Introduction and Act I Review
New
Geckonator
Saint of Awe
Through the coincidence of recent events in my private life, a few weeks ago I got in touch with an old internet friend I had not spoken to for several years.
In our first new conversations, we caught up on many things, but one point which she proudly informed me of stood out immediately: She had written a novel.
You see, I had not been completely unaware of her projects and output while I had been out of contact. Some of the circles I lurked around on Bluesky, née Twitter, had still had ties to her and often shared her work; meaning I had vaguely seen, but not fully understood the context of, art and discussion around this project already.
The name alone was enough to intrigue me, though.
Do unto others, what has been done to you
In a wonderful twist of fate, I had just started reading the Iliad as a bit of intermittent heavy reading a few days before this reunion with Tammy. In subsequent conversations, just commenting on my odd little half-formed mental picture of the work from secondhand exposure and now proximity as people in her Discord groups talks, I felt increasingly intrigued and in tune with where the project was coming from... even if it turned out that, as Tammy explained, the Iliad and Trojan War cycle were actually less major influences beyond some prominent theming and very broad strokes. It's a work aiming for the exploration of cycles of violence, through both political history and interpersonal abuse; for the deconstruction of political fantasy in the alternate history genre and the immense Human suffering implied in what many idly wish for; and for more than a little... exploration of grotesque and transgressive sexual dynamics that speak to a lot of very personal fears.
Yes, this story is technically erotica. The mature tag is on this thread for a reason.
Or, at least, it's a work with a lot of sexual elements in conversation with a very niche genre of erotica. Tamara calls it "kink horror", and with what I've read so far and want to talk about... I'm inclined to agree with her and call that the best possible label.
But let's back up and address that genre for a second, because I feel pretty certain that a large portion of the SV audience interested here won't be able to follow right away.
"We're close to Rubicon. Wake the dog up."
I really wonder if the writers of Armored Core VI are online enough to have taken any notice at all of how much this analogy of dogs and handlers has spiraled out completely beyond their own story and intents.
As far as I can quickly and easily trace the history of pre-release material, that line and its implications first reached anglophone audiences via a trailer in late April of 2023. It, and all the swirling rumors and explanations around it from other previews and promotional material, inspired something right away. I believe there was already some... exploration of just how sexual the connotations of being an authority figure's "Hound" are early on, but the impact truly hit on July 14th of that year (narrowly beating out the release of ACVI's story trailer, which revealed more of the Hound dynamic and that game's themes of miserable debt-slave transhumanism, by a few days to give her credit for being ahead of the curve) when Internet mind-control erotica writer Kallie released the then-one-off story WARHOUND, featuring a female protagonist in a brutal, mecha-heavy military sci-fi setting being brainwashed and enslaved by a shadowy military representative of a totalitarian government.
It was immediately off to the dog races, if you will.
This fiction hit at basically a perfect moment. Not only was Armored Core VI set to release in the late summer of that year, but it was roughly at the end of the (too short, in my opinion, but that's grumbling for elsewhere) run of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. G-Witch had very prominently and enthusiastically featured lesbian protagonists in a way that had captured a large online yuri fandom, and that translated into a hunger for more mecha fiction catering to those tastes in romantic themes... and often quite darker than romantic.
So now we had a trend on our hands, as sites like ReadOnlyMind and ArchiveOfOurOwn lit up with a decent little storm of writers trying their hand at this concept. What's shared in common tends to be the rough emotional appeal: the mech Pilot as an instrument of violence for a larger political or economic cause, but a fundamentally disempowered one; often literally dehumanized by some invasive cybernetic or psychological process to be a more effective tool for their Handler.
Yes, there is a trend of basically always calling the commanding officer in this fiction a "Handler" rather than anything else... which is definitely an element that rubs some the wrong way.
A criticism of this genre I've heard from a few friends is that it's fundamentally a small, niche fandom of relatively young women (often trans women) stumbling into genre conventions with a lot of enthusiasm but maybe not enough experience and... research (I'm really not sure of a better word to describe reading or watching other fiction with a critical eye so you can make your own better) under their belts. It shows in things like the "Handler" terminology taking on a life of its own outside of the fundamental commanding officer relationship, with often not bothering to imagine something more sexually transgressive than that, and with just not iterating as much with original science fiction beyond the Armored Core and Gundam influences.
But still, I personally find a good deal of it very fun or hot, so I ended up following a few writers and artists within the theme, hence being exposed to MYRMIDON before I even started talking to Tammy again.
So, why am I posting about this on here?
Well, after getting in touch with Tammy again and learning more about MYRMIDON, I started realizing that its thematic differences with and niche in the kink space of Mechsploitation mesh naturally with things that I'm already talking about in my Draka Let's Read: the relationship between political science fiction and alternative history with sexual fantasy, but also with darker aspects of abuse and gender and deeper interpersonal pain.
Which is to say, I think Tammy's kind of ended up making, without realizing it, a "The Domination of the Draka But Good" fic without the baggage of actually having it be fanfic of the Draka. A brilliant coincidence of convergence, it turns out, as I explained what the Draka are to her and left her utterly baffled.
Aside from that, I also just like the themes and intentions she's evidently putting into this work in general... as I will start getting to in the review proper.
However, I actually held off on sitting down to read it for these past few weeks, for one simple reason: it wasn't done yet. Tammy had a complete draft of the whole book last year but has been rewriting it entirely into a three act structure released over time on AO3. I wanted to hold off on really releasing my input because on some level I thought I would be a Jane-come-lately if I got too into the weeds of discussing it with her or breaking it down before she had a finished product when I had just come in at the end of her work. That time is now past, as she currently has the second draft of Act III finished and editing. This is now a complete novel, and I want to share my thoughts as a bit of an open critique in writing to get a conversation started.
So, just transparently and up front, my overall disposition on MYRMIDON is positive right off the bat. I can never say I'm here to be a dispassionate critic or pick away at the details. This is shameless promotion for a friend, as I believe there are enough people on SV to be interested in this story and I want to spread and talk about it now that I've read it. Please read Tammy's book; she's an excellent writer, a great artist, and a good woman who I know has put a lot of herself into this.
But beyond my unavoidable bias, I think there's a lot to talk about. This isn't a "Let's Read" as such, because I don't think this calls for a detailed recounting and laborious plot beat by beat analysis of the book (it's free on AO3 linked above; go read my friend's book) so I would, rather, like to organize things by topic.
The first third of the Triptych Tammy made for the banner art on AO3. The full thing is kind of a spoiler, however.
So, right away, my impression of the first Act of MYRMIDON when I finished reading and stepped back was "Wow, that's literally the first episode Evangelion retold with more military/political horror and sexual assault."
This is a very funny thing to realize because I learned a bit ago that Tammy had not in fact seen Evangelion until a few months ago, well after the first draft of MYRMIDON.
To give a basic summary for those who need a little more explanation or prodding, and just to provide a basic foundation for my critique, the story of MYRMIDON starts off with a group of low-status conscripts from a broadly Eastern Bloc-coded Communist state called simply "The Regime" returning to their base in conquered Switzerland after a deployment in an apparently still-resistant France. Among them are girlfriends Amelia "Mel" Heydari and Gwenneth Hazelwood, still reckoning with the fact that the former had just killed a man for the first time during the otherwise routine and menial assignment. Mel is, unfortunately, identified at this point by the leadership council of the "Achilles Project", a shadowy operation by the Regime to supplement and replace their Exosuit Corps which has proven militarily and politically unreliable for their already evident grand plans for world conquest ("liberation"-I'll get to the ideology of The Regime and the decidedly complicated characterization it receives soon enough). She is put through a rapid recruitment into the Corps and ideological sales pitch, mainly playing on her fawning idolization of the Exosuit Corps General and Achilles Project Director Lydia Voss, but it quickly becomes clear that her actual consent or cooperation is not important to the Project, as the plan sees her as merely a promising set of psychological conditions for cyborg conditioning (mainly her autism) and Voss sees her as just another victim for a clear habit of sexual abuse.
Tammy's Official Cast Sheet, with biographical reference details. There's also a nude version, which is how I know if any given character is trans or cis regardless of whether it comes up in the plot.
Mel is literally groped, drugged, and thrown into an automated torture chamber by Voss, subjecting her to a week of hypnagogic brainwashing facilitated by the wonder drug cocktail "Lotus" (I'll get into my interest in these details of how the story handles the stereotypical brainwashing/mind break plot of Mechsploitation later, but suffice to say it's interesting that Lotus is stated to mostly be a combination of very mundane and functional psychoactive substances). This week creates a dissociative secondary identity dominating a barely functional Mel, known as "Pilot One", who is promptly scrambled for a sortie with one of Voss's Exosuit units to Bordeaux to both crush the French insurgents and test her capabilities. This does not go well, however, due to the volatile balance of a resistant Mel and bloodthirsty Pilot One, and the Act ends with Pilot One having to be subdued from her berserk state while Voss ominously looks on and brags that this is all just part of the plan to "finish what Lenin started."
It's all relatively straightforward when I lay it out like that, and the resemblance to the first episode of Evangelion is a little uncanny. You have the teenage loner (Mel and Gwen are both 18, serving The Regime's mandatory military service; the character sheet means this is the fast and immediate way to realize this story takes place in late 2065, or 148 "Revolutionary Era" to use The Regime's calendar which counts the 1917 Russian Revolution as Year 0) recruited by a sinister father figure (again, I'll get to it) to pilot a mecha, then a disastrous deployment that ends in the mech going berserk due to the sinister horrors involved in its creation backfiring.
