love ur mom and rp with problematic ppl, or get rekt

[ohhhlordy]

Normally I don't post things here and prefer to spectate, but this little event is definitely worth of a BRPS post. Like many of the posts here, it concerns the Pern/DRoP fandom; big, sapient dragons who bond to humans and fight a biological terror that threatens their home, so on and so forth. The post itself concerns several former friends whom I

Comments

[blot]

Ah Pern. I love it? Like. I love it so much. nd have been considering trying to find a lil place to hunker down. Have like, one character and just RP that one character, so I can get my pern-love dealt with while not over exerting myself. But things like this make me hold back some? Which sucks. I mean, Metagaming isn't a unique thing. Neither is people getting upset about headcanons. But Pern-sites don't seem to handle it well, and I don't get why.

[ohhhlordy]

Yea, I love the -concept- of Pern but the people and the general tomfoolery that happens in the fandom? Yeeeeah, not so much. Metagaming isn't the end of the world but it's awfully bad rp etiquette, but... the rest? Classic Pern Fandom Awful.

[blot]

I love pern so much?? And like this whole Mother/Daughter distrust could be SO cool??? It has so much awesome potential???

[iczer6]

Is Mother/Daughter distrust a *thing* in Pern? Everything I know about Pern I learned from badrperssuck.

[blot]

I mean, I can't imagine a reason not for it to be? Queens are important... But well. I imagine there are some bad eggs? Uh, no pun intended. But then again, I am the like Lord Of Bad Parental Relationships.

[sockunderasock]

Depends on the mother and daughter? Usually, dragons aren't very close with their parents. Their rider and weyrlingmasters fulfill more of the parental role. Plus dragonets are decently precocial given their size and complexity - not superprecocial, but they have good mobility and thermoregulation right off the bat - so the parental role isn't usually emphasized. A competitive hatchling and a competitive parent are likely to eventually bump heads rather than love each other unconditionally.

tl;dr There is definitely no reason it can't be a thing.

[magedragonfire]

It doesn't come up at all in the books, that I can recall. Or at least in the older books.

[sockunderasock]

I don't think its ever a focus and the chromatics are never really mentioned, because they're never really mentioned in the older books - but didn't at least a couple of gold mother-daughter pairs have pretty dysfunctional relationships? Issues with viewing each other as competition and aggression and stuff? Not exactly the same - the dragons don't have the same levels of personality in the books as they do in most RPs - but similar enough to suggest a basis for the dynamic.

[magedragonfire]

Hmm. Well, we start off with Nemorth being dead before Ramoth hatches, so there's nothing to go on there. I don't recall Ramoth saying anything major about either Wirenth or Prideth - and if there was any negativity to Prideth, that may have been influenced by Lessa's opinion of Kylara more than anything. I don't remember if Faranth and Alaranth had any particular reaction towards one another, either.

To be honest, I don't think there was a lot of interactions between related dragons, ever. Buuuut my memory is admittedly spotty, so I wouldn't count it out that you're correct that a couple didn't get along!

I'm not sure if it's worth calling any negative dynamics that came up 'dysfunctional', precisely, either - they're not on the same level of intelligence as humans in the books. With regards to mating, they're much more animalistic than anything. I wouldn't be surprised if this carries over to maternity in the canon universe, with distant dis/interest at best and competitiveness for resources/mating aggression occuring at most.

[alondra_del_sol]

I would say that the human relationships are the dysfunctional ones and the dragons get caught up that. The jealousy/animosity between Brekke/Kylara. Lessa's distaste for Kylara, etc.

[dragonyinpink]

Day late and a dollar short here, but relationships with dragons in Pern canon are seldom very nuanced. They're typically written with a childish level of intelligence and sometimes are little more than fancy horses to fly the plot around. To be quite honest, the canon has aged poorly and McCaffrey was very imaginative but never known for solid relationship writing of any kind.

It's common in the fandom to give dragons more detailed personalities and motives, but there are multiple schools of thought on how to do that "right".

There's also the somewhat related and troubling fact that dragon incest isn't considered a problem, which is downright uncomfortable. McCaffrey had some kind of excuse about how pernese dragons are all so closely related anyway due to how they were created, but 1) yikes and 2) I've seen it handled as dragons having no particular understanding of their own family ties. People reconcile that with more-intelligent-and-interesting fandom dragons differently.

Basically, Pern is wild.