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** Perhaps the suicide thing was meant more as "when a bondmate passes violently and suddenly, with no chance for the two to say goodbye"?
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**** Yup, and one of the biologists who came on the original expedition actually thought it was a better solution than having the anus and sex organs so close. (Also, a threadscored tail wouldn't be a death sentence- they store the dung until they defecate Between. the hole is just that- a hole.Threadscoring severe enouhg to be an issue would be enouhg to kill the dragon from the severity
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** Actually, there is no error. Pellar wasn't sure he was recognised as an actual apprentice before.It was the recognition that Pellar was recognized as a proper apprentice that he was thrilled about.
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,
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** I always figured that the queen dragon is ovulating during her mating flight -- the longer she flies, the more eggs she releases. That was why F'lar was angry at Jora, who couldn't restrain her queen from eating and subsequently had short flights and small clutches.
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** I always figured that the queen dragon is ovulating during her mating flight -- the longer she flies, the more eggs she releases. That was why F'lar was angry at Jora, who couldn't restrain her queen from eating and subsequently had short flights and small clutches.
clutches. As for why it's good for the species, that seems obvious -- the bronze dragon with enough strength and stamina to keep up with the queen becomes the father of her clutch and passes his genes along.
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** I always figured that the queen dragon is ovulating during her mating flight -- the longer she flies, the more eggs she releases. That was why F'lar was angry at Jora, who couldn't restrain her queen from eating and subsequently had short flights and small clutches.
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**Tenim wasn't destroying the firestone, just the mine. His plan was to reopen the mines under him.
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* In The White Dragon, a dragon dies offscreen, and this is treated as a rare event - Jaxom rushes home (times it, in fact) in order to comfort his foster father, and ex-dragonrider who lost his companion many years before. However, it's established that when ''any'' dragon dies, ''every'' dragon in the world lets out a howl of mourning. By a conservative estimate, there are 1000s of dragonriders in the world at that time, and when a rider dies, his dragon inevitably suicides. Even assuming an average lifespan of 100 years, shouldn't there be a dragon dying every month or so, at least?
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*I think there's a few things to look at on the time loop front. One, as wonderful as Anne's work was, she occasionally had problems with thinking through implications of her work, and was fairly resistant, as I remember, to self-correction when she made a decision. It was also in the days before wikis and forums, and so her potential beta reader pool, if any, was probably limited. As a result, it's mostly handwavium.
*That being said, one could look for solutions. Depending on your opinion of Todd-- I don't like his work, but it is a theoretical solution-- one could try to get a solution hashed out for debatable levels of canoncity. Regardless of said opinion, it's possible that solution COULD work out as a reasonable or rational one but still not be acceptable to the majority of fans. I know I might have a knee-jerk reaction there, even knowing that I know this. If we're just looking for justifications regardless of canon status, that's a different story.
**One way of looking at it is the old saw of time being an illusion, and that from some perspective in the Pern continuum, all of the events are happening simultaneously. Though the use of the word perceptive is possibly a bad one since there isn't supposed to be a privileged observer position. Maybe there is in the FSPverse! It also raises questions about free will, though there are people who argue that there isn't free will in a linear timeline. I suppose if free will exists at all, it may have a certain similar achronal existence of its own.
**Other possibilities I can think of is that Anne was wrong similar to her change on the sexual orientation thing. Maybe loops are highly stable, but come from recursive reinforcement. IE, an event happens for one reason or another-- a lot of weyrfolk die off, causing their dragons to suicide, or KPY's poor choices on the minimum Gold numbers meant a few bad clutches wiped out the other Weyrs, who concentrated their numbers over time in either case, eventually leaving Benden alone. Lessa makes the trip to fix it, and suddenly the universe's conservation of effort makes THAT the reason why everything happened. No loop begins to collapse until you actually observe something about it. Details may be changed by elements that happen external to the loop, but if they impinge upon the loop, the prior loop is preserved. The problem with THAT is it makes Time into a Fate-like force/entity that forces things to happen. Which, again, there might be a Privileged Observer in this universe.
**Of course, anything like that opens the whole can of worms in alternate timelines, creation/destruction of universes, temporal inertia, etc., so it may not be worth the effort.
