Episode 154: Transcript
Romancing the Dragon, with Moniquill Blackgoose
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, do you remember when we went to a lecture about emergency medicine on Pern?
Annalee: [00:00:05] I do indeed. That was a long time ago. I would say at the turn of the century we went to Dragon*Con and I was looking for a panel. I feel like it was like an afternoon panel and I just I really wanted something that felt like it could never happen anywhere but at Dragon*Con.
[00:00:31] And this was a panel for people who were doing Pern... I want to say LARPing. And it was how do you do emergency medicine in your LARP? Not actual real-life medicine like what if someone fell over while LARPing but like what if you have a dragon rider who's like injured within the game.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:52] Somebody falls off their dragon and they hurt their leg.
Annalee: [00:00:56] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:56] And the dragon's freaking out. We have to make a stretcher.
Annalee: [00:00:59] They had a stretcher there.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:02] No. They have to make a stretcher out of materials you can find on Pern.
Annalee: [00:01:04] Exactly. And the thing was is one of the people on the panel was an EMT and they were like, actually I want to show you guys like how you would bind like a broken limb and like how you would do this and that. And so it was like trying to bring all this realism into this fantastical world and it truly was the greatest.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:25] I mean dragon riding is a risky business. I mean you need like a harness you need to like have a strong bond with your dragon. You have to like know how to navigate and like sometimes you fall off and you know it gets wild.
Annalee: [00:01:39] You are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. And today we are talking about dragons and dragon riders and we're going to be joined by the incredible Moniquill Blackgoose, author of To Shape a Dragon's Breath. And later in the episode we're going to talk about an important, important subject, which is: dragon sex.
[00:02:02] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of a book that's coming out in June or might already be out by the time you're listening to this called Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:15] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My most recent book is Promises Stronger than Darkness.
Annalee: [00:02:21] Also on our mini episode next week we'll be talking about how the tech industry is producing even more dystopian science fiction, masquerading as economic futurism, and it's all about what will happen to San Francisco when a group called The Gray Shirts take over.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:39] By the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and we don't have any giant corporate overlords or gray shirts or like tech billionaires funding us. We're just funded by you, our listeners. And like the way we do that is we have a Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And you know, if you can give us a few bucks a month, whatever you can afford, it all goes back into us making this podcast and keeping it going. And you know, we have a Discord. We post mini episodes every other week that are just for our Patreon supporters. And we really appreciate you and your support. So if you want to be part of our community, check us out at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:03:20] Okay, let's get into dragons.
[00:03:20] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:03:55] Now we're super excited to talk to Moniquill Blackgoose, author of To Shape a Dragon's Breath, which was I think both of our favorite novels last year.
Annalee: [00:04:03] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:04] Moniquill Blackgoose is an enrolled member of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe and a lineal descendant of Ousamequin Massasoit. She's an avid costumer and an active member of the Steampunk community. She's blogged, essayed and discussed extensively across many platforms, the depictions of indigenous and indigenous coded characters in sci-fi and fantasy. Thanks for joining us, Moniquill.
Moniquill: [00:04:25] Lovely to be here.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:27] So one thing that we've noticed is that there seems to be like kind of a trend right now of like dragon rider books, especially Dragonrider Academy books. Obviously, there's Fourth Wing, there's your book. Why do you think that there's so many books on this lately? Why is this kind of a happening trend?
Moniquill: [00:04:42] I honestly don't know why it's a happening trend. I know why I got into it. And because I wanted to write a school book that was directly opposed to Harry Potter. And I've wanted to do that since like 2007.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:55] Nice.
Annalee: [00:04:57] Much appreciated.
Moniquill: [00:04:58] I knew I wanted to write a dragon book because I am a huge fan of the Pern universe. That was a huge part of my childhood and my teen years.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:08] We were just talking about Pern.
Annalee: [00:05:10] Yeah, I wonder if I mean, this is the thing about dragons is that they can be a lot of different things and a lot of stories. And I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how you see dragons and in your work, but also in general and maybe how Pern influenced them.
Moniquill: [00:05:26] Well, Pern was a game changer in how dragons like dragons as bond creatures, as opposed to they were mostly enemies in earlier texts,
Annalee: [00:05:36] Yeah, like giant monsters.
Moniquill: [00:05:38] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:39] Yeah. They're sort of kaiju. Yeah.
Moniquill: [00:05:42] Is everybody familiar with the mythological term transformer? As in like this mythological archetype, the transformer is a kind of character archetype.
[00:05:51] I kind of see dragons as filling that slot. You can put whatever you want on them. Like my dragons in my universe are different than other dragons and other universes. They breathe alchemy. They are more animalistic. They're not fully cognizant human like intelligence creatures. Although they are smarter than a lot of humans, especially in the Western world, give them credit for in my universe. They're an excellent placeholder thing and they're one of the few things that occur in both European cultures and Native American cultures. We have dragon myths here.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:30] Yeah. There's dragon myths everywhere, I guess. We're like basically like obviously Asia has a ton. I mean, they're kind of a universal signifier.
