, I think she was thinking about it, and also was thinking about the fact that this is 2,500 years later.

Lleu: And as a result of, among other things, Thread, everything is a kind of racial admixture, and the kinds of preconceptions are no longer in effect.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is such a fascinatingly white perspective, I think, on this space future. This idea of, “Yeah, people will just completely forget a cultural identity” has this very, to me, specific flavor of white American “My culture doesn’t exist because it’s the dominant culture, and so I think of it —”

Lleu: Yeah, I don’t disagree. I do think that she also was sort of conscious of that, specifically. I’d — I hate to be like, I’ve got to give Anne McCaffrey credit for doing something good, but that is the plot of Dragonseye —

Lleu: — the faculty of the College being like, “Okay, if we’re going to survive on this planet long term, we can’t be clinging to Earth. We need to create a Pernese culture, a culture that is specific to our planet, this planet that we live on now, and that will belong to everyone, because that’s the only way we’re gonna be able to manage long-term knowledge transmission.” So I do think that it’s possible to read it, at least retrospectively —

Lleu: — as a conscious choice that was made by effectively the ruling class.

Tequila Mockingbird: Looking at the characters we’ve been introduced to so far, it has always been in this Pernese perspective. From a Pernese perspective, Menolly, wouldn’t be using necessarily “Black” or “Asian,” right? Those are not categories of identity that currently exist on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it does make me ask the question, too, of, okay, are F’lar and F’nor meant to be read as white? Because they’re also being described as “golden-skinned” and “brown-skinned” and “tanned.” But I also think that’s definitely a way that white authors describe white characters. We get “swarthy,” “dark,” “brown-skinned” to mean just not incredibly. Scandinavian-looking.

Lleu: Yeah, I mean, here’s the thing. Are we meant to read Sebell and Briala as not being phenotypically “white”? I think so. Does it make sense to read them as “characters of color” as such? Absolutely not.

Lleu: In part because that framework of understanding is clearly not operative on Pern. And also because it’s clearly not what she was trying to do. So I wouldn’t want to give her credit for “representation.”

Lleu: Because I think she’s trying to write something where race is irrelevant. Is that necessarily a good approach?

Lleu: Maybe not. But I think that was the intention. And so, to that end, while I would be happy to see, in a film adaptation, F’lar and F’nor cast with nonwhite actors, that’d be great. But I don’t think that it makes sense to think of them in that way.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think it’s mostly interesting for people who are looking outside and asking what McCaffrey’s intentions were, how McCaffrey was viewing this. I do think it worth noting that Briala is not at all a sympathetic character.

Lleu: No, she’s not! However, she’s also, if the phrasing is “dark-complexioned”... I don’t know. I’m of two minds there, because, on the one hand, I’m like… Okay. Especially because Sebell is a “brown man,” we know Sebell travels a lot. He’s from Boll, so he’s out in the sun… Briala’s from Tillek, and Tillek is icy, northern, cold fishing Hold —

Lleu: — being tan, essentially, yeah. On the other hand, Pona is explicitly described as “golden-haired,” right?

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s the the evil, blonde female character from the teen movie.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, to be fair, the evil blond character usually has a sidekick who is a brunette and frequently a brunette of color.

Lleu: Right, so it just depends on whether we want to make the jump from Briala being described as “dark,” having brown or black hair, versus Briala actually being…

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And complexion is is one of those tricky words —

Lleu: So, I feel more strongly about Sebell than I do about Briala. I do think that it probably is fair to say neither of them is “white.” But I would put that in scare quotes, because I think she was thinking enough about it to be like, “Ah, yes, this is irrelevant,” but not enough to think about, “Mm, what, what are the actual implications of —”

Lleu: “— anything else that’s going on in my world-building and in my descriptions of characters’ physical appearances.

Tequila Mockingbird: And you know, that’s a theme that’s gonna come up. Mccaffrey thought about it, and she could have thought about it a little more.

Tequila Mockingbird: There are definitely some others who don’t think about it at all, broad world-building everything, and McCaffrey thought just enough to be real dangerous.

