Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #6: Dragondrums (1979)

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

Tequila Mockingbird: And today we're talking about Dragondrums. This is the last book in the Harper Hall trilogy that started with Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, but was published overlappingly — this book didn't end up being published until after The White Dragon came out.

Lleu: Dragondrums is — sort of, anyway — the story of Piemur, Menolly’s friend that she makes at the Harper Hall in Dragonsinger. This book is set four years after Dragonsinger: Menolly has grown into herself and started doing Harper spy things with Sebell and on her own, and Piemur, now aged 14 or 15, at the beginning of the book, his voice finally begins to change, and so he can no longer sing, at least until his voice settles, and he freaks out about this, and is like, “What am I going to do with my life?” And the answer to what he's going to do with his life is, be Master Robinton's new special apprentice and start doing spy stuff with Menolly and Sebell. As a cover story for this, because for some reason they don't want anyone to know that he's Master Robinton's new apprentice, Piemur is assigned to the drum heights at the Harper Hall, so learning to send and receive drum messages, which is one of the, at this point, several forms of high speed communication across Pern. The drum apprentices really don't like him, because he is too good at what he does. Sounds… familiar.

Lleu: And they begin relentlessly bullying him, ultimately leading to him being knocked unconscious for about 20 minutes.

Tequila Mockingbird: A totally safe thing that is medically fine and nothing to worry about.

Lleu: Yes, so he has a concussion, and in a couple days he's fine, apparently. Piemur, in the meantime, has been making do with a few outings with Menolly and Sebell to do fun spy stuff. They go to a Gather at Igen Hold, and then they go to a hatching at Benden Weyr, where Mirrim, Menolly’s first girl( )friend that she made in Dragonsong, a young woman at the Weyr, Impresses a green dragon, which is the first time that this has happened in a few thousand years, as far as we know. Everyone is shocked — we'll talk about that later, maybe. Anyway, Piemur finally, a couple days after his traumatic brain injury, accompanies Sebell to a Gather at Nabol Hold, which is where Lord Meron, who we met back Dragonquest as one of the two villains, is dying and refuses to name an heir. So Piemur and Sebell are there to try and figure out who people would prefer, of Meron’s heirs, and also to figure out why there are so many fire lizards in Nabol Hold, because there shouldn't be that many. They find out that the Oldtimers, who had been banished to the Southern Continent, are trading with Meron, and also Piemur steals a queen fire lizard egg from Meron’s bedroom and then manages to get himself unintentionally transported to the Southern Continent, where he spends a few weeks exploring; the egg hatches and he impresses the fire lizard; he makes a runner beast — so basically a horse — friend; and then makes his way, finally, to Southern Hold, where he's reunited with Menolly and Sebell, who have been kind of out of their minds with worry for him and also have had sex for the first time because their fire lizards mated, and Piemur is made a drum Journeyman, and everything is fine, and he's going to stay in Southern indefinitely.

Lleu: Yeah. So, the first question that this book raises for me is, why does it exist?

Tequila Mockingbird: Why did we need this book? And the answer is that we didn't. Menolly’s story is a pretty contained duology. Dragonsong and Dragonsinger work together as a pair really well, and then this book very much feels tacked onto the end. I think, honestly, the real answer is, she had a contract for a trilogy, and she needed to make some money; Dragonsong and Dragonsinger sold well, because they're genuinely good books in a way that this one simply isn't.

Lleu: Yeah, so she wrote this book because she was like, well, I need to write a third book; I guess I'll write about Piemur. Many of the things about it feel like very obvious retreadings of things from Dragonsong and Dragonsinger. Piemur goes through basically the same arc as Menolly, of living Holdless and being like, “Oh, actually, I can do this. Maybe I want to be ‘Piemur of Pern’!” And the problem is, it just kind of falls flat, because we already saw this, two books ago, better executed, with a more likable character.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it's not really Piemur’s fault, because I also think his characterization is just very inconsistent between the kid we met in Dragonsinger and the character that we eventually get over the course of this book. So, on one hand, I do like Menolly more, and I do think those books are better, but I'm not entirely sure that that's about his innate likability as a protagonist.