Moniquill: [00:06:38] You find dragon myths where you find dinosaur bones.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:44] Yeah. Interesting.
Annalee: [00:06:45] Like what are some of the differences between dragon myths in like Eastern East Coast indigenous stories versus in like your standard kind of like... I feel like the standard Western myth is now embodied by Smaug the dragon. Like the JRR Tolkien. Classic red dragon with a horde.
Moniquill: [00:07:05] I actually only know a lot of dragon myths from the Great Lakes region because a lot of my own tribes mythology has been lost because of genocide. But in the Great Lakes, they're often very wise. They're often opposed to Thunderbird. And they often had access to lots of copper, which you can steal from them or usually through cleverness and trickery.
[00:07:34] No one ever kills dragons in the stories that I know anyway. It's more, this is a dangerous animal and you'll have to work around that. How can you prove yourself to be clever, strong, etc. to take the copper from them away.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:55] I wonder why it's copper.
Moniquill: [00:07:57] Because copper is what you find in the Great Lakes region. And it's very useful for making arrowheads and pots and stuff.
Annalee: [00:08:03] Yeah, it's a good metal. Why did you want to have dragons as bond creatures in the sort of Pern tradition? Like what, why did you kind of morph it into that?
Moniquill: [00:08:12] That's kind of just where the story started for me. I wrote a really long essay at one point before I started this book about... If there wasn’t magic - if magic didn’t change how colonization happened - what would be the point?
[00:08:28] Which is a thing that I see a lot in Native American things not written by Native Americans. When you see characters written by white people. I'll just go ahead and write it. And I wanted to confront that and say that if there had been dragons, yes, it would be very different. I specifically want to deal with colonialism on the East Coast because that's where I’m from. And to set it up, like we're in a bad place when we start. And the story throughout the next two books is going to be climbing back out of that bad start.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:08] Interesting.
Moniquill: [00:09:09] Yeah. And the return of dragons is kind of the turning point on which history will pivot.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:16] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:09:17] Well, I feel like, I mean, most famously, like the Temeraire series does this, you know, kind of reimagining all kinds of different colonial...
Moniquill: [00:09:27] I love the Temeraire series.
Annalee: [00:09:27] I do too. I'm like very pro.
Moniquill: [00:09:30] And I understand entirely how it came to be because it was very much want to write Master and Commander fan fiction and there's dragons. So the entire world history has happened somehow exactly up to that point.
Annalee: [00:09:41] Yeah, it was all the same.
Moniquill: [00:09:43] And I get that as a premise, but I don't get how that would happen. My world history diverges in the late Cretaceous.
Annalee: [00:09:52] Ooh, really? Wait, okay. I'm sorry. Record scratch for me.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:56] Yeah, no, we need to know more about this.
Moniquill: [00:10:00] None of the characters know this, by the way, and they won't within the book. This is...
Annalee: [00:10:04] I want to hear about the late Cretaceous.
Moniquill: [00:10:06] Oh, aliens turned up and made dragons. Then the K.T. event happened. They scrapped the project and left. The dragons we have today are what's left of that.
Annalee: [00:10:15] Oh, interesting. And so are they explicitly connected with dinosaurs?
Moniquill: [00:10:19] Not that any of my characters in universe would know, but yes. They share a lot of genetic components with dinosaurs.
Annalee: [00:10:26] This is the best lore drop.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:28] Yeah, I had no idea that there were aliens.
Moniquill: [00:10:32] The aliens will not show up anytime in the books. If I set other things in this universe farther into the future, like in the equivalent of the 20th and 21st century, they might know this.
Annalee: [00:10:42] Interesting.
Moniquill: [00:10:43] But the level of science currently in the 1840s world, there's no way that anyone would have discovered this.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:50] So how do you see the existence of dragons kind of changing the course of colonization? Obviously, like we wanted to talk to you about your world-building in general - which is so fascinating. So, we’d like to hear more about how you came up with that.
Moniquill: [00:11:02] They're kind of a microcosm of cultural attitudes and cultures of sustaining versus cultures of conquest. Whereas lots of Europe is very focused on resource acquisition and harvest. Whereas most cultures on Turtle Island are more about sustaining in the spot that you're in, it's not about conquest or expansion. It's about thinking seven generations into the future. And I wanted to see how would that affect how you treat dragons in your society? How would you use dragons in your society? The two stories that the characters tell, Anequs tells the story to the egg, and then Strida tells the story of how the Anglish think they got dragons, and the very stark contrast between the attitudes there was very deliberate.
