History Literature / DragonridersofPern

* BladeEnthusiast: Dragonriders don't carry swords, but many are deadly efficient duelists with eating knives. Swords don't seem to exist in the setting, even machetes are referred to as long, flat knives. This is most likely due to the scarcity of metals on Pern.

%% * ABoyAndHisX: Dragonriders and their dragons; at various points, people in general and their fire lizards.
%% Add more context to describe their relationship and what effect it has on them. %%

* DuelToTheDeath: In ''Weyr Search'', the first story in ''Dragonflight'', Lessa telepathically goads the bronze dragonrider F'lar into one of these against the corrupt Holder named Fax, since Fax murdered every one of Lessa's family.

%% * KillEmAll: Todd [=McCaffrey's=] solo books.

* CoolPet: Fire lizards.

* GiantFlyer: The dragons.

The series initially had a [[{{Fantasy}} fantasy]] feel, with a few ScienceFiction trappings,[[note]]If John W. Campbell published it in ''Analog'', he at least believed it to be science fiction. He did not publish anything he thought of as fantasy literature, which is why Creator/RayBradbury and [[Literature/ThePeople Zenna Henderson]] never appeared in the magazine.[[/note]] then evolved into ScienceFantasy. [=McCaffrey=], for her part, always insisted that the stories were straight Sci-Fi, though it could be hard to tell in many of the books.

* MadLibFantasyTitle

* HideYourGays: Half averted. Homosexual men are not uncommon on Pern, and in fact most (if not all) blue riders fit the bill. That fact doesn't get brought up very often, though when it does come up, it's not treated as anything noteworthy. There is never a mention of homosexual women, however.

%% ** F'lar in the first book is something of JerkassStu. Subsequent books rebalanced his personality considerably.

* KnifeNut: Dragonriders don't carry swords, but many are deadly efficient duelists with eating knives. Swords don't seem to exist in the setting, even machetes are referred to as long, flat knives. This is most likely due to the scarcity of metals on Pern.

* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: Just try keeping the scores of dragonriders (and their dragons!), harpers, Lord Holders (and their spouses and kids!), weyr ladies, and various other characters straight. The abbreviated names don't help either; they tend to blur together, and several have even been subject to name drift.
** When ''Dragonflight'' (the original novella, published in ''Analog'' in December 1967) first appeared, the Fort weyrleader who greets Lessa after her long time trip is named M'ron. When [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonflight the "Dragonflight" *novel*]] was published in July 1968, his name had been changed to T'ton. By ''Dragonquest'', he was T'ron, and remained so.

* IJustWantToBeNormal: Sort of an example-by-proxy with Jaxom. He's very sensitive about Ruth's unusual color and small size (he's about the size of the original Dragons, but they were engineered to get way bigger), and wants Ruth to be treated like any other dragon. He becomes very embarrassed when he finds out that Ruth is {{Asexual}}, though Ruth shows a lack of concern typical of Dragons in this setting.

%% * JerkAss: Okay, let's count 'em. Kylara, Lord Meron, Thella, T'kul, T'ron, Mardra, Merika, Masterglasssmith Norist (leader of the anti-AIVAS group), Lord Fax, Lord Chalkin, Yanus (Menolly's father), and more. It seems that every major antagonist character in the series is not merely opposed to the heroes but a complete dick as well.

* DontMakeMeTakeMyBeltOff: Menolly's father beats her in this manner for the grave sin of improvising her own music.

* DragonVarietyPack: Dragons are differentiated by their colors (one of five: Gold, Bronze, Brown, Blue, and Green), which indicate their rarity, their genders (Golds and Greens are female, the others male), and their rider's place in the weyr hierarchy.

* DrowningMySorrows: Even decades later, Lytol drinks to unconsciousness after a dragon dies to numb the pain of losing his.

* DueToTheDead: Centuries after she sacrificed her life to save Pern, Sallah Telgar's body is brought down from space and given a very elaborate ceremonial funeral, including the coffin being borne by queen dragons.

* EmptyShell: If a rider who loses his dragon does ''not'' commit suicide, he or she is frequently left as this. The quintessential example is Kylara, who is left almost catatonic when her queen dies.
** Lytol manages to avert this. While he never gets over the pain of losing his dragon, he presses on through life by engaging in other pursuits. First by being a Weaver, then by dedicating himself to making Ruatha Hold prosperous again for his ward Jaxom, whom he treats as a son (albeit in a distant fashion).