Lleu: Yeah. One of the difficulties with this book that I think we both had is that a lot of the plot for the first half, 60%-ish, of the book is driven by everyone around Piemur insisting that he is “indiscreet,” that he talks too much, that he is too quick to tell people what he knows, to show off what he knows. This is not a characteristic that we have seen from Piemur in Dragonsinger. There's one moment where he's vaguely indiscreet, and it's explicable because he's 10 or 11 at that point.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think there could be something interesting to say about the way that in a small community you can acquire a reputation and then grow and change beyond that and it's really tough for other people in that community to reevaluate you. The way that that can actually be a struggle in a small, closed community or as people grow up. Let us not forget that they're in middle school, like, age-wise, and that is when I think no one is at their best and many people are at their worst. But that's not the story that she told. Instead, the narrative seems to agree that Piemur is indiscreet? Or that this is a struggle he has to overcome? When, yeah, it just seems like he's being relentlessly bullied by his peers and failed at every turn by the adults who are supposed to supervise and care for him.

Lleu: Menolly and Sebell and Master Robinton spend the whole first 60% of the book, more or less, not telling Piemur anything, and Piemur is so worried about being perceived as indiscreet, especially because he knows he has this reputation as kind of a prankster, that he (a) refuses to ask them any questions, because he'll think, “Oh, like they'll think I'm being indiscreet,” and (b) refuses to tell them when things are wrong. And so…

Tequila Mockingbird: What I remember you saying earlier is, it just seems like the problem is artificial.

Tequila Mockingbird: The big issue of, “Oh, my gosh! He's being bullied by these kids!” Well, this is such an easily solved problem, if he just trusted the adults that he should be able to trust, and if they had just shown themselves worthy of trust, slash in literally any way capable of supervising adolescents and pre-adolescents, which is their job.

Lleu: Yeah, that's the biggest thing that bugs me about this book: no one seems to be paying any attention, and it especially is frustrating, coming from Sebell, who is, we estimate, probably about 18 —

Lleu: And has apparently forgotten how 12- to 16-year-old boys generally behave in this context.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also, there's just what I would, as someone who works with children professionally, call criminal negligence —

Tequila Mockingbird: — on the part of the drum Journeyman who's supposed to be supervising this.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also, frankly, of the Drum Master, who seems to be leaving this completely in the hands of the drum journeyman. That is how you get hazing and things where children die. That's literally what happens when you set up this kind of system and leave it to run without any checks, balances, and supervision.

Lleu: The one — for me, anyway — saving grace of this is Silvina, who is the quote-unquote “Headwoman” at the Harper Hall. She's in charge of all of the day-to-day logistics of the Hall.

Lleu: Yeah, and also seems to have essentially equal status to a craftmaster in certain decisions. We hear her being consulted at the end of Dragonsinger when Menolly overhears (and doesn't realize that this is what she's overhearing) the masters talking about whether or not she should be promoted to Journeyman. Silvina is one of the people who's being consulted for her assessment of the situation. So I had taken from everything in Dragonsinger that Silvina is involved in Harper Hall administration. But apparently not, because no-one told her anything that's going on.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right! And it's and it's so frustrating, because, again, it feels so artificial. It feels like a fake problem, like an idiot ball plot, where if, say, you communicated things to the people in charge of this, they would know what was going on, and this problem would not occur. But even when Silvina does find out, she doesn't intervene directly in the situation. And I don't know whether that implies that she doesn't have that authority to directly interfere with another master's apprentices —

Tequila Mockingbird: — or whether that suggests a belief either personally from Silvina, or, more broadly, of McCaffrey and her world-building, that you can't intervene in this type of bullying, it only makes it worse, which I think is a lie adults tell other adults to remove them from the moral obligation to care for children.

Lleu: Yeah. It definitely seems to me like that's what she thinks. Certainly that’s what Piemur thinks, is that if he tells anyone about this it will just make the problem worse. On the one hand, I don't think that's true. On the other hand, given that the big climax of the bullying plot is that Piemur has been asked to run a message down from the drum tower and then come back with a response, and as he's running back up the stairs he slips, because the stairs had been greased. He reaches out for the handrail; the handrail has also been greased. And he falls down a flight of stairs and cracks his head on a stone flight of stairs and is unconscious for fully 20 minutes.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. I, when reading it, was like, “Okay, am I reading this with bad action, movie logic of ‘and then he's fine’? Or am I reading this as someone who knows something about medicine which says that it's a miracle if he ever wakes up again?”

Lleu: Yeah. The takeaway from this health-wise is that he's fine after, like, two or three days of rest, apparently. The takeaway from this health-wise for me as a reader is like, “Oh, okay! All of Piemur’s behavior after this point can be explained on the basis of, he suffered a severe traumatic brain injury.”

Lleu: I don't think that's how we're supposed to read it. But in any case, the only consequence of this for the other drum apprentices who did this de facto attempted murder —

Lleu: — or for the drum Journeyman who allowed the situation to get this out of hand and was, in fact, himself actively also abusing Piemur.

