History Headscratchers / DragonridersOfPern

** It was an expression of his determination to do everything he could to win the mating flight. His dragon used some kind of trick (doubling back somehow? I just remember there was a trick, his dragon turned up somewhere hers didn't expect him & caught her) and when he said the above quote, Torene realized he had planned this with his dragon because he wanted her so much. That doesn't mean it makes sense for him to talk like it was all up to him, but McCaffrey can be a little into the "dominant, pushy male = hot" thing, as demonstrated in many scenes.

* 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?

** While Half Circle ''is'' shown as more sexist than the Harper Hall, there were quite a few people in the Hall who very much gave a crap about Menolly. A journeyman condescendingly tells her she's "obviously" supposed to be with the other girls, who are students rather than apprentices. Dunca, the dorm mother for the female students, hates Menolly for several reasons; one of which is her talent being developed under Petiron. One of the music teachers flat out told her it was a waste of time to educate women to be Harpers. Benis, Lord Groghe's son, accuses her of theft and tries to take her money away at the fair. Et cetera, et cetera. Basically, the entirety of ''Dragonsinger'' '''was''' people arguing back and forth about whether Menolly should be a Harper.

* 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.
** He didn’t have much choice. He was the only rider in the area and his dragon was going to mate with her dragon no matter what. They were going to have sex no matter what. His mind was already overwhelmed with dragon mating urges and it was hard for him to think clearly – to consider, like you said, locking himself up – he had to fight to stay human. Maybe he simply didn’t think about it because in the Weyr "The dragon decides, the rider complies”. All he is doing is urging her to accept the inevitable and to try to find pleasure in it. She would have to face this problem anyway, because Zaranth would continue to rise. I also think that it was stated that if riders don’t have sex something bad may happen to their dragons. I agree that the scene in itself is not handled very well. Tai should be still traumatized and it should take much more time and effort to help her, but these are “Dragobriders of Pern” where a good sex tends to magically solve emotional problems.

* My question is why all the dragons aren't suffering from major physical and mental deformities from serious inbreeding. During the 400 turns after the Weyrs disappear, Benden Weyr is eventually reduced to a single queen. When a single queen breeds with a limited selection of bronzes(sometimes only one lik ramoth with mnementh), it greatly decreases the variability of the gene pool. So why aren't dragons suffering from some major genetic diseases?
** The simple answer would seem to be that Kitti Ping zapped such potential genetic landmines out of the dragons when she designed the original batch. And lacking the evolutionary pressures to induce mutations (and sports like Ruth usually dieing un-hatched), a limited gene pool wouldn't hurt the dragons much.

** And we also learn in Dragonblood that due to the way dragon DNA is structured it is much much harder for it to randomly mutate, which further helps keep the gene pool free of the normal side effects of inbreeding. Though the book does show one of the disadvantages in not having a more genetically diverse group, since one disease almost wiped out the entire dragon race until a way was found to alter the dragons genetics to make them immune.

** 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.

** [[WildMassGuess A longer flight results in the male having more time to fertilize a larger amount of eggs?]]
** It was said that it's the wole flight, not particulary fertilizing part, that should be long to get a good cluth. It was more along the lines "the futher and higher queen will rise."

** 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.

** 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

* 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 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.

** This Troper agrees with both comments above this one. Not to mention, Ruth's asexuality was MEANT to underline his difference from the other dragons. Makes sense considering that he's a mix of all colors... which means of both genders. Jaxom's insecurities, of course, only leads even more to point just how much of a Gary-Sue he actually is in the books.
** It could be because Jaxom was fed up with being different. He's one of the last Ruathans left, the son of Fax, who is always being stared at and isolated. He went against tradition and Impressed a unique dragon who everyone thought would die, and whom people thought might not be a proper dragon. And then he ends up with the tiny Ruth, who's pretty much asexual. It's hammering in the point that Jaxom's pretty much a freak among Holders and riders alike.

** If I remember the book correctly, It was less about mating specifically, and more about how Jaxom felt he wasn't truly a Rider or a Lord Holder (Jaxom's position as Lord Holder was insecure, since the other Lord Holders weren't keen on having a Rider as Lord Holder. Jaxom was excluded from almost all the Weyer did as well, so he felt disconnected from the Riders too. Jaxom wanted Ruth to rise as proof Ruth could do anything the larger dragons could. Which also explains why Jaxom largely stopped once he remembered almost all Green Riders were male (Remember the only Green Rider Jaxom really knows is Mirrim.)

