Amazing video produced by Jessie Gender along with a group of creators whom many of them are from the ** LGBTIAQ+ community** .
I knew from my anthropology class many years ago that George Lucas borrowed concept from the The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
What I did not know is that the author, Joseph Campbell is:
- A misogynist
- An antisemite
- Didn’t research properly
This explains why the hero must be a (white) men.
Carl Jung’s theory about collective unconsciousness and archetypes are also outdated and discarded by psychology.
The archetypes reduce women to “mother”, “Goddess”. etc. but never the hero.
Also, since Jung’s theory categories people neatly into archetypes, those who does not fit social norm (LGBTQIA+ people) were never represented.
When the creation is based on such shaky foundations, no wonder the Star Wars fandom turns out to be racist and misogynist.
Btw, do you know who else’s book borrows heavily from Jung? Jordan Peterson.
According to her, the Dragons of Pern would systematically choose gay riders… then she added some BS on top of that, trying to justify the scientific imperative of having as many dragons as possible… but where is the classist thing coming from?
Only blue and green dragons would systematically choose gay riders, and those were largely considered disposable - although a few appeared in the narrative, most often they were only mentioned in the stats of how many of each colour hatched and how many died. Gold, bronze, and brown dragons wouldn’t choose gay riders, and riders of those dragons were the only ones eligible for any leadership positions. So by default, gay riders were automatically and permanently relegated to subordinate positions due to their sexuality. When you combine dragons being picky about their rider’s sexuality while also insisting that each colour of dragon prefers certain personality types, you end up with some really unfortunate implications. The best thing the Pern fandom did for the fandom was decide that dragons don’t care about someone’s sexuality, severing the implied link between sexuality and competence (since green dragons were persistently described as being flighty, unreliable, and dramatic.)
And the classist elements are there all through the entire series. It’s supposed to be some amazing feminist story because only women can ride gold dragons, and gold dragons are the highest ranking ones. But they’re also only a tiny handful of all dragons, less than 1%, and all the other women on Pern are largely treated like shit because they’re only seen as breeders for the next generation. Conveniently, most gold riders also seemed to come from particular bloodlines, with it being noted that Ruatha Hold in particular provided a lot of them. So basically the message here is that a small portion of women, if they come from sufficiently good bloodlines, are worthy of being treated with respect, but none of the others are.
Pern is absolutely classist as hell, and any stories about characters from lower classes always inevitably end up with them becoming a higher class, whether that’s Impressing a dragon (preferably bronze or gold), joining a crafthall (preferably the Harpers, given that being a musician, archivist, or spy has more “prestige” than being a tanner or blacksmith), or being given land in the Southern Continent to become members of the aristocracy themselves. So one could argue that there’s an aspirational element, but “lower class person can only achieve anything of note if the upper class give them the opportunity to become upper class” is still pretty classist, especially given that with the dragons, it’s related to a genetic trait and also requires a specific combination of sexuality and personality.
There were also specific rules about what colour Pernese people had to be, but because this simultaneously made blonde haired and blue eyed people incredibly rare as well as black people, you can argue the toss about whether Anne McCaffrey was also a racist. Obviously by modern standards, “all the human races interbred so much that everybody averaged out to looking kind of Latino” is not a great look, but it was common in a lot of sci-fi of the 70s as a means of implying that everybody stopped caring about race. But the Ruatha Hold family were specifically established in one of the books as founded by red haired blue eyed people, so Anne McCaffrey’s most favoured family line on Pern also happened to be really, really white…
And the problem is that it’s not just that the world was like this, because obviously what an author writes is different to what they believe. But the portions of the fandom aged 35+, who were active in the fandom in the early days of the internet, can confirm that Anne McCaffrey actually believed it, and regularly attacked fans who didn’t agree with her, either on her forums or through cease and desist letters from her lawyers. (I got one. I was 16.)
Don’t get me wrong, I do love Pern as a setting. I still dabble occasionally, but only because when Anne died, Todd McCaffrey did away with sending threatening letters to any fan who stepped out of line, and the fandom as a whole decided to make Pern less homophobic, less misogynistic, less classist, and less racist. I feel like fans today, who have only experienced the adjustments fandom made to Pern, have no real idea of just how toxic it was in the past.
Ouch. I’m sorry, didn’t know that.
I binge-read a lot of the books in the late 1990s, but didn’t engage with the online fandom. My interpretation was that it depicted a degenerated advanced society that got forced into something like a Medieval structure because of the Fall, with the Southern continent being a chance to escape it and build something different.
Based on IRL observation, it looked plausible that in a world plagued by regular extinction level events, people would fall back to the minimum required for survival.
I think it’s definitely one of those series that looks worse in hindsight - and when we’re adults - than it did in the 90s. But like… it’s one thing to write a society that, due to external factors, has a definite class system, but quite another for the author to reinforce it through their choices - like defaulting to only gold and bronze dragons being worth anything. There were many parts of the narrative where a rider didn’t need a bronze/gold dragon for story reasons (would the events of Dolphins of Pern have been any different if T’lion’s dragon had been green or blue rather than bronze? Would Menolly’s story have been any less compelling if the majority of her firelizards had been green or blue, rather than a largely ignored minority?), so the choice to make sure that a character who is supposed to be sympathetic has the “best” dragon/firelizard colour is very much classism on the author’s part, albeit through the metaphor of an alien species with a caste system.
Agreed. I mostly ignored all of those aspects as part of “suspension of disbelief”… and probably read the books too fast to really reflect on much of the stuff. Also read some of them translated, and others in English while still learning it, so probably missed a lot of the nuances both ways.
With hindsight, what I think looks the worst, is learning that she would C&D anyone for not interpreting them “the right way”. That’s low.
Yep! Especially since most of the people she was threatening were kids. I know there was at least one person, slightly older, who fought it and the matter went to court. I’ve always wondered what the judge thought, having to make a decision regarding an old lady suing a 20-something woman over fictional dragons being depicted in the “wrong” way. The fan won the case, probably because the whole thing was ridiculous.