Tequila Mockingbird: Deliberately turning a blind eye because he didn't like Piemur, yeah.

Lleu: Yeah. The only consequences for this are, they get like light rations for a week, and they're not allowed to go to the next Gather.

Lleu: I think this is an interesting comparison with the short story “The Smallest Dragonboy” that we talked about in our second bonus episode, where there is a similar case of severe bullying, and the consequences that the bully is immediately kicked out of the Weyr, banished from the community. Why did that not happen here?

Tequila Mockingbird: I think my instinct with that was, well, yeah, you don't want to give a dragon to someone who is prone to that kind of violent outburst or bullying behavior. But similarly, do you want to put a bully who is willing to cross the line into serious harm for totally petty reasons in charge of communications between isolated communities? Do you think that that’s gonna go well? ’Cause I don’t.

Lleu: Yeah, or to give them, as Journeyman Dirzan has, legal status as a person of rank. Journeyman are, we’re told, high enough status to give orders to people who do not have aristocratic or craft rank and expect to be obeyed, under normal circumstances.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it's also — he doesn't lose the responsibility for taking care of children.

Tequila Mockingbird: So what the heck is supposed to happen the next time a new apprentice shows up at the drum heights? Are they just gonna be like, “Well, hope that these random teenage boys like him better.” Is that fine? What structural change is being made to prevent this from happening the next time?

Tequila Mockingbird: If you wanted to make an excuse, which I don't know that I necessarily do, this is happening a few years before Robinson's heart attack at the end of The White Dragon, and I think it is definitely implied that his health is already getting a little bit wonky in this book —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and that Silvina is very concerned about that, and that a certain amount of the time and mental energy and resource of Harper Hall has now been diverted to the fact that Robinton has some serious health issues that he's not interested in addressing, and that they are trying to figure that out.

Lleu: I do think that's true. I noticed in particular, there's, I think, one reference in Dragonsong to the fact that Robin's hair is greying, and there are a lot more references in this one to the fact that his hair is “silvering” or, like, “tinged with silver.” So we're definitely supposed to be conscious of the fact that Robinton is aging. And also just a bunch of other miscellaneous little moments where someone is a little more solicitous about him than it maybe seems like they need to be, in a way that I think we can read as people being more concerned about his health.

Tequila Mockingbird: Is this the book where he is like, “Yeah, Menolly, I really think you're great, and I would totally be in love with you, but I'm old. So, marry Sebell, instead.”

Lleu: Yeah, that does happen in The White Dragon. In this book, Menolly and Sebell have fire lizard sex for the first time —

Lleu: — and afterwards, Menolly’s like, “Ah, well, I had no idea! There was always Robinton, and you always kind of stepped aside!” And then there's this bit —

Tequila Mockingbird: “We each loved him in our own way,” I think, is the line.

Lleu: “She did not hide from Sebell then how much she loved Master Robinton, nor would that ever come between them because they each loved the man in their separate ways.”

Tequila Mockingbird: We're never gonna escape the fantasy obsession with teenage girls falling in love with middle-aged-to-elderly men. I don't know why…

Lleu: To be fair, also, in this case, presumably-originally-teenage boy falling in love with middle-aged-elderly man.

Lleu: At least it's equal opportunity? Question mark, whether or not we think that's a good thing. So, at the very beginning of this book, as I was going back and re-listening to the audiobook for the first time in a while, I found myself thinking, like, “Oh, maybe it's not as bad as I remembered. Maybe it'll be fine,” ’cause the beginning is, like, I don't know — Piemur still seems like Piemur. And then all of the bullying stuff…

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, because before that I was engaged: oh, no, his voice breaks, and he loses his identity as this talented soprano singer, and he has to deal with that emotionally. And I was really set up for what I thought was gonna be a charming “and then he re-finds his identity within the Harper Hall, and he learns that there's more to him than his singing voice,” and his place in this community is reaffirmed, and that's the happy ending to this children's book.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then it kind of starts to do that. Okay, and there's bullying he has to overcome, great. And then it just takes a big swerve.

Lleu: Yeah. First of all, I find the bullying part just kind of unbearable to read because of how deeply irresponsible, negligent, all of the adults are being. And then, when he suddenly finds himself in Southern, there's all these things that are kind of parallel with Dragonsong, and he eventually, as he's making his way along the coast, he runs into a group of people from Southern Hold, including a woman named Sharra, who we met in The White Dragon, who's the Southern Holder’s, Toric’s, sister, and who's a healer and so is off gathering medicinal herbs, and she kind of brings Piemur along and teaches him stuff about the Southern Continent. And there’s a striking — they've been out and about gathering things, and she's like, “Yeah, if you survived multiple Threadfalls by yourself, Holdless, on the Southern Continent, you belong here!” This is the exact same thing that Lessa says to Menolly, in Dragonsong — Lessa’s like, “If you Impressed nine fire lizards, you belong at the Weyr.” And everyone else around Menolly at Benden Weyr agrees with this, but we, as readers know, no, that's not right, Menolly belongs at the Harper Hall.

