#the protagonists aren’t morally incorruptible

[mandaloriandragontrainer]

I truly believe The Dragon Prince hasn’t taken off on here the way similar animated shows have because it’s too nuanced. The number of grown adults I’ve seen get upset because neither humanity nor Xadia is portrayed as wholly good or wholly evil and they can’t just pick a side is very telling.

[kariachi]

Okay, but, if you like Pern but are unhappy with... how much it is shit? I really do recommend Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series. It’s ain’t perfect (rep can be middling at best, you will be sat there going ‘if I see another age-gap romance I swear to the gods-’, ‘divine right of kings’ is there and makes sense in-universe but also will niggle people, there is so much rape and it’s a bit more graphic- though that one is tempered by her actually treating it as a horrible, evil thing and being really fucking open about it, you will not see ‘but she liked it so it was fine’ in the Valdemar books) but it is still so good.

Things Valdemar does better than Pern

Companions. The angel bondmate horses may not be as cool as dragons, but damnit if the relationships between them and their Heralds isn’t better than the rider/dragon ones

Also, they’re the reason the Divine Right of Kings thing works- in-universe the reason Companions are around is the first king of Valdemar prayed to the gods for some way to ensure his kingdom would always be under the care of good, trustworthy, moral people, and so Valdemar was given the Companions, who only bond to good, trustworthy, moral, incorruptible people who would throw themselves into fire to ensure the health and wellbeing of others, and the ruler must be Chosen by a Companion

Seriously, finally some good fucking ‘divine right’

Leans hard into it’s fantasy setting, so you don’t have to deal with smug ‘everything here is based on science’ bullshit when the science is out a third grade textbook. Is shit weird? Yeah, it’s magic, move along.

The rep is there, which if you’ve read Pern you’ll know is a big jump. POC exist outside of backstory and get to be main characters, queer peeps get to be main characters, everyone gets stories

There are even a-spec characters! One is specifically because she traded her sexual desires, urges, and interests to her goddess in exchange for becoming a holy warrior of protection and vengeance (which her goddess made damn sure was something she honestly wanted to do in the depths of her heart, with full understanding, first, because the gods in this series are Good) but still!

Woman. Characters. Done. Right. There’s a lot of bullfuckery going on, but the women have agency, lead stories far more often, don’t get pushed aside (in their own stories, thank you Dragonflight) for focus on male characters, aren’t pitted against each other in ‘not like other girls’ bullshit

Seriously, all I can picture is if Mercedes had written Dragonquest. Brekke would’ve been the main character and we would’ve gotten her entire fucking story from pre-Search to while F’nor was healing (and he wouldn’t have fucking raped her, not and remained a protagonist, and the dragon shit wouldn’t be nearly so bad, and just it would’ve been so much better)

And I know Pern doesn’t have gods or religion (which, ugh) but y’all I enjoy the gods in the Valdemar series so much? Like, they aren’t generally involved in shit but it’s also very much because they value the free will of their followers? They’ll only get involved if their followers ask it of them. This even leads to differing relationships with differing gods by differing people.

‘But Achi that sounds like a recipe for disaster‘ It is! Karse spends centuries in holy war against Valdemar because a group of fuckers decided to use their religion for power and this hands-off method means Vkandis (their god) couldn’t do anything until the people were in such fear of their own religious leaders that they started asking him for help, and by then it was so bad he had to 1) literally perform the miracle of animating a giant statue of himself, plucking the crown off statue-him’s head, shrinking it down, and using it to crown his chosen Son of the Sun (basically fantasy-pope but Moreso) while granting her all the power one would expect a sun god to grant his mortal representative; 2) burn every corrupt, high-ranking priest in the country alive simultaneously, just to get shit to where something could actually be fucking done before the world ended

We call him ‘Vkandis the Unsubtle’ for a reason, the other one being that when, millennia ago, a kingdom prayed to him for protection from threat outside their kingdom he erected a fuck-off-tall wall of magical fire around their country that only allows those who can be trusted to do no harm and keep their mouths shut in

btw there are gryphons behind the wall of fire. Does Pern have gryphons? No, because Anne was a pansy.

And the thing with the gods leans into something else I love about this series- the characters are people, with virtues and flaws. They make mistakes, those mistakes have consequences (some of them far reaching- why does Valdemar not have magic? Because the last magic user, in an attempt to protect the kingdom from enemy mages, set up a security system that ended up driving every magic user in the kingdom mad and so guess what), and people get called out on them. Sometimes good people do bad things, bad people can have good in them and that doesn’t make them right, the characters are just more well-rounded than Anne’s. Right up to the gods themselves.

It’s not the perfect series, but I really recommend it to anyone who’s read Pern and wanted something less... that.

[homunculus-argument]

Shit you find in books written over 100 years ago:

 The narrator takes 5 half-page paragraphs to say “the weather was bad and [protagonist] was feeling like shit.“

The plot is pretty good, but unfortunately gets paused for pages and pages in order to explain the entire fucking life story of a side character who just popped in.

Extra points if the whole rambling life story is a long justification of how the said character is actually very chaste, moral, beautiful and intelligent despite of being poor or a minority.

The author feels the need to specify that this female character is a virgin, for some reason. It never becomes relevant to the plot in any way.

Long, convoluted justifications on why the incorruptibly pure pureness lawful good protagonist absolutely had simply completely zero other choice than to do something a modern reader couldn’t even spot as controversial if it weren’t for the mountains of justifications.

The absolutely ruthless and morally bankrupt Absolutely Horribly Evil Villain who actually comes off as a fairly likeable guy, as the text makes it explicit that he’s too busy robbing people to bother to be racist.

Words “civilised” and “christian” are used interchangeably.

Everyone in the setting is white, so the author has to settle for being racist towards whatever white people he dislikes the most.

A teenage boy is considered more competent at doing “men’s work” than a fully grown and capable adult woman.

A teenage girl is considered completely fair game for men 10 years older than her. Extra points for the protagonist seeing her for the first time in years, and the last time she was 14 and completely a child in every way but now she’s 16 and fully grown and matured into a beautiful woman.

 You suddenly vaguely remember reading a Donald Duck comic parody of this story at some point. You prefer the Donald version more, on the grounds of having more ducks and less antisemitism.

The Spunky Tough Tomboy Girl Who Is Controversial And Absolutely Inappropriate! (but she’s virgin and chaste so it’s actually cute and ok!) She is never actually shown doing or saying anything particularly controversial, apparently at the time just being female and occasionally voicing an opinion is absolutely wild and inappropriate enough.

Beauty=goodness, with the rare explicit exception of a male character who’s as ugly as a babboon’s goddamn ballsack, but totally makes up for it by being an exceptionally good person, and therefore deserving a wife who is obviously both.

Casual background racism that can and will with zero warning spontaneously leap into Professional Weapons-Grade Olympic Competitive Level Jesus Fuck That’s Racist.

Outdated language that you know used to mean something completely different, but that won’t stop you from giggling because the protagonist laments that his clothes aren’t gay enough.