[00:11:58] This is ultimately a story of cultures clashing on the fundamentals, on what it means to be human, on what our responsibilities are to each other and to the planet, and all that kind of thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:10] Yeah, so how did you come up with the alternate history of the Anglish and the notion of a pagan colonizing force instead of a Christian colonizing force? It was all so fascinating. I want to hear where that came from and how you came up with that.
Moniquill: [00:12:25] It actually came from I wanted a universe in which the Roman Empire never happened and Christianity never got out of its cradle. Who would be the next contender for conquering Europe? And I decided it would be the Vikings. The Norse folks had a vast extensive network all up the major rivers of Europe. And if there were no Romans to have Romanized, you know, they would have still been at the Stone Age level of technology, the Picts and the Celts and the Saxons. So when the Vikings stroll up, it's pretty easy for them to impose their culture on everybody.
Annalee: [00:13:09] I mean, also like Stone Age technology is pretty great. I don't want to cast aspersions on Stone Age technology here.
Moniquill: [00:13:19] But particularly voting, the Vikings were very good at this compared to the rest of Europe at the time.
Annalee: [00:13:27] And they were expansionist.
Moniquill: [00:13:28] And they were expansionist. And if we got them well into the Mediterranean, and there was nobody standing in their way. That's kind of how my universe is set up.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:39] So you mentioning Vikings and also talking about like cultures that see dragons as like a form of... as conquest versus sustaining makes me wonder if like you were influenced by the How to Train Your Dragon movies.
Moniquill: [00:13:53] I wasn't because this is this universe is older than that for me. But I think it's really cool. And I don't mind the comparison because those are very fun movies.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:04] Yeah, I love those movies. I just finally saw them recently.
Annalee: [00:14:08] So you also were talking a little bit about the difference between how we see indigenous characters interacting with their dragons and versus the Viking folks, the Northern Europeans. Also, there's a lot of science in this book, which I think is another way that you're kind of disturbing some of the tropes that are typical in dragon stories in the West.
Moniquill: [00:14:31] I studied so much organic chemistry for this.
Annalee: [00:14:33] Yeah. So tell us about that. Like tell us about bringing the science in.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:37] Yeah.
Moniquill: [00:14:39] All of the skill to craft actually works. I have made sure with the stoichiometry.
Annalee: [00:14:44] Awesome.
Moniquill: [00:14:46] The ultimate thing that dragon breath does is it rips atoms apart. And then through the use of the patterns - in Anglish culture the skiltas, and in indigenous cultures the dances - and I'm sure in other parts of the world, other things. It is very much about making patterns that dragons can recognize from above. And I would love to open my world up to be more collaborative and have other authors come in with their own cultural ideas, because I can't study everybody else's culture. I wouldn't I wouldn't want to impose.
Annalee: [00:15:22] Yeah.
Moniquill: [00:15:24] I don't have any knowledge of what Asia is doing in my universe. I do know that most of South America is way higher tech because they got earlier access to Polynesians, because if you have dragons, you can get even further with your amazing navigational technologies.
Annalee: [00:15:45] Something that I think both of us were really curious about is like, well, what's happening in the West of the landmass? We’re on the East Coast, you just said it's the 1840s. So this is in U.S. history, of course, this is the very beginning of the white settler wars in the West. Yeah.
Moniquill: [00:16:04] The Europeans have not been successful in crossing the Mississippi at all. And they won't be. The city of Cahokia is still there.
Annalee: [00:16:12] Who's living there? The Cahokians, I guess.
Moniquill: [00:16:15] Mississippi.
Annalee: [00:16:17] All right. So Mississippian culture did not go away.
Moniquill: [00:16:20] Yeah, it just continuously evolved into I mean, it never... The history of Cahokia is something that I could go off on a huge tangent about.
Annalee: [00:16:27] Me too. I've heard a lot about it. So that's why I'm like, yes, tell me more. Yeah.
Moniquill: [00:16:34] I'm largely not going to be talking about that in the trilogy. In the trilogy, I'm going to be dealing with the East Coast and Great Lakes region and parts of Canada.
Annalee: [00:16:41] Cool.
Moniquill: [00:16:42] Because that is my wheelhouse. That is the people that I know in the cultures I'm familiar enough with to feel comfortable writing. I don't have a whole lot of knowledge of Plains cultures and West Coast cultures. I would not feel comfortable writing from the point of view of like a Diné character or an Apache character. That's not my wheelhouse.
Annalee: [00:17:05] But I like that you were like, well, then we'll just leave them sovereign. There, you know, that's great. Yeah. Yeah.
Moniquill: [00:17:12] The Europeans just have not gotten there.
Annalee: [00:17:13] This is a world where the frontier, the quote unquote frontier remained the frontier. The United States never, you know, pushed its boundaries beyond what it had promised in the 1830s.