Lleu: And so, because this is set up as third book in the trilogy, and there are all of these parallelisms with Menolly, including the severe bullying and abusive living situation —

Tequila Mockingbird: And even the physical injury that seems like it's preventing you from doing the thing you want to do.

Lleu: Yeah. So my expectation is, “Okay, yes, Sharra telling Piemur he belongs in Southern is Lessa telling Menolly she belongs in the Weyr.” Seems right in the moment, but it's built on some mistaken assumptions or lack of information. So eventually, when he's reunited with people, he'll realize that, “Oh, no! I actually do belong back as a Harper.” And, I mean, he's technically still a Harper. But the end of the book is like, yeah, Sharra was right. He doesn't belong in the North with any of his friends, or the people that he's known, or doing any of the things that he used to do. He should be wandering through the wilderness by himself forever.

Tequila Mockingbird: He's not by himself! He has a baby horse and a fire lizard.

Lleu: Sorry, yes, he has a baby horse and a fire lizard to keep him company. And it's like —

Tequila Mockingbird: Why is this the happy ending that we've been building towards? Are we supposed to think that this is correct? Just recently we were talking about Dragon Code,[1]which is a Piemur-centric version of The White Dragon, which[2], again, was published before Dragondrums but takes place after Dragondrums, continuing his narrative and showing the events of that book from his perspective.

Tequila Mockingbird: — Anne McCaffrey's daughter. And it's not good, but it was interesting, because I sort of understand the impulse? I get why she would feel like Piemur’s story doesn't feel finished, this is not a satisfying resolution, it feels like there's more to say about how he can be a Harper and a Southerner, and fulfill the promise of his own personality and his own characterization.

Lleu: Yeah, it's really striking comparing the end of this book with the end of Dragonsinger. The end of Dragonsinger is, Menolly is being promoted to Journeyman, Sebell and Talmor have had to kind of drag her out of her seat because she's too shocked to actually walk from the apprentice tables to the journeymen tables and the dining hall, and Sebell’s like, “Well, we could carry her,” and Menolly’s like, “No, no, no. I have Harper boots now — I can walk anywhere!” And it's like this incredibly satisfying, triumphant moment: her fire lizards are like flying around, bugling, and comparing how satisfying that ending is with the end of Dragondrums, it's just… Clearly we're supposed to be feeling the same thing at the end of Dragondrums. All of the narration is, “Yes, Piemur finally understood, this was where he really belonged!” And it’s like, where you really belonged is isolated, by yourself, in the wilderness, with no people to talk to? Ever?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And to your point about how Menolly’s narrative resolves in Dragonsinger and feels very resolved, here we get, “Oh, but also!” — addition to Menolly’s story, where, as you note, we get the romantic climax between her and Sebell, where they're on the boat sailing to the Southern Continent to try and figure out what happened to Piemur, and their fire lizard has a mating flight, and suddenly they're romantically involved. And it's clear to the reader that Sebell has been romantically interested in Menolly for some time; it is much less clear whether Menolly reciprocates this without the intervention of a fire lizard?

Lleu: Yeah, it seems like there was maybe something, but not in a way that she would necessarily have acted on otherwise, whereas Sebell definitely — we see the meeting flight from his perspective as his queen fire lizard is getting ready to mate, which, there's some gender politics going on there.

Lleu: And Sebell, once he figures out what's going on, is very much like, “This isn't how I wanted it to be, but I did want to have sex with Menolly eventually, just not under the influence of a mating flight.” Whereas we don't see that from Menolly’s point of view.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we've also seen him, you know, trying to put his arm around her shoulder at some points, and seeking her out, so it's clear that he's been interested.

Lleu: Even Piemur has noticed — there's multiple instances where Piemur is like, “Sebell’s clearly. I wonder if he knows he's being extremely obvious about it.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But it is interesting to me to sort of see it as, okay, Menolly’s arc wasn't complete. McCaffrey didn't feel like that moment of independent professional triumph at the end of Dragonsinger was sufficient. She has to have a romance.

Tequila Mockingbird: She has to have this romantic, heterosexual, dragon-mediated “Oops! Sex! And now I'm safely tied up. That box has been checked,” in order for Menolly’s story to feel finished.