**I guess the summary is: to justify it, we either have to change the understanding of physics in this universe, or we have to change the meaning, in small amounts or in large, of the author's statement. The former is traditional to all sci-fi, the latter may be more satisfying, especially for fanfic. :P
*That being said, one could look for solutions. Depending on your opinion of Todd-- I don't like his work, but it is a theoretical solution-- one could try to get a solution hashed out for debatable levels of canoncity. Regardless of said opinion, it's possible that solution COULD work out as a reasonable or rational one but still not be acceptable to the majority of fans. I know I might have a knee-jerk reaction there, even knowing that I know this. If we're just looking for justifications regardless of canon status, that's a different story.
**One way of looking at it is the old saw of time being an illusion, and that from some perspective in the Pern continuum, all of the events are happening simultaneously. Though the use of the word perceptive is possibly a bad one since there isn't supposed to be a privileged observer position. Maybe there is in the FSPverse! It also raises questions about free will, though there are people who argue that there isn't free will in a linear timeline. I suppose if free will exists at all, it may have a certain similar achronal existence of its own.
**Other possibilities I can think of is that Anne was wrong similar to her change on the sexual orientation thing. Maybe loops are highly stable, but come from recursive reinforcement. IE, an event happens for one reason or another-- a lot of weyrfolk die off, causing their dragons to suicide, or KPY's poor choices on the minimum Gold numbers meant a few bad clutches wiped out the other Weyrs, who concentrated their numbers over time in either case, eventually leaving Benden alone. Lessa makes the trip to fix it, and suddenly the universe's conservation of effort makes THAT the reason why everything happened. No loop begins to collapse until you actually observe something about it. Details may be changed by elements that happen external to the loop, but if they impinge upon the loop, the prior loop is preserved. The problem with THAT is it makes Time into a Fate-like force/entity that forces things to happen. Which, again, there might be a Privileged Observer in this universe.
**Of course, anything like that opens the whole can of worms in alternate timelines, creation/destruction of universes, temporal inertia, etc., so it may not be worth the effort.
**I guess the summary is: to justify it, we either have to change the understanding of physics in this universe, or we have to change the meaning, in small amounts or in large, of the author's statement. The former is traditional to all sci-fi, the latter may be more satisfying, especially for fanfic. :P
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** It's still pretty ''stupid'' to continue delivery to the point of absolute exhaustion. A nice little twelve-hour sleep in the middle of delivery would have posed no problem for a creature capable of ''traveling through time''. And even so, a twelve-hour stopover couldn't have hurt anything - a delay that short will make little to no difference in a mass inoculation, which is measured in days, not hours.
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* What the heck was going through Tenim's mind when he came up with the plan to destroy (what he thought was) the last firestone mine on Pern? Did he seriously think that his own stockpile of the stuff - skimmed off the top of a regular shipment of firestone - that he gathered for less than a year would be enough for 3000 dragons to use ''every day for more than fifty years'' to spare the planet from destruction? In addition to this, how do you suppose he intended to get the dragonriders to work with him?
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** As has been said, Lessa was living in a world where the dragonriders had already gone forward. Also, at the time she would have had no way of knowing how the Oldtimers acted; they only became JerkAsses after they came forward and had to deal with tyhe changes that resulted from the Long Interval. ( witness the Oldtimer who tried to requisition a specific knife being made for somebody. I imagine that was soemwhat tolerated towards the end of the 8th Pass due to the fact that the Crafter and Lord Holder involved would have grown up under the threat of Thread; during the 9th Pass, people saw it as the jerk move it was (The Crafter in question actually offered to make a similar knife for the rider, but that was refused, even though it would have resulted in both gettign what they wanted ( the rider wanted the knife because of it's workmanship))
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** As has been said, Lessa was living in a world where the dragonriders had already gone forward. Also, at the time she would have had no way of knowing how the Oldtimers acted; they only became JerkAsses after they came forward and had to deal with tyhe changes that resulted from the Long Interval. ( witness the Oldtimer who tried to requisition a specific knife being made for somebody. I imagine that was soemwhat tolerated towards the end of the 8th Pass due to the fact that the Crafter and Lord Holder involved would have grown up under the threat of Thread; during the 9th Pass, people saw it as the jerk move it was (The Crafter in question actually offered to make a similar knife for the rider, but that was refused, even though it would have resulted in both gettign what they wanted ( the rider wanted the knife because of it's workmanship))
workmanship))
** Two of the most important things that the Oldtimers brought with them was their expertise in fighting Thread, and their Records. The latter is arguably more important, because if they'd been left behind, the Records could well have moldered and rendered illegible, like most of Benden Weyr's Records. That's the reason why F'lar went looking for Records in the abandoned Weyrs, he was hoping to gather all the information he could on Thread fighting (as well as solving the mystery of where the Weyrs went). If Fort ''et al'' had stayed behind, they likely would have fallen into complacency like Benden Weyr before F'lar too over, and the Dragonriders, along with Pern, would have been doomed.