Moniquill: [00:17:27] Yeah. The large flight going on that we're talking about in books two and three is expansion from the St. Lawrence River system. Because that's the original way that the Vikings came into the inland. They came into the Great Lakes and the East Coast, a little bit. Vaskosish, the “Sportugal” end of Europe has taken over the southern part of the United States: the Virginia, Florida, et cetera area. And when we talk about the Battle of the Polvara, that's the Potomac, on the map. So everything below that is very Vaskos.
Annalee: [00:18:08] And so have you drawn maps? Like, is this all stuff that you?
Moniquill: [00:18:12] Oh, yeah, they're in the book.
Annalee: [00:18:13] But as you're writing it, like, I mean, there's maps in the book, but like when you're writing it, you haven't. Did you make the maps that are in the book or?
Moniquill: [00:18:20] I made terrible sketches that wonderful artists made into maps.
Annalee: [00:18:25] So you are sketching as you're writing.
Moniquill: [00:18:27] But yes, I outlined and it is almost exactly earth, which makes it more fun for me to determine how the cultural shifting and spreading went. Europe looks very, very different and I largely won't get into it.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:43] Yeah, makes sense.
Annalee: [00:18:45] I think marginalized Europe.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:47] So I wanted to talk more about how dragons change history in your series. Like, so dragons are a communication technology or they're a long range, like, they provide more cultural iterative change. You talked about how people from Polynesia are able to reach South America more easily because they have dragons. And I'm curious about the other ways in which dragons kind of empower people who maybe weren't as empowered in our version of history. And also, do dragons have something to do with the Roman Empire no longer being a thing in your universe?
Moniquill: [00:19:16] I didn't actually write that history. I just determined the Romans never happened. What would happen instead?
Charlie Jane: [00:19:22] Makes sense.
Moniquill: [00:19:23] It's entirely possible. I am a huge lover of fanfiction. I don't read fanfiction for my own works, but I encourage people to make it. Like, I won't get involved because obviously I can't, but I invite others to, you know, if you have questions like this, answer them yourself. Yes. Because I haven't thought of a lot of the rest of the world. My story is very tightly focused on New England. We're not getting out of upstate New York in this story.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:52] Right, right, right. I guess I'm just wondering about the other ways in which dragons kind of like can serve to like help people or the thing you said about Polynesians really interested me. And I'm wondering other ways in which dragons maybe assist in sort of cultural or economic or social progress.
Moniquill: [00:20:08] There's definitely a lot more connectivity in this world. Everybody is much more aware of everybody else existing because at some point somebody might have turned up on a dragon. Yeah. We've unlocked flight very early in the technology tree, but also when you have different humans meeting, you end up with conflict. So we've had a lot of different conflicts and wars and a lot of the most egregious exploitation can't really have happened to the same way. It's harder to have intergenerational chattel slavery in a much more connected world because more people will have a problem with that and come and fight you over it.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:50] Interesting. Huh.
Annalee: [00:20:52] Yeah, that is really interesting. Okay, I have one extremely dragon-centric question, which is, so as you were talking about all this stuff and you were like dragons are kind of like bond creatures. And I mean, it raises this question of like, well, are the dragons people? Like how do the dragons feel about this? Like dragons are treated like they're mounts, right? They're not enslaved, but they're not free.
Moniquill: [00:21:19] They're animals. Animals are a kind of people.
Annalee: [00:21:23] So they're like cows. Yeah, that's what I mean. They're people. They're like a moose or like...
Moniquill: [00:21:29] Dragons are very much like wolves or bears or dogs. They exist on their own terms for their own reasons. And humans can have relationships with them. That's the indigenous view.
Annalee: [00:21:39] Yeah.
Moniquill: [00:21:40] Is that the idea of owning another creature is just gross and anathema. That beings don't exist for use. And that goes for plants, animals, the land itself. It exists for its own reasons. And you also exist and can have a relationship. And you can do that wrong. You can be a jerk in your relationships. And most immorality is about not being a jerk in your relationships with everyone and everything. Whereas the European model is very much conquest-based. We've tamed these animals. We've conquered this land. We've brought civilization. We've chopped down this forest and made the land good for humans. Whereas we left the forest there and grew the trees we wanted to grow and made paths and continue to utilize this area rather than leveling it. The idea of what makes civilization of what the point of wilderness is.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:49] 100%. Yeah. Now, and I really wanted one of the many, many things I love about your book - and I'm so excited for the sequels - is that perspective that you bring in there. Yeah. I can't wait to see where it goes. Moniquill, can you tell us where folks can find you on the Internet?