Lleu: Yeah, which is wild because it truly didn't need to be here. The sex scene comes out of nowhere.

Lleu: Like, we could have just skipped to their arrival in Southern Hold, and the book would have been the same.

Tequila Mockingbird: Also, the way in which we do lose Piemur’s close perspective in some places.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think some of that seems to just be McCaffrey's preference as a writer. Is Dragonsinger the only one that's really in that tight third person?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because all of the other ones that I can think of are primarily —

Lleu: Well, Nerilka’s Story is first person, but it's an exception for many reasons.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Okay. Fair. Primarily giving us a sort of a fairly close third person, but it jumps from character to character. It is really an omniscient third-person narrator —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and it’s almost more Austen-like, in that it shifts to show you different perspectives in different scenes, it jumps around in that way.

Lleu: Even Dragonsong is like that; there's a bunch of scenes that are from Elgion's perspective or from Alemi's perspective, in addition to the bulk of the book being from Menolly’s, and even a few moments where we have it from her father's perspective.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I don't think that you can't do that, obviously, and there are some books, like in Dragonsong, it works just fine. But here it does, I think, show the way in which, yes, this is Piemur’s story, but mostly Piemur is just the lens through which McCaffrey is telling the next installment of the broader narrative of the society on Pern.

Lleu: There are a couple things in particular that stand out in this context. One is, again in direct parallel to Menolly, when Piemur goes to the hatching at Benden Weyr with Menolly and Sebell, there's an unexpected Impression, and the unexpected Impression is Menolly’s friend Mirrim, who Impresses a green dragon and is the first woman to impress a green dragon, as we will later discover, in 2,000 years. At this point they're like, “This is unprecedented! We had no idea this was possible,” and also for some reason, “People are going to be mad about this.” And it's not clear to me why people are going to be mad about this. We overhear a conversation between some people where it's a little bit, like, “Oh, it's just sexism. People are mad that Mirrim Impressed when there are all these disappointed boys from the Holds who could have impressed and didn't,” but…

Tequila Mockingbird: I think there is also, because during the Long Interval they've lost the tradition of queen dragonriders fighting Thread, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: They'd been like, “Oh, no, all the other dragon riders fight, but they just lay eggs.” They have now rediscovered this cultural tradition where actually they had flamethrowers, but I think there is still, maybe, this idea among Pernese culture that that's different, not as intense.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the idea of a woman being a dragon rider on just a completely bog standard fighting dragon seems more transgressive in some way.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don't think that there's a particularly good reason. I think that's just the narrative beat that she wanted to hit.

Lleu: Yeah, so again, especially thinking about this in conversation with slash contrast with the first two books, this feels like a cheaper imitation of Jaxom Impressing Ruth in Dragonsong and Dragonquest —

Lleu: — because that clearly had significant political implications for the planet as a whole. Whereas this is like, “Oh, and this is going to be controversial!” But then we're never going to get any follow-through on this, and in The White Dragon, when Mirrim and her dragon show up, the follow-through is like, “Oh, now her dragon’s sexually mature,” but she's just kind of there to be a foil, for Jaxom’s sexual development. It's just so…

Lleu: …weird. It doesn't work for me as a parallel, which I think it's meant to be, exacerbated by — speaking of people whose characterizations change —

Lleu: Mirrim’s characterization in this. So in Dragonsong, Mirrim is, you know, a little overbearing, but fundamentally a nice teenage girl.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s also dealing with the fact that her foster mother is comatose at the time we meet her.

Tequila Mockingbird: She's under a lot of stress, and she's dealing with that stress by being a little bit of a busybody or a bit nervously, “have to stay busy, I have to be bustling around so I'm not stressing.”

Lleu: Yeah. And in this book she's like that, but even more so. And it's horrible.

Lleu: I don’t — she's just mean! And she continues to be just mean for the rest of the series.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s noticeable that Menolly is also just like, “Ugh, Mirrim. She's so annoying.” She was your first friend! We get this whole charming scene earlier where Menolly is very pleased to be friends with Mirrim. And it's, “Oh, the first person of my age who I've really connected with.” Why did that suddenly have to go away?

Lleu: The thing is, Menolly does insist, “Yeah we're still friends! Mirrim’s a great friend! She can be kind of difficult sometimes, but she'd give you the shirt off her back.” Well, we've literally never seen her do that, and we never will see her do that, because she's not actually like that. You're just saying that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Even though Menolly is defending her, she's also getting annoyed with her, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: When we get Menolly’s perspective, Menolly isn't pleased by her. So it's not a, “Okay, this person is a little crotchety, but we get along” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — it's just, the dialogue doesn't seem to match the actual narration.

