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Jan. 1st, 2019 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe other thing I wrote this year for Yuletide was A Soldier's Return, a pinch-hit fic for Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment about Polly and Maladicta in the aftermath of canon, and in the course of writing it I rediscovered all my old Monstrous Regiment opinions and turned up some new ones.
Last time I read Monstrous Regiment -- I mean, last time before last week, when I zoomed through it in a panic because I had three days to write this pinch-hit that I'd picked up in a fit of hubris -- I spent a lot of time attempting to make sense of the ending, and this fic was very definitely written in reaction to that; my recipient had a great letter in which they talked about how much they liked explorations of class and rank and loyalty and competence porn, and I was really excited to dive into all of that, and then I got completely sidetracked trying to resolve my own annoyance about the ending of the book featuring Polly marching off into the role of Jackrum 2.0 when the entire book has just demonstrated to us that Jackrum (whom I love!) is part of the problem rather than the solution.
The recipient did specify that they would prefer not to have other people's gender headcanons included in the fic, which made life easier for me as it meant I didn't have to make any pronoun decisions or decide what my gender opinions about Polly and Mal actually are. (Looking at my old post it seems I didn't have any solid opinions in 2013 either, so this is at least consistent.) At this point I think my personal read is that Polly would probably ID as genderqueer if the option was already ready and available but is not about to invent the concept, and Mal is more likely to invent a concept but as far as actual identification goes I'd probably buy pretty much anything, who even knows what Mal's deal is! Certainly Terry Pratchett doesn't!
The only thing about Mal's deal that I do feel pretty solid on is that Mal absolutely has a flaming crush on Polly; I wasn't reading for it last time, but this time I'm like 'oh, Pratchett really does go out of his way to tell us all the times that Mal is watching Polly do things instead of doing anything else useful, doesn't he?' However it's easy to forget about this in the second half of the book, as indeed I seem to have done in 2013 when Mal/Polly came out of left field for me, because Mal gets completely subsumed into the coffee withdrawal and the long-running Apocalypse Now riff and doesn't do anything related to their actual personality from approximately the midway point all the way to the anticlimactic gender reveal. This book is weird enough when you're just trying to make sense of everything in the foreground, but when you're trying to pull out the Mal thread and focus on it, it looks even weirder.
In conclusion, I still love this book a tremendous amount and it is ALSO kind of a mess full of confounding and mildly nonsensical structural decisions, and I could definitely have written something better and more substantive if I hadn't had three days in which to do it, one of which included a car crash (it was fine, just not very conducive to fic-writing). But I extremely enjoyed the excuse to reread with the lesbian lens on high and would very much enjoy hearing other people's opinions and headcanons!
Last time I read Monstrous Regiment -- I mean, last time before last week, when I zoomed through it in a panic because I had three days to write this pinch-hit that I'd picked up in a fit of hubris -- I spent a lot of time attempting to make sense of the ending, and this fic was very definitely written in reaction to that; my recipient had a great letter in which they talked about how much they liked explorations of class and rank and loyalty and competence porn, and I was really excited to dive into all of that, and then I got completely sidetracked trying to resolve my own annoyance about the ending of the book featuring Polly marching off into the role of Jackrum 2.0 when the entire book has just demonstrated to us that Jackrum (whom I love!) is part of the problem rather than the solution.
The recipient did specify that they would prefer not to have other people's gender headcanons included in the fic, which made life easier for me as it meant I didn't have to make any pronoun decisions or decide what my gender opinions about Polly and Mal actually are. (Looking at my old post it seems I didn't have any solid opinions in 2013 either, so this is at least consistent.) At this point I think my personal read is that Polly would probably ID as genderqueer if the option was already ready and available but is not about to invent the concept, and Mal is more likely to invent a concept but as far as actual identification goes I'd probably buy pretty much anything, who even knows what Mal's deal is! Certainly Terry Pratchett doesn't!
The only thing about Mal's deal that I do feel pretty solid on is that Mal absolutely has a flaming crush on Polly; I wasn't reading for it last time, but this time I'm like 'oh, Pratchett really does go out of his way to tell us all the times that Mal is watching Polly do things instead of doing anything else useful, doesn't he?' However it's easy to forget about this in the second half of the book, as indeed I seem to have done in 2013 when Mal/Polly came out of left field for me, because Mal gets completely subsumed into the coffee withdrawal and the long-running Apocalypse Now riff and doesn't do anything related to their actual personality from approximately the midway point all the way to the anticlimactic gender reveal. This book is weird enough when you're just trying to make sense of everything in the foreground, but when you're trying to pull out the Mal thread and focus on it, it looks even weirder.
In conclusion, I still love this book a tremendous amount and it is ALSO kind of a mess full of confounding and mildly nonsensical structural decisions, and I could definitely have written something better and more substantive if I hadn't had three days in which to do it, one of which included a car crash (it was fine, just not very conducive to fic-writing). But I extremely enjoyed the excuse to reread with the lesbian lens on high and would very much enjoy hearing other people's opinions and headcanons!