** 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 getting what they wanted--the rider wanted the knife because of its 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.

** But sooner or later, all that built up loss of energy is going to take its toll right? This Troper believes that it's because of Thread. All that ash and dead Thread that escaped from the Red Star into Pern probably helped to balance out the energy toll in some way or another... This might explain why the Red Star is so barren, come to think of it.

** 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.
** In Dragondrums, Piemur notices that huge schools of fish come to surface after Threadfall to eat drowned Thread. I wouldn't be surprised if the ashes from burning it made really good ''plant'' food, so it probably ''does'' makes up really well for the dragons going ''between'' to die.

** On the other hand, as Mike pointed out in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", there is a world of difference (pun intended) between the mass of a planet and the portion of that mass that is involved in the life cycle. It's not just the dragons themselves - according to the Dragonlover's Guide, they also excrete wastes ''between'', and 3000 dragons at a time for 2500 years adds up to a big pile of...well, you know what I mean.

** 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.

** Yes, it is consistent, but it still doesn't make ''sense.'' (Robinton, I grant you, but implications were thatit was "his time to die" and even time travel wouldn't put the brakes on it). To quote [[http://www.cracked.com/article_16625_8-classic-movies-that-got-away-with-gaping-plot-holes.html Cracked.com's comments on Harry Potter]], " "We've made it to the past! Now we've only got a few minutes to go back and stop the dementors!" No you don't, you have as much time as you need. It's f* cking time travel. If you mess up, just go back and try again." Ramoth did go back in time to save them, but she picked the most useless point she could do so. Why didn't she pick a better point to intervene? She could have killed the felines ''years'' in advance! It's not like dragonriders don't use time-travel to "cheat" - Ruth and Jaxom in particular time-skip for really trivial reasons, and I can't read ''Dragonheart'' without getting a nosebleed at all the hopping around in time. So why is it when it could actually be of some practical, non-convoluted use it's suddenly taboo? Sorry, this is a bugbear of mine - StableTimeLoop or not, it still looks like a plot hole to me.

*** As far as Lemos and Nabol Holds go, Bart Lemos and Nabhi Nabol managed to somewhat salvage their reputations when they agreed to attempt a flight to the Oort Cloud to gather Thread spores. Granted, they did it in order to secure the rights to what would later become Ista, but as they both died in the attempt, the Holds were likely named in honor of that final sacrifice. As to Bitra Hold, this is what ''The Dragonlover's Guide To Pern'' has to say on the matter.
-->"[Avril Bitra] is believed to have been heroically martyred for the sake of the colonists of Pern when she single-handedly piloted a small ship with faulty controls head-on into the wandering planet, the colonists' name for the Red Star. The original founders of Bitra left Benden Hold because of disagreements they had over Bitra's role in the foundation of Pern. Their view was that Admiral Benden and Governor Boll stood by to let Pern fall to the terrible menace while only Bitra and her colleagues tried to save it. Bitra was called the champion of the lost cause, who was failed not by her skills but by a sabotaged starship. In the end, despite the opposition, the Hold was named as a memorial to Avril Bitra."

*** IIRC, the 'good maternal instincts' at the firelizard level mostly meant that the golden mothers were willing to protect the nest until the eggs hatched and the babies impressed, whereas the greens would lay eggs and forget they existed. In both the lizards and the dragons, once they're Impressed, they appear to be treated like any other member of the group. Ramoth does care about people messing with her eggs!

*** On that same note, it's always been said that the dragon chooses and the rider complies, so... It's possible, I do believe, that that might happen... But let's not get too much into that. It gets a bit disturbing really. But then again, if you think about it, family ties exist mostly within humans only, in cases of animals, it's a matter of who is the most suited for breeding the next generation of little ones and if dragons have that sort of mindset... well...
**** Wrong, familial ties are actually quite common amongst the animal kingdom. It's just that dragons have pretty little of this in them.
*** Basically, yes, and that's actually what throws many Holders (but not always Crafters, where the mores are more relaxed) off -- roughly speaking, many holders think of Weyrs as of brothels where everyone sleeps with everyone regardless, and this was actually mentioned several times in the books. And that's the reason why most Weyr children are fostered or adopted, instead of being raised by their own parents, in addition to the "easier to cope when your father is killed by the Thread" reason. It ValuesDissonance in full swing, plain and simple.