** Two of the most important things that the Oldtimers brought with them was their expertise in fighting Thread, and their Records. The latter is arguably more important, because if they'd been left behind, the Records could well have moldered and rendered illegible, like most of Benden Weyr's Records. That's the reason why F'lar went looking for Records in the abandoned Weyrs, he was hoping to gather all the information he could on Thread fighting (as well as solving the mystery of where the Weyrs went). If Fort ''et al'' had stayed behind, they likely would have fallen into complacency like Benden Weyr before F'lar too over, and the Dragonriders, along with Pern, would have been doomed.
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*** Except that it's stated that dragons store waste in their tails and release it while ''between''. Which in and of itself makes no sense, since that means a whole lot of fertilizer is just vanishing forever.
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*** ''The Skies of Pern'' retcons Lessa's reaction yet again (she reminisces sympathetically about helping to "raise" Mirrim).
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*** ''The Skies of Pern'' retcons Lessa's reaction yet again (she reminisces sympathetically about helping to "raise" Mirrim).Mirrim).
**** People tend to remember things they want they want to, not the way they really happened. Lessa would probably rather think of herself in a kind, nurturing light regarding Mirrim.
**** People tend to remember things they want they want to, not the way they really happened. Lessa would probably rather think of herself in a kind, nurturing light regarding Mirrim.
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**** It's not hard to calculate out. Assuming a dragon has a comparable length:weight ratio to a terrestrial bird, a 20 meter green would weigh close to 50 tons (This isn't a perfectly reasonable calculation, but it is a decent point to start). Carbon in a living organic creature tends to run at about 20%. This would mean each green dragon (the vast majority) takes 10 tons of carbon out of the biosphere. Meanwhile, Earth's atmosphere contains about 720 gigatons of carbon, the soil 2000, and the oceans 38,400 gigantons more for a total of 40,900 gigatons. Assuming that the biosphere will be damaged by losing just 1% of it's carbon, and that the red star adds nothing via thread, that still 40,900,000,000 green dragons that have to die before the issue arises. It will take at least hundreds of thousands of years, possibly millions, before the issue raises it's head even at the 1% level. With less conservative estimates, it will take more time for the dragons to screw up their biosphere than Earth has seen since the last dinosaurs died.
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** Moreta was tired, too, and she wanted to go home. Plus, ''trying to help everyone get the flu vaccine so less people would get the disease'' (or at least, fewer fatal cases) tends to push things like resting to the back of your head. And Moreta probably thought that resting when hundreds of people needed her would be selfish, even with time-travel.
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** Moreta was tired, too, as well as perhaps not yet fully recovered from her own illness, and she wanted to go home. Plus, ''trying to help everyone get the flu vaccine so less people would get the disease'' (or at least, fewer fatal cases) tends to push things like resting to the back of your head. And Moreta probably thought that resting when hundreds of people needed her would be selfish, even with time-travel.
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* That big to-do about who gets to be Weyrleader in ''Dragonflight''. What, so the dragons wouldn't have a problem about father-daughter incest if R'gul weren't such a [[HarryPotter greenbowler]]?
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* That big to-do about who gets to be Weyrleader in ''Dragonflight''. What, so the dragons wouldn't have a problem about father-daughter incest if R'gul weren't such a [[HarryPotter [[Literature/HarryPotter greenbowler]]?
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*** The wishes of the riders and the Weyr do have influence on the mating flight, that was why R'gul was weyrleader in "Dragonflight" and not F'lar, the Weyr as a whole was couldn't accept him as Weyrleader, and therefore even though Mnementh was bigger and stronger he didn't catch the queen, conversely it seems pretty clear later in the book and in the later ones that if you cut off Mnenemth's wings, he would still somehow manage to fly Ramoth, because of the influence of their riders. So in this case I would guess that Mihall's desire had an influence, and that Torene's did as well she just didn't say anything out loud about it.