This is obviously a reductive summary, but it's a good starting point to focus in on the details that I think set this story apart and make it interesting to talk about. It takes a broad outline of a good mecha story opening and then builds its themes over top of it.
I think it's really hard to talk about MYRMIDON without its visual art accompaniment (Tammy has always been a visual artist in her whole multimedia suite, and it's part of the distinct image that's marked her contributions to many projects from Paradox modding to her own fiction), and that art makes it impossible to avoid talking about Voss.
So let's start there.
A note on appearances... in almost any piece where Mel's cyborged up and has the uneven bloated right eye, cover one half of her face with your hand or something in your field of view, then try the other. Mel and Pilot One seem to have a bit of a problem with boundaries and time division, and have very different demeanors.
Seeing Voss for the first time without context, my immediate impression was that she was a transphobic caricature, and that there has to be something really interesting at play to explain that, textually, from a proudly trans artist.
Act I does not really provide much elaboration on this yet, but I have reliably gathered from discussions in Tammy's servers where I've tried avoiding getting too many answers about the plot and central reveals that there is a reason to Voss's rhyme, so to speak, with the horrendous creatures of transphobic propaganda. She is an unkempt, sexually licentious predator not necessarily because she is transgender and entrusted with authority (Mel is, if I have not mentioned it yet, herself trans, as are the extremely personable and enthusiastic Cuban private Tanya in her initial unit and the male pilot in the Exosuit team, both very aggressively normal and well-adjusted people by all appearances) but because she is a transgender woman who willingly climbed the ranks of totalitarian state power that enable and encourage one's worst vices in exchange for dedication to the cause. Her own gender anxieties and neuroses will apparently be a topic for the next two Acts, but for now she stands, at least in my interpretation, as someone whose gender has sort of been betrayed and suppressed by her belief system bringing out her worst impulses. She is, as one of Tammy's captions on an illustration of her says, a "state assigned abusive dad (female)" because the role of the commanding officer has always been strongly culturally encoded as fatherly, and this is still a society which has never made a concerted effort to end the sexual abuses allowed to father figures, regardless of its nominal "historical progressivism."
And as for facial hair, something trans women (at least myself and most others I know... there are obviously exceptions where some of us can be more comfortable with it but I think the political valence is universally recognizable) often try desperately to avoid being seen or associated with... I would like to just give my read of a theme throughout the act about it.
When Mel is initially met by Voss, she herself hasn't had time to shave or clean up in preparation... mostly because, obviously, she's been on the road with her unit and has just gotten back without time to really decompress or clean up.
But then during the horrific, automated surgical scene:
It is the precise, mechanical priority of the Pilot process to render Mel hairless, but only as a side effect for function. It just as ruthlessly shaves off a streak of her beloved head hair--a symbol of her gender before she even started hormones--to allow room for the invasive installation of a computer interface into her brain.
This is all enjoyed by Voss upon molesting her later, upon emergence:
All of this is to say... my literary read of what Tammy is going for (this is such a weird thing to say about someone I can literally message on Discord right now but it's part of the exercise) is that the facial hair is representative of the individual agency and, by extension, failure that a trans woman can have as an individual in living up to the social assumptions and demands of our identified gender. When I get so busy I can't grab a shower or wash my face, the times I usually assign for shaving, stubble is a reminder of my own neglect or priorities that can generate a lot of personal anxiety and demands to fix it before anyone can see. Mel lives with this too, with the rigors of military life forcing her into the dysphoric position of being observable in this moment of vulnerability, whereas Voss has been granted so much power by the state and been elevated above so much criticism or resistance--Voss's position makes her as capable of ignoring "no" as any capitalist billionaire--that she can neglect herself and feel no shame, even seemingly wield it as a privilege while fetishizing the beauty standard being forced on others.
Her history of sexual assault is implied to be a known and expected quantity, too, by the other authority figures around her. Even if they aren't, there are at least suspicions that keep getting ignored and paint a picture of institutions completely and realistically in thrall to letting a "good officer" keep working in her little fiefdom.
In fact, it's a repeated motif of the chapter that two relatively high up authority figures in the Project, Party Regional Secretary Zoya Borysenka and lead Doctor Berkowitz, both clearly recognize and are uncomfortable with Voss singling out Mel for obvious sexual abuse and keep getting cowed into silence... even though Zoya specifically says her job is supposed to be political and ethical oversight of the program. The Stasi (in the form of Ailin, who is so mysterious and monstrously devoted to the state that they get they/them pronouns seemingly out of gender itself being scared of their authority) even plays a part, clearly having some role in making clear Voss can't actually be stopped.
By the way, apparently in the very earliest drafts (as in, concept art) of MYRMIDON, Voss was cis and textually her dehumanization and abuse of Mel was a chaser thing.
Up to you how to debate the "what could have been" there and how that thematically compares. I'm personally here for depicting the most horrible and toxic T4T imaginable rather than it being the pure and true option as in a lot of romantic fiction written by trans women.
One central influence on MYRMIDON that I'm immediately hit by is music. This is something Tamara is quite open about, because she made a whole Spotify playlist to accompany it.
Like, if I had to guess as to the assignment of songs to this Act, tracks 1 through 10 line up quite well with the arc currently, with TOOL's Undertow in particular lining up with the aquatic prose associated with Mel's indoctrination in the Pilot program. The depths of Fort Dietrich are dark, cavernous, and positioned over flowing underground rivers directly comparable to the River Styx of the chapter's title; and both the chapter blurb on AO3 and one passage in particular use that exact wording of being sucked under uncontrollable currents for losing control of one's self to describe the narcotic effects of Lotus:
None of this is just to say there's plagiarism here, of course, or to just make a simplistic "I recognized the thing!" claim. What I'm saying is that Tamara chose very well in terms of connecting her work to a kind of "bardic" tradition, going for poetry and a very clear understanding of what moods and experiences from inspirational works that she wants to channel. The playlist makes for a very good descent from from despairing heavy rock dirges describing the suffering of personal abuse (both chemical and interpersonal), where we are now, and then into more aggressive and anxious tracks indicating acts to come.
With a particularly grim and portentous exception at the end of the list, which the Act directly quotes...
"Blue skies drive the dark clouds far away," as Gwen thinks when masturbating to this photo of better times, to relieve her worry about what happened to Mel.
Yeah, it's not hard to figure out where exactly Voss and The Regime are taking the world in the name of Final Communism, even if you're not like me seeing hints and discussion of Act III being posted in real time.
Ah, but what about the greatest musical reference of all... Homeric epic poetry? (It was performed bardic style in Ancient Greece so it counts.)
Well, right away, just as a moment to gush about Tammy's visual artwork and illustrations, even if she asserts that the Iliad connections were never very deep or thorough, her stylistic choices capture something that I want to point out.
The use of earthen red or dark ("wine dark", you could say) background tones, contrasted by deep black figures and highlights of a few other colors... The fantastic (in both the superlative and "not realistic" senses of the word) use of shapes and silhouette along with caricatured posing... It's rather reminiscent of Greek black-figure pottery, isn't it? The world and aesthetic of MYRMIDON is deliberately mostly Cold War retro-futurism mixed with anime and truly impossible nightmare machines, but I think it still catches a very classical brutality. This is a world where the powers that be claim a path to technological communist utopia, but it really feels like it's spiraling into a Bronze Age atrocity.
I mean, even just the name "Achilles Project" says a lot about the motivations and awareness of the people involved. The metaphors are even textually jumbled, as Voss mentions that Berkowitz chose most of the names of the Project as part of a personal interest in mythology ("nostalgic as always") and called the enabling drug mix of the whole thing "Lotus", which was a Homeric story from the Odyssey, not the Iliad, with no relation to Achilles or his Myrmidons.
What we can gather is that The Regime wants soldiers who are not modern Humans. They don't even want cold, mechanical drones implied by the etymology/mythical origin of the Myrmidons as "ant men." They want killers, they want the classical, Homeric mind--famously theorized by some out of date evolutionary psychological theories to be literally "bicameral" in terms of hallucinating orders from the gods much like how Mel becomes subjected to Pilot One--that might suffer poetically but never flinches from a constant forward push of bloodshed ordained by the gods.
The Regime has decided that the actual Human soldiers produced by a modern society, even an ideological Communist one with universal military service and inducement to volunteer for elite units, has produced disappointments to the kind of war they want to wage.
They don't want a big-breasted Ukrainian war hero who makes for good pinup posters but I suspect they killed with an earlier iteration of the Program or just allowed to die because she wouldn't sleep with Voss or something. They don't want people with spouses back home like Captain Ambroz, or basic Human needs and wants in the barracks.
They want:
They want:
They want... a Warrior Mindset.
Hey, did I mention that I once saw Tammy jokingly compare Voss to Pete Hegseth?
The world of MYRMIDON is fucked.
Tammy's most recent map of the setting; although she warns that everything beyond the Regime and American borders is liable to be inaccurate as details can change/be contradicted.
I'm not certain on what exactly the point of divergence was, and I still insist on not asking Tamara outright because I think it's more interesting to try and gather what I can from the text, but the clear outcome is that the Cold War never ended... and the United States never started winning it. The Soviet Union stayed committed to a maximalist Communist program and the memory of Stalinism, with no Khrushchev thaw or reforms but instead a constant push for doctrinaire centralization and an uncharacteristic swerve in policy to directly absorb its allies (and annexed enemies) over time rather than the traditional Non-Partisan Moscow Consensus of buffer zones and ideologically aligned states. No, instead Communism remains on the march, militarily, in a constant assault on the West. France fell in living memory, and Britain was violently "liberated" in the 2050s--the black zones of nuclear fallout and lawlessness all over the map, and Gwen's facial burn scars as a resettled refugee, should tell you exactly what kinds of weapons The Regime uses alongside the exosuits.
