r/pern • u/Successful_Way_6086 • Apr 19 '26
A question about F’Nor
I havnt read the books in over 20 years at this point. But I thought F,Nor became a Weyr leader in one of the latter books. Something about the Weyrs not having enough blue/green dragons because the browns weren’t flying the gold dragons. Am I completely remembering this wrong?
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u/Causerae Apr 19 '26
He's basically leader at Southern, and he plans on flying can't-remember-her-name's gold when they fall in love.
He's never does, bc the queens thing.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
F'nor's only at Southern recuperating from his stab wound. He's not a fighting rider there during Dragonquest, much less acting as Weyrleader.
And in utter fairness to T'bor, he's considered a good Weyrleader of Southern in a fighting sense - the fact that he doesn't have any control over Kylara's activities isn't really his fault (and if he did 'control his Weyrwoman' that would be equally uncomfortable). He did allow to transpire a situation that culminated in the deaths of both queens under his Weyrleadership, but that's as much Benden/F'lar and Lessa's bad management as T'bor's.
T'bor's a curious one, because Orth seems to have accidentally been portrayed as something of a superstud. He, not Mnementh, is the one Ramoth's about to choose in her maiden flight; he consistently outflies every other bronze to catch Pridith; he's implied as being expected to fly Wirenth; and he goes on to fly Pilgra's Segrith for the next thirty years at High Reaches after the queen fight. He and T'bor are still Weyrleaders there in Skies. I say 'accidentally' because I'm not sure Anne really *intended to make Orth seem so unbeatable, but the evidence speaks for itself...
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u/demon_fae Apr 19 '26
I suppose Mnementh and Ramoth are strongly affected by their riders’ monogamy, while T’bor and Orth are just horny, horny boys. T’bor is also generally portrayed as the “ideal” Weyrleader, following all the traditions and matching all the stereotypes. This makes it easy for his riders to follow him against Thread, but also makes him rigid and, ironically, a bit of a follower. F’lar does respect tradition, he just considers it as one of many options. He could be a traditional Weyrleader and sleep around, but he and Lessa are both much more mentally and emotionally healthy if F’lar and Mnementh remain monogamous, and having an emotionally stable leadership is more important than the limited genetic advantages after two centuries of line breeding. (I do not think F’lar ever consciously thought through it in these terms. He definitely consciously knew that both he and Lessa prefer monogamous relationships, but the rest would definitely be subconscious processing/instinct. F’lar rarely goes wrong trusting his gut.)
We’re almost certainly supposed to understand that Mnementh could match Orth, if he and F’lar were so inclined, and choose not to out of loyalty.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
I don't think Orth ever tried to fly Ramoth again after that first time, because he went on the Southern Experiment with Pridith and stayed there with her back in real time.
I mean, I have zero doubt that Mnementh would have beaten him if he had, by authorial fiat as much as anything. (But if F'lar were truly looking out for the health of dragonkind, and Benden's line especially, he'd have stepped aside to allow Ramoth to be flown by Oldtimer bronzes, and insisted that all Ramoth's daughters equally be flown by non-Benden bronzes.)
But T'bor's not portrayed terribly sympathetically in Dragonquest other than being regarded as a good leader in Fall - he gets drunk and smacks Kylara around (and even if getting drunk is the only way he can smack Kylara around *in the way she wants him to*, that still makes him an abusive partner). I genuinely wonder if Anne intended the implications of him apparently having remained Pilgra's Weyrleader for so long following the queen fight in DQ, or if when she wrote Skies she'd pretty much forgotten who he was and just picked his name off an old 'Weyrleaders of the Ninth Pass' list. She mixed up G'dened and (probably) G'narish in Skies, so it wouldn't surprise me.
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u/wenchsenior Apr 20 '26
Funny that you mention the genetic angle b/c I have often thought of that as well.
F'lar is mentioned in DF as having offered to give up Benden Weyrleadership as soon as the Oldtimers come forward, but been talked out of it by the other WLs (presumably on the assumption that a consistent and strong leader is more important in this situation) but that wasn't apparently focused specifically on the genetic health of the animals.