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** dragons were engineered, not evolved, so it's probably just that Kitty Pang made a minor mistake during the genetic manupulation. She herself said she was working under about the worst possible conditions and had time pressure ( as well as the fact that her training had only covered minor modifications of species, not basically making a whole new species) as well. Essentially, she was concentrating on getting dragons functional, not ideal.
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** dragons were engineered, not evolved, so it's probably just that Kitty Pang Kitti Ping made a minor mistake during the genetic manupulation. She herself said she was working under about the worst possible conditions and had time pressure ( as well as the fact that her training had only covered minor modifications of species, not basically making a whole new species) as well. Essentially, she was concentrating on getting dragons functional, not ideal.
*** I believe the excretion-from-tail aspect was described as belonging to the original dragonets before Kit Ping started fooling with them.
*** I believe the excretion-from-tail aspect was described as belonging to the original dragonets before Kit Ping started fooling with them.
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*** actually, No. in Chronicles of the First Fall, a mating flight was abnormally low due to it being the first one ( the female dragon had overeaten before the flight) and it produced few eggs, to the point that dragons would not have been able to sustain fighting Threadfall. The same dragon flying properly produced a much larger clutch. So it IS the length of time the flight lasts that is important. Best guess is that each egg is fertilised sequentially, not simultaneously.
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** dragons were engineered, not evolved, so it's probably just that Kitty Pang made a minor mistake during the genetic manupulation. She herself said she was working under about the worst possible conditions and had time pressure ( as well as the fact that her training had only covered minor modifications of species, not basically making a whole new species) as well. Essentially, she was concentrating on getting dragons functional, not ideal.
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** Kitty Pang actually included precautions against harmful mutations in the genetic code. a) they rarely hatch if there has been mutation b) they end up like Ruth. There have been mutations, though. Originally, there was a genetic limit to the size of dragons keeping them to the size of Oldtimer dragons. With Ramoth and Mnementh, mutation had removed that restriction, resulting in far lerger dragons.
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** As has been said, Lessa was living in a world where the dragonriders had already gone forward. Also, at the time she would have had no way of knowing how the Oldtimers acted; they only became JerkAsses after they came forward and had to deal with tyhe changes that resulted from the Long Interval. ( witness the Oldtimer who tried to requisition a specific knife being made for somebody. I imagine that was soemwhat tolerated towards the end of the 8th Pass due to the fact that the Crafter and Lord Holder involved would have grown up under the threat of Thread; during the 9th Pass, people saw it as the jerk move it was (The Crafter in question actually offered to make a similar knife for the rider, but that was refused, even though it would have resulted in both gettign what they wanted ( the rider wanted the knife because of it's workmanship))
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** Does WordOfGod state that getting lost ''Between'' is permanent? My personal {{Fanon}} has always been that if you screw up the jump imagery, you emerge from ''Between'' as a cloud of dust. Same for dragons committing suicide. The biomass is all still there, just spread out over a wide enough area that it's invisible to the eyes.
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** There's actually a scene in The White Dragon that gives us, very subtly, exactly the OP's point. So subtly that it went right over this troper's head when she was a teenager and finally, on the umpteenth reading last year, smacked her over the head with the realization that heterosexual dragonriders, at least in the era when men ride greens, are a serious minority. Basically, Jaxom briefly witnesses the preamble to a green mating flight, with a group of sweaty male riders milling excitedly around the male green rider, and it makes him really uncomfortable, and a few subtle things are said about how he... kind of hadn't thought about that part. After that he [[Wangst Wangsts]] a lot less about Ruth not being interested.
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** There's actually a scene in The White Dragon that gives us, very subtly, exactly the OP's point. So subtly that it went right over this troper's head when she was a teenager and finally, on the umpteenth reading last year, smacked her over the head with the realization that heterosexual dragonriders, at least in the era when men ride greens, are a serious minority. Basically, Jaxom briefly witnesses the preamble to a green mating flight, with a group of sweaty male riders milling excitedly around the male green rider, and it makes him really uncomfortable, and a few subtle things are said about how he... kind of hadn't thought about that part. After that he [[Wangst Wangsts]] a lot less doesn't {{Wangst}} so much about Ruth not being interested.