*** Not saying you're wrong, but this must have been a very late addition to the lore, as it bears little resemblance to the world shown in earlier books (and I haven't read the last few / Todd's). The idea of a dragonrider marrying at all sounds baffling, and a weyr-dragon marrying a non-dragonrider sounds like a world-shattering scandal, not something so frequent that one could say how it's 'often' handled! (Disregarding Jaxom, who wasn't exactly a weyr member and whose dragon was outside standard dragon sexuality.)
*** I don't know about the "spouses" part of it, but I believe it's mentioned somewhere in the first three books that substitutes can be utilised.
**** Stated outright in ''Dragonseye'' (''Red Star Rising'' in the UK), in the context of female greenriders wondering what to do when/if their dragon rose to mate, given that blueriders generally "didn't like girls".

*** StableTimeLoop or not, I think there's also the reason for Anne simply wanting to make that a plot point. As to that point, it could be that Ramoth wasn't able to pinpoint that set of time. It is said that Ruth had an uncanny ability to time very accurately, but that's not an ability that is shared by all dragons. In most cases of timing, it is hinted that the dragon has to be aware of exactly what the area is like at that time. After all, it was shown that Ramoth had jumped too far into the future when she went back to retrieve the dragons from the past. So as far as destroying the felines 'years' in advance... not so simple.
*** If Ramoth corrected the problem in advance, the cats would never threaten F'lessan & co. Ergo, how would she randomly in the future have the sudden urge to hare off after some pride of cats in the middle of the Southern continent? That's the point of the StableTimeLoop - there really is only so small a margin in time between when Ramoth knows there's a problem - and nothing that leads to her knowing there's a problem can be changed, so everything before is cast in stone - and the time where it's too late to do anything.

*** This is true. Which is why they tried to implant the rule that no rider should rider another's dragon. Not that that worked out... Lessa had it done none the less. Thankfully, nothing actually happened.

*** The DoubleStandard comes in when you realize that pretty much every male Dragonrider with a green dragon was homosexual (or at least bisexual)... and they don't seem to mind this, but they mind their daughters being in same-sex relationships.
**** Except their daughters would never be in SAME-sex relationships. Females can't Impress male dragons. (There don't seem to be lesbians on Anne's Pern, despite fans writing homosexual female blue riders.) The objection is just to their "sleeping around" (and at least early on when there was still land to go around, losing a marriage bartering chip and someone to produce children to claim more land.)
***** First two statements above were both {{Jossed}} (or AscendedFanon, depending on your POV) by ''Dragongirl'', where a woman Impresses a Blue. Perhaps it's "''Straight'' women can't impress male dragons?"
**** Well, I think it has more to do with the fact that women can get pregnant. Men can't. So yeah, not quite the double standards, but perhaps a more simple reason of not wanting to have so many kids running around Pern. Of course, this makes even more sense when one remembers just how frequently a Green rises.
**** Actually, since going between ends a pregnancy, except within the first month, having female green riders would not increase the population. Green dragons are fighting dragons, and fighting thread involves a lot of going between. That was one of Mirrim's problems later on, she wanted a baby, but kept miscarrying, because she couldn't tell she was pregnant in time to stop going between, and save the baby.
**** Given that line of logic, doesn't that mean that Lord Holders should have been neutered once they hit thirty? Seems that powerful men taking advantage of Pernese ''Droit de seigneur'' were responsible for more offspring than they could reasonably keep track of. A single Lord was probably responsible for more population growth than you could possibly blame on a green dragon. ''They'' didn't seem too worried about overpopulation (at least until the plague hit, a la ''Moreta''.)
***** Remember that there's no majorate or salic law in Pern, and Lord Holder's heirs aren't always their eldest sons -- in fact, they are ''elected'' (by the other Lord Holders and usually from the incumbent's bloodline, but still elected), so most Lord Holders like to "throw their seed wide", to ensure that at least one of their offspring would be acceptable to their colleagues to keep the post in the family.
**** If anything, the situation on Pern is usually the exact opposite of "trying to keep them from breeding too much" - the population was tiny to start with and supposed to be fruitful and multiply, and then kept having disasters dumped on them. LOTS of kids is repeatedly held up as a virtue. Putting a woman on a fighting green means either that she can't have babies, due to all the betweening, or she's out of action, depriving the wing of a fighter. It's clearly stated in one of the stories set during the rise of the first weyrs that they thought it was a good idea to encourage gay men to become green riders so that the greens would stop taking maternity leave.