Lleu: At the very least, Menolly is not straight. First of all, no interest in men, even later on, when she does —

Lleu: — end up married to a man, it’s like, I don’t know. It’s still a little bit like, “Ehh, how much are you actually in love with this man?” I don’t know. But more to the point. I don’t know, it’s like everything about her character, but also in particular it’s her relationship with Audiva. They’re they’re becoming more friendly, and then they have this very sweet interaction —

Lleu: — where Menolly literally says to her, like, “I’ve never had a girlfriend before.” Uh-huh! Say more about that! I highlight this, not because I have necessarily a strong argument that we should read Menolly as a lesbian, or as bi, or whatever else, and more because it’s one of the few instances in the series where I think there is really any serious possibility of reading a female character as not straight.

Tequila Mockingbird: And one could argue that that is because a driving mechanism of this series is the female protagonists having dragon-mediated sex with a specific male character —

Tequila Mockingbird: But the multiple versus single dragon balance here of how sexuality is being mediated by our psychic dragon bonds in these books. And we’ll get there.

Lleu: — is the fact that Menolly explicitly says in Dragondrums that Beauty has had mating flights and clutches before, and Beauty won’t tell her where she hides her eggs. It’s like.

Lleu: That raises so many questions, Menolly! You can’t just throw that throw that out there. But she does. Anyway.

Lleu: Let’s talk about How Brekke and F’nor’s traumatic experience where goes to the Red Star and comes back barely alive and Brekke calls out to him and his dragon, Canth, and also, through her fire lizards, to every other person on the planet who has a fire lizard and says, “Don’t leave me alone!” And it’s this extremely traumatic event. It’s the one major intrusion of global politics into this book. And then Menolly writes a pop song about it.

Lleu: And Robinton’s like, “Oh, thank god! You wrote a pop song about this so I don’t have to. So we can explain it to people.”

Lleu: Yes, but pop songs can be sad! First of all, I guess the answer to “What is it like to live in a world where your most traumatic experiences are immortalized in a song written by a 15-year-old-girl?” is “That’s what it’s like dating Taylor Swift.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I suppose, yeah. Or, to be fair, any number of other —

Lleu: — also, the more serious follow up is, what does all of this tell us about the role of Harpers on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this book begins to tell us quite a lot, and a lot of it is interesting. So, we know already that they are in charge of teaching children, and teaching children things about the history of Pern but also the current social situation and political situation of Pern. We have the implication that you’re taught to recognize dragonriders by songs about them. And we also know that they are involved in just playing music for social events. When the Gather shows up, they’re like, “Yep, we have a rotation. Everybody gets a turn to sing and, you know, music for dancing, background music.”

Lleu: Yeah. And we know from Dragonflight and Dragonquest that at least the Masterharper is fairly heavily involved in global politics at this point in time. But only near the end of Dragonquest do we really start to appreciate the extent of his involvement. And then we jump to Dragonsong.

Tequila Mockingbird: We also start to see, like the subtlety of his involvement. Robinton’s not just being consulted; he is very smart and very good at manipulating social situations, and we see when he’s accused of being in love with Lessa, and he defuses it perfectly. And Lessa’s like, “Oh, this isn’t an accident; this isn’t a coincidence. He’s very good at this.” And we start to see that a little bit more here, with Robinton making very specific choices about which journeyman to send to which Hold and communicating with other Harpers about, like, “Okay, this is what I need you to do.” And we have the dangling mystery of, why does Sebell need to learn to fake being a Sea Holder?

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause he comes to Menolly and is like, “Hey, can you teach me how to not, crucially, actually sail a boat, but how to look like I know how to sail a boat?”

Lleu: He gets one; Sebell gets the other. So Sebell is Robinton’s special journeyman who goes off and does things. So this is the book where we start to really see that not only is Robinton good at managing the Lord Holders in social situations, but also that he has a planet-wide spy network and is actively manipulating the course of history through his Harpers, who are both musicians and also —

Lleu: — field agents, in a way that is not clear at all in Dragonquest but starts to become clear here.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it is kind of a fun deeper exploration of standard bard trope. On the surface you’re like, “Oh, yeah, it’s vaguely feudal, medieval European world. We’ve got the vaguely troubadour social role. Totally, that makes sense.” And then McCaffrey digs a little bit deeper, and it’s interesting to note that this is, I think, a broader preoccupation of hers. This is not the only time that she commits to world-building in which musicians are also acting as spies. In her Brainship book, uh, The Ship Who Sang, there’s a religion which is called “Dylanism.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is the religion of using music to try and effect social and political change.