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** There's actually a scene in The White Dragon that gives us, very subtly, exactly the OP's point. So subtly that it went right over This Troper's head when she was a teenager and finally, on the umpteenth reading last year, smacked her over the head with the realization that given male green riders, straight-up heterosexuals are a serious dragonrider minority. Basically, Jaxom briefly witnesses the preamble to a green mating flight, with a group of sweaty male riders milling excitedly around the male green rider, and it makes him really uncomfortable, and a few subtle things are said about how he... kind of hadn't thought about that part. After that he Wangsts a lot less about Ruth not being interested.
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** There's actually a scene in The White Dragon that gives us, very subtly, exactly the OP's point. So subtly that it went right over This Troper's this troper's head when she was a teenager and finally, on the umpteenth reading last year, smacked her over the head with the realization that given male green riders, straight-up heterosexuals heterosexual dragonriders, at least in the era when men ride greens, are a serious dragonrider minority. Basically, Jaxom briefly witnesses the preamble to a green mating flight, with a group of sweaty male riders milling excitedly around the male green rider, and it makes him really uncomfortable, and a few subtle things are said about how he... kind of hadn't thought about that part. After that he Wangsts [[Wangst Wangsts]] a lot less about Ruth not being interested.
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* The sex/mating flight scene in ''The Skies of Pern'' bugs me. It's abundantly clear that Tai is ''afraid'' of the impending sexual encounter, and that her other mating flight experiences have been tantamount to ''rape''. F'lessan thinks this is absolutely terrible, but the most helpful response he can come up with is to urge her over and over to "choose" him (even though she's never though of him "that way" before and she's terrified) so that her experience with him will not be rape. (It's not even clear whether she does so, but it turns out afterward that everything's magically okay and she had a wonderful time.) Can't he give her her freedom, instead? Get out of range, lock himself in a room and slide the key to her under the door? He doesn't even consider how he might achieve this and so the scene is not believable as some kind of redemption. A bounded choice isn't a real choice.
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* Why does Jaxom constantly {{Wangst}} about Ruth's sterility/{{Asexuality}} in ''The White Dragon''? Wouldn't Ruth mating with a green (and consequently, Jaxom sleeping with the green's rider) put him in a bad position with the other, sexually conservative Lord Holders, never mind the fact that Jaxom is heterosexual? Surely ir would add fuel to the argument that Ruth belongs in a Weyr? To me, it always looked like Ruth saved him a major headache. It's not as if it's an issues of continuing Ruth's bloodline, since only the bronzes have any hope of siring baby dragons.
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* Why does Jaxom constantly {{Wangst}} about Ruth's sterility/{{Asexuality}} in ''The White Dragon''? Wouldn't Ruth mating with a green (and consequently, Jaxom sleeping with the green's rider) put him in a bad position with the other, sexually conservative Lord Holders, never mind the fact that Jaxom is heterosexual? Surely ir it would add fuel to the argument that Ruth belongs in a Weyr? To me, it always looked like Ruth saved him a major headache. It's not as if it's an issues of continuing Ruth's bloodline, since only the bronzes have any hope of siring baby dragons.
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** There's actually a scene in The White Dragon that gives us, very subtly, exactly the OP's point. So subtly that it went right over This Troper's head when she was a teenager and finally, on the umpteenth reading last year, smacked her over the head with the realization that given male green riders, straight-up heterosexuals are a serious dragonrider minority. Basically, Jaxom briefly witnesses the preamble to a green mating flight, with a group of sweaty male riders milling excitedly around the male green rider, and it makes him really uncomfortable, and a few subtle things are said about how he... kind of hadn't thought about that part. After that he Wangsts a lot less about Ruth not being interested.
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*** It's not about planetary mass, it's about ''biomass''. Which is much, much smaller, see below.
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*** It's not about planetary mass, it's about ''biomass''. Which is much, much smaller, see below. Even further than that, if the biology is anything like Earth's, the major limiting factor would be fixed (plant-available) nitrogen. I don't know how much of this there is, but it's small enough on Earth that our planet could not support our current population if someone hadn't [[http://www.radiolab.org/2012/jan/09/how-do-you-solve-problem-fritz-haber/ invented a process]] to chemically fix nitrogen sometime in the past 100 years. But as someone said above, no doubt drowned Thread and Thread ash return nitrogen & other elements of fertility to the soil and seas.