The worst, perhaps most horrifying part of all this... is that they're actually making it work. The Regime, despite all the dystopian, comically evil crimes this plot revolves around, seems to be characterized as having built a genuine, noticeable percentage of Communism for the lives of its subjects, a standard of living and social unity that means this system cannot collapse into the cynical national power grabs of the real world USSR.
Poster for in-universe relocation drives to grow the "World Capital" built in Western Siberia. The Regime is stated to make very ideal and lovely Garden Cities.
This is a system that even has what we would consider progressive social and ecological values, which frankly I would think actual USSR ideologues of the Malenkov/Suslov mold would fight tooth and nail to never let into their Parties. It's stated that large portions of France and Switzerland have been rewilded for ecological preservation (along with the slightly more sinister implied land use of "rehabilitative collective farmland" implying some kind of labor camp system...), and obviously for better and worse this is a state where queer people have been normalized up to the highest levels of leadership.
They even let a doll be Premiere! Just don't ask if she really has any free will or agency anymore... or if she's Human... or if she's alive...
From Tammy's worldbuilding piece above and without asking more questions myself, the best I can gather as to the foundation of The Regime is that there was some rapid equalization of roles between the DDR and Soviet Union in the Eastern Bloc (USSR advanced faster in WW2 so they grabbed all of Germany, maybe?), and also North Korea while they were at it. The Germans apparently got into leading roles in world communism very fast, which is why the displayed written language of the Regime from our characters' perspective in Europe is German, but it's mentioned that everyone in The Regime speaks an artificial state-encouraged conlang called "Eurasian"--which I think is a dialect of Russian?--and some of Tammy's art has propaganda written in I think Chinese characters too, for a full trilingual affect.
Meanwhile, the United States has been on the losing streak of the century, and its people and notional liberal ideals are having it even worse. This is apparently not something that features much in MYRMIDON at all, as a novel mostly focused on The Regime itself (Tammy has had some talk of America being more of something for a sequel), but hanging out in her Discord communities and checking her art feeds I did gather quite a few statements about the wider world in the setting. America in this timeline somehow still had a Trump (even though I would question how you ever get a break from Military Keynesian political-economy when there's a limited but real nuclear shooting war with the Soviets/Eurasians/Regimers every few years), and it's been festering with decades of MAGA incompetence and evil while the people opposed to it just keep quiet and barely hold on in cowardice, nudging things into barely functioning after decades of failed policies. Even arming the resistance, what should be an easy task when The Regime comes in with nuclear dicks swinging, is botched and corrupt, as American policy focuses on arming the most vocal CHUD movements and governments. They just keep making more perfect, unlovable foes for The Regime to keep bombing and starving.
Poster for the in-universe French reactionary resistance, of the kind that the "Biscay Battalion" fought at the end of Act I belong to.
The first (very milquetoast) Democratic President in 32 years was just elected in 2064.
All of this makes for a world where The Regime might come across as the lesser evil, even the greater good; a genuine path to progress and Human liberation worth fighting for. Certainly its conscripts seem to think so at the start of the story, as they enthusiastically break out into a chorus of the Internationale with enthusiasm so organic that their commanding officer hates it.
But here is where I think the story is quite genuinely heartfelt and well-considered as the work of an avowed Communist author: The Regime is still evil, even if socialism is good.
The first war crime is the war itself, and The Regime is fundamentally the aggressor in its conflicts. Escalation to major war, and normalization of nuclear war, were things both superpowers in real life knew were against the "rules" of a post-war world where direct empires and conquest were off the table, no matter how great the supposed provocation. But in the MYRMIDON timeline this norm is completely abandoned, if it ever existed at all. The Regime takes the logical conclusion of doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism--that there must be eventually one Communist state ruling the entire world brought about by force of arms against capitalist states--and runs with it to no deviation.
There is no alternative.
No matter how high the quality of life Regimers might enjoy, or how much they believe in their government and institutions, they were founded on expansionistic violence whose victims aren't exactly fully compensated with a "well, you're free now and well off compared to the world". And even in the present, that government actually works to shield horrendous monsters from their own society's sense of justice just because they are useful or influential in bringing about the state's goals. A gay man dying of radiation poisoning in England will certainly have a very different answer as to how "liberated" he feels versus that picturesque lesbian couple in Welthauptstadt and... Hey, wait a minute, this sounds familiar doesn't it?
I saw Tamara pithily call MYRMIDON a "Communist America Timeline", even though The Regime has no cultural connection to America, and I think I Get It.
The Regime is less a reflection of any ideal path of true World Communism or a realistic ideological extrapolation of anyone in the CPSU and more an exploration of Communism being dealt the same winning hand that liberalism got with America until the end of the 20th century. It is a multiethnic, assimilationist society built on an open ideological call and popular support, with a wealthy consumer society and the most advanced technology in the world, and it just can't seem to stop winning and becoming more and more influential in global affairs as it visibly outcompetes its nearest rival and sells itself as the superior way of life. Nobody can beat it militarily and it's a genuine historical improvement almost all countries would take over what came before.
But being "historically progressive" is not the same thing as being right.
Like, let me point out two other, very sinister details about implied Regime politics and culture in Act I, even aside from all of the rape.
The first, is that this is clearly a consumer society, a culture that resembles the real America more than not in terms of the appeal of products and brands in how people want to live and associate with each other.
Nudossi, Baikal Cola... Eastern Bloc historical brands portrayed as being as beloved and integral to everyday life as any capitalist one could dream of. I consider that last sentence particularly sinister; nostalgia is sort of the opposite of historical progress, isn't it?
Note that this isn't ranting against them having things that they enjoy or consume--in my personal political disposition I'm a lot less inclined to rant against "treats" than others close to me, both because I've tried to avoid reflexive anger anymore and because I think it's unavoidable that people want certain base pleasures in their way of life--but it's the clear and continued fetishization of them as "the good life" earned by Communist citizenship and military support of the state that gets me. Even if it's all served in biodegradable sustainable plastic, it's still happiness from a vending machine and a shot of cheap flavors. If you think that Coca Cola and McDonald's are crass bribery for supporting the American Empire, then I don't really see how you can miss something feeling off here.
And then there's Security Commissioner Ailin, agent of the openly oppressive institution of the Ministry of State Security. Not only are they a reminder that this is an avowed surveillance society worse than even the most horrendous NSA activities and corporate advertising in America (there are wired security cameras everywhere which the Regimers never mind or act wary of, and Voss can spy directly on Gwen in her bunk on a voyeuristic whim), but they drop an... interesting historical reference.
Passionarity (and related words; it's hard to translate so you can mess around with a lot of terms based on "passion" to convey it, like Tammy does here with Ailin making an adjective) is a historical pseudoscience promoted by one Lev Gumilev, whom the more brain-poisoned among us might recognize from The New Order but who otherwise is just an interesting and creepy figure in the development of modern Russian nationalism and Putinism. It's a broad, unscientific concept about praising people that have some heroic or "progressive" quality in embracing change and suffering for the greater good of their race, related also to how groups of people and nations take on some kind of stereotypical nature relating to their environment and "ecology". If you think about this for even ten seconds you can probably realize this is basically a fascist narrative of history (the struggle of peoples, everyone expected to be a hero through violence and death, etc.), and that's without even having to get to the section of his Wikipedia page going into how Gumilev thought Jews were inherently cowardly and "mercantile" parasites who can't fight and sacrifice themselves like good Eurasians.
No wonder Berkowitz flinched at the word. This is the sort of ideology that put her family in the "Jewish Autonomous Republic" in the first place.
So, suffice to say, The Regime's notion of one unified people for Communism clearly still carries heavy baggage of racial narratives and the chauvinism of its imperial core in the former USSR and Germany, and what are basically modern Putinist imperialist racial views are accepted and condoned at the highest levels of state security. Just as in America assimilation into a notionally accepting "nation of immigrants" comes with the quiet or loud priority of whiteness, assimilation into the "nation of workers" seems to have a priority for passionarity.
(Also note Ailin's "palpable lack of an accent"; just like how Americans often describe the conservative, white, Midwest newscaster dialect.)
I mean, there's also the subtext of a white superior officer recruiting a woman of color for Human experimentation and sexual abuse in a fort whose name just happens to resemble Fort Detrick, the infamous base of the US's historical biological warfare programs, but that's too obvious a point to add, right?
The final point I have about The Regime is...
It's a meme.
That's not a dismissive insult, I mean that it is literally named and modeled after a Twitter meme from a few years ago: a habit of leftists proclaiming "Regime!" in agreement with any act of state oppression that they agreed "owned" liberalism/America (IE: pretty much any time a non-western government does anything). This habit expanded with aesthetic accounts and a general vibe of people yearning for such a "Regime", for the hard hand of a state that openly and harshly controls all rather than the indirect systems of liberal civil society and market economics which most of us live in. The Regime is that dream, of the past and of the future, and in the fashion of the ideal science fiction writer Tammy then went "wow, isn't this future kind of awful?"