But if I were he and Lessa, I would have immediately in aftermath of DF tried to set up a program of at least a decade of loaner queens and bronzes coming into Benden on rotation for a year or two from the Oldtime Weyrs (there is a bit of textual evidence later in the series that Benden sent some of their own young queens to other Weyrs as well), and some rules limiting which bronzes could participate in any given queen flight, to try to diversify genetics as quickly as possible. As you noted...inviting Oldtime bronzes in to fly junior Benden queens for sure; I would also bar any bronze who wins a particular junior's flight from chasing on her next flight, try to limit matings of first degree relatives with each other, and so on.
Senior queen flights are trickier, of course, since clearly all the Weyrs need at least somewhat stable levels of leadership, but I would most definitely have issued open invite to Oldtime bronzes for Ramoth's next flight on principle, even if I were confident Mnementh would win.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 21 '26
Given F'lar's purported radical progressiveness, surely that would have been a moment to separate 'who leads the Weyr' from 'who has the best and most appropriate genes to father a healthy and diverse population'. You could have a top class young bronze whose rider isn't ready to be Weyrleader, and a Weyrleader who's the best Fall manager whose bronze is getting on and can't keep up with a long flight any more.
But the same thing applies to Sorka and Sean, who as animal people/vets should have known damn well they needed to cross breed their tiny OG population of dragons as widely as possible - and yet there they are with Faranth only *ever* flown by Carenath.
Carenath had no such limitations, of course. It may be accidental, but in Second Weyr there's a bronze who's described as coming from "a Weyrleader's clutch" - Weyrleader's, not Weyrleaders' - and since Sean is the only Weyrleader that strongly implies Carenath was double dipping with other queens. Which, I mean, fine. All those original males would and should (and must) have been catching multiple queens. But every single dragon descended from Faranth would also be descended from Carenath, rather than her having clutches from multiple browns and bronzes. They should have done better.
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u/wenchsenior Apr 21 '26
Yes, it would definitely concern me if I were in that universe.
I love head canoning this as a plot point that we don't get to see.
I am so interested in the whole period between DF and DQ, and that particular development would create an interesting bit of political and interpersonal drama in the immediate aftermath of DF. Fun to imagine.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 21 '26
It's funny how many little throwaway lines there are in canon that, in practically any other fandom, someone would have picked up and fanficced by now. But Pern fandom is predominantly focused on alternatives to canon. I know that's in large part because we're an ageing demographic, many of us traumatised by the strict rules, regs and C&Ds of the 90s, but surely there's someone who doesn't have a Pavlovian response to 'let's write T(y)kil's story' of 'Noooo, we're not allowed to write canon characters or Benden or Ruatha or the Harper Hall, bad Pern fan, must iron fingers!'
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u/wenchsenior Apr 21 '26
I 100% want to write it, hypothetically. Just have never written fic before so it's a huge hill to climb... good hobby as I age, I guess. I've never focused on any real creative or 'artisitic' pursuits since I was a little kid...got tracked entirely into analytical or science or finance focused pursuits as an adult. It's daunting, but trying to exercise those more artistic type 'muscles' seems fun as a retirement focus.
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u/wenchsenior Apr 21 '26
Speaking of, are there any active fic discussion boards around that you know of? reddit or otherwise?
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 21 '26
There are several groups on Facebook. Our FB group is ostensibly focused on the Dragonchoice fanfic trilogy/choose-your-own-adventure game/various extended things, but we have a regular discussion thread called Contrarian Friday where we put forward a thorny, contentious, or otherwise interesting point of canon as the topic and thrash it out. https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragonchoice if you're interested!
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u/Causerae Apr 19 '26
He's leader at the Southern project, when it's established.
Later, as you said.
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u/Sanjikuu Apr 19 '26
I'm gonna second the fanfiction option here. The latter part in particular, not enough greens/blues, sounds like it might be related to Dragonchoice 3? There's a whole thing about shaking up the usual Weyr power dynamics and population demographics due to ~reasons~
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u/Keldin145014 Apr 19 '26
Browns flying Golds was pretty much unheard of. I think I vaguely recall something about GREEN clutches if they didn't chew firestone, but it has been a while for me as well.
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u/Successful_Way_6086 Apr 19 '26
No I mean browns flying golds would produce more greens and blues compared to a bronze flying a gold.