*** This Troper agrees. Mirrim had never been the easiest character to get along with. It's pointed out by some of the other characters at times.
*** Hatchings are really joyful and overwhelming even for the non-riding spectators, so Lessa and F'lar were probably too caught up in the moment to think about anything else until the Hatching was over.
*** ''The Skies of Pern'' retcons Lessa's reaction yet again (she reminisces sympathetically about helping to "raise" Mirrim).
**** People tend to remember things the way they want to, not the way they really happened. Lessa would probably rather think of herself in a kind, nurturing light regarding Mirrim.
*** This Troper also agrees. Mirrim isn't the easiest person to get along with. Painful at times really. Lessa was probably really just more annoyed at the rider herself than the fact she impressed.

*** But sooner or later, all that built up loss of energy is going to take its toll right? This Troper believes that it's because of Thread. All that ash and dead Thread that escaped from the Red Star into Pern probably helped to balance out the energy toll in some way or another... This might explain why the Red Star is so barren, come to think of it.
*** Sooner or later? Dragons have only ''existed'' for a few thousand years! There hasn't been ''time'' for their suicides to take away any significant amount of Pern's biomass.
**** 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.

*** 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.

*** 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.

*** My guess is that Ruth's asexuality only underlined how OMG DIFFERENT he was from the other dragons, and Jaxom was just finding excuses for angst.
*** Or Jaxom was just being a teenage male, and projecting his own insecurity about not being macho onto Ruth's nonexistent libido.
*** This Troper agrees with both comments above this one. Not to mention, Ruth's asexuality was MEANT to underline his difference from the other dragons. Makes sense considering that he's a mix of all colors... which means of both genders. Jaxom's insecurities, of course, only leads even more to point just how much of a Gary-Sue he actually is in the books.

*** This Troper isn't sure about the apprentice part but is certain that blue clothes are a sign of being an official harper. Which is why, in the books, they've called it Harper Blue.

* It's been a while since this troper read the book, so I might have a few things wrong, but in ''Chronicles of Pern: First Fall'', one of the stories is about Torene and her queen Alaranth. Basically, Torene clashes with a guy called Mihall, who has a bronze (can't remember what the bronze was called) and when Alaranth rises to mate, Mihall's bronze flies her. When Mihall and Torene are having sex, Mihall says something like 'There's no way I was going to let anyone else have you'. I get that maybe he was that strongly in love with her, but doesn't ''Torene'' get any say in who she ends up with?

*** As is made quite clear in "Moreta". While she respects Orlith's preferred bronze's rider for his skill at leading in Threadfall, she doesn't have much affection for him as a person, and they maintain separate quarters and a business relationship outside of mating flights.

*** 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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* I can't believe no one has mentioned the biggest glaring wtf in the series- Lessa bringing the Oldtimers forward. Didn't anybody stop and think that if she hadn't gone back and gotten them, then the weyrs would still be populated by Lessa's time, and there would be six working weyrs without any time-travel necessary? That's aside from the fact that the Holders used the missing weyrs as evidence that the dragonriders weren't needed anymore, so if the population of those weyrs had never vanished, the holders would have had far less ground for their no-more-thread arguments.