Lleu: Yeah. It's so weird, and so frustrating, that Mirrim, who I think is interesting and has the potential to be really interesting, as the first female green writer in a long time, gets just thrown under the bus. Now she's just there to be the annoying person who will be rude to people and be able to be criticized for it, and also in particular will be there to tease Jaxom unkindly about Ruth and say thoughtless things, and then cry and demand reassurance. This is just the most classic sexist stereotype, and I don't understand why you're doing this, again, with a character who was nice!

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think what we see is, you only get one nice female character per book.

Tequila Mockingbird: We can't have Mirrim being a compelling and sympathetic female character. Menolly is already here.

Tequila Mockingbird: And when Menolly leaves, Sharra is there. We can't pass the Bechdel-Wallace test or we'll die.

Lleu: Yeah. It does kind of, unfortunately, seem to be the case. Speaking of gender politics, the other big main series plot development that happens only in this book, for some reason, is that Lord Meron dies. And, first of all, Lord Meron dies pretty explicitly as a direct consequence of Piemur stealing the fire lizard egg from his bedroom. Which is very funny, on the one hand, and also a little disturbing that Piemur is explicitly rewarded for this, (a) with the fire lizard egg, by the narrative, and (b), at the end, Sebell and Menolly make it clear to him that all of his transgressions are forgiven because of his role in Meron’s death. Hello?

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, to be fair, he does not in any way steal the fire lizard egg with the intention of harming Meron.

Tequila Mockingbird: And Meron is significantly ill. It's implied, but not stated, because again, we must remember that this is a children's book, that he's dying of syphilis or some other venereal disease.

Lleu: Yes, he's dying of something that “suits his proclivities” is how it's described.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. It's a spiritual punishment for the fact that he's an unpleasant person who has been promiscuous.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it's clear that it's a very ugly and painful and protracted death, but I also do think it's it's worth pointing out that a contributing factor in his death is the fact that they deliberately and maliciously withhold medication and medical attention in order to torture him.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause that's exactly what you need to include in your children's book.

Lleu: So Meron has refused to name an heir, even though he knows he's dying, and they desperately want to avoid a possible civil war that could potentially involve all of the various young people who've been trained to Hold and do not have land to Hold, who would then conceivably, anyway, be backing all of the various different claimants to the Lordship of Nabol.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is, again, fitting into that larger plot arc, where she is in these first two trilogies really thinking about, “Okay, suddenly we have this Southern Continent. How is that going to destabilize the political situation that exists?” Honestly, I think Fax, the one who conquered Lessa’s home Hold, and also —

Tequila Mockingbird: He marries into Crom. But it's made clear that that is very transgressive and very different.

Tequila Mockingbird: This idea of one person trying to Hold multiple Holds has never really been done before, and they say, how can you protect that many people from Thread? How can you be a good Lord Holder to that disparate of a populace? And he doesn't care. He's out for the power. And even in his death, he's left an imprint on Pernese culture, because now people know, you can do that.

Tequila Mockingbird: The tension with Toric, of, he wants to have this incredibly large Hold on the Southern Continent. It's like, well, how much can you reasonably Hold? And he's like, “Hey. We have the grubs. I don't actually need to protect these people from Thread. I can have as much as I want.”

Lleu: This is where the main plot of the series is going. It's not entirely clear why this needs to be a significant focus of Dragondrums in particular, or why they needed to torture him. So here's the thing about Meron. He is a very unpleasant person. I don't think he did anything wrong at any point in his life, actually. Obviously he's done interpersonal things wrong — he's been very rude. But the things that we're supposed to perceive Meron as villainous for are the fact that he and Kylara were having an extramarital affair?

Tequila Mockingbird: We've been told repeatedly that you are not actually confined to monogamy within the culture of the Weyr.

Lleu: The thing that everyone hates Meron for is his involvement in the death of Kylara and Brekke’s dragons. This involvement was, he and Kyle are having sex and Brekke’s dragon, the mating flight flew closer to Nabol than anyone could have predicted, and then Kylara's dragon also rose up, and they fought, and both dragons died. There's simply no way that Meron could have predicted this situation?

Tequila Mockingbird: It is Kylara's responsibility to know what's going on with her own dragon. And even if he had wanted to, how would he have known? He's not a dragonrider!

Tequila Mockingbird: Over and over, both we're supposed to hate him because he's just ontologically evil, but also there's no reason for him to do any of the quote-unquote “mean” things he does. He just seems like a deeply unpleasant person who is unkind and disrespectful to everyone around him because he can be? Question mark?