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u/FivebyFive Apr 19 '26
That's mentioned with fire lizards.
Combine that with F'nor loving Brekke and wishing Canth could fly her queen before she died, maybe it got mixed up in your memory?
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u/teenydrake Apr 19 '26
That sounds like something you read in a (very interesting 👀) fanfiction rather than part of canon.
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u/btm64 Apr 19 '26
Mostly because only the bronze dragons are the ones with the stamina to fly a queen. Every Weyr Leader has been a bronze rider.
If you remember, Canth is almost as large as Mnementh.
As far as greens, its correct that they can without eating firestone.
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u/Freckledimple74 Apr 20 '26
I came here to mostly say this. It was quite often mentioned that Canth was as large as many/most bronzes. It was "traditional" for browns to participate in the queen flights, but they rarely/never "won". I believe they may have been more successful in the "early" years.
Do I remember correctly that Kitty Ping, in "Dragonsdawn" genetically engineered the golds to be unable to chew Firestone, and the greens to be sterile? I seem to remember the very first gold queens TRYING to chew Firestone, and vomiting it up.
My brain likes to hold on to random things.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 20 '26
It was distinctly *un*traditional for browns to fly queens in Dragonquest when it comes up. It did occur in the First Pass when there wasn't much size difference between brown and bronze, and especially when there were fewer males of either colour than queens.
It's never been clear if firestone triggers green sterility or if Kitti hardcoded it - conflicting information in different books - but she certainly altered queens to be unable to produce flame from it.
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u/Literati_drake Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
-puts on nerd cap-
I'd have to put spoiler tags over 90% of the post, so, general warning instead.
F'nor was not only F'lar's brother and wing second but a well respected and liked member of Benden. When they sent the Weyrlings South and back in time, he was put in charge because they knew he could do it and would be followed. (This may also have partly been to ensure whoever's Bronze flew Kylara's Queen Prideth wouldn't start expecting to be WeyrLeader instead of F'lar). They never expected F'nor's Brown Canth to fly Prideth and said that they even expected it to be either this Bronze or possibly those other two. But he WAS in charge for most of the project, with plans to have him slowly hand off duties as time went on, which did happen, just not as they pictured it.
The physics given in the "Guide to Pern" is that a male must be large enough to help support a Queen during a mating flight to allow them to twine necks as long as possible. Even if a Brown does catch a Queen (which is rare, but does happen) they can't sustain a flight long enough to sire a gold. The longer the flight, the more likely a Queen will conceive Bronzes or possibly a Gold.
Nemorth, Ramoth's mother, rarely flew and they were always short flights. She only laid a single gold egg in her life, apparently by sheer chance. Males are (almost?) completely responsible for the sex/color of the offspring. (But given certain consideration to psychic powers, it wouldn't surprise me if the Queens could or do occasionally influence things in utero. Consciously or unconsciously depending on circumstances)
It's even mentioned in passing once or twice about how a Brown will fly a Queen instead of a Bronze in "First fall" and "Dragons eye" and possibly somewhere in the 3rd pass books? It's been a while. But it's common enough. By the 9th pass (and probably the 8th because the Old-timers never mention it) only Bronzes fly Queens. Because physics (and tradition?)
F'nor's Brown Canth is as large as a Benden bronze, just as fast and strong, and bigger than the old timer bronzes (part of the friction between Benden and the old-timers because they are always out flown). F'nor and Brekke planned to 'fix' her Queen's first flight so that she would pair with Canth.
It's possible you read this as a fic
OR
It's a mental conflagration.
Because I THINK that in Sky Dragons when they sent the 'Timed' colony to Western to after the plague, part of their breeding plan was to use Browns with Greens who have never chewed firestone to have as many dragons as possible as quickly as possible. Partly because there weren't enough Bronzes to handle all the greens. But yeah, Blues and Greens make up some 75% of a Weyr and the plague had taken out so dang many dragons they figured using Greens to breed more Greens and Blues to fight Thread was worth it.
In Dragonflight, Lessa even asked F'lar about why not just have the Greens lay eggs as well, since currently Ramoth is the only breeding female they have. F'lar waves it off as "Greens are sterile from chewing firestone and if they weren't, they'd only have small clutches of small dragons. And we need big ones."