** Menolly is accepted by ''almost'' everybody in Harper Hall...but the ones who object to her presence make her life hell. A rare example of the protagonist not winning everyone over; instead, she settles for getting her own back.

** In ''Dragonquest'', there's a specific reference to fire lizards "eating Thread". Granted that the person making the claim, Kylara, is mentally unstable and an unabashed liar, in later books the idea seems to be dropped in favor of fire lizards flaming thread like their larger cousins. There's also a mention in ''Dragonsinger'', which parallels ''Dragonquest'' in the Harper Hall trilogy: Menolly's fire lizards, while shut inside the Harper Hall refectory during Threadfall, get very excited and are described as making the motions of "licking Thread from the air."

* MoodRingEyes: Dragons' and fire lizards' eyes change color according to their mood.

* BestServedCold: Lessa was ready to wait ten years disguised as a menial servant to take revenge on the man who slew her entire family. During this time she turned Ruatha, one of the wealthiest Holds, into a complete ruin through simple sabotage and slight adjustments of co-workers' emotions and decisions via [[PsychicPowers telepathy]], and manipulated [[GuileHero F’lar]] into a duel with Fax to make him pay. She was only [[LittleMissBadass ten years old]] when this started.
* BitchAlert:

* ADegreeInUseless: By the time of the Second Pass, Pern's sole college (that later becomes the Harper Hall) is wondering why they still consider Computer Science to be a prestigious degree when they only have one computer left on the planet - that gets destroyed by a lightning strike a few chapters later.

* DesperatelyLookingForAPurposeInLife: Dragons were explicitly created to fight Thread. The Weyrs are supported by the Holds for their services in fighting Thread. So once the dragonriders stop Thread from falling again, the big problem immediately becomes the question of how the Weyrs will support themselves once there is no Thread to fight, and the Holds therefore won't be supporting them- and exactly what they'll do with their time.

* DoubleStandardRapeFemaleOnMale: Tarvi Andiyar married Sallah Telgar because he got her pregnant - because she drugged his klah with an aphrodisiac. And most of their later children were conceived when she went down on him while he was half-asleep and unable to refuse her advances. After her horrible death at the hands of Avril Bitra, Tarvi changes his name to his wife's and regrets that he never told her how much he loved her until she was dying.

*** One of the things that distinguishes Jaxom of Rutha Hold as ''not'' a Dragonrider is that he does not receive the honorific. Although before that decision was made, Lessa amuses herself by wondering his name might be shortened to since--not being weyr-born--his name was never designed with contraction in mind.

** Since the time spent ''between'' increases the further you go in time, hypothermia and sensory / oxygen deprivation almost killed Lessa when she went back 450 Turns--she was babbling and needed bed rest for a while after getting out. It's explicitly stated that the only thing keeping her ''and'' Ramoth from going completely insane was their mental contact. (On the return trip they figured out how to take a series of much smaller time jumps, resting after each one.)

* IHaveYourWife: How F’lar manages to convince the Holders to cooperate with Benden Weyr after the Long Interval -- he sends dragons to abduct their wives and daughters.
** Unusual mainly in that the ''hero'' (well, the heroine's LoveInterest) is pulling this maneuver - and has justification. If the dragonriders starve, the entire colonized continent of Pern will either be eaten by Thread or starve in the midst of their dead land.

* LawOfChromaticSuperiority: A dragon’s or fire lizard’s size and physical ability is directly linked to its color. Though there have been exceptions, such as Canth - a bronze-sized brown. Intelligence was gauged this way as well, up until Ruth, a runt white dragon as smart as any dragon portrayed.

** A significant amount of altitude is also necessary for a safe and productive mating, as the dragons, particularly the queen, are unable to safely use their wings during the actual copulation. Insufficient height can lead to the pair being forced to disengage too early in order to break their falls, resulting in fewer viable eggs--or even worse, one or both of the pair being injured or killed on impact due to being too wrapped up in the act of mating to realize they're about to hit the ground.