Moniquill: [00:23:04] I'm on Tumblr and that's pretty much the only place I'm on. I've got email and I've got Tumblr. I don't do Twitter or Instagram or Spotify or any I don't even know what ones there are at this point. I am still mourning the death of AIM, AOL Instant Messenger. That was my go to for many, many years. They can find me on Discord and no matter where you go, if you look for Moniquill, you will probably find me because I've been using that name pretty exclusively since 2001. So if you see someone you think might be me, drop me a line. It's probably me.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:39] I will see you on Tumblr.
Moniquill: [00:23:40] Okay.
Annalee: [00:23:42] Do you have like a time when the second book in?
Moniquill: [00:23:45] I am still working on the second book. I've got a solid 60,000 words of it done. It is past when it's supposed to have been done, but I hit some pacing snags. In theory, we're going for I think either fall or spring of next year, but don't quote me on that.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:07] Nice.
Annalee: [00:24:08] Okay.
Moniquill: [00:24:09] Follow my Tumblr and it will give you very updated, very detailed updates.
Annalee: [00:24:13] Amazing. Well, I can't wait to read it. Well, thanks so much for taking the time. Yeah, thank you so much for talking with us. This was awesome.
Moniquill: [00:24:20] Thank you very much.
[00:24:22] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:24] All right. So Annalee, what makes dragons so sexy?
Annalee: [00:24:28] Well, it's a complicated question because there are a lot of dragon stories, and I'm going to say almost exclusively this is in books and short stories, not really in movies, where you're seeing basically what Moniquill was talking about earlier: dragons that are bonded dragons who have psychic connections or just emotional connections with their riders. And she was mentioning Pern. And of course, famously in the Pern series, dragons, you know, they're wild creatures, right? And so they're just like fucking whenever they feel like it.
[00:25:10] But because they have an emotional connection with their riders and a psychic connection, when the dragons have sex in the Anne McCaffrey Perniverse, the humans who ride the dragons are forced to have sex. Basically, like they they're overwhelmed by the dragon's feelings. And so when they're dragons, fuck the humans, fuck. And I feel like that's really the moment when dragon sex gets popularized.
[00:25:35] I'm sure there's tons of dragon sex going all the way back into the mists of time. But that's when in the fantasy sci-fi world, you start to see this trope. And so I think my short answer to your question is what makes dragons sexy is this idea that humans can kind of gain a connection to them and channel their magnificent wild sluttiness and kind of act it out on their own.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:05] So dragons are kind of a primal force in a way. They're a primal force that includes this kind of sexual potency. And, you know, in the Pern universe, you're psychically bonded with them. And so their sexuality becomes your sexuality. It's kind of feels a little bit like vampires in a way because vampires also have this sort of sexual potency. That anybody who's connected to them will be kind of become part of or be affected by.
Annalee: [00:26:30] Yeah, I mean, it's similar. Although, of course, vampires are basically, you know, they're human size, they're former humans. But I think it's a similar idea. Like it's this kind of primal force and it involves kind of mind control.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:45] And so it's like when women start writing more fantasy books or becoming more prominent in fantasy, you start getting these kinds of fantasies being foregrounded that are like different from the kinds of fantasies about dragons or vampires that we'd had previously. Like we're talking about specifically like Anne McCaffrey and like I brought up Anne Rice kind of obliquely.
[00:27:03] And so, you know, so you have the psychically bonded dragon sex. I know that you and I also were both obsessed with the Gideon Cross's Dragon Temple saga, which was a book...
Annalee: [00:27:14] Touched by Venom.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:15] Touched by Venom. That's right. I really loved that book. It was actually very controversial at the time. I feel like there was a lot of controversy around that book. There were a lot of debates about it in places like Strange Horizons and elsewhere. And everybody we knew was kind of shouting about it. And it was like bringing out a lot of that sexual potency of dragons into kind of mainstream fiction and more into the foreground. Because one of the things that happens is that dragon venom gives men these really powerful erections. It's like this very kind of strong sexuality that comes from dragons. And then later in the book, there actually is kind of sexuality involving the dragons, right?
Annalee: [00:27:54] Yeah, I mean, Janine Cross, I would say, is kind of the next generation. And so she's not dealing with the idea of psychic connections to dragons so much as the dragons are part of the agricultural life of these communities. And so they're raised because they can be ridden like horses, but they also lay eggs. And so people eat dragon eggs all the time.
It's like a major source of protein. So they're like, like I said, they're part of the agricultural life of the community, and so they’re raised because they can be ridden like horses, but they also lay eggs, and so people eat dragon eggs all the time. It’s like a major source of protein. So like I said, they’re a part of the agricultural life of the community, but they also produce venom, which is kind of, which is a drug, basically. And the drug makes you hallucinate, but it also makes you really horny. And the more you're exposed to dragons, like if you're a dragon rider, you're just constantly exposed to this venom in a variety of ways. And so the dragon riders are in this kind of semi-drugged out, state where they are kind of psychically connected to their dragons, but they're also just always having sex with each other.