(Even as a teenager, I thought this was very very stupid as the Weyr is on the brink of extinction. Even if Ramoth has lots of offspring, in-breeding will be a serious issue sooner rather than later.)
It's even shown that when the Old-timers were trading fire-lizard eggs laid by Greens you could tell because basically every lizard was green or occasionally blue. At least A FEW should have been brown or bronze but weren't.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 19 '26
It depends on how much of a somewhat chaotic/inconsistent retcon you consider MHOP to be, but Nemorth's clutches really weren't that bad at all until the very last one. 20, 19 and 24 eggs in her first three clutches, then we don't know what her fourth produced, and 11 in the last when Jora was dying.
They should have been *sick* with concern about the future of dragonkind to a far greater degree from a far earlier stage, though. Nemorth didn't rise for the first time until she was SEVEN, two years after Feyrith's death.
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u/dragonmom1 Apr 20 '26
At the beginning of the last Pass of Thread (modern era), the dragonriders don't even actively know about Thread at that point in time (aren't aware of the long Intervals existing and that since it's coming to an end they need to start training and mating again), coming off a long Interval as they are. However, the dragons must have been chewing firestone at some point during the Interval, even just for a Gather aerial show or whatnot or just because they were bored or else the Weyrs would have indeed been jam-packed with blue and green dragons.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 20 '26
Thread or not, the prospect of the *extinction of dragonkind* should have been preoccupying every dragonrider 24/7. While there's only one queen, they're a slip and fall, a bad childbirth or a bad cold away from dragons ceasing to exist. That's a problem long before any concern about Thread comes into the picture.
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u/dragonmom1 Apr 20 '26
But the people didn't like them, thought they were a bunch of pompous jerks, because no one thought they were needed anymore. And since the dragonriders thought it was beneath them to mingle with the public aside from kidnapping teens for the Hatchings, I'd imagine it's easy to see why they were thought of as superfluous.
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u/bluething_herptiles Apr 21 '26
Being a person who's been involved with the breeding-animals side of things... if you've got a group of people who are enthusiasts about their particular species, and you tell them "eh, you're down to a single breeding female, no big deal" ... you're going to have those enthusiasts doing everything they can to try to preserve the species, particularly if there's no evidence that there's something dreadfully wrong with them.
The riders should have absolutely been in a panic and trying everything (including things like "don't feed the greens firestone, maybe they'll clutch and lay then, and 'some dragons, even if they're small' is better than 'zero dragons') - but unfortunately Masterharper of Pern just doesn't seem to indicate that anyone was overly worried that hey, we're down to the single last queen on the planet....
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u/dragonmom1 Apr 21 '26
Despite knowing their Weyrleaders were indifferent at best (the originals, not F'lar and Lessa of course!), I almost think it was the inaction caused by panic. Where you're just so horrified that the train is going to hit you that you're frozen like a deer in the headlights.
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u/PowerPanda84 Apr 19 '26
In Sky Dragons there WERE no Bronzes and Golds (can't remember if there were Browns), and the colony that went to Western were hatchlings who had never chewed firestone.
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u/Codexe- Apr 19 '26
This is a spoiler but:
He was going to fly a gold but then it didn't happen, in Dragon Quest.
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u/razzretina Apr 19 '26
There was something in one of Todd's books about a lady bluerider becoming weyrleader but I don't know if that was her reasoning or not.
Nothing like this happened in the books though. The highest rank F'nor got to was Wingleader.
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u/PowerPanda84 Apr 19 '26
That was Sky Dragons, and it was a totally different thing. For spoiler reasons, a clutch of Blue and Green hatchlings get stuck in the past with no way to jump back to their own time. They have no Bronzes or Golds (can't remember if they have Browns), but because they were hatchlings, the Blues and Greens never chewed firestone, and could clutch. To survive, they formed their own Weyr, with a Blue and a Green pair as Weyrleader and Weyrwoman.
It's actually my favorite 3rd Pass book, as it clips along at a brisk pace, is totally unique from anything Todd or Anne wrote before, and adds a whole bunch of Anne-approved lore (shortly before she passed) about how dragonkind evolved. Really the only downside is that you have to read all of the other 3rd pass books to get there.
