On "Forever Faithful"
The Smoke Jaguar issues will continue until the ilClan improves
We’ve been talking a lot about the Inner Sphere and Near Periphery lately, maybe so much that people have started to forget that I’m mainly a fan of the Clans. So, as this letter’s going out on the pre-anniversary of the Exodus Fleet arriving in the Pentagon Worlds (2786) and the beginning of Clan Smoke Jaguar’s Exodus from Huntress (3060), I thought we could dip away from the main narrative to look at a novel about the Jaguars – Forever Faithful, by Blaine-
Oh.
Oh dear.
Lost Causes
The last time I looked at one of Blaine Lee Pardoe’s novels, I tried to steer the middle course of acknowledging his nasty views while focusing on the plot. It seemed like the right call because I had plenty to say about the contrast between the Sarah McEvedy that Pardoe told the reader about and the Sarah McEvedy that he showed readers in his 2006-07 serial Betrayal of Ideals. But to do that this time would be verging on irresponsible because Forever Faithful was finished in 2019, around the time that Pardoe’s right-wing politics were becoming more of an issue. While he kept writing for Catalyst Game Labs (CGL) for three more years and three more novels, plus two novellas and some other work, Faithful seems to have a particularly bad reputation. I’ve even seen people confidently claim that it’s an allegory for the “Lost Cause” of the Confederate States of America (CSA), a short-lived pro-slavery rebellion in 19th Century North America. That’s a pretty serious allegation considering that the novel is still being sold, so let’s take it seriously.
In case there was any doubt, I have no intention of defending Pardoe and to some extent I don’t think he’d want to be defended on this charge. He clearly sympathizes with the CSA and buys into that Lost Cause myth, adopting the term “War of Northern Aggression” rather than the more usual “American Civil War’, venerating Confederate generals and so on. It’s absolutely true that Forever Faithful is a novel written by a Lost Causer – but that alone doesn’t make it an allegory for the Lost Cause, it just gives us reason to suspect that it could be. My reservation here’s not just a general principle – rather, it’s because I understand that sympathies for the Confederacy are not widely held within CGL. So, even if we’re treating as plausible the idea that Pardoe wanted to write a Lost Cause allegory, the people he was writing for (and his editor, for that matter) were unlikely to have been onboard. It seems to me that the only way to really establish this is to look at the plot.
But before doing that, we should probably establish the core concepts of the Lost Cause so we know what to look for. Generally, the myth is based around three claims (all of which are bunk):
Slavery was not the cause of the American Civil War. To Lost Causers, slavery was going away anyway and it was only used as an excuse by a warmongering Lincoln government. The fact that the South launched the war in order to defend slavery rarely gets in the way of this idea.
The Confederacy fought in defense of “state’s rights”. This is the flip side of the first claim, and probably the most ridiculous part of the whole mythology. After all, the South had been happy about the infamous Dred Scott decision trampling on the right of Northern States to prohibit slavery within their borders.
The South fought a more effective, more civilized war and only lost due to weight of Northern manpower and resources and/or bad luck or perfidy at the Battle of Gettysburg. Hero worship of criminals like Robert E. Lee generally fits in here.
I’ve seen these beliefs grouped differently and I’m sure an expert would have a lot more to say, but I hope this definition is at least workable for our purposes.
Monuments
The events of Forever Faithful pick up on the 19th of April 3060, in the midst of the Great Refusal – the Inner Sphere’s attempt to put a final end to the Clan Invasion. The Great Houses had joined together in an alliance, dubbed the Star League after the Terran Hegemony-led union of centuries prior, and launched a counter-attack. Their primary target was Clan Smoke Jaguar. The Jaguars were driven out of the Inner Sphere and – thanks to information provided by Trent, a Smoke Jaguar who defected to the Star League – were attacked at their homeworld, Huntress. After Huntress was secured, the Inner Sphere taskforce moved on to the shared capital world of the Clans, Strana Mechty, where a formal Trial battle was fought to declare the invasion at an end.
Trent is one of the two main characters of the novel. Paul Moon, a prominent Smoke Jaguar officer who had been Trent’s commander some years prior (and treated Trent rather badly) is the other. Both men believe themselves personally responsible for the fate which befell their Clan. Over the course of the novel their shared sense of guilt will unite them in a rather unlikely plan to continue the Jaguar legacy – though not without admitting that the Clan had its problems, including the unconstrained rule by the Warrior Caste. While Trent and Paul are determined to make a future for their people, they are just as determined to do away with what was wrong with the Clan in the process. I think it’s fairly well-known now that the adventure they set off on leads to the creation of the Fidelis, a Smoke Jaguar offshoot led by Paul Moon. The novel’s last chapter ties the Fidelis into the main plotline, showing how they were drawn into the coalition against the Word of Blake’s “War of Purification” and touching on the honorable role that they played in that fight.
