skygiants | (no subject)

The 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!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sovay

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).

So first of all, I'm glad you're all right from the car crash, way to bury the lede there.

I should re-read Monstrous Regiment. I read it once when it came out and I didn't hate it, but I don't think I got even as far as analyzing the structural failures of the ending; I liked parts of it immensely and was confused to distressed by its overall tone of Victor/Victoria meets Oh, What a Lovely War! I haven't read it since.

From:

skygiants

Thank you! Everyone walked out of it all right (well, everyone on our side; who knows what has become of the person who drove into us, but presumably they were also unharmed enough to drive away at top speed, as indeed they did) and even the car was still functional enough that the owner could drive it very carefully home, so as car crashes go it was probably the best possible outcome.

I didn't like Monstrous Regiment when it came out, then reread it several years later and discovered that it was one of Pratchett's most interesting failures and actually I loved it. I think it's one of those books that benefits from having forewarning of the places that multiple themes are going to have a crash and send each other off the rails.

From:

hebethen

Oh, so that was you, I should have known :P The (book) ending is pretty weird -- it really only makes sense to me as a sort of dark joke about the difficulty of breaking vicious cycles.

It sounds like you all came out unharmed from the crash; I hope your wallet doesn't take too bad a beating either.

From:

sovay

Everyone walked out of it all right (well, everyone on our side; who knows what has become of the person who drove into us, but presumably they were also unharmed enough to drive away at top speed, as indeed they did) and even the car was still functional enough that the owner could drive it very carefully home, so as car crashes go it was probably the best possible outcome.

Er, mazel tov.

I think it's one of those books that benefits from having forewarning of the places that multiple themes are going to have a crash and send each other off the rails.

Reading the comments in your earlier post, it struck me that as weird as the ending is with everyone marching off to war again after we had an honest-to-God deus ex machina even, I think it may have been an unavoidable byproduct of Pratchett's metaphors: by definition, World War I was not the war to end all wars. If you don't have a II, you're at least going to have something like it.

(Specifically, I suddenly had the couplet from the end of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui stuck in my head: "Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard, / The bitch that bore him is in heat again." Which was the wrong war for Monstrous Regiment, but at least told me the wavelength I should be on.)

From:

skygiants

I'm extremely glad you liked it! :P I think last time around someone compared the ending to Small Gods, and there's definitely echoes -- the weight of history, the weight of cycles -- but part of the weirdness of the ending is that putting it in just a few pages doesn't give it the weight it should, after giving the conclusion of the war a LOT of weight, so it's all off-balance.

And I did, thank you! I was a passenger in the event, so my wallet hasn't taken any particular beating, though I will probably be kicking in some towards whatever costs the driver ends up incurring.

From:

skygiants

It's true, although I think on this third read that my WWI comparison was, if not wrong, at least not entirely right; the proper metaphor -- with Ankh-Morpork marching in to proxy war somebody else's endless faraway conflict -- isn't WWI but Vietnam, and Mal's entire weird Apocalypse Now side plot is meant to make sure it gets pulled that way.

...but since the book is from Polly's POV, it looks more like a WWI metaphor because most of the Vietnam media he's drawing on wants to be from the point of view of an Ankh-Morporkian (in this analogy) rather than one of the people actually involved in the original conflict.

From:

sophia_sol

HELLO YES I HAVE OPINIONS ABOUT MONSTROUS REGIMENT.

tbh I've never actually....internalized that ending of the book as being what happens in the end because it always felt weird to me that in this book about the awful pointlessness of war, Polly goes off to, what, perpetuate further war? Okay. (though I also always vaguely assumed that this made more sense for people who aren't me, so it's interesting to discover that it's not just me!)

Mal has always felt pretty definitively genderqueer to me, to the point when ANY pronoun for Mal feels wrong because it's like, pinning Mal down. (yes, even nonbinary pronouns.) This really gets in the way of reading fic, because of all the pronoun options for Mal "she" honestly feels the most wrong to me and that's what nearly all the fics about Mal tend to go for. It actively makes me uncomfortable to see Mal blithely referred to as "she" with no further complications, and always has, even before I knew much about nonbinary genders!

