TheLastStarMaker's Clan

In creating the Pern setting, McCaffrey set out to subvert the clichés associated with dragons in European folklore and in modern fantasy fiction. Pernese dragons are similar to traditional European dragons in the fact that they can breathe fire and resemble great lizards or dinosaurs with wings, but the resemblance ends there. Unlike most dragons in previous Western literature, Pernese dragons are entirely friendly to humanity. Furthermore, they are not magical at all. Instead, they are a heavily genetically modified species based on one of Pern's native life-forms, the fire-lizard.

The Pernese use intelligent firebreathing dragons and their riders to fight Thread. The riders have a telepathic bond with their dragons, formed by Impression at the dragon's hatching. Later books deal with the initial colonization of Pern and the creation of the dragons through genetic manipulation.

On canon Pern, barring rare mutations, female dragons and fire-lizards are always either green or gold in color, while males are blue, brown or bronze.

Gold dragons, also called queens, are the largest dragons (40–45 feet or meters long) and the only fertile females. Gold dragons are by far the rarest dragons on Pern, at just less than one percent of the population. They are dominant over all other colors; any non-gold dragon will invariably obey a queen's orders, even against the wishes of its own rider. Queens are incapable of digesting firestone and producing flame (see below); however, they do fight Thread – they fly in the lowest wing, with their riders armed with specially-designed flamethrowers to flame any Thread missed by the wings flying above. An egg that is going to hatch a gold dragon is notable: It is gold-colored and larger than other eggs. A gold dragon will always Impress a heterosexual female and are believed by most Weyrfolk to prefer young women who were not raised in the Weyr.

Bronze dragons are the largest males (35–45 feet or meters long), although they are generally significantly smaller than the queens. Bronzes account for about five percent of all dragons. They are almost always the ones to mate with queens, as the smaller colors generally lack the stamina to chase and catch the gold dragons when they rise to mate. Due to the 5-1 bronze/gold ratio and the infrequency of gold mating flights, they often mate with greens (the losers of a gold flight almost always seek a green for their needs), but their size often puts them at a disadvantage in chasing the agile, smaller females. The senior bronze of a Weyr is determined through which bronze wins the mating flight of the senior gold. In canon Pern, the rider of a bronze dragon is always a heterosexual male.

Brown dragons are the next largest color (30–40 feet or meters long). About fifteen percent of all dragons are brown. They may occasionally mate with queens, although this is rare, and becomes even more rare as the dragons increase in size; by Ramoth's time in the Ninth Pass it is unheard of. All brown riders in the Pern novels are men; most are heterosexual, but bisexual or "masculine" homosexual brown riders are not rare.

Blue dragons are the smallest males (24–30 feet or meters long) and make up about a third (thirty percent) of all dragons on Pern. They are nearly as agile as greens, but unlike the greens, they often have enough stamina to last for an entire Threadfall. They mate only with greens, as they are simply too small to keep up with a massive queen over a long mating flight. There are few prominent blue dragons or blue riders in the books. Some assume the position of teaching the new riders after their Impression. Canon blue riders are typically homosexual or bisexual, though some are heterosexual. In interviews, McCaffrey stated that homosexual women may be able to Impress a blue dragon. In the later books written with her son, Todd McCaffrey, blue Tazith is ridden by Xhinna, the first female weyrleader and the first female rider of a blue dragon.

Green dragons are the smallest normal color (20–24 feet or meters long), and make up about half of all dragons on Pern (fifty percent). They are female, but unlike the queens, they are infertile—due to the chronic use of firestone—and can produce flame. They are extremely valuable in Threadfall because of their agility, but they lack the stamina to last an entire Fall and generally fly in two or three shifts. Originally, greens Impressed only girls; however, after various natural disasters and plagues decimated Pern's population, women were needed to help repopulate the planet. Since going between during pregnancy can induce miscarriage and because removing pregnant riders from the Wings reduced the effectiveness of the Wings, it became impractical to present large numbers of women as candidates for Impression. Thus, green dragons began Impressing homosexual boys; by the time of the end of the Second Pass, female green riders were becoming rare. By the time of Moreta in the Sixth Pass, female green riders were entirely forgotten, although greens gradually begin Impressing to women again in the Ninth Pass. Females of any sexual orientation may Impress green.

There is only one white dragon mentioned anywhere in the Pern novels: Ruth, whose rider is Lord Jaxom of Ruatha Hold. He is not an albino, as his hide contains very faint patches of all the normal dragon colors. Ruth's egg would not have hatched if Jaxom had not forced it open and released the dragonet from a thick membrane sac; thus, it seems likely that white coloration in dragons is normally a lethal mutation. Although his parents are the largest queen, Ramoth, and largest bronze, Mnementh, in the history of Pern, Ruth is smaller than even a normal green dragon in his time; he is only slightly larger than the largest dragons of the first generation. While his exact length is never specifically mentioned in the books, it does state that he stands higher than a runnerbeast (horse) at the shoulder, extrapolations suggest that he might be 18 feet or meters long. He is male or neuter (undetermined), and assumed sterile, with no urge to mate. Ruth also has the unusual ability to intuitively orient himself in time.
The larger a color is, the less common it is. For instance, there are more blues than browns, and there are more browns than bronzes. Half the dragon population is female, with green dragons being roughly fifty percent of the population and golds being one percent or slightly less.

Riding a larger color of dragon confers higher social status in Pern's extremely hierarchical society, color rankings following the dragons' own strict instinctual hierarchical organization based on fire-lizard structures. Perhaps as a result of this, it is commonly believed that the larger colors are more intelligent, although recent novels imply that this may not be true.

The Pernese believe that chewing firestone makes female dragons sterile; they therefore refuse to allow queens to use it. Greens, on the other hand, are so common that if they produced offspring it would quickly lead to overpopulation. They always chew firestone, and because of their numbers and agility they are vital to any Thread-fighting force. However, Dragonsdawn suggests that Kitti Ping—possibly motivated by old-fashioned ideas about gender roles—deliberately engineered greens to be infertile and gold dragons to be incapable of producing flame in order to protect the gold dragons, the only reproductively fertile females, from the dangers of Thread fighting.

~The information above has been sniped from Wikipedia because I'm lazy~