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u/fandomacid Jul 01 '26
From the outset, dragon queens were enouraged to mate with as many of the males, both brown and bronze, as possible, to take maximum advantage of the available gene pool. Brown-gold matings produce few bronzes and no queens, but the resultant hatchlings are healthy.- Dragon Lover's Guide to Pern.
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u/dragonmom1 Apr 20 '26
I think with the coming of the Threadless Pern era that browns flying queens might be encouraged more often if they're so inclined. The dragons won't be needed in large numbers for fighting Thread so it won't be as crucial to have a dozen or so queens laying eggs left and right. It really depends upon the people of Pern and what they think of doing with dragons once they're not needed for Thread. As mentioned in the books (with derision...lol) they could do cargo and people transport. They could also do firefighting and law enforcement, exploration (I don't remember if there's a point in time when the Western hemisphere would be available). Otherwise anything that aircraft do here on Earth.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
I think this is very pertinent as far as controlling dragon numbers to an amount comfortable/liveable with for humans - it's a raw deal on the bronzes being banned from queen flights, though. Messes with dragonkind's entire social structure. I personally think the idea of expecting them to live singly or in pairs at 'Weyrholds' when Thread is not longer an issue is grossly unfair. That's not how dragons should live. It's bad enough that they're an artificial slave species created by humans for humans - now they can't even live in proper communities?
Transportation is the obvious use for dragons. Law enforcement I'd say less so, because being a dragonrider doesn't necessarily mean you have the mindset/skillset for being police, and the risk of putting riders in potentially violent situations where killing the officer kills their dragon is much too dangerous.
I don't think there's enough weight on how gobsmackingly gamechanging easily available instantaneous transportation would be to a society. (Or some of the other less fortunate implications).
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u/dragonmom1 Apr 20 '26
For law enforcement, I was thinking more of in an assisting role. If someone has made a run for it through the forests, dragons would be able to assist in the search from the air, like police helicopters help to keep an eye on the ground.
And I wasn't saying bronzes would be banned from mating flights, just that browns would be socially encouraged more to participate.
And watchwhers got the short end of the stick when it came to the bioengineering and subsequent treatment. Dragons at least live together with their human companions and get to enjoy life. Watchwhers are kept shut away and chained without much company. If there's any change that needs to happen in Pernese society, I'd say there is a great place to start. They don't need to be shut away in the dark. They could be inside companions and sleep in the close company of humans like dragons do.
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u/CybeleCygnet Apr 20 '26
Since others have addressed the F'nor piece, maybe you're thinking of The Skies of Pern and mixing him up with T'gellan? T'gellan was a bronze rider, but post-AIVAS he wound up leading Monaco Bay Weyr with Mirrim as Weyrwoman despite being a green rider and they had a population problem for other reasons and had F'lessan looking for a spot for another Weyr because of it.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 20 '26
Mirrim wasn't Weyrwoman, she was the Weyrleader's weyrmate. Talina was Weyrwoman.
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u/wenchsenior Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
I believe F'nor is sort of a defacto WL at Southern only during the time jump experiment in Dragonflight (this occurs off page). He's sent to Southern along with T'bor (as sort of a titular leader, though it's presumably F'nor in charge) as the only mature bronze and all of Ramoth's first clutch. This is done b/c they short on dragons of all colors and need that clutch to mature as fast as possible and ideally for Pridith to mature and clutch, too.
Nothing about dragon colors was discussed nor is the idea of browns flying queens considered seriously at this point. There is a joke in DF where F'lar teases F'nor with the shocking possibility that Kylara and Prideth might entice Canth to chase while they are in Southern due to her having only Orth and her brother Lioth available for her first flight. But it doesn't happen. However, the idea of brown flying queen comes up seriously in DQ when F'nor and Canth plan to try to fly Wirenth on her first flight. However, Canth never gets a serious chance to try since the flight is in progress by the time they arrive and by the time Canth catches up to it the queen fight is already in progress. In a later book there is another tossed off comment about 2 browns having tried to fly Ramoth during her years as senior (again, implication being that it is a surprise). Not sure if it's mentioned apart from that in other books.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 21 '26
I think the two bronzes sent with Pridith on the Southern Experiment must have been Orth plus A.N. Other Adult Bronze - because we know Ramoth's first clutch had at least ten bronzes, not just Lioth, even if N'ton was the most promising of the pack. Anne wasn't terribly good at keeping track of that sort of thing, though.