Lleu: God, that’s my least favorite far future sci-fi thing that people do.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and also as a note of, she doesn’t have a great, uh… would we say record on disability in fiction.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s some ableism baked into a lot of her broader world-building thoughts even beyond the Pern books.

Lleu: Yeah. I also think, and I would have to look more carefully at what specific books are identified as influences, but I suspect that the portrayal of Harpers here is, directly or indirectly, an influence on the development of the bard in later fantasy.

Lleu: I’m thinking, in particular about, there’s several varieties of bard in Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons that are just —

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, it gets picked up by other fantasy and, you know, more “romantasy” female fantasy writers. Mercedes Lackey is definitely influenced by this, both in how she depicts bards but also, frankly, in how she depicts Heralds in her Heralds of Valdemar books.

Lleu: I think these books, again, are extremely important for understanding the history of the subsequent fantasy and science fiction genres, because they established so many elements that —

Lleu: — people have taken up in a variety of different contexts in both genres, and I do think that the way that she portrays Harpers is one of those elements.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although, the idea that they’re blue, that they wear little blue outfits… I feel like that one doesn’t get taken up as much.

Tequila Mockingbird: They were like, “The psychic bonds with magic animal companions, we can totally copy that —”

Tequila Mockingbird: “— but the fact that the bards wear blue… Mm, wouldn’t want to be stepping on toes there.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I think it is entirely possible that we will have to come back and do a little bonus episode with our Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, maybe also Dragondrums thoughts. But for now, time to be done, and time to offer the idea that, hey? If this awakened your nostalgia or got you really curious and you are thinking you might want to read this one, ehh, maybe don’t. If you really liked Dragonsong, this is probably a perfectly good companion continuation. But we would also like to recommend some other things that might be better.

Lleu: So I have two things that come to mind. One is, if what you enjoyed about Dragonsong and Dragonsinger is having a protagonist who is extremely competent and has this incredible gift, and also has this extremely traumatic backstory that has left her convinced that she is worthless and can’t do anything right, and you haven’t already read Tamara Pierce’s Immortals quartet, of which the first book is Wild Magic… I don’t want to say, like, “You should go read that,” ’cause it also has some significant problems.

Lleu: — think about them together. My other recommendation might be Patricia McKillip’s The Bards of Bone Plain, if what you enjoyed about this is being immersed in a community of musicians. I can’t necessarily say that McKillip understands the practicalities of music better than McCaffrey. I mean, McCaffrey was a trained singer; she had to give up on her vocal training for reasons and was deeply upset about that, which is one of the reasons I say Menolly is her projection character in the series. There’s also some things where I’m like, “I don’t think Anne McCaffrey understood how chamber music worked.” Because Menolly does explicitly say that Petiron told her that you’re not supposed to move your body while you’re playing music, because that’s amateurish. But anyone who’s ever played chamber music knows that, actually, moving your body while you play music is —

Lleu: — one of the ways that you keep each other on tempo, and signal to each other what pace you should be playing the music at, and stay together in the context where you don’t have a conductor. So that’s one of the many little things in this book that makes me go, “Uhhh, I don’t think that’s right…” Anyway. But The Bards of Bone Plain, Patricia McKillip. Great snapshot of a particular musical and scholarly community. Also, if you’ve ever had to write a dissertation or, I would imagine, a novel, you’ll find some very relatable passages.

Tequila Mockingbird: And my recommendation, if you’re looking for more of a young adult school story about a young woman who is thrown into an academic community and builds an interpersonal community, I would recommend Witchlings, by Claribel Ortega. I think there are three books out right now. But entirely possible that there will be more depending on when you listen to this.

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.