Tequila Mockingbird: It doesn't seem to get him anything. He doesn't seem to want political influence, because he's tossing that aside by being blatantly disrespectful and unpleasant to everyone in power around him. He does seem to want financial power, I guess?

Lleu: The one crime that Meron commits is that he has been illegally trading with the Oldtimers in the Southern Continent. I don't, personally, think that this merits torture and death as a result of the consequences of the torture. Personally.

Tequila Mockingbird: And especially when they bend over backwards to be like, “Well, we don't want to kill any of the Oldtimers,” even when they're violently attacking people. “We couldn't possibly do that!” Because one thing we do see in this book, and frankly one of the best scenes in this book, is when Piemur is sent to visit the mining Hold.

Tequila Mockingbird: And he sees an Oldtimer sort of show up and try and coerce the Miner into handing over the sapphires that are not his by right, and Piemur is sneaky and helps hide them and disguises himself as an apprentice, and they are able to hoodwink the Oldtimer, and it's this fun little, “Ooh, how are you gonna save the day and be clever?” And it does suggest that the Oldtimers have been quote-unquote “trading” with a lot of people. They're just not super voluntary about it. Meron is getting stuff back instead of just having stuff stolen from him?

Tequila Mockingbird: And obviously kind of a dick move, but not deserving of capital punishment.

Lleu: Right. The trade off of this right is that Meron has been purchasing things for the Oldtimers and sending them to them, and the things that he's been purchasing is like, Craft goods, stuff from the Weavercraft, new fabric, new dresses, new clothes, things like that. Would you rather that they just showed up and stole them? Or would you rather that someone paid for them, even if the actual transportation was technically illegal?

Tequila Mockingbird: And broadly raises this question about, how effective is shunning as a punishment?

Tequila Mockingbird: In a community in a community that is interdependent in the ways that this society is, how realistic was it, really, to be like, “Okay, you're gonna go to another continent, and we're never gonna see you, or talk to you, or exchange anything with you ever again, and this will just be fine.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that's frankly a very childish way of looking at a political situation, so I'm not shocked that that doesn't work out.

Lleu: And this also has been one of the big political questions of the series so far, is how do we organize this society into something that functions as a unified whole when everything is legally independent? The Weyrs are all supposed to be politically independent from each other, the Holds are all obviously politically independent from each other, the Crafts are all politically independent from each other and from the Holds. But in order to do something about Thread, we need a functioning world government. And the solution to this has been essentially to either convince or coerce everyone into seeing the Benden Weyrleaders as the head of a world government. But… I don't know that that's a good long-term solution. And this book and this Meron plot shows that there are some flaws and fraying points in this solution. Because — and this is a question that she comes back to in later books — what happens if someone doesn't want to cooperate with the world government that you've tried to institute and is within their legal rights to not do so?

Tequila Mockingbird: This is a broader question that she poses, but doesn't really want to commit to over the course of the series, because the the roots of Pernese culture are very libertarian in a lot of ways. There's this overwhelming focus on autonomy, this idea that you have your land and you get to do whatever you want. But then, as you note, they need cooperation in order to survive. And there's this, I think of it as a very typical libertarian fairy tale of, “Well, obviously, when it's an emergency, everyone will just do the right thing, and it will be fine!”

Tequila Mockingbird: “And we won't actually need to engage with whether or not we have a state that can enact violence upon its members in order to punish them or coerce them into behaving in a way that it is for the good of the community, because we just won't do that, and it'll be okay!” And then… that doesn’t work.

Lleu: Expecting everyone to just do the right thing doesn't work, and the only solution that they have available to them is, “Well, I guess we'll —”

Lleu: “— torture Meron,” or, in Dragonseye, invade Bitra Hold and do a little show trial where we find a pretext to depose Chalkin and exile him.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it goes all the way back to Dragonsdawn, where they’re like, “What are we gonna do with Ted Tubberman? I guess we'll shun him. How is this gonna affect his wife and minor children? We won't worry about that.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it doesn't go well — we'll talk about it when we get there, but it doesn't go well. And there's a very, in a lot of ways, childish refusal to proactively build a functioning society, that I have always found very deeply frustrating about this type of political and personal ideology, this “If we keep our eyes closed, the monsters can't see us. If we don't plan for it, it will all be fine.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Because then when something goes wrong, they default to torture and violence and coercion, because they don't have a structure in place.

