Merry Crisis

[coalcube]

On the 7^th night of Hanukkah my vindictive author gave to me....

Madness Opens: Mon 26 Dec
Author Reveals: Sun Jan 1

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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

What is it with Pern Yuletide fic and unrequested hate crime?

[(Anonymous)]

it is pretty true to the source author, I guess

[(Anonymous)]

Glossing over sexual assault *is* kind of central to the canon.

[(Anonymous)]

From gay bashing dragons to trans raping dragons: the dragonriders of pern story

[(Anonymous)]

Seriously, fuck that fandom. I am so glad I left it.

[(Anonymous)]

I still read the stories every year because god help me I like the world and some of the canon characters, but... it does attract a shocking amount of shit like this.

[(Anonymous)]

Pern fandom sucks

[(Anonymous)]

I'd love to hear more about this. What does Pern fandom consist of? Like where do people hang out? I didn't realize it really had a fandom, and until now the gay-bashing dragon fic was the only example of Pern Author Behaving badly that I knew of.

[(Anonymous)]

There is a massive Pern fandom full of horrible, horrible people in rp circles. The drama is cataclysmic and constant.

[(Anonymous)]

All I remember of pern rp fandom outside of yuletide is something like 20 years ago artists doing dragons "for adoption" and you had to stand to hatching or whatever and if you got or adopted an egg then you'd get a drawing of the egg hosted on the artist's server and after some time they'd replace the link with a drawing of a hatchling of whatever color, then a young dragon, then an adult dragon

As a fandom fetus I thought it was beyond cool

[(Anonymous)]

Ok so take this and add on an extra 20 years of now adult humans backstabbing and scheming to get the shiny dragon and growing increasingly bitter and resentful towards each other

[(Anonymous)]

I had a friend who was into some Pern role playing website around that same time and it sounded soooooo cool.

[(Anonymous)]

It reminded me a lot of the Mercedes Lackey mailing list where you made up a detailed persona and got it certified or whatever and did stuff in that vein irl, like fantasy SCA shit.

[(Anonymous)]

That was my baby's first online fandom experience. We did everything on those voy message boards. Good times.

[(Anonymous)]

I regularly roleplayed Pern back in the day and, if the RP scene is still similar (which I'm guessing it is because of the factors listed below), yes it is notoriously wanky and full of petty grudges and backstabbing. I'll try to explain this to canonblind people as well.

One of the main game mechanics when it comes to Pern RP is playing IC hatchings, where a clutch of dragon eggs hatches and telepathically bonds with one of the characters. Characters who attend these hatchings in the hopes of getting a dragon are called candidates. You could sometimes apply for non-riders or established riders, but a lot of the fun comes from attending the hatching and getting a special mod-crafted dragon just for your character so starting out as a candidate is the most popular route by far.

But the thing that makes this so wanky is the dragon ranking system. Gold and bronze dragons are the highest-ranked, followed by browns, then blues, then greens. That doesn't mean the lower-ranked dragons aren't fun to play (personally, I actually had more fun with browns, blues, and greens because they weren't immediately funneled to leadership roles and had more flexibility) but a lot of mods would assign your character a dragon based on things like how much they enjoyed your writing or character concept. This made getting a higher-ranked dragon a sort of status symbol and something people got into arguments over on the regular. More than once I joined someone's Pern RP only to find out that it was a spite-fueled spinoff of another RP in which the mod didn't get the dragon they wanted.

I think my most memorable experience had to be one where the mods accepted a bunch of candidates and set up for a normal hatching, including accepting candidates for the gold egg (for the canonblind: there is almost never more than one gold egg per hatching, and candidates for the gold egg are often separate from the others. Not all games separate them, but this one did, so if you made a character that was going for the gold egg you would get no dragon if they weren't chosen by the gold dragon). Come the day of the hatching, the gold dragon goes to...the mod's own character. Who was not a candidate at all, certainly not for the gold dragon.

Again for the canonblind, hatchings are often attended by non-candidates who watch from the stands, and though it isn't unheard of in Pern canon to have a character in the stands get a dragon, it is very rare and in RP it's kind of a red flag for someone wanting to have the most special character. Players were angry that no one who actually applied for the gold dragon got it, and apparently this mod's two co-mods didn't know that this was the plan and tried to make her walk it back and give the gold to a player. She was so upset that her fellow mods and the playerbase didn't adore her plot twist that she deleted the entire forum.

[(Anonymous)]

This is pretty par for the course, yeah. It's not the first time I've heard of a mod that has nuked their entire forum because people got mad at them for giving the gold to their own character and I'm sure it won't be the last. I have friends still writing in the fandom and they're still complaining about this type of stuff as of... like last week.

[(Anonymous)]

dc

The fact that the Watsons are into this fandom suddenly makes a lot more sense. This is exactly the kind of nutty gatekeeping they'd be modding.

[(Anonymous)]

+1

Suddenly all becomes clear.

[(Anonymous)]

omg this story is amazing. thank you, coalie, for this beautiful report of a deeply foreign land.

[(Anonymous)]

cyrt

LOL and here I foolishly thought dragons would be assigned by some form of random selection.

Thanks for the writeup! I can totally see how this would generate regular epic wankstorms.

[(Anonymous)]

And OG gay-bashing dragon ended with the OC being chosen by a gold dragon, which as Pern fic cliches go is the ultimate.