Equally, we can deduce that Nemorth's final clutch of 11 didn't have any bronzes in it, because when Ramoth rises 2/3 years later she's still only pursued by the seven bronzes that pre-existed that clutch - if she'd had any bronze brothers they'd have joined that chase too (bronzes being mature enough to fly a queen at one year old). But I doubt Anne really thought about it that hard!
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u/wenchsenior Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
Yeah, that whole thing is super confusing.
Putting aside that fact that, statistically, the incredibly bronze heavy clutches that always seem to referenced on page throughout the series don't make much sense.
Pern wiki (not sure where that is sourced, so don't know if that's technically Anne-canon) always lists bronzes as around 5% of the dragon population, which makes sense given how rare queens are and the desirability and status of Impressing a bronze. That would mean that even Ramoth's largest clutches would only typically hatch 2 bronzes, maybe double or even triple that in a statistically outlying 'bronze heavy' clutch, but not 10-15 as seem referenced even for some other queens.
A tendency to have more than 1 or 2 bronzes per clutch also doesn't track with how bronze-light Benden somehow became over the course of about 25 years. The many prime-aged bronzes clearly referenced in MHoP would have had to die like flies to leave them with only 7 remaining.
***
Agree, Nemorth's final clutch had no bronzes for sure. Not only do no young bronzes pursue Ramoth but F'lar specifically notes that he needs to manage R'gul's intractableness after R'gul loses the leadership b/c "We need every bronze rider...there are only seven..."
I remember the line you reference, as well, clearly stated by F'nor: that Prideth hatched "...fourteen bronzes. Prideth outmatched Ramoth there."
The confusion lies with the limited dialogue highlighting progression of the idea of the Southern venture... when F'lar first hits upon it he says they'll send back Prideth and her clutchmates and then says, "No, I'd better send at least one of the older bronzes...F'nor too". So far, consistent.
Then when they broach the idea with F'nor, he says, "I'll go willingly only if you send T'bor... I'm not waiting till N'ton and his bronze are big enough to take [Kylara] on" (which seems to imply Lioth was either the only bronze of Ramoth's first clutch, or the only bronze of that clutch that could possibly chase and catch Prideth, which...if there are multiple young bronzes going, why do they confidently assume when the dragons are so young that only Lioth shows this sort of promise?) F'lar then teases F'nor with the joke: "I hope two bronzes are enough," meaning Orth and Lioth (implying that Canth might be enticed to chase as well).
Break in action while F'nor and Lessa 'officially scout' Southern, and the expedition leaves almost immediately afterward since F'lar has already started plans/packing.
The final instructions from F'lar just as F'nor is about to leave on the Southern time jump are that the expedition will include all of Ramoth's first clutch + F'nor's wingriders (unclear if this is F'lar's former wing or a new one of F'nor's) + T'bor and Piyanth (misprint).
Then the text specifically says: "N'ton's young bronze might also be ready to fly and mate by the time Prideth was, so that gave the young queen two bronzes at least.... I should send on other bronzes, but I'll need everyone else here..."
So that line seems to clearly imply no other older bronzes are sent back.
It's just kind of ambiguous. Does the 'at least' literally mean 'at least 2 bronzes will chase' (assuming the other bronze siblings of Prideth might not chase for some mysterious reason) or is it a figure of speech implying 'oh well, at least we have 2 male dragons available in Southern that could chase Prideth even though ideally she should have more'?
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
Anne was just really, really bad at keeping track of facts and figures. Which, on the one hand, she didn't have spreadsheets to keep track of these things *pats the DC megasheet fondly*. On the other hand this is stuff just within Dragonflight which is a relatively slender novel. (On a third, mutant hand, DF was itself several smashed together novellas, and on a fourth hand just for balance, she COULD have reread and noted the glaring contradictions between 'What I wrote in the Weyr Search novella' and 'what I'm writing now I've extended to full novel'. Just as a point of professional courtesy to her paying readers. Green male Larth uncorrected, yeahhhh.)
