BattleTech's Ultimate Lost Cause

A spicier than usual discussion of politics in BattleTech fiction

This article was originally published on the 23rd of August 2025 on Ko-fi as a reward for financial supporters.

When I was first getting into BattleTech in the 1990s, it seemed like there were no fans of Clan Wolverine.

I heard people talk about them occasionally – there was interest at the time, like there was in the fate of the original Thomas Marik and the true identity of his replacement – but nobody was hoping that they’d be super cool people to cheer for. By the time that Blaine Lee Pardoe’s Betrayal of Ideals started coming out in BattleCorps, my old BattleTech group had broken up and I wasn’t keeping up to date. The novel passed me by and I only read it for the first time in 2024. In fact, if I wasn’t running into people online declaring their fandom for the Wolverines, I probably wouldn’t have bothered getting the book… at least, not in a hurry. There were so many other BattleTech things to catch up on.

My more measured review of Betrayal of Ideals is already in the main newsletter series. I’m not going to repeat much of that. What I’m doing here is a bit more confrontational – I don’t love that tone, but it’s necessary to tie together my thinking from the Betrayal review and the Forever Faithful discussion. In particular, while working on that latter discussion it occurred to me that there was one more reason why Pardoe wouldn’t have made Forever Faithful into an allegory for the Lost Cause.