[00:29:01] I mean, it is kind of horny, but it's also really about colonial power and how the people who own the dragons are keeping people in line, basically, by feeding them this venom and also by kind of preventing certain classes of people from having access to dragons. So I think the Dragon Temple saga had this really nasty reception in the fantasy community, partly because it kind of didn't follow the Pern tropes. It really overturned them.
[00:29:35] And also people just felt like it was too gross and smutty. And they kind of read the opening chapter, which is full of people walking around with giant erections. And then they missed out on the whole anti-colonial message overall of the series that was all about, you know, like actually the way that the colonizers treat the dragons is destroying them and killing them off. And they have to kind of learn how to recreate the dragon's natural life cycles.
[00:30:03] So there's also, I would say, the other big sort of next generation dragon story or just dragon story cycle are the Temeraire books, the Naomi Novik books, which I mean, the Dragon Temple saga is like this weird blip because of course they were not very popular and they were critically - I would say shit on, even though they're great. The Temeraire books were as big or bigger than the Pern books. And I think have really changed the way we see dragons. And they also overturn a lot of the Pern narratives.
[00:30:37] The dragons are fully people. They talk and have opinions and prefer different kinds of cuisine. And like in some nations they have civil rights and in other nations they don't. They become kind of an allegory for a marginalized group, but they also become participants in every nation that they're in. And the main character throughout all of those books, he is a dragon rider. He has a very special dragon who's extremely smart. Like it's just a characteristic of this dragon's species or subspecies or breed or whatever that they're like, you know, really great at like math and philosophy and stuff.
[00:31:20] And so it's a relationship that is as much as possible a relationship of mutualism rather than like the dragon being an overwhelming force that forces you to have sex. It's much more like Temeraire the dragon is first kind of like a kid. Like the dragon rider has to raise Temeraire and then Temeraire becomes just like a member of the family.
[00:31:44] But there is some weird sex stuff because of course the dragons have to be bred like horses, even though they're also people. So there's a lot of like dragon arranged marriages in a way because the humans are constantly trying to pair up dragons that are really powerful because the dragons are also warships. So Temeraire's rider is always trying to hook Temeraire up with like appropriate dragon girlfriends.
[00:32:10] There's actually a scene. I thought I had maybe hallucinated this scene and then I was talking to people online about it and they were like, no, you did not hallucinate it. This really happens. There's a scene when Temeraire is going through adolescence and starts masturbating. And his rider like finds him like in a pool with like a bunch of goop in the pool and it's kind of like, okay, so Temeraire had a little spooge in the pool there. And I know I was like, wow, that's like on one hand kind of weirdly wholesome, but also strange way to interact with dragon sexuality.
[00:32:46] So dragon sexuality is kind of like normalized and humanized in the Temeraire books a lot. It's like you caught your teenage kid or whatever masturbating is like, it's kind of the vibe of that, that whole scene. So I think that there's a big shift toward definitely, of course, these dragons are formidable and, you know, win wars for the humans, but they're also just people.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:13] We kind of talked about this a little bit with Moniquill earlier, but they're one of the big divisions with dragons is are they beasts and are they like animals that we can, you know, that we can kind of work with? The same way we work with horses or dogs or whatever. Are they people? Are they people who have language? Are they, or, you know, they could also be gods who are kind of in a weird way, like people, but extra powerful. But, you know, do they, do they have, do they have language? Do they have point of view?
[00:33:39] And this really becomes important the moment you start thinking about sexuality, because obviously we, for very good reasons, we have a lot of taboos around like bestiality and about around sexuality involving not human animals that aren't capable of speaking or having consent. And we already talked a little bit about how the Pern books have very kind of questionable consent in a lot of ways.
Annalee: [00:33:59] I would say completely questionable. I would say there's a lot of clearly coerced sex that's kind of treated as sexy, but is obviously coerced.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:08] Yeah, that's a little problematic. It's a lot problematic. And so, you know, one way around that is to just make the dragons be people like, you know, and another way around it is to do what, you know, sort of Game of Thrones does where dragons are animals and there is a lot of sexy stuff around the dragons, like when Daenerys first hatches her dragon eggs, the way she does it is by like getting naked in a fire and like running around with these eggs. And then, you know, she emerges from the fire naked with baby dragons and it's like, you know, and there's definitely a lot of like sexual imagery that's peripheral to the dragons in Game of Thrones. And there's sex like up the wazoo in Game of Thrones in general, but the dragons themselves are just, they're like horses. They're just, you know, sex happens adjacent to them and they make people powerful and that power that they give people allows them to be more sexually, you know, plausible. But, but the dragons themselves are not sexy.
[00:35:05] And then, yeah, you have, you have things where the dragons are just like, it's a teenage kid who is discovering sexuality.