This whole theme is a perfect fit for something I've already been talking about for months now in the Draka thread, whenever Human Domestication Guide comes up again: the tendency of otherwise sweet and unobjectionable people to lose themselves in the leftist power fantasy of destroying capitalism and instituting their kinks as public policy and not realizing that the vibes are fucked (and they're replicating the horrors that got us here, but the vibes being fucked is really important too). The Regime is a knowing parody of a more "tankie" Leftist Revenge Fantasy than the Anarchist one in the Affini, but I think there's absolutely still a takedown and lesson here.
This parody of the Leftist Revenge Fantasy also extends, by the way, to The Regime's symbol of the Scarlet Trigon, but I think I'll leave some discussion of what Tammy says that was based on and some... rather fucked art featuring its practical use for a later Act where I think it comes into play.
One of my smaller but still relevant thoughts on this story is... well, I put it in the header there, I am getting a bit tired of writing this review/analysis so now I'm getting into technical minutiae.
I've noticed that a lot of mind control and problematic domination erotica likes to revolve around finding true, perfect scientific solutions to free will. Hypnosis in this sort of fiction doesn't just let you do a consensual meditation exercise with your partner where you agree to take on suggestions and compulsions; it literally entrances and alters your state of mind. Drugs aren't just altered states of consciousness and physiological dependence that could condition you to act adversely; they instantly corrode your morality and will into a puppet for others. Pheromones aren't just an unproven pseudoscientific fixation with no evidence of sexual or social influence in Humans; they actually make you instantly horny or obedient.
And so on, you get the idea.
I wouldn't say that MYRMIDON is a subversion of this kind of magic working brainwashing in fiction, but it does play it effectively for horror with certain grounded rules that I think make it worth praising and comparing to others.
The first is that Lotus is not a wonder drug that does whatever the Achilles Project requires, but rather an arbitrarily effective cocktail of many real substances and their effects. Opiates are the most obvious and important: it's employed as a painkiller and dissociative agent to facilitate Mel's integration with scary cybernetics, and to burn out her natural dopamine and impulse control so that the machinery and conditioning can work her over as a strung out doll. In the cockpit, even more varieties of conditioning chemicals are mentioned like amphetamines, acid, and DMT as all being a part of the mix to keep her running in the field. It's neither a magic obedience chemical nor an anti-drug PSA caricature of addiction; it's just wrecking Mel's body in very tiring ways.
The second is the surgical process itself, which is perhaps the most unrealistic and fantastical science fiction element in the whole story, as it revolves around an automated surgery machine performing some very accurate and very rapid work on a volunteer with no prior examination or preparation, but has very evocative and terrible results. The whole process come across as an almost demonic horror kept in the deepest levels of Fort Dietrich, something that can't be real and if it was nobody would believe you. The process is very gruesome and thoroughly described, hinging on just a few major implants, and it strikes me that MYRMIDON is in an interesting and I think growing category of science fiction to say that brain-computer interfaces could be possible and work... but that they're probably really not worth it. The modifications to Mel's body are drastic and invasive, with not exactly seamless scar tissue and integration, and she has to be rigged up as a machine with entirely new bodily needs than what the Human body can provide, including an 18 volt power supply for her brain implants and an artificial liver so she can survive as a sealed away machine. And even then, after all this she is not some universal invincible technopath nor a wired-up genius with all the knowledge in the world; this is all mostly interface for horrible neuroablative conditioning and then a plug-in to help her dissociate into her mech (sorry, raise her "oneirosynthesis score").
Doctor Berkowitz's description of "plenty of animal tests" makes jokes about this just being Communist Neuralink very easy.
And third... the conditioning sequence itself. I am a sucker for symbolic, politically loaded hallucination sequences, so the rather blunt imagery of Mel being forced to forget her family and friends and to surrender control to the programming of Pilot One; to see the world just in terms of Regime authorities to be obeyed and crude stereotypes of "reactionaries" to be slaughtered, was very compelling to me. It was a good way to simplify and narrativize from Mel's perspective of what I gather had to be more of a week of fine tuning and burning out neuron associations by the technicians and machines involved.
This is Tammy's illustration of the conditioning scene which I can post... the other one is not so friendly to SV what with Mel being entirely nude, hoisted up by mechanical tentacles, and dripping in unidentified fluids.
Hey, this is a mecha book, right? I might as well nerd out over some technical details I observed and offer my own interpretations through some Cold War militaria interests as well.
The book so far seems to have a very interesting relationship to the conventions and technological assumptions of the mecha genre, insofar as it accepts them as givens to enable the aesthetic and narrative conceit of exosuits being a thing and humanoid robots being a viable combat platform... but then stops stretching the rules to try and justify or prefer them any more than that. The easiest at hand anime comparison is VOTOMS rather than Gundam: the exosuits are a few meters tall and have some awkward form factors, and they fundamentally do not negate any of the branches of combined arms we know in reality. There is, in fact, an amusing mention of tank crews taking great joy in seeing exosuits stumble or fail under the inherent limitations of complex bipedal robotics.
Exosuits, actually, mostly come across as an inherently awkward and limited technological moment in time: a step up from infantry in terms of a heavy weapons platform and a step down from tanks in terms of footprint and vulnerability to precision strikes (I theorize there's also perhaps some relationship to fighting dispersed on nuclear battlefields, but I'll save that speculation for another Act...) but not a replacement for either and still desperately limited by its form factor.
In fact, I think it's a lovely worldbuilding detail and a horrific bit of grounding for all the energy in the whole supersoldier brainwashing process that the real advantage of a cyborg drugged out Pilot isn't necessarily performance--they at one point say the best central planning and prediction computers in The Regime called it at just a 15% increase in efficiency versus a normal pilot--but compatibility with a much more compact exosuit.
There's no art of the Mk. 2 suits piloted by the normal people in Pilot One's unit, but just take as a comparison their American rival, the M3A2 Powell. The Powell has to have a big monolithic central torso to hold an enclosed cockpit, while the Mk.3 gets to be a few feet lower in profile and have more of its space and power supplies devoted to advanced weapons like a railgun by basically sealing Mel into a medieval torture rack with her limbs locked into the suit's own.
(I wonder if anyone in this timeline ever bothered to ask Masamune Shirow about his actually decently thought out concept as an engineering graduate of the form factor and interface of a limited size mech... Maybe they just hated the idea of leaving the arms out there... Or maybe he died in whatever conflicts led to the division of Japan.)
The technological disadvantage of the US in this timeline manifests as very heavy metal, really WW2 or even Russia-coded military technology. Big, heavily armored slabs of slower robotics with conservative high-explosive weapon choices. The Regime almost comes across as aliens in comparison with the carbon black organicism. This was apparently even more pronounced in early concept art where Tammy made the A01 look quite skeletal and insectoid.
The lack of outlines/use of white space for panel lining is also a fascinating look... almost like a hieroglyphic representation of the mech or something.
The action itself in Act I is very brief, mostly framed by the Evangelion esque bridge action and the ominous levels of biochemical control exerted over Mel/Pilot One, so there's not much to comment on tactically save for the fact that it pulls a neat writing trick of not needing much space or overwrought exposition on the rules of exosuit combat to convey how exactly Pilot One breaks them and is so terrifying. Her seeming preference for direct hand to hand kills of the pilot inside the cockpit (I know a certain friend of mine who will read this thread expressed distaste for the eagerness of Mechsploitation to jump into tactically pointless melee combat, but... well, it's narratively justifiable in an urban clusterfuck fight and at the hands of a psychotic lobotomite being wired dopamine by intensity of violence, right?) and reaction speeds get the classic anime "observers watching shit go down" treatment, and I think Tammy's prose really shines when it can get going into the horrible and frantic mode of someone witnessing or being subjected to something they can't quite understand or control.
Tammy is particularly proud of this piece and specifically hoped I'd share it here!
"Anthropomorphic gesticulation" is apparently quite frowned on in exosuit forces, which means gestures can only be a sign that something really bad is going down. It's another appreciated detail about the limitations of exosuits, that there must have been some doctrinal study into the range of motion enabled by a fully anthropomorphic robotic chassis and found them wasteful or even counterproductive compared to understanding that it is just a vehicle of war.
Now, uhh, a bit of picking at how exactly the Socialist People's Army is supposed to be organized:
I'm not quite sure about the reasoning behind the "Echelon" structure of the conscript unit Mel is initially employed in. The Soviets historically had a very specific and organized system of conscription and tiers of reservists into a large and dedicated infrastructure, so the "Third Western Echelon" being a seemingly detached garrison from Fort Dietrich led by and independently deployable under a captain seems off to me. Who do they answer to in a war? Surely their regiment, brigade, or division is the more relevant unit here? I think I also saw a pin in the Discord saying an Echelon was a three squad formation so really shouldn't Duffy be a lieutenant and not--
Wait a second.
Ooooohhhh, okay, it's a joke-but-part-of-the-point element of them really being quite like the modern West, by making them comparable to the Israelis with poorly stretched, piecemeal conscript units and overpromoted officers.
(I think there's also a pretty clear link between what The Regime does with Bordeaux and the Gaza War, with The Regime basically enclosing a ruined urban strip by the sea and sustaining a Humanitarian crisis around it while using special forces incursions and firepower to try and slaughter anyone left. There's even a bit of other conscripts filming Pilot One's rampage for social media that now feels pretty deliberate.)
(Voss being a four-star general just called "General" is also a Communist Americanism that I think is deliberate; the equivalent in a Soviet/Russian military tradition would be Army General or Marshall, depending on if we count exosuits as infantry or not and whether they're their own service branch or just a strange set of special purpose battalions.)