This might not seem to fit the Lost Cause of the Confederacy narrative particularly well. Those making the case generally point to Chapter Fifteen of the novel as a “smoking gun”. In the first half of this chapter, Trent reflects on the state of the planet Huntress under the Star League occupation force. In the character’s view, the old order has been torn down but nothing really put in its place, leading to crime and active resistance. Trent then sees:
a monument to the civil war that had brought about the formation of the Clans. It commemorated the lives lost in Operation Klondike, the Clans’ retaking of the Pentagon Worlds. [Trent] remembered the statue of the springing smoke jaguar carved from black marble that once adorned the top of it. The Star League had seen fit to chisel the magnificent cat off the top. In some places in the city entire monuments had been removed and presumably destroyed. Such actions felt wrong to him […] This is part of the League’s problem. They do not understand that defacing or destroying a monument or destroying other ones does not change history. In fact, it often ends up reinforcing that history. Rewriting the history books to impose a new social order rarely works in the long term.
It doesn’t take a mind-reader to work out that Pardoe was thinking about Confederate monuments here. During the time he was working on Forever Faithful, the campaign to remove such monuments was already in full swing.
Case Closed?
Not quite. This is certainly the fingerprint of an author who buys the Lost Cause myth, and it does make that reading a credible one. However, I’m not sure that it’s the most available reading. Again, Pardoe’s not the only person who worked on the book, and he’s certainly not the only person who approved it. After Forever Faithful was released, Pardoe wrote on his blog that one of the themes he wanted to explore was what happened after the war was won:
How many times have we seen nations win the wars and lose the peace? If it feels like the Star League did not have a plan for what to do with Huntress after they won it is because they really didn’t. How do you liberate a people that do not want liberation? The parallels, even contemporary, are many and sad.
Now, we don’t have to believe that Pardoe’s being sincere, but it seems fair to read that quote as similar to the novel's pitch and follow-up discussions with CGL. To put that another way, even if you think that this is baloney, it’s probably what the custodians of the BattleTech were swallowing – and not without some reason. The US-led occupation of Iraq after the Second Gulf War of 2003 had been brought back into focus by the emergence of Islamic State in 2014. While Islamic State was substantially defeated when Forever Faithful went to print, the sense that the crisis had been created by an invasion without a plan for reconstruction still hasn’t gone away today. The long occupation of Afghanistan didn’t end until 2021, but it was being criticized in similar terms. Even though it’s fairly likely that Pardoe was thinking of Confederate monuments first and foremost, it’s plausible that when other people at CGL read the book – maybe even the “smoking gun” text in Chapter Fifteen – they thought of Saddam Hussein’s statue being toppled in Baghdad.
Indeed, if we return to our three core claims of the Lost Cause myth, it seems like the broad narrative makes a poor attempt on the first (as it acknowledges that the Clans started the war) and gives up the second (largely because the Smoke Jaguars aren’t seceding from the Inner Sphere). Only on the third point is it possible to draw an analogy, but it doesn’t really hold up to the views of our protagonists. Trent thinks of the old Smoke Jaguars as arrogant, brutal, and corrupt (those exact words are repeated several times in Forever Faithful), and Paul Moon comes to agree with that judgment over the course of the novel. Neither man attributes the Clan’s defeat to weight of resources, instead granting that the Star League’s soldiers were capable and well-led. Perhaps we want to say that Trent and Paul are stand-ins for the “heroes” of the Confederacy? Trent fits this extremely poorly, given that his main role in the downfall of the Smoke Jaguars is betraying the Clan, while Paul Moon isn’t shown to be a capable commander until after his Clan is defeated.
I respect the view that Pardoe’s talk about monuments was coming from an ugly place and a second edition of Forever Faithful would be better off without it. But the novel as a whole just doesn’t work as an allegory for the Lost Cause.
The Saviors
One point that I’ve touched on in passing before should be restated as we head to the finish. Paul Moon and Trent are depicted as white men. That’s not unusual for characters in BattleTech, but it is somewhat less common for Clan Smoke Jaguar characters. During the Clan Invasion, all three of the original Smoke Jaguar leaders – ilKhan Leo Showers, Khan Lincoln Osis, and saKhan Sarah Weaver – were shown as black. Indeed, the Khan’s name, Lincoln, can’t help but have a certain resonance here! Still, I would caution against trying to spin the table around and fit the meta-narrative of the Clan War to some kind of Confederate Wish Fulfillment which sees the aggressors from the north of the map attempt to overthrow the honorable way of life of the Inner Sphere, stall out due to their own arrogance, and finally suffer defeat when an army loosely united in defense of states’ rights seizes Lincoln’s capital and kills him. As easy as it was to string that together, some things are just unfortunate coincidences. (Even running that line for trolling purposes could be pretty corrosive – so while I can’t stop you trying it out, I am asking you to let it lie.)
Instead, I think we should be alert to a more subtle problem. The Forever Faithful narrative tells us that in order for Clan Smoke Jaguar to be freed from its legacy of “brutality”, it needed white men to show the way – the old “White Savior” narrative. This is in keeping with BattleTech’s old problems with representation and it’s something that could be worked on. Even if CGL doesn’t want to go down the commercially dubious path of having an old novel rewritten, they could certainly commission works that detail more of the Smoke Jaguar story and make it clear that it’s the content of character, not the color of skin, that determines who among them should be called arrogant, brutal, and corrupt.
I know some readers like it when I take on real life controversy - and if you’re among them, there’s a supporter reward article called BattleTech’s Ultimate Lost Cause with more talk about how Blaine Pardoe has used pro-Confederate myth. It’s part of the TOP SECRET series, available to all supporters from the one-off tip level on up.