*** It had to happen because it already happened? Uh, no. That would make any time-travel into the past justified unless it causes a complete paradox. Especially considering that in this case, doing so made things ''worse'' in the interim, and caused future problems because of Oldtimer vs. modern attitudes. That's aside from the genetic issues of the entire dragon species being so severely inbred over centuries. No, it sounds more like [[TimeTravel time-travel]] as [[AppliedPhlebotinum Applied Phlebotinum]].
**** This is more an issue with the weird causality issues of the universe than with Lessa, though--she went back to get them not because it seemed like a good idea at the time but because the Weyrs already weren't ''there'', and they needed them desperately. Maybe if she had just decided to stay put, the timestream would have suddenly changed around her, but would you count on that if you were in her place? (Also, while going back to get the Oldtimers created trouble down the line, it also meant that Pern was suddenly supplied with five full-strength, ''experienced'' Weyrs. That's not a bad thing, and it probably saved lives in the short term.)
**** Along with being experienced, it's mentioned in the second book that the Oldtimers taught the modern Benden Dragonriders quite a lot about dealing with Threads. And on top of THAT, you have to look at Benden Wyr in particular -- it was woefully understaffed, had only 150 or so Dragons (as opposed to the nearly 400 or 500 in the second book, seven years after the Oldtimers came forward), and you have to wonder if they really would be better off. Six weak Wyrs, all with a small number of dragons, without any Thread-fighting experience, weighed against having five experienced and strong Wyrs (1800 dragons!) available right in the nick of time.
**** There's a sociological issue involved as well: during the previous Intervals, the dragonriders grew decadent and complacent, and lorded their position over the Holders. Having that many more idle riders around is just going to burden the population even more and create still more resentment toward supporting the Weyrs (F'lar had a hard enough time getting them to cooperate as it was).
**** (continued from above) The bigger issue, however, is one that plagues all time travel. Where does a time loop like that start? In Terminator, we see it start with the need to protect Sarah Connor, and unwittingly (or not) creates John Connor in the process. It's a stable time loop (in the first movie), but it also has a very clear beginning, a reason for starting the loop that doesn't boil down to "because it happened". The only justification Lessa had for going back to the past was a hunch that she already did. This, of course, brings up all the ridiculous time-travel related questions: why did she only bring them forward in time in the nick of time, rather than some time before the Threadfall even started (except for the series' answer "because")? Why didn't they exploit it more often? It's TIME TRAVEL. If someone had thought to travel back and stop the fight between Wirenth and Prideth, would that have made a time loop where those two didn't die "just because", or was it impossible because it already happened? It Just Bugs Me that time travel isn't really given the consideration it requires in this series.
***** It only makes sense if once something is changed only the changed version is remembered (and written). This makes it seem like you can't change the past. If someone thought to use time travel to get reinforcements from the past for a bunch of Wyrs on decline after a long pass, then the timeline would adjust so they were always gone, which is just what happened. When AIVAS was not fooled, used time travel to kill thread off forever regardless of the consequences, the Oort Cloud creatures countered with the plague of Moreta's time. It is either ingenious or McCaffery never bothered to make it ontologically consistent, just stable.
***** The whole point of the stable time loop concept is that you can't change the past because the ''present'', including everything you remember about the past, has 'already' been determined by the outcome of every time jaunt backwards to a point before 'now' that's ever happened and that's ever ''going'' to happen. And since this is true for ''every'' 'now' you'd care to pick from the timeline, the future is just as set in stone as the past; if you're predestined to travel back in time to do X (because you did in fact arrive and do X in the past), you will, and if you're not, then you won't. Free will? Doesn't exist here, though nobody may be aware of that (because they never were predestined to realize it, of course).
***** Alternatively, time loops exist because the act of traveling back in time in anything BUT a stable time loop erases the timeline that existed beforehand. So someone goes back in time, and changes things, and everything progresses from that point forwards, but the original timeline now no longer exists, so despite the fact that they succeeded, nobody knows. This handily explains the whole "Travel back in time to fetch the old weyrs" problem, as well; in the original timeline, all of them stayed and slowly declined over the 400 year wait, eventually leading to having many weakened weyrs that could not defend the planet successfully. They discover time travel, and go back in time to bring the old weyrs forward to their own time in desperation, which they succeed at doing, leading to the disappearance of the dragons. This changes the timeline to the current one, where they disappeared, leading to a stronger Pern come 400 years later, at which point they go back to a slightly earlier point, take the dragons before the alternate timeline can, and return to their own time. Therefore the appearance of a stable time loop is maintained, but the facts are fundamentally altered. That's the real problem with time travel; you have no way of knowing if you have actually succeeded since you'll be wiping out your own timeline in the process of success.
* 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.

*** Touche. I probably should have thought of that, being a biology major... ([[MostWritersAreHuman Most Writers Are Chordates]]?) Still seems like it would be a liability during Thread time, but then again, the dragonets could teleport so there wouldn't have been much pressure ''not'' to keep their tails the way they were.

*** I believe the excretion-from-tail aspect was described as belonging to the original dragonets before Kit Ping started fooling with them.
**** 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

*** She'd pretty much have to have done so, since the initial batch was so small.

*** 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.

*** Yeah, that is the most logical explanation. As you noted, though, it wasn't really well played for the "redemption" outcome. I haven't heard about bad effects for the dragons if the riders don't have sex... is that a Todd thing?

*** While Half Circle ''is'' shown as more sexist than the Harper Hall, there were quite a few people in the Hall who very much gave a crap about Menolly. A journeyman condescendingly tells her she's "obviously" supposed to be with the other girls, who are students rather than apprentices. Dunca, the dorm mother for the female students, hates Menolly for several reasons; one of which is her talent being developed under Petiron. One of the music teachers flat out told her it was a waste of time to educate women to be Harpers. Benis, Lord Groghe's son, accuses her of theft and tries to take her money away at the fair. Et cetera, et cetera. Basically, the entirety of ''Dragonsinger'' '''was''' people arguing back and forth about whether Menolly should be a Harper.