***
I reiterate again: This thread is a recommendation and promotion, as I am shamelessly biased already by having had interesting conversations on the topics involved with the writer of the work in question. I encourage anyone here, particularly those who were interested in my Draka Let's Read, alternate history fiction in general, or trans girls writing weird transgressive horror to check it out and come in with your own opinions or analysis. I think that even with the relatively straightforward first Act I've read so far that this is working in a unique blend of genres and ideas, and I'm eager to read more and talk about it.
...Which I couldn't do right away because I wanted to take the time to write this report, of sorts.
A review for Act II will soon follow. Act III's... well, that depends on when Tammy publishes it publicly, I suppose.
In our first new conversations, we caught up on many things, but one point which she proudly informed me of stood out immediately: She had written a novel.
You see, I had not been completely unaware of her projects and output while I had been out of contact. Some of the circles I lurked around on Bluesky, née Twitter, had still had ties to her and often shared her work; meaning I had vaguely seen, but not fully understood the context of, art and discussion around this project already.
The name alone was enough to intrigue me, though.
MYRMIDON, by PROLETKVLT (AKA Tamara)
Do unto others, what has been done to you
In a wonderful twist of fate, I had just started reading the Iliad as a bit of intermittent heavy reading a few days before this reunion with Tammy. In subsequent conversations, just commenting on my odd little half-formed mental picture of the work from secondhand exposure and now proximity as people in her Discord groups talks, I felt increasingly intrigued and in tune with where the project was coming from... even if it turned out that, as Tammy explained, the Iliad and Trojan War cycle were actually less major influences beyond some prominent theming and very broad strokes. It's a work aiming for the exploration of cycles of violence, through both political history and interpersonal abuse; for the deconstruction of political fantasy in the alternate history genre and the immense Human suffering implied in what many idly wish for; and for more than a little... exploration of grotesque and transgressive sexual dynamics that speak to a lot of very personal fears.
Yes, this story is technically erotica. The mature tag is on this thread for a reason.
Or, at least, it's a work with a lot of sexual elements in conversation with a very niche genre of erotica. Tamara calls it "kink horror", and with what I've read so far and want to talk about... I'm inclined to agree with her and call that the best possible label.
But let's back up and address that genre for a second, because I feel pretty certain that a large portion of the SV audience interested here won't be able to follow right away.
Mechsploitation: How From Software Accidentally Inspired a New Genre of Science Fiction Pornography
"We're close to Rubicon. Wake the dog up."
I really wonder if the writers of Armored Core VI are online enough to have taken any notice at all of how much this analogy of dogs and handlers has spiraled out completely beyond their own story and intents.
As far as I can quickly and easily trace the history of pre-release material, that line and its implications first reached anglophone audiences via a trailer in late April of 2023. It, and all the swirling rumors and explanations around it from other previews and promotional material, inspired something right away. I believe there was already some... exploration of just how sexual the connotations of being an authority figure's "Hound" are early on, but the impact truly hit on July 14th of that year (narrowly beating out the release of ACVI's story trailer, which revealed more of the Hound dynamic and that game's themes of miserable debt-slave transhumanism, by a few days to give her credit for being ahead of the curve) when Internet mind-control erotica writer Kallie released the then-one-off story WARHOUND, featuring a female protagonist in a brutal, mecha-heavy military sci-fi setting being brainwashed and enslaved by a shadowy military representative of a totalitarian government.
It was immediately off to the dog races, if you will.
This fiction hit at basically a perfect moment. Not only was Armored Core VI set to release in the late summer of that year, but it was roughly at the end of the (too short, in my opinion, but that's grumbling for elsewhere) run of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. G-Witch had very prominently and enthusiastically featured lesbian protagonists in a way that had captured a large online yuri fandom, and that translated into a hunger for more mecha fiction catering to those tastes in romantic themes... and often quite darker than romantic.
So now we had a trend on our hands, as sites like ReadOnlyMind and ArchiveOfOurOwn lit up with a decent little storm of writers trying their hand at this concept. What's shared in common tends to be the rough emotional appeal: the mech Pilot as an instrument of violence for a larger political or economic cause, but a fundamentally disempowered one; often literally dehumanized by some invasive cybernetic or psychological process to be a more effective tool for their Handler.
Yes, there is a trend of basically always calling the commanding officer in this fiction a "Handler" rather than anything else... which is definitely an element that rubs some the wrong way.
A criticism of this genre I've heard from a few friends is that it's fundamentally a small, niche fandom of relatively young women (often trans women) stumbling into genre conventions with a lot of enthusiasm but maybe not enough experience and... research (I'm really not sure of a better word to describe reading or watching other fiction with a critical eye so you can make your own better) under their belts. It shows in things like the "Handler" terminology taking on a life of its own outside of the fundamental commanding officer relationship, with often not bothering to imagine something more sexually transgressive than that, and with just not iterating as much with original science fiction beyond the Armored Core and Gundam influences.
But still, I personally find a good deal of it very fun or hot, so I ended up following a few writers and artists within the theme, hence being exposed to MYRMIDON before I even started talking to Tammy again.
Shameless Promotion
So, why am I posting about this on here?
Well, after getting in touch with Tammy again and learning more about MYRMIDON, I started realizing that its thematic differences with and niche in the kink space of Mechsploitation mesh naturally with things that I'm already talking about in my Draka Let's Read: the relationship between political science fiction and alternative history with sexual fantasy, but also with darker aspects of abuse and gender and deeper interpersonal pain.
Which is to say, I think Tammy's kind of ended up making, without realizing it, a "The Domination of the Draka But Good" fic without the baggage of actually having it be fanfic of the Draka. A brilliant coincidence of convergence, it turns out, as I explained what the Draka are to her and left her utterly baffled.
Aside from that, I also just like the themes and intentions she's evidently putting into this work in general... as I will start getting to in the review proper.
However, I actually held off on sitting down to read it for these past few weeks, for one simple reason: it wasn't done yet. Tammy had a complete draft of the whole book last year but has been rewriting it entirely into a three act structure released over time on AO3. I wanted to hold off on really releasing my input because on some level I thought I would be a Jane-come-lately if I got too into the weeds of discussing it with her or breaking it down before she had a finished product when I had just come in at the end of her work. That time is now past, as she currently has the second draft of Act III finished and editing. This is now a complete novel, and I want to share my thoughts as a bit of an open critique in writing to get a conversation started.
So, just transparently and up front, my overall disposition on MYRMIDON is positive right off the bat. I can never say I'm here to be a dispassionate critic or pick away at the details. This is shameless promotion for a friend, as I believe there are enough people on SV to be interested in this story and I want to spread and talk about it now that I've read it. Please read Tammy's book; she's an excellent writer, a great artist, and a good woman who I know has put a lot of herself into this.
But beyond my unavoidable bias, I think there's a lot to talk about. This isn't a "Let's Read" as such, because I don't think this calls for a detailed recounting and laborious plot beat by beat analysis of the book (it's free on AO3 linked above; go read my friend's book) so I would, rather, like to organize things by topic.
Get In The Robot, Mel
The first third of the Triptych Tammy made for the banner art on AO3. The full thing is kind of a spoiler, however.
So, right away, my impression of the first Act of MYRMIDON when I finished reading and stepped back was "Wow, that's literally the first episode Evangelion retold with more military/political horror and sexual assault."
This is a very funny thing to realize because I learned a bit ago that Tammy had not in fact seen Evangelion until a few months ago, well after the first draft of MYRMIDON.
To give a basic summary for those who need a little more explanation or prodding, and just to provide a basic foundation for my critique, the story of MYRMIDON starts off with a group of low-status conscripts from a broadly Eastern Bloc-coded Communist state called simply "The Regime" returning to their base in conquered Switzerland after a deployment in an apparently still-resistant France. Among them are girlfriends Amelia "Mel" Heydari and Gwenneth Hazelwood, still reckoning with the fact that the former had just killed a man for the first time during the otherwise routine and menial assignment. Mel is, unfortunately, identified at this point by the leadership council of the "Achilles Project", a shadowy operation by the Regime to supplement and replace their Exosuit Corps which has proven militarily and politically unreliable for their already evident grand plans for world conquest ("liberation"-I'll get to the ideology of The Regime and the decidedly complicated characterization it receives soon enough). She is put through a rapid recruitment into the Corps and ideological sales pitch, mainly playing on her fawning idolization of the Exosuit Corps General and Achilles Project Director Lydia Voss, but it quickly becomes clear that her actual consent or cooperation is not important to the Project, as the plan sees her as merely a promising set of psychological conditions for cyborg conditioning (mainly her autism) and Voss sees her as just another victim for a clear habit of sexual abuse.
Tammy's Official Cast Sheet, with biographical reference details. There's also a nude version, which is how I know if any given character is trans or cis regardless of whether it comes up in the plot.
Mel is literally groped, drugged, and thrown into an automated torture chamber by Voss, subjecting her to a week of hypnagogic brainwashing facilitated by the wonder drug cocktail "Lotus" (I'll get into my interest in these details of how the story handles the stereotypical brainwashing/mind break plot of Mechsploitation later, but suffice to say it's interesting that Lotus is stated to mostly be a combination of very mundane and functional psychoactive substances). This week creates a dissociative secondary identity dominating a barely functional Mel, known as "Pilot One", who is promptly scrambled for a sortie with one of Voss's Exosuit units to Bordeaux to both crush the French insurgents and test her capabilities. This does not go well, however, due to the volatile balance of a resistant Mel and bloodthirsty Pilot One, and the Act ends with Pilot One having to be subdued from her berserk state while Voss ominously looks on and brags that this is all just part of the plan to "finish what Lenin started."
