Dragonflight

While Dragonflight’s protagonists, Lessa and F’lar, often find themselves at odds with each other—F’lar’s steadfastness clashes with Lessa’s gung-ho attitude–their moral codes are strikingly similar. Together they stand as models for Dragonflight’s code of conduct. “Good” characters in Pern display a certain brand of stoic, restrained, selfless behavior. Like F’lar and (eventually) Lessa, they subordinate the needs of the self to the needs of the collective. Excess of any sort is frowned upon—especially excessive emotion. Rather, the ideal person is measured in all things; they do not lean too hard in one direction or another.

At the same time, social expectations are highly gendered in Dragonflight. It is therefore useful to explore good and bad behavior in Pern through this lens. For example, in Dragonflight, “bad” men come in two forms: they either desire too much power (an excess of greed), or they are lazy or slow to action (an excess of sloth). The book’s first villain is the tyrant Fax. He lacks proper restraint in political terms—he conquers more than his appropriate share of land—and in social terms, he lacks sexual restraint by bedding many wives and treating them poorly. On the other end of the spectrum is R’gul, who has an excess of reticence. He is too conservative, both in his vision of the world and his vision of the Weyr’s place in it. Rather than embracing and enforcing the Weyr’s purpose as protectors against a dire threat, he shortsightedly bends over backwards to appease the Holding Lords, refusing to see the truth of the Threads until it is (almost) too late. F’lar briefly masquerades as a conservative too: initially, Lessa judges him harshly for his apparent unwillingness to make a stand and take control of the situation. But in reality F’lar is a model for Dragonflight’s perfect balance of virtue: he is able to wait and rein in his powerful emotions, but also to utilize them when the time is right.

Dragonflight also fault women for excess—most of all for sexual promiscuity. Kylara is the prime example of this type of character. She sleeps with various dragonriders and has “the amorous tendencies of a green dragon” (154), the highly feminized subset of dragon noted solely for their licentious behavior. Most damning of all, Kylara is self-absorbed and leverages her beauty to get ahead in the world—a cardinal sin for women in Dragonflight. Kylara’s obsession with herself nearly ruins F’lar’s plan in the Southern Reaches; she repeatedly shirks her duties as leader and time travels to watch herself at various stages of her life. Other pretty girls show moral weakness too. F’lar’s companion Lady Tela is pretty but foolish, and Lessa’s beautiful rivals at the Hatching die horribly for their girlish fear, which Lessa characterizes as silly.

Conversely, the prior Weyrwoman Jora’s great fault was her laziness. This sin of excess finds a counterpart in her physical appearance: Jora was not just stupid and incompetent, but also obese. Women who are revered in Pern tend to be even-keeled and sexually modest, usually due to their advanced age (like Gemma and Manora). The one exception is Lessa who, notably, has more “masculine” faults than feminine. Like Fax, she is greedy and hotheaded until life experience helps her temper herself.

These gendered variations in Pern’s broader moral code complicate Dragonflight’s feminist legacy. Life within the Weyr is in many ways egalitarian in matters of sex and gender; women occupy positions of leadership alongside men, sexual mores are relaxed, and the community (rather than individual mothers) shoulder collective responsibility for childrearing. McCaffrey also implicitly critiques some of Pern’s more sexist practices—e.g. some Lords’ practice of keeping multiple wives, or the ban on queen dragons (and their female riders) taking part in combat. On the other hand, the faults the work identifies in its female characters—flirtatiousness, vanity, etc.—reinforce misogynistic tropes common in our own society.