Gay dragonriders
What about the tent peg?
The question of dragonrider sexuality will never go away. Irrelevant in Dragonflight, when Anne had not even fixed the gender of green dragons, subsequently touched upon in Moreta, made more blatant in Red Star Rising/Dragonseye, and brought into the open in interviews with Anne herself, the issue arises in virtually every discussion of Impression.
The “Renewable Airforce” document states that dragonets make their choices based on the candidates’ sexuality. According to the rules it sets out, green dragons decide either heterosexual women or males “with feminine personalities”. Cerulean riders “tend to be gay with masculine temperaments”. Browns and bronzes elect only heterosexual males, and queens only heterosexual females. Moreover, the hatchling dragonet “recognises by the sweat pheromones the appropriate sexual partner”.
But the idea that gay men exude female pheromones is wholly unsupported by any scientific evidence. There have been studies which present that heterosexual and homosexual men may react to pheromones in different ways, but there is nothing to signal that gay men produce a differe
The Tent Peg Statement
"The Tent Peg Statement" is an infamous fandom wank involving Anne McCaffrey, a noted science fiction writer who had many intricate and precise rules for fans talking about, and creating fanworks, about dragonriders's sexuality and dragons. [1]
"The Tent Peg Statement" is centered around McCaffrey's 1998 intimate q&a session between Anne and a fandom administrator who was passing along some questions from some generic fanfiction writers [2]. In this interview, McCaffrey said that any male who engages in anal sex becomes gay, even if that anal sex was rape, and more generally around her depiction of gay people in the Dragonriders of Pern series. As proof, she offered an example of a man she knew personally who was "involved in a rape situation involving a tent peg. This one event was enough to have him start on a route that eventually led to him becoming effeminate and gay."
Although McCaffrey tried to wipe this utterance and the interview from memory, it has made its way to the internet where it is widely known and mocked even in non-fannish circles. [3]
In 2000, post-interview, some of these McCaffrey's Pern rules w
Issues. Oh, my goodness, execute I have issues. Let’s start with the ones that really make my head spin – the sexual politics. Because they are vast and unattractive and often convoluted, and form huge swathes of the plots, so they cannot be ignored.
First issue on the books is rape. Rape occurs in all three books, under the guise of marital right, or Romance or simply teenage boys will be boys, and that last is actually one of the ickiest of the lot. Once again, there are spoilers beyond this point so be warned.
Basic fact about the dragons – they are projecting telepaths/empaths. They usually keep this under regulate, only communicating with their bondmates or other selected people. One major exception is mating flights, especially between the fertile gold/bronze pairings.
Dragons mate in the air, after several male dragons chase after the female, who is basically in heat. If the female is gold, the longer and harder the flight until she is caught, the more and better eggs she will lay. Greens are infertile and lay no eggs. However, in either case, longer flights help relieve the sexual tension for those males who execute not catch her. (Just a note – the dragons are r
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I’m rereading the Dragonriders of Pern and recognize that I’d forgotten some of the details about the telepathic bonds between dragons and their riders. I remembered that the dragons communicate fluently in human language but only telepathically, and only with the rider they bonded with after hatching. And also that they can teleport instantly over drawn-out distances that would otherwise take days or weeks of flight, which allows them to burn Thread out of the sky in many places at once. And that they can time travel — though that’s extremely dangerous.
I also vaguely remembered the way the dragonriders succumb to sex with each other during the mating flights of their dragons: The riders of the mating pair are overcome with sexual desire for each other, often against their will, sometimes hardly aware of what they’re doing. When it’s bronze on gold, it’s rather “standard” because gold dragons are queens, bronzes are males, the gold dragonrider is always a female, and the bronze rider a male. But when it comes to the “lesser colors” — browns or blues mating with greens — it’s a bit mur