(I've also, in my travels on the internet, discovered people who think Jackrum is a crossdressing cis woman and I was legitimately like DOES NOT COMPUTE because how on earth you read Jackrum as anything but trans I do not know.)

At any rate I adore this book too despite its various imperfections, I'm just so glad it exists in this world.

From:

sovay

the proper metaphor -- with Ankh-Morpork marching in to proxy war somebody else's endless faraway conflict -- isn't WWI but Vietnam, and Mal's entire weird Apocalypse Now side plot is meant to make sure it gets pulled that way.

Interesting. I hadn't seen Apocalypse Now in 2003/2004, so the great weight of idiot brass and pointless fighting in mud pulled me right into the Western Front.

...but since the book is from Polly's POV, it looks more like a WWI metaphor because most of the Vietnam media he's drawing on wants to be from the point of view of an Ankh-Morporkian (in this analogy) rather than one of the people actually involved in the original conflict.

I also suspect it threw some weight that Pratchett was British: whatever he was aiming for, his referents for stupid endless war looked different.

Edited (can't remember when in the school year I read it) Date: 2019-01-01 09:34 pm (UTC)

From:

skygiants

HI YES THANK YOU FOR YOUR OPINIONS ABOUT MONSTROUS REGIMENT

It's such a weird ending and it pulls itself in about five different directions, and the way Polly's written at the end of it makes no sense unless you read a lot more into what she's doing at the end and her intentions to make some kind of major change than what's actually on the page.

There's so much going on with the way Mal is written that I can understand and roll with pretty much anybody's headcanon on the matter -- overall I think I agree with you that any specification feels weirdly like pinning something down that shouldn't be pinned down, but obviously not strongly enough not to do it anyway just for the sake of doing something -- but I ALSO do not have the faintest idea how you read Jackrum as cis in any way, shape or form.

(I had an initial thought about writing this fic in such a way that I didn't have to use pronouns at all, and I might have tried for it if I'd had any hopes of being able to pull it off and do Pratchett prose at the same time and finish within the deadline. Vonda McKintyre did it once and very successfully! But it's a lot easier to do with side characters than with POV.

As a sidenote, I was also interested to see when I reread the book that Mal/adict/a is only actually referred to as Mal twice in the whole text -- I'd internalized it to such an extent that it felt obvious, but the narration always uses whatever full name is in use at the time and Polly is the only person to ever use the nickname in dialogue. But I still can't really think of Mal as anything but Mal!)

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I think you're right about that -- and it passed me by on the first few reads, too, because I've read a lot more WWI media than I have Vietnam.

And I do think that he might even have started out with WWI or even something older; like, I've always wondered if the book he started out to write wasn't a much more straightforward Sweet Polly Oliver pastiche and then somewhere in the middle he watched Apocalypse Now and reread Catch-22 and possibly some Vonnegut and the whole thing kind of warped in on itself under the weight of military absurdism.

From:

sophia_sol

re Jackrum, I think that some people are SO oblivious to the existence of trans people and the trans perspective that it literally would never occur to them if it isn't explicitly spelled out in as many words. Which like, I still do not understand at all, but it's the closest I can come to getting why someone might read Jackrum that way.

ah, too bad you were so short on time writing the fic, having it be totally pronoun-less for Mal would be INCREDIBLE. Probably the easiest way to do it would be to write it from the pronounless character's first-person POV although then that would get in the way of it being like Pratchett prose!

What's the Vonda McKintyre book where she does it successfully? That sounds relevant to my interests!

For me, the Mal nickname isn't as entrenched as for you, I think because having been a Firefly fan in my youth means that in my head that name is Already Taken. To me Maladict is the character's name and I'm perfectly happy with that. Though Mal is fine too! Maladicta is right out.

From:

skygiants

It's Dreamsnake and currently I remember very little about it except the existence of the stable threesome with the pronoun-less character, even though that group only appears for a quarter of the book or less, just for the fact that it was the first time I'd ever seen someone do that and realized it was a technique that could possibly live in the toolbox. But I seem to have liked it!