It's all relatively straightforward when I lay it out like that, and the resemblance to the first episode of Evangelion is a little uncanny. You have the teenage loner (Mel and Gwen are both 18, serving The Regime's mandatory military service; the character sheet means this is the fast and immediate way to realize this story takes place in late 2065, or 148 "Revolutionary Era" to use The Regime's calendar which counts the 1917 Russian Revolution as Year 0) recruited by a sinister father figure (again, I'll get to it) to pilot a mecha, then a disastrous deployment that ends in the mech going berserk due to the sinister horrors involved in its creation backfiring.
This is obviously a reductive summary, but it's a good starting point to focus in on the details that I think set this story apart and make it interesting to talk about. It takes a broad outline of a good mecha story opening and then builds its themes over top of it.
Lydia Voss: The Worst Trans Woman, as Drawn by a Trans Woman
I think it's really hard to talk about MYRMIDON without its visual art accompaniment (Tammy has always been a visual artist in her whole multimedia suite, and it's part of the distinct image that's marked her contributions to many projects from Paradox modding to her own fiction), and that art makes it impossible to avoid talking about Voss.
So let's start there.
A note on appearances... in almost any piece where Mel's cyborged up and has the uneven bloated right eye, cover one half of her face with your hand or something in your field of view, then try the other. Mel and Pilot One seem to have a bit of a problem with boundaries and time division, and have very different demeanors.
Seeing Voss for the first time without context, my immediate impression was that she was a transphobic caricature, and that there has to be something really interesting at play to explain that, textually, from a proudly trans artist.
Act I does not really provide much elaboration on this yet, but I have reliably gathered from discussions in Tammy's servers where I've tried avoiding getting too many answers about the plot and central reveals that there is a reason to Voss's rhyme, so to speak, with the horrendous creatures of transphobic propaganda. She is an unkempt, sexually licentious predator not necessarily because she is transgender and entrusted with authority (Mel is, if I have not mentioned it yet, herself trans, as are the extremely personable and enthusiastic Cuban private Tanya in her initial unit and the male pilot in the Exosuit team, both very aggressively normal and well-adjusted people by all appearances) but because she is a transgender woman who willingly climbed the ranks of totalitarian state power that enable and encourage one's worst vices in exchange for dedication to the cause. Her own gender anxieties and neuroses will apparently be a topic for the next two Acts, but for now she stands, at least in my interpretation, as someone whose gender has sort of been betrayed and suppressed by her belief system bringing out her worst impulses. She is, as one of Tammy's captions on an illustration of her says, a "state assigned abusive dad (female)" because the role of the commanding officer has always been strongly culturally encoded as fatherly, and this is still a society which has never made a concerted effort to end the sexual abuses allowed to father figures, regardless of its nominal "historical progressivism."
And as for facial hair, something trans women (at least myself and most others I know... there are obviously exceptions where some of us can be more comfortable with it but I think the political valence is universally recognizable) often try desperately to avoid being seen or associated with... I would like to just give my read of a theme throughout the act about it.
When Mel is initially met by Voss, she herself hasn't had time to shave or clean up in preparation... mostly because, obviously, she's been on the road with her unit and has just gotten back without time to really decompress or clean up.
But then during the horrific, automated surgical scene:
It is the precise, mechanical priority of the Pilot process to render Mel hairless, but only as a side effect for function. It just as ruthlessly shaves off a streak of her beloved head hair--a symbol of her gender before she even started hormones--to allow room for the invasive installation of a computer interface into her brain.
This is all enjoyed by Voss upon molesting her later, upon emergence:
All of this is to say... my literary read of what Tammy is going for (this is such a weird thing to say about someone I can literally message on Discord right now but it's part of the exercise) is that the facial hair is representative of the individual agency and, by extension, failure that a trans woman can have as an individual in living up to the social assumptions and demands of our identified gender. When I get so busy I can't grab a shower or wash my face, the times I usually assign for shaving, stubble is a reminder of my own neglect or priorities that can generate a lot of personal anxiety and demands to fix it before anyone can see. Mel lives with this too, with the rigors of military life forcing her into the dysphoric position of being observable in this moment of vulnerability, whereas Voss has been granted so much power by the state and been elevated above so much criticism or resistance--Voss's position makes her as capable of ignoring "no" as any capitalist billionaire--that she can neglect herself and feel no shame, even seemingly wield it as a privilege while fetishizing the beauty standard being forced on others.
Her history of sexual assault is implied to be a known and expected quantity, too, by the other authority figures around her. Even if they aren't, there are at least suspicions that keep getting ignored and paint a picture of institutions completely and realistically in thrall to letting a "good officer" keep working in her little fiefdom.
In fact, it's a repeated motif of the chapter that two relatively high up authority figures in the Project, Party Regional Secretary Zoya Borysenka and lead Doctor Berkowitz, both clearly recognize and are uncomfortable with Voss singling out Mel for obvious sexual abuse and keep getting cowed into silence... even though Zoya specifically says her job is supposed to be political and ethical oversight of the program. The Stasi (in the form of Ailin, who is so mysterious and monstrously devoted to the state that they get they/them pronouns seemingly out of gender itself being scared of their authority) even plays a part, clearly having some role in making clear Voss can't actually be stopped.
It's a really quite harrowing and grounded portrait of oversight doing nothing because the purpose of the system is what it does.
By the way, apparently in the very earliest drafts (as in, concept art) of MYRMIDON, Voss was cis and textually her dehumanization and abuse of Mel was a chaser thing.
Up to you how to debate the "what could have been" there and how that thematically compares. I'm personally here for depicting the most horrible and toxic T4T imaginable rather than it being the pure and true option as in a lot of romantic fiction written by trans women.
Rage--Goddess, Sing the Rage of Peleus' Son Achilles
One central influence on MYRMIDON that I'm immediately hit by is music. This is something Tamara is quite open about, because she made a whole Spotify playlist to accompany it.
Like, if I had to guess as to the assignment of songs to this Act, tracks 1 through 10 line up quite well with the arc currently, with TOOL's Undertow in particular lining up with the aquatic prose associated with Mel's indoctrination in the Pilot program. The depths of Fort Dietrich are dark, cavernous, and positioned over flowing underground rivers directly comparable to the River Styx of the chapter's title; and both the chapter blurb on AO3 and one passage in particular use that exact wording of being sucked under uncontrollable currents for losing control of one's self to describe the narcotic effects of Lotus:
None of this is just to say there's plagiarism here, of course, or to just make a simplistic "I recognized the thing!" claim. What I'm saying is that Tamara chose very well in terms of connecting her work to a kind of "bardic" tradition, going for poetry and a very clear understanding of what moods and experiences from inspirational works that she wants to channel. The playlist makes for a very good descent from from despairing heavy rock dirges describing the suffering of personal abuse (both chemical and interpersonal), where we are now, and then into more aggressive and anxious tracks indicating acts to come.
With a particularly grim and portentous exception at the end of the list, which the Act directly quotes...
"Blue skies drive the dark clouds far away," as Gwen thinks when masturbating to this photo of better times, to relieve her worry about what happened to Mel.
Yeah, it's not hard to figure out where exactly Voss and The Regime are taking the world in the name of Final Communism, even if you're not like me seeing hints and discussion of Act III being posted in real time.
Ah, but what about the greatest musical reference of all... Homeric epic poetry? (It was performed bardic style in Ancient Greece so it counts.)
Well, right away, just as a moment to gush about Tammy's visual artwork and illustrations, even if she asserts that the Iliad connections were never very deep or thorough, her stylistic choices capture something that I want to point out.
The use of earthen red or dark ("wine dark", you could say) background tones, contrasted by deep black figures and highlights of a few other colors... The fantastic (in both the superlative and "not realistic" senses of the word) use of shapes and silhouette along with caricatured posing... It's rather reminiscent of Greek black-figure pottery, isn't it? The world and aesthetic of MYRMIDON is deliberately mostly Cold War retro-futurism mixed with anime and truly impossible nightmare machines, but I think it still catches a very classical brutality. This is a world where the powers that be claim a path to technological communist utopia, but it really feels like it's spiraling into a Bronze Age atrocity.
I mean, even just the name "Achilles Project" says a lot about the motivations and awareness of the people involved. The metaphors are even textually jumbled, as Voss mentions that Berkowitz chose most of the names of the Project as part of a personal interest in mythology ("nostalgic as always") and called the enabling drug mix of the whole thing "Lotus", which was a Homeric story from the Odyssey, not the Iliad, with no relation to Achilles or his Myrmidons.
What we can gather is that The Regime wants soldiers who are not modern Humans. They don't even want cold, mechanical drones implied by the etymology/mythical origin of the Myrmidons as "ant men." They want killers, they want the classical, Homeric mind--famously theorized by some out of date evolutionary psychological theories to be literally "bicameral" in terms of hallucinating orders from the gods much like how Mel becomes subjected to Pilot One--that might suffer poetically but never flinches from a constant forward push of bloodshed ordained by the gods.
The Regime has decided that the actual Human soldiers produced by a modern society, even an ideological Communist one with universal military service and inducement to volunteer for elite units, has produced disappointments to the kind of war they want to wage.
They don't want a big-breasted Ukrainian war hero who makes for good pinup posters but I suspect they killed with an earlier iteration of the Program or just allowed to die because she wouldn't sleep with Voss or something. They don't want people with spouses back home like Captain Ambroz, or basic Human needs and wants in the barracks.
They want:
They want:
They want... a Warrior Mindset.
Hey, did I mention that I once saw Tammy jokingly compare Voss to Pete Hegseth?