Annalee: [00:35:12] Yeah, it's a little awkward, especially because they're so big.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:17] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:35:17] So there's the distinction between like dragon as animal, which also I would say you see in a lot of books that try to imagine dragons as like the objects of scientific study. So there's Marie Brennan's series, which starts with a book called A Natural History of Dragons. And that's purely about the dragons are animals. They're part of the natural world. It's a very well conceived understanding of how dragons might fit into the ecosystem. And like there's big dragons and then there's like little tiny dragons that are like kind of insect dragons. Marie Brennan loves to do that kind of scientific world building and she does a great job there.
[00:36:00] Of course, there's romance in those books, but it isn't really like to do with the dragons. But the other distinction that I think is really interesting to think about really grows out of Rebecca Yarrow's series, which starts with Fourth Wing, which I would say kind of this is now the sort of third generation of dragon books after Pern, right? So it's still in the same wheelhouse of you ride on the dragons. The dragons are kind of weaponized animals and they bond with their riders. And I would say the axis that that creates is I want to call it like Smaug versus Tern.
[00:36:40] So Smaug is the evil red dragon from The Hobbit. Super iconic. It behaves exactly the way an old fashioned dragon is supposed to. It kills people. It lights towns on fire. It has a giant horde of gold in its secret mountain lair. And it is very clever. Like it loves riddles and puns. It can speak, but it is this kind of terrifying stranger who just visits harm upon people and who has to be slain. Moniquill talked about that, about how there was this idea in the West that like you find a dragon and you kill it. And that's the whole point.
[00:37:18] And then Tern is the terrifying, huge, powerful dragon that the main character in Fourth Wing bonds with. But of course, to her, Tern is a daddy. It's very much like imagine a perfect dad who is protective, but also supportive. Like Tern always comes to her rescue, of course, and like helps her. The main character has a disability that makes it really hard for her to stay in the saddle on the dragon. So the dragon helps her come up with like ways to work around that and stay in the saddle and like supports her and isn't like, you know, oh, well, because you're disabled, you should die, which is kind of the attitude at the school where she's at, that people just feel like if you're disabled, that you're worthless and should just die during dragon exercises.
[00:38:09] So there's the terrifying stranger of Smaug. And then there's the good big daddy of Tern. And that's kind of our new axis of dragon sensibility. And obviously Smaug doesn't get to have sex with anybody. Tern, when we meet Tern, has a long term female partner dragon. So Tern is like, again, a daddy, like a married dad, very wholesome.
[00:38:36] And there is a scene where Tern and his wife, female companion dragon, I can't remember if they're technically married or if they're mates or something like that. But anyway, they're fucking. And the main character ends up kind of having slightly Pernish sex with the smoking hot, brooding guy that she kind of didn't want to get together with, who's bonded with the Tern's wife.
[00:39:00] And that ends up being OK. Like this is spoilers for a book that's been out for a while. Like it winds up being an enemies to lovers romance. That's like really genuinely good. Like I loved that book and I felt like the romance worked out really great. Doesn't turn out that the guy is really secretly shitty or like a jerk. He actually is secretly a great guy.
[00:39:20] So in Fourth Wing, the dragons are people. They do have psychic bonded sex, but the humans do have agency. Like they aren't just forced to fuck. Like the humans wanted to have sex. Yeah, like they, you know, it's, they kind of needed the dragon horniness to like push them over the border there. But it is something that they that they did want.
[00:39:44] And indeed, Tern, like I said, is kind of like part of the family. And so dragons are imagined as relatives, like part of the human community. So you see a little bit of this in Temeraire, but the dragons are still segregated. Whereas in Fourth Wing, I feel like the dragons, they are segregated off in the stables, I guess, when they're not being ridden. But they're free. Like they're able to go off and do whatever they want. They're not like tied up or put into a basement or something like that.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:13] Yeah, I actually wanted to shout out a book that I read recently, which I really loved, which was So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole, which is a young adult novel, which has a lot of the same kind of tropes that we've been talking about.
[00:40:25] The sister of the main character bonds with the dragon unexpectedly, that actually is like a dragon belonging to the colonizers who they had been driven out of her island home with the help of the gods. And then she bonds with this dragon and gains like a psychic link with the dragon and its other rider because dragons have two riders.
Annalee: [00:40:46] Oh, cool.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:47] The other rider is this chick that she already had a crush on. And now they're psychically linked and she can't let this other chick that know that she has a crush on her. So that's really awkward because they're telepathically communicating all the time and stuff is bleeding through the telepathic link.
[00:41:02] And it's... I like that version of it, like especially where it's like very sweet, very sensual. Nobody is like forced to get together. They still have a lot of agency in how much they share through their psychic link. And the lesbian romance between these two people who are on opposite sides of a conflict but have to ride the same dragon together is super well handled. I really loved that. I thought it was really fun.
