YMMV / Dragonriders of Pern

• Awesome Music: The game's main theme is a chipper, adventurous chiptune on the Commodore 64.
• Broken Base:
  • Never ask whether the dragons are measured in feet or meters. Oddly enough, there's a composite scale going around that most of the role-players accept quite readily.
  • Rapidly approaching this concerning Todd McCaffrey's books, divided mostly between fans who say "Eh, they're not that bad" and those who consider them ascended fanfiction.
• Complete Monster:
  • Lord Holder Fax managed to gain control of seven Holds through various means, mostly conquest. One Hold, however, he "won" by marrying into the leadership...and then doing his level best to kill his Lady wife via childbirth. He also had zero problems with killing every man, woman, and child even suspected of having Ruathan blood in his bid to gain supremacy over that Hold. It's also heavily implied that he if not outright raped, then stole and coerced every half-pretty female in his jurisdiction that he could get his hands on.
  • Lord Holder Chalkin had a jail area that was more or less like a freezer, with small "cells" cut into rock, all of them cold and damp, into which he threw anyone that pissed him off in the slightest. A servant spilled a container of sugar and got two weeks in one of these cramped, cold cells. People were frequently kept in the cells until they died of the cold and damp, and their bodies were thrown into a lime pit, rather than given whatever passed for a normal burial. He was also heavily "tithing" his peoples' produce, whether it was food or textiles or what have you, to the point of forcing his people to starve and work themselves to death in an effort to please him while he wallowed in an excess of supplies of all kinds.
• Deconstruction Fic: A lot of this goes on in RPG groups.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In All the Weyrs of Pern, chapter 11, in a light-hearted exchange, Golanth boasts that "No feline would challenge me!", with F'lessan agreeing. Not so funny at the end of The Skies of Pern...
• Hate Sink: McCaffrey seems to like making her villains as outrageously despicable as possible. Besides the Complete Monster examples above, Dragonsdawn gives us Avril Bitra — who may not be as objectively awful as Fax, but on a visceral level is arguably even more loathsome as a character. Other noteworthy examples include Kylara, Meron, and T'kul. Even her books for younger audiences aren't immune, with juvenile analogues present in characters like Pona and Piemur's fellow drum apprentices.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: When fire lizards are first rediscovered, F'lar exclaims "Lessa'll want one for sure." She ends up loathing them for their part in the egg-theft.
• Once Original, Now Common: "Another book series about dragon riders? That's so overdone."
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Todd McCaffrey's books can be very divisive.
• Values Dissonance: There's a lot of this, some probably deliberate, some not. Pernese culture is feudal, hierarchical, violent, classist, and (after the plague) pretty misogynistic.
  • A measure of Pernese misogyny is that it's considered perfectly normal for a man to "take" a woman who refuses to acknowledge her love for him. F'nor more or less rapes Brekke, and F'lar physically assaults and occasionally humiliates Lessa in earlier books. F'lar actually thinks to himself that he "might as well call it rape" when he has sex with Lessa and their dragons aren't involved (this is before they actually fall in love). He's vaguely troubled by this but not overwhelmed with guilt or anything, and it doesn't seem to occur to him that maybe he should stop having sex with her unless she actually wants it. He just figures he's pretty good in bed and he'll get her to come around eventually. It's not actually important that F'lar conceive a child with Lessa, and the Weyrleaders and Weyrwomen are not required to sleep with each other, so he was just raping her for his own pleasure.
  • The way the highborn characters treat lower-ranking individuals is also pretty appalling. Lessa is bad-tempered and judgmental to the point that she nearly causes a political crisis by demanding that an insult be punished; Jaxom generally ranges from thoughtless to downright obnoxious in the way he treats commoners. Both do mature at least a bit over the course of the series.
    • Which actually is a case of Shown Their Work, as this was exactly how the things were back in the days of the class-based morals. And actually still are in some places, though at least now this attitude is generally frowned upon.
  • There's also some Values Dissonance in how the disabled are treated — in MasterHarper of Pern, Robinton fathers a mentally disabled child. The child's mother urges him to go find peace and happiness by paying attention to the other boys, and not worrying about his so very disappointing disabled kid. To his credit, Camo appeared earlier in the Harper Hall trilogy, and while no one said he was Robinton's son, he was well-treated and happy.
  • Word of God on how Impression and sexual orientation work implies that riders who aren't 100% heterosexual are barred from leadership positions in the Weyr, as only heterosexuals are supposed to Impress bronze and gold dragons. (At the time McCaffrey began the series, including any roles at all for non-heterosexuals was considered progressive.)
    • And that's not mentioning the infamous "tent peg" theory McCaffrey was very fond of. Thankfully it's been quietly swept under the rug even before Todd took over the series.
• The Woobie: Menolly. Early on, very much so. After she comes out of her shell, she's a far more assertive character that only fools would think of messing with.
  • Jerkass Woobie or Iron Woobie: Lessa. You really can't blame her for being so harsh and temperamental considering her family was massacred, she'd hidden as a slave in her own home for ten years, and the main reason she decided to try for Weyrwoman was because she had no clue what she'd do after getting revenge on Fax. When F'lar actually asks her about it, she realized that "she hadn't thought that far before."

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