Edited Date: 2019-01-01 10:22 pm (UTC)

From:

sophia_sol

Oh neat, looks like it's already on my to-read list because of your review at the time! So hopefully I might get around to reading it someday!

From:

kaberett

I have always felt weird about it and should possibly, now I'm much more settled in my own experience of gender and in a safer environment, actually reread it and see what I think -- because yes, "interesting failure" is a compelling description of it! (Probably being a small tran in an unhelpful environment was not the... best place to read it from, first.)

From:

skygiants

oof, yeah -- and it's a book that so clearly goes in waving the flag that it's Going to Do Gender Stuff and then ... misses the mark in a whole bunch of key ways while also leaving a bunch of fascinating oddly-shaped spaces. I'd be very curious what you'd think of it now!

From:

sovay

if the book he started out to write wasn't a much more straightforward Sweet Polly Oliver pastiche and then somewhere in the middle he watched Apocalypse Now and reread Catch-22 and possibly some Vonnegut and the whole thing kind of warped in on itself under the weight of military absurdism.

This is where it would really help for the author to be dead strictly sensu Barthes, because now I would also love to know how this book even happened.

From:

julian

I sort of hazily of it as half WWI and half the Franco-Prussian War, what I think of as the beginning of all the endless European wars, even though that is entirely ahistorical.

Mal's Apocalypse Now stuff just felt like older Pratchett, making jokes for the sake of joking. It never *felt* like Vietnam, even though I know that's what Ankh Morpork is supposed to be analogizing to.

From:

elsane

OH THAT WAS YOU I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN.
I bookmarked it because I was too tired to comment and it needs a proper comment, it is so full of great lines and great thoughts. I love Monstrous Regiment, but yes, its ending is so weirdly off-balance, and I really loved the shape your story made to level it out.

From:

laleia

I’m glad I’m not the only one slightly baffled by the ending of Monstrous Regiment! I recently read a take on the ending by someone who interpreted it as Polly going off NOT to war but specifically to take down the patriarchy (and that she is quite specifically not going off to fight more but instead to browbeat the military into not fight more, I guess), which was an interesting take but this person also very strongly stated that her read was The Correct Interpretation Of The Text and anyone who didn’t read it that way was demonstrating Poor Reading Comprehension or was a misogynist and I definitely spent a good deal of time wondering if I just missed something (since I’ve always read it as a sort of nihilist, everything-sucks-and-war-is-not-so-easily-avoided ending).

From:

skygiants

Ahhh thank you, I'm very glad you liked it! (Writing Pratchett-wise is terrifying and something I may never again attempt.)

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I've definitely read several interpretations -- both fanfic and meta -- that take as read that Polly Is Going Off To End War and ... I think you can read it that way, it's nice to read it that way, but there's a lot more going on in the text than Polly's Going to Fix It. Honestly everything in that book is wildly ambiguous, the points of certainty I have in it are few and far between and when I find them I grip onto them desperately because everything else is SO open to interpretation!

From:

skygiants

There are moments when I see Vietnam other than in Mal's riffs -- the parts where Jackrum is the most Spirit of War-ish, elderly Brando with a genial laugh. Honestly one could write a whole essay tracking down all the bits of wars and War Texts that get into Monstrous Regiment and how they play against each other. I really do want to read it next to Catch-22.

From:

toujours_nigel

Ah, I loved the fic!

And yes, Monstrous Regiment is such a very strange book, not helped by Sir PTerry's rather unformed ideas about gender fluidity and transfolk (see also Unseen Academicals), but Maladict'a's is definitely one of the oddest threads in it, flash-sides and all.

I wonder whether, along with Vietnam, one of the originary roundworld wars wasn't the Crimean War? Not just because of the endless slogging or distance, but also because it's one of the first wars documented via telegraphs etc, which relates to the importance of the klacks in MR.

From:

skygiants

Aw, thank you - I'm really glad you liked it!

Oh, I bet you're right about Crimea -- I don't know much about it and wouldn't have caught it, but that makes a lot of sense with the tech levels and the way the telegraph interacts with previously localized wars.