Death to (Communist) America: The Regime and the Horror of Alternate History
The world of MYRMIDON is fucked.
Tammy's most recent map of the setting; although she warns that everything beyond the Regime and American borders is liable to be inaccurate as details can change/be contradicted.
I'm not certain on what exactly the point of divergence was, and I still insist on not asking Tamara outright because I think it's more interesting to try and gather what I can from the text, but the clear outcome is that the Cold War never ended... and the United States never started winning it. The Soviet Union stayed committed to a maximalist Communist program and the memory of Stalinism, with no Khrushchev thaw or reforms but instead a constant push for doctrinaire centralization and an uncharacteristic swerve in policy to directly absorb its allies (and annexed enemies) over time rather than the traditional Non-Partisan Moscow Consensus of buffer zones and ideologically aligned states. No, instead Communism remains on the march, militarily, in a constant assault on the West. France fell in living memory, and Britain was violently "liberated" in the 2050s--the black zones of nuclear fallout and lawlessness all over the map, and Gwen's facial burn scars as a resettled refugee, should tell you exactly what kinds of weapons The Regime uses alongside the exosuits.
The worst, perhaps most horrifying part of all this... is that they're actually making it work. The Regime, despite all the dystopian, comically evil crimes this plot revolves around, seems to be characterized as having built a genuine, noticeable percentage of Communism for the lives of its subjects, a standard of living and social unity that means this system cannot collapse into the cynical national power grabs of the real world USSR.
Poster for in-universe relocation drives to grow the "World Capital" built in Western Siberia. The Regime is stated to make very ideal and lovely Garden Cities.
This is a system that even has what we would consider progressive social and ecological values, which frankly I would think actual USSR ideologues of the Malenkov/Suslov mold would fight tooth and nail to never let into their Parties. It's stated that large portions of France and Switzerland have been rewilded for ecological preservation (along with the slightly more sinister implied land use of "rehabilitative collective farmland" implying some kind of labor camp system...), and obviously for better and worse this is a state where queer people have been normalized up to the highest levels of leadership.
They even let a doll be Premiere! Just don't ask if she really has any free will or agency anymore... or if she's Human... or if she's alive...
From Tammy's worldbuilding piece above and without asking more questions myself, the best I can gather as to the foundation of The Regime is that there was some rapid equalization of roles between the DDR and Soviet Union in the Eastern Bloc (USSR advanced faster in WW2 so they grabbed all of Germany, maybe?), and also North Korea while they were at it. The Germans apparently got into leading roles in world communism very fast, which is why the displayed written language of the Regime from our characters' perspective in Europe is German, but it's mentioned that everyone in The Regime speaks an artificial state-encouraged conlang called "Eurasian"--which I think is a dialect of Russian?--and some of Tammy's art has propaganda written in I think Chinese characters too, for a full trilingual affect.
Meanwhile, the United States has been on the losing streak of the century, and its people and notional liberal ideals are having it even worse. This is apparently not something that features much in MYRMIDON at all, as a novel mostly focused on The Regime itself (Tammy has had some talk of America being more of something for a sequel), but hanging out in her Discord communities and checking her art feeds I did gather quite a few statements about the wider world in the setting. America in this timeline somehow still had a Trump (even though I would question how you ever get a break from Military Keynesian political-economy when there's a limited but real nuclear shooting war with the Soviets/Eurasians/Regimers every few years), and it's been festering with decades of MAGA incompetence and evil while the people opposed to it just keep quiet and barely hold on in cowardice, nudging things into barely functioning after decades of failed policies. Even arming the resistance, what should be an easy task when The Regime comes in with nuclear dicks swinging, is botched and corrupt, as American policy focuses on arming the most vocal CHUD movements and governments. They just keep making more perfect, unlovable foes for The Regime to keep bombing and starving.
Poster for the in-universe French reactionary resistance, of the kind that the "Biscay Battalion" fought at the end of Act I belong to.
The first (very milquetoast) Democratic President in 32 years was just elected in 2064.
All of this makes for a world where The Regime might come across as the lesser evil, even the greater good; a genuine path to progress and Human liberation worth fighting for. Certainly its conscripts seem to think so at the start of the story, as they enthusiastically break out into a chorus of the Internationale with enthusiasm so organic that their commanding officer hates it.
But here is where I think the story is quite genuinely heartfelt and well-considered as the work of an avowed Communist author: The Regime is still evil, even if socialism is good.
The first war crime is the war itself, and The Regime is fundamentally the aggressor in its conflicts. Escalation to major war, and normalization of nuclear war, were things both superpowers in real life knew were against the "rules" of a post-war world where direct empires and conquest were off the table, no matter how great the supposed provocation. But in the MYRMIDON timeline this norm is completely abandoned, if it ever existed at all. The Regime takes the logical conclusion of doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism--that there must be eventually one Communist state ruling the entire world brought about by force of arms against capitalist states--and runs with it to no deviation.
There is no alternative.
No matter how high the quality of life Regimers might enjoy, or how much they believe in their government and institutions, they were founded on expansionistic violence whose victims aren't exactly fully compensated with a "well, you're free now and well off compared to the world". And even in the present, that government actually works to shield horrendous monsters from their own society's sense of justice just because they are useful or influential in bringing about the state's goals. A gay man dying of radiation poisoning in England will certainly have a very different answer as to how "liberated" he feels versus that picturesque lesbian couple in Welthauptstadt and... Hey, wait a minute, this sounds familiar doesn't it?
I saw Tamara pithily call MYRMIDON a "Communist America Timeline", even though The Regime has no cultural connection to America, and I think I Get It.
The Regime is less a reflection of any ideal path of true World Communism or a realistic ideological extrapolation of anyone in the CPSU and more an exploration of Communism being dealt the same winning hand that liberalism got with America until the end of the 20th century. It is a multiethnic, assimilationist society built on an open ideological call and popular support, with a wealthy consumer society and the most advanced technology in the world, and it just can't seem to stop winning and becoming more and more influential in global affairs as it visibly outcompetes its nearest rival and sells itself as the superior way of life. Nobody can beat it militarily and it's a genuine historical improvement almost all countries would take over what came before.
But being "historically progressive" is not the same thing as being right.
Like, let me point out two other, very sinister details about implied Regime politics and culture in Act I, even aside from all of the rape.
The first, is that this is clearly a consumer society, a culture that resembles the real America more than not in terms of the appeal of products and brands in how people want to live and associate with each other.
Nudossi, Baikal Cola... Eastern Bloc historical brands portrayed as being as beloved and integral to everyday life as any capitalist one could dream of. I consider that last sentence particularly sinister; nostalgia is sort of the opposite of historical progress, isn't it?
Note that this isn't ranting against them having things that they enjoy or consume--in my personal political disposition I'm a lot less inclined to rant against "treats" than others close to me, both because I've tried to avoid reflexive anger anymore and because I think it's unavoidable that people want certain base pleasures in their way of life--but it's the clear and continued fetishization of them as "the good life" earned by Communist citizenship and military support of the state that gets me. Even if it's all served in biodegradable sustainable plastic, it's still happiness from a vending machine and a shot of cheap flavors. If you think that Coca Cola and McDonald's are crass bribery for supporting the American Empire, then I don't really see how you can miss something feeling off here.
And then there's Security Commissioner Ailin, agent of the openly oppressive institution of the Ministry of State Security. Not only are they a reminder that this is an avowed surveillance society worse than even the most horrendous NSA activities and corporate advertising in America (there are wired security cameras everywhere which the Regimers never mind or act wary of, and Voss can spy directly on Gwen in her bunk on a voyeuristic whim), but they drop an... interesting historical reference.
Passionarity (and related words; it's hard to translate so you can mess around with a lot of terms based on "passion" to convey it, like Tammy does here with Ailin making an adjective) is a historical pseudoscience promoted by one Lev Gumilev, whom the more brain-poisoned among us might recognize from The New Order but who otherwise is just an interesting and creepy figure in the development of modern Russian nationalism and Putinism. It's a broad, unscientific concept about praising people that have some heroic or "progressive" quality in embracing change and suffering for the greater good of their race, related also to how groups of people and nations take on some kind of stereotypical nature relating to their environment and "ecology". If you think about this for even ten seconds you can probably realize this is basically a fascist narrative of history (the struggle of peoples, everyone expected to be a hero through violence and death, etc.), and that's without even having to get to the section of his Wikipedia page going into how Gumilev thought Jews were inherently cowardly and "mercantile" parasites who can't fight and sacrifice themselves like good Eurasians.
No wonder Berkowitz flinched at the word. This is the sort of ideology that put her family in the "Jewish Autonomous Republic" in the first place.
So, suffice to say, The Regime's notion of one unified people for Communism clearly still carries heavy baggage of racial narratives and the chauvinism of its imperial core in the former USSR and Germany, and what are basically modern Putinist imperialist racial views are accepted and condoned at the highest levels of state security. Just as in America assimilation into a notionally accepting "nation of immigrants" comes with the quiet or loud priority of whiteness, assimilation into the "nation of workers" seems to have a priority for passionarity.
(Also note Ailin's "palpable lack of an accent"; just like how Americans often describe the conservative, white, Midwest newscaster dialect.)
I mean, there's also the subtext of a white superior officer recruiting a woman of color for Human experimentation and sexual abuse in a fort whose name just happens to resemble Fort Detrick, the infamous base of the US's historical biological warfare programs, but that's too obvious a point to add, right?
The final point I have about The Regime is...
It's a meme.