[00:41:24] I feel like what I'm hearing is that we are kind of taking what people liked about Pern, the bonded dragons, the kind of romancy stuff, the psychic link, all that stuff. But we're kind of stripping away the horrible consent issues that made it so squicky for our forebears.
Annalee: [00:41:44] For dragons. I think that's totally right. And I mean, that makes sense. Because like I said, we're now in the third generation of bonded dragon stories that have romance: what would be called romantasy, now, and what really could have been called romantasy back in the Pern days. I mean, it's kind of treading the same territory for sure.
[00:42:03] The other thing I wanted to mention, maybe to finish up here, is that I think that what you're seeing in these third generation dragon novels is also pushing the envelope on how we represent sexuality among humans.
[00:42:18] One of the things about the Pern books that a lot of people liked at the time was that they do represent homosexuality. They do it in a really messed up way. It's super, super problematic. But remember, this was like the 70s and we didn't have a lot of representation of gay sex. And it is normalized in the books. Again, it is not the way we would want to represent it now. There's all kinds of problems, but it is normal. Characters will be having gay sex. They are not cast out. They're not viewed as second class. It's just something that happens.
[00:42:54] And what I think is super intriguing about Fourth Wing is that, again, it's an ambiently queer book. Characters are, most of them are bisexual. The main character, Violet, I mean, we don't know yet if she, I don't know yet if she's bisexual. She might be. She's really mostly into this one guy. But unlike other dragon riders, Violet bonds with two dragons. And that's not typical. Like, in fact, I think it's unheard of.
[00:43:24] Basically, it's one human, one dragon. But she bonds with two, which creates this kind of found family that has, I don't want to say it's polyamorous, but it gets out of the binary. There's not this idea that it's like a kind of monogamous bond between human and dragon. Humans, we see, can bond with multiple dragons and the two dragons are very different. So there's that.
[00:43:49] And also, of course, the dragon psychic bond is also shared between, like, her dragon, the dragon's mate, and then Violet's boyfriend is now psychically connected to her through this whole psychic bonding thing because the two mates are bonded. Anyway, my point is that, like, there's a lot of people in on this relationship that has horny overtones.
[00:44:13] And Moniquill, Blackgoose's novel, To Shape a Dragon's Breath, is explicitly polyamorous.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:19] Yes, it is.
Annalee: [00:44:19] The main character has a male partner and a female partner. It’s completely normalized. It's not treated as, like, this is some strange perversion that's brought about by dragon connection. That's who she is. She comes from an indigenous culture where that's completely unremarkable and she sees no reason why she shouldn't behave that way.
[00:44:39] But it is made possible in many ways by her connection to the world of dragons because dragon riders are so rare and important that she can kind of get away with stuff that a typical indigenous person in this world wouldn't be able to get away with. I mean, she is constantly being beset by people who say that she shouldn't be allowed to ride a dragon. She's not worthy. There's something wrong with her. But still, she occupies a position of slight privilege.
[00:45:09] And so, again, this is this third generation of dragon bonded books is saying, like, all right, you know, we started out by saying that our connection to these wild creatures helped us normalize homosexuality. And now the connection with these wild creatures helps us normalize non-monogamous relationships, you know, relationships where love and romantic love go beyond a dyad.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:32] Yeah. And actually, I do want to bring it back slightly to vampires because I feel like vampires have a similar kind of thing of like breaking down some of these taboos and some of these boundaries. And like, because it's a magical fang dude, you can kind of get past some of the, you know, I think it's just that's one of the things that fantasy could do for us.
Annalee: [00:45:53] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:54] I think it's a thing to celebrate about fantasy.
Annalee: [00:45:56] Yeah, I think so too. And I think that also remembering that humans, there's no human exceptionalism, like humans are wild animals too. I mean, maybe we don't, we've domesticated ourselves, but we're still just animals. And like we, you know, we have a lot of animal feelings that don't obey what religion and culture suggest we should obey. So giving into the dragon is in a way, a kind of freedom.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:24] Hell yeah. All right. You've been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. If you just somehow stumbled on us, you can subscribe. But then you can get this awesomeness every other week in your podcast app or whatever. And if you like us, please leave a review on Apple or wherever else you can leave reviews. You can find us on Mastodon, on Patreon, on Instagram, and probably in a few other places.
[00:46:46] Thanks so much to our wonderful, incredible producer and engineer, Nay Harmon. Thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for the music. And thanks again to you for listening. If you're a patron, we'll see you in Discord and we'll have a mini episode next week. Otherwise we'll be back in two weeks with another episode.
[00:47:02] Bye.
Annalee: [00:47:03] Bye.
[00:47:04] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]