* NeverTheSelvesShallMeet: This seems to change at different points in the series. At the start, Jaxom coming close to himself causes incredible exhaustion, and Lessa overrunning herself three times at the same temporal point results in swaying and mumbling gibberish. This might be a problem exclusive to dragonriders - being the result of their telepathic bond with their dragon effectively becoming duplicated - as a number of non-dragonriders in Todd [=McCaffrey's=] books avoid this trauma when travelling through time, and Masterharper Zist even talks to his past self outright with no issue.
* NewPowersAsThePlotDemands: In ''The Skies of Pern'', the dragons "discover" their powers of [[MindOverMatter telekinesis]]. This is not entirely pulled out of thin air; in ''All The Weyrs of Pern'', AIVAS said that dragons should be able to do it, and it was covertly confirmed when the dragons were able to carry huge starship engine assemblies that, despite the lower gravity of the Red Star, they should not have been able to support, even ''en masse''. In a variation of the MagicFeather trick, AIVAS told no one that truth except Jaxom (and by proxy, Ruth).
* NobodyPoops: Mostly maintained, although a convalescing Menolly is helped to use "the necessary" at one point. And Piemur has some “uncomfortable moments” after a few days surviving on raw fruit in the jungle.

* SelectiveObliviousness: Petiron completely ignored his son when Robinton was growing up, and expected him to be skilled with music despite never paying any attention or trying to help Robinton develop his skills. When he finally realised that Robinton was a musical genius whose compositions were being widely played, he was furious that everyone had 'kept' this knowledge from him, only for several people- including his wife- to point out that literally everyone else had seen it from the start, he was the only one who never bothered paying his son enough attention to realise it.

** Character names - both major and minor - frequently end up changing between books. The worst example of this happening is probably that Lord Larad's wife's name strangely changes from Dulsay to Janissary in ''All the Weyrs of Pern'' and back to Dulsay again in ''The Skies of Pern''.

* SyntheticPlague: [[spoiler: How thread is ultimately made extinct, as a fail-safe in addition to altering the course of the Red Star. Using rediscovered technology, they learn that thread is just one part of a complex space-borne ecology in the Pernese Oort Cloud and that it has natural parasites. They then genetically engineer one of these parasites into a lethal and virulent form, and seed the parasites such that the oort cloud will be infected by it.]]
* TeacherStudentRomance: Robinton and Menolly, but an unusual example. They know they're fond of each other, and after [[spoiler: his heart attack]] they both admit that said feelings are not 100% platonic. However, she's involved with someone else, and he is very much in favor of that relationship. So other than that brief recognition and pang, his relationship to her remains teacher / surrogate family.

* WritersCannotDoMath: Several of the Ninth Pass books are a bit inconsistent with their events and what year they took place in. For example, ''The White Dragon'' is repeatedly said to take place five years after ''Dragonquest'', yet the date given - 15PP - is actually seven years afterwards. In one particularly jarring example, Readis is said to be seven at the beginning of ''The Dolphins of Pern'', despite the fact that his parents only met each other five years prior.

* RealityEnsues: Dragons were explicitly created to fight Thread. The Weyrs are supported by the Holds for their services in fighting Thread. So once the dragonriders stop Thread from falling again, the big problem immediately becomes the question of how the Weyrs will support themselves once there is no Thread to fight, and the Holds therefore won't be supporting them- and exactly what they'll do with their time.

** Mardra abruptly vanishes halfway through ''The Renegades of Pern'' and is never mentioned again.

* OurDragonsAreDifferent: Another TropeCodifier.

* PatternCodedEggs: The colors of dragons' eggs indicate the colors of the dragons which will hatch from them. This is also true of fire lizards.

* CinderellaCircumstances: Lessa. Born into the ruling family of Ruatha, the richest and grandest Hold on Pern, she disguises herself as a SculleryMaid after the rest of her family is slaughtered by the tyrant Fax. ''Weyr Search'' is the story of a Cinderella who's in the process of rescuing herself, using her PsychicPowers to ruin her family's land and castle and manipulate visiting dragonman F'lar into killing Fax, after which she's completely prepared to clean up, take over and restore the place. She is less than enthused by F'lar and certainly does not regard him as a PrinceCharming coming to her rescue.

* BestServedCold: Lessa was ready to wait ten years disguised as a menial servant to take revenge on the man who slew her entire family. During this time she turned Ruatha, one of the wealthiest Holds, into a complete ruin through simple sabotage and slight adjustments of co-workers' emotions and decisions via [[PsychicPowers telepathy]], and manipulated [[GuileHero F’lar]] into a duel with Fax to make him pay. She was only ten years old when this started.

* DragonRider: One of the {{Trope Maker}}s.

* {{Pride}}: Lessa, full stop. She is completely willing to let dragons battle with each other, because she feels insulted. This is also the source of most of her friction with F'lar in the first book, combined with her being unused to being able to rely on anyone besides herself.