Warning: tender topics ahead.

Firstly, it must be established that there is no good way to define queerness, even in humans. For our purposes here, it covers sexuality, sex, gender, and romantic attraction. Full definitions for these terms would be best found through a search; defining them takes too long.

Let’s begin by quickly describing human queerness: any way in which the above categories vary or mismatch from a perceived cultural norm. This, incidentally, is the same definition we will come to for draconic queerness, but we will have to look closely at our categories.

Straight, Cis Dragons

Look, it's kind of complicated, I can show you a chart if you want, but dragons might have five genders. There are two sex types, but three ways to be male and two ways to be female. Thus, they have either two or five basic genders depending on how nitty gritty you want to get – let's be simple and say since only two sets of pronouns are used for them (he and she), they have two. This is also helpful because they have two orientations, also.

The normative position for a dragon is for their sex to match the expectation for their color; to have the orientation expected for their color/sex; and to have the pronouns associated with these positions also. For example, bronzes are expected to be male, use he/him pronouns, and chase rather than rise.

Queer Dragons

Armed with the knowledge that Anne McCaffrey gave her dragons the minimum possible variation amongst themselves and didn’t like to make queer characters central to the plot, we can assume what canon says is always the case is in fact simply how things are expected to be. Therefore, variations in the normative expectations of color = sex = gender = orientation are queer.

A green who stamps their foot and insists on neuter pronouns, and Chases when they feel the urge as well as Rising, would be considered queer. A bronze who is just like, super girly, would be considered queer. A dragon with an intersex condition (such as the canonical Ruth) would be considered queer. There is a veritable rainbow of possible examples I could give.

Okay… but like, why?

Because you don't know what color will come out of your egg, you might end up writing a queer dragonet – you decide their pronouns in week 3, and of course don't know their color until the end of the game. Weyr sites can be very unfriendly to queer dragons and this will harm your character portability.

If this is a concern for you, don't worry! You have the chance to opt out. I will be sending out a job around the middle of the game to ask for any opt outs.

If you opt out: if you choose he/him and a Chasing disposition for your dragonet, this will restrict you to blue or brown. If you choose she/her and a Rising disposition, you will essentially be guaranteeing yourself a green.

If you choose he/him and Rising, or she/her and Chasing, and also tell me you’re opting out of queerness, we might need to revisit your decision to opt out!