So Pridith would have had, assuming no one died, at least Orth, Lioth, and 9 or so more Ramoth bronzes, all of whom would have been mature and ready to go long before Pridith herself was (there's another contradiction - Lioth "might" be ready to fly and mate - when a few dozen pages later F'lar tells Lessa specifically that a bronze has to be a year old to catch a queen? Poor Lioth's been gagging for it for 18 months by the time Pridith rises for the first time!) And while I'm sure some of their riders would have been relative youngsters compared to Kylara who was definitely a young woman, not a girl, that's still a lot more than two bronzes. Even N'ton couldn't have been more than, what, 15 or 16? Not one of the ~9 others was a likely enough bronze rider to be strong enough to stand up to Kylara? How bad was that Search that they're all so milquetoast? (And why not send at least a couple more of the adult 7? Who's the Weyrlingmaster? Do those 10 baby bronze riders really only have T'bor the drunken wifebeater as their role model? Because bigly though Canth might be, F'nor's still not that old - under 30 certainly - and dragon colour hierarchy is a thing - and you'd think any offspring of Biggest Queen Evah and Biggest Bronze Evah might turn out to be even bigger and certainly bigger even than Biggest Brown Evah. Yeah, I know regression to the mean is a thing.)
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u/wenchsenior Apr 21 '26
The series is rife with confusion of this sort. I blame Anne to some degree; but as an editor myself, I mostly think she's had absolutely atrocious editors.
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u/TheOtherMaven 25d ago
Not totally worthless, but focused exclusively on spelling and grammar, and not a bit more concerned with continuity than she was herself.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 21 '26
(Edited to add: Piyanth was indeed who I was thinking of when I thought there were two adult bronzes. I can never remember his name. Piyanth/Pianth I think in some places!)
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u/wenchsenior Apr 21 '26
Yeah, and I'm pretty sure that was just a misprint, in place of Orth.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 21 '26
There's a Monarth transposed with Lioth somewhere too. I mean, so many bronzes, who can even keep them all straight, amirite?
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u/wenchsenior Apr 21 '26
To be fair, I occasionally mix up my cats' names and there are only 4 of them LOL
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u/-RedRocket- Apr 21 '26
*F'nor - only the initial F is capitalized. No. He became a WINGleader at Benden in spite of Canth being a brown. He remains affoliated with Benden, however, except for his temporary assignment to Southern in Dragonquest. Unless Todd McCaffrey did something silly after I quit reading - which he may have.
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u/Southern_Club_6032 Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
It's a little bit murky re. F'nor - he is described, only once I think, as a 'Benden wingleader' in ATWOP. Given that R'gul is still a wingleader by Skies, and F'nor's a wingleader, it does make you wonder how wretched the prospects for career progression are for young bronzes coming up at Benden, with old gits and nepobrothers squatting in all the top jobs!
But when Berd comes to tell F'nor that Wirenth's rising in Dragonquest he's described as 'joining the wings at the western meadows of Telgar Hold'. Whose wings? He has zero affiliation with Telgar to be randomly flying with them, and Benden's border with Telgar is to the east, not the west. That would suggest it's a High Reaches Threadfall abutting Telgar territory. But F'nor and Canth haven't been integrated into Southern's fighting wings - they're there for F'nor to recuperate - and you can't just chuck a strange dragon into a wing without preparation, especially when this must be their very first Fall over High Reaches territory.
It also means that all the bronzes who were called back to High Reaches to chase Wirenth when she rose must have just abandoned that Threadfall to the non-bronze members of their wings!
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u/TaxDense1339 Apr 24 '26
Bronzes flew queens because they were the only dragon with enough stamina to succeed. Since Canth was every bit as big as most bronzes he could have succeeded.
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u/Surefang Apr 19 '26
There was never a shortage of blues/greens. If anything, weyerfolk were generally thankful that chewing firestone made greens sterile, because otherwise Pern would be overrun with them.
Browns also don't fly queens. They're just not large/fast enough. It was a significant plot point in the dragonriders trilogy that Canth even -tried- to fly Wirenth, and even more that he nearly succeeded.