Lleu: Yeah, I mean, this is the problem with, among other things, feudalism. There's no accountability mechanisms, especially if you don't even have a king in this case, to depose people, and…

Tequila Mockingbird: You know, what Pern really needs is a competing newspaper.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because part of the problem is baked in in that the Harpers are the ones who are providing justice. They're providing the closest you get to an independent legal system. But they're also the propaganda machine.

Tequila Mockingbird: The the call is coming from inside the building. You can't actually structure yourself like this. It doesn't work.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, it works as long as you have a god-king who is actually morally correct —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and the narrative will just reinforce that they're just correct, and everyone just needs to believe them and obey them.

Lleu: Yeah, if Pern had Aragorn, everything would be fine, maybe? Question Mark?

Lleu: The last thing I want to talk about, and it's very silly, is, I just want to talk about N’ton. Um. I love him.

Lleu: Well, on rereading this book I'm like, “Oh, this book is why I imprinted so heavily on him.” And the reason is because Piemur extremely has a crush on N’ton. N’ton is the Weyrleader at Fort Weyr. Technically, he didn't directly replace the Oldtimer Weyrleader who was banished, but effectively he replaced the Oldtimer Weyrleader, who was banished, so he’s young. And here is how N’ton is described when he first shows up:

Lleu: “N’ton had always been Piemur’s ideal of a dragonrider: tall, with a really broad set of shoulders, dark brown hair slightly curled from being confined under a riding helmet, an easy, confident air reflected by a direct gaze and a ready smile. The contrast between this present Fort Weyrleader and his disgruntled predecessor, T’ron, was more vividly apparent as N’ton smilingly greeted the harpers’ apprentice.”

Lleu: Piemur is fully just in love with N’ton, and this continues throughout the book. He's always like, “Yes, and then N’ton took his hand, and he was so strong! N’ton put a hand on his shoulder.” And when Sharra is extolling the virtues of Southern and being critical of dragonriders and the North, Piemur’s first instinct is like, “Well, N’ton isn't like that, so…” But he's like, I don't want to say that out loud, but he's only thinking about N’ton. And again, she didn't have to do this. She didn't have to spend a full paragraph being like, “N’ton is just so handsome and hot and good!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Actually, she did have to do that, because he is, and we should say it. Where else is N’ton a cutie-patootie?

Lleu: He’s in Dragonquest as F’lar’s minion, and he’s all smiles all the time, very patient with F’lar thinks he’s dying of the flu, etc. So I find him endearing for that reason also, but I didn’t read Dragonquest more than maybe once as a child.

Lleu: So that’s not why I had in my head, “I love N’ton!” It’s definitely because of this book, which I did listen to at least once, probably more than once, as a child, even though I was like, “This book is not good and doesn’t make sense to me.” But N’ton is there, and…

Tequila Mockingbird: Everybody has a crush on N’ton because he’s crushable! He’s crushworthy.

Tequila Mockingbird: So instead, we have some other recommendations. If you felt the itch, I have two recommendations that are both stories of a young person coming into a new world and going on a coming-of-age quest to figure out their identity and their role while dealing with a complicated relationship with a somewhat dubious mentor figure, which I think parallels fairly well. One is The Last Fallen Star, by Graci Kim, which is part of the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, and one is The Marvellers, by Dhonielle Clayton.

Lleu: My recommendation is a little outside the box, because I was having some difficulty, but my recommendation is Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To…, which is a short novel from, I want to say, 1978, something like that — ’70s, anyway. It is a critique of the Robinsonade genre, so a family or a person arrives on a desert island and reconstructs “civilization,” quote-unquote, from first principles. So this book is about a group of space travelers whose ship has crash-landed on this planet, and they are a random assortment of people. The main character is a kind of artist-academic, and the rest of the crew are like, “All right, well, it's time to re-establish civilization! So we've got to figure out a breeding program, so that we can have a viable community of humans, and start building shelters, so that we can eventually out a city and everything else…” And the main character’s like, “I don't want to do that. I don't want to have sex with any of the men who were coincidentally in this spaceship. Actually.” And it does this kind of extended critique of the idea that (a) you can recreate civilization from first principles on a desert island with a small group of people and (b) that this is desirable to do in the first place. And I don't want to spoil too much, but many people end up dead by the end of the book. So it's great, and Russ's prose is extremely tasty, so if you were interested in the part of the book where Piemur is wandering the Southern continent, learning to survive, why not — well, really, if you're interested in the part of Dragondrums where Piemur is on the Southern Continent learning to survive you should just read Dragonsong, which is the same thing, but better.

Lleu: If you are a little dubious of that narrative, take a look at We Who Are About To…

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.