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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.

*** Some fanfic works with the theory that Bitra Hold was named during a time of political dissension in general, not just over Avril's actions, and naming the hold 'Bitra' was a thumb-in-the-eye to the establishment. Play up someone the mainstream considers to be a villain as a misunderstood hero in leather pants and some people will flock to your cause while others shun you.

* There's a major continuity error in Dragon's Fire. Early on, Pellar throws a fit when Kindan comes to Master Zist; Master Zist comments that it's quite normal for a master to have more than one apprentice, though usually the senior apprentice is just moved up to journeyman when a new apprentice comes in. Stops and thinks a minute, then says essentially "Ok, you're now my Journeyman, though you still need to take some classes." Much later, after Pellar's been with the other watch-wher keeper, a rider comes to collect him - and gives him a suit of blue clothes, proper Harper _apprentice_ clothes. And Pellar is delighted at this. Huh?

** 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.

**** 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.

** My God, [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale Sci-Fi fans really have no sense of scale]]. Do you understand how ''tiny'' a portion of a planetary mass makes one dragon? You can bleed ''billions'' of dragons per hour, and it will still take milennia for it to be noticeable. The whole time dragons existed on Pern? Around 2500 years, so the lost mass is really negligible.

** On the other hand, as Mike pointed out in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", there is a world of difference (pun intended) between the mass of a planet and the portion of that mass that is involved in the life cycle. It's not just the dragons themselves - according to the Dragonlover's Guide, they also excrete wastes between, and 3000 dragons at a time for 2500 years adds up to a big pile of...well, you know what I mean.

** 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.

** 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))

*** This is true. Which is why the tried to implant the rule that no rider should rider another's dragon. Not that that worked out... Lessa had it done none the less. Thankfully, nothing actually happened.

** Perhaps it's because there was a decrease in the amount of female partners being chosen by greens and as of such, the searchriders didn't search for them any longer. As for a queen candidate being picked by a green, there are different characteristics that each dragon looks for, and seeing as how they are queen candidates, it's highly likely that they aren't suited to being greenriders in the first place.

** The relationships between the dragons themselves always threw me off. The justification for making the golden dragons "breeders" instead of "fighters" was that they had good maternal instincts. But when Prideth and Wirenth are killed, Ramoth makes no acknowledgement of the fact that they were her ''daughters'' - and Prideth, the less-mourned queen, was her very first gold. She notes that Amaranth (in ''All the Weyrs of Pern'') is "a true daughter" to her, but never refers to other dragons as her children. They just don't seem to have a sense of family among themselves. Furthermore, even though Aramina says that dragons talk to each other, their real affection seems reserved for their riders. Well, until ''Skies of Pern'' anyway, where all the dragons suddenly becomes very chatty, and the Todd Mc Caffrey books where the dragons apparently talk to anyone and everyone. So does a dragon have a sense of identity as a dragon, along with any acknowledgement of familial ties, or are they so attuned to their riders that that's all that matters (with the exception of weyrmates)? The latter would make sense, since many weyrmated dragons would appear to be brother and sister...

* Why the hell is there a hold named ''Bitra''? As thoroughly noted in ''Dragonsdawn'', Avril Bitra was a consummate bitch, and spent her scant time on Pern mining gemstones so she could escape the planet and live in luxury rather than having kids and founding a hold--and proceeded to die a presumably messy death in space. I could believe that the hold was named in honor of her, except for the fact that, you know, the ''bitch'' part. The characters that knew her all hated her guts, and even the men she was cooperating with didn't seem to have any love lost for her. How did a hold bearing her name ever come to be at all, let alone one of the big famous ones? (Lemos and Nabol bug me as well, since you know, the men with those names ''also'' died in their primes and weren't exactly saints, but I could concieve of them at least having relations in the interim).

* Why the hell is there a hold named ''Bitra''? As thoroughly noted in ''Dragonsdawn'', Avril Bitra was a consummate bitch, and spent her scant time on Pern mining gemstones so she could escape the planet and live in luxury rather than having kids and founding a hold- and proceeded to die a presumably messy death in space. I could believe that the hold was named in honor of her, except for the fact that, you know, the ''bitch'' part. The characters that knew her all hated her guts, and even the men she was cooperating with didn't seem to have any love lost for her. How did a hold bearing her name ever come to be at all, let alone one of the big famous ones? (Lemos and Nabol bug me as well, since you know, the men with those names ''also'' died in their primes and weren't exactly saints, but I could concieve of them at least having relations in the interim).

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