From the Kidlet Lexicon

[resonant]

I was recommending books to the ten-year-old, and I mentioned Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger. "I think I remember it being a pretty good book," I said, "but I'm not sure, because she also wrote books for adults, and as I remember it, the gender politics were pretty awful."

"What do you mean, gender politics?"

"Well, it's been a long time, but what I remember is that all the women were beautiful and tempestuous, and mostly they were there to be prizes for the men to win. The books weren't very interested in what they wanted, unless it was a man, and they fought over men, but aside from that they didn't really have relationships with each other."

"Oh, yeah, I've read books with women like that. Sugarboxes."

Comments

[giglet]

Huh. I remember thinking that on Menolly's end, it was more along the lines of hero worship (ala Ged for the Archmage in Wizard of Earthsea). But I was also pretty young when I read them.

[sorrel]

Well, that's how I saw it when I read it the first time, too. It's only when I went back to reread them that my squick sensor started going off, and not long after that I read that in the original version, AM had intended to write the two of them into a relationship, until wiser heads prevailed and she changed it. But the sort of... emotional lead-up to that was still there. And looking at the relationship over the Pern series as a whole, she's pretty much always a little uncomfortably close, emotionally. And it never read like she loved him as a surrogate father or a mentor- to me, anyway.