That's not a dismissive insult, I mean that it is literally named and modeled after a Twitter meme from a few years ago: a habit of leftists proclaiming "Regime!" in agreement with any act of state oppression that they agreed "owned" liberalism/America (IE: pretty much any time a non-western government does anything). This habit expanded with aesthetic accounts and a general vibe of people yearning for such a "Regime", for the hard hand of a state that openly and harshly controls all rather than the indirect systems of liberal civil society and market economics which most of us live in. The Regime is that dream, of the past and of the future, and in the fashion of the ideal science fiction writer Tammy then went "wow, isn't this future kind of awful?"
This whole theme is a perfect fit for something I've already been talking about for months now in the Draka thread, whenever Human Domestication Guide comes up again: the tendency of otherwise sweet and unobjectionable people to lose themselves in the leftist power fantasy of destroying capitalism and instituting their kinks as public policy and not realizing that the vibes are fucked (and they're replicating the horrors that got us here, but the vibes being fucked is really important too). The Regime is a knowing parody of a more "tankie" Leftist Revenge Fantasy than the Anarchist one in the Affini, but I think there's absolutely still a takedown and lesson here.
This parody of the Leftist Revenge Fantasy also extends, by the way, to The Regime's symbol of the Scarlet Trigon, but I think I'll leave some discussion of what Tammy says that was based on and some... rather fucked art featuring its practical use for a later Act where I think it comes into play.
The Mind Break is Just Opiates
One of my smaller but still relevant thoughts on this story is... well, I put it in the header there, I am getting a bit tired of writing this review/analysis so now I'm getting into technical minutiae.
I've noticed that a lot of mind control and problematic domination erotica likes to revolve around finding true, perfect scientific solutions to free will. Hypnosis in this sort of fiction doesn't just let you do a consensual meditation exercise with your partner where you agree to take on suggestions and compulsions; it literally entrances and alters your state of mind. Drugs aren't just altered states of consciousness and physiological dependence that could condition you to act adversely; they instantly corrode your morality and will into a puppet for others. Pheromones aren't just an unproven pseudoscientific fixation with no evidence of sexual or social influence in Humans; they actually make you instantly horny or obedient.
And so on, you get the idea.
I wouldn't say that MYRMIDON is a subversion of this kind of magic working brainwashing in fiction, but it does play it effectively for horror with certain grounded rules that I think make it worth praising and comparing to others.
The first is that Lotus is not a wonder drug that does whatever the Achilles Project requires, but rather an arbitrarily effective cocktail of many real substances and their effects. Opiates are the most obvious and important: it's employed as a painkiller and dissociative agent to facilitate Mel's integration with scary cybernetics, and to burn out her natural dopamine and impulse control so that the machinery and conditioning can work her over as a strung out doll. In the cockpit, even more varieties of conditioning chemicals are mentioned like amphetamines, acid, and DMT as all being a part of the mix to keep her running in the field. It's neither a magic obedience chemical nor an anti-drug PSA caricature of addiction; it's just wrecking Mel's body in very tiring ways.
The second is the surgical process itself, which is perhaps the most unrealistic and fantastical science fiction element in the whole story, as it revolves around an automated surgery machine performing some very accurate and very rapid work on a volunteer with no prior examination or preparation, but has very evocative and terrible results. The whole process come across as an almost demonic horror kept in the deepest levels of Fort Dietrich, something that can't be real and if it was nobody would believe you. The process is very gruesome and thoroughly described, hinging on just a few major implants, and it strikes me that MYRMIDON is in an interesting and I think growing category of science fiction to say that brain-computer interfaces could be possible and work... but that they're probably really not worth it. The modifications to Mel's body are drastic and invasive, with not exactly seamless scar tissue and integration, and she has to be rigged up as a machine with entirely new bodily needs than what the Human body can provide, including an 18 volt power supply for her brain implants and an artificial liver so she can survive as a sealed away machine. And even then, after all this she is not some universal invincible technopath nor a wired-up genius with all the knowledge in the world; this is all mostly interface for horrible neuroablative conditioning and then a plug-in to help her dissociate into her mech (sorry, raise her "oneirosynthesis score").
Doctor Berkowitz's description of "plenty of animal tests" makes jokes about this just being Communist Neuralink very easy.
And third... the conditioning sequence itself. I am a sucker for symbolic, politically loaded hallucination sequences, so the rather blunt imagery of Mel being forced to forget her family and friends and to surrender control to the programming of Pilot One; to see the world just in terms of Regime authorities to be obeyed and crude stereotypes of "reactionaries" to be slaughtered, was very compelling to me. It was a good way to simplify and narrativize from Mel's perspective of what I gather had to be more of a week of fine tuning and burning out neuron associations by the technicians and machines involved.
This is Tammy's illustration of the conditioning scene which I can post... the other one is not so friendly to SV what with Mel being entirely nude, hoisted up by mechanical tentacles, and dripping in unidentified fluids.
Unlimited Exosuit Warfare
Hey, this is a mecha book, right? I might as well nerd out over some technical details I observed and offer my own interpretations through some Cold War militaria interests as well.
The book so far seems to have a very interesting relationship to the conventions and technological assumptions of the mecha genre, insofar as it accepts them as givens to enable the aesthetic and narrative conceit of exosuits being a thing and humanoid robots being a viable combat platform... but then stops stretching the rules to try and justify or prefer them any more than that. The easiest at hand anime comparison is VOTOMS rather than Gundam: the exosuits are a few meters tall and have some awkward form factors, and they fundamentally do not negate any of the branches of combined arms we know in reality. There is, in fact, an amusing mention of tank crews taking great joy in seeing exosuits stumble or fail under the inherent limitations of complex bipedal robotics.
Exosuits, actually, mostly come across as an inherently awkward and limited technological moment in time: a step up from infantry in terms of a heavy weapons platform and a step down from tanks in terms of footprint and vulnerability to precision strikes (I theorize there's also perhaps some relationship to fighting dispersed on nuclear battlefields, but I'll save that speculation for another Act...) but not a replacement for either and still desperately limited by its form factor.
In fact, I think it's a lovely worldbuilding detail and a horrific bit of grounding for all the energy in the whole supersoldier brainwashing process that the real advantage of a cyborg drugged out Pilot isn't necessarily performance--they at one point say the best central planning and prediction computers in The Regime called it at just a 15% increase in efficiency versus a normal pilot--but compatibility with a much more compact exosuit.
There's no art of the Mk. 2 suits piloted by the normal people in Pilot One's unit, but just take as a comparison their American rival, the M3A2 Powell. The Powell has to have a big monolithic central torso to hold an enclosed cockpit, while the Mk.3 gets to be a few feet lower in profile and have more of its space and power supplies devoted to advanced weapons like a railgun by basically sealing Mel into a medieval torture rack with her limbs locked into the suit's own.
(I wonder if anyone in this timeline ever bothered to ask Masamune Shirow about his actually decently thought out concept as an engineering graduate of the form factor and interface of a limited size mech... Maybe they just hated the idea of leaving the arms out there... Or maybe he died in whatever conflicts led to the division of Japan.)
The technological disadvantage of the US in this timeline manifests as very heavy metal, really WW2 or even Russia-coded military technology. Big, heavily armored slabs of slower robotics with conservative high-explosive weapon choices. The Regime almost comes across as aliens in comparison with the carbon black organicism. This was apparently even more pronounced in early concept art where Tammy made the A01 look quite skeletal and insectoid.
The lack of outlines/use of white space for panel lining is also a fascinating look... almost like a hieroglyphic representation of the mech or something.
The action itself in Act I is very brief, mostly framed by the Evangelion esque bridge action and the ominous levels of biochemical control exerted over Mel/Pilot One, so there's not much to comment on tactically save for the fact that it pulls a neat writing trick of not needing much space or overwrought exposition on the rules of exosuit combat to convey how exactly Pilot One breaks them and is so terrifying. Her seeming preference for direct hand to hand kills of the pilot inside the cockpit (I know a certain friend of mine who will read this thread expressed distaste for the eagerness of Mechsploitation to jump into tactically pointless melee combat, but... well, it's narratively justifiable in an urban clusterfuck fight and at the hands of a psychotic lobotomite being wired dopamine by intensity of violence, right?) and reaction speeds get the classic anime "observers watching shit go down" treatment, and I think Tammy's prose really shines when it can get going into the horrible and frantic mode of someone witnessing or being subjected to something they can't quite understand or control.
Tammy is particularly proud of this piece and specifically hoped I'd share it here!
"Anthropomorphic gesticulation" is apparently quite frowned on in exosuit forces, which means gestures can only be a sign that something really bad is going down. It's another appreciated detail about the limitations of exosuits, that there must have been some doctrinal study into the range of motion enabled by a fully anthropomorphic robotic chassis and found them wasteful or even counterproductive compared to understanding that it is just a vehicle of war.
Now, uhh, a bit of picking at how exactly the Socialist People's Army is supposed to be organized:
I'm not quite sure about the reasoning behind the "Echelon" structure of the conscript unit Mel is initially employed in. The Soviets historically had a very specific and organized system of conscription and tiers of reservists into a large and dedicated infrastructure, so the "Third Western Echelon" being a seemingly detached garrison from Fort Dietrich led by and independently deployable under a captain seems off to me. Who do they answer to in a war? Surely their regiment, brigade, or division is the more relevant unit here? I think I also saw a pin in the Discord saying an Echelon was a three squad formation so really shouldn't Duffy be a lieutenant and not--
Wait a second.
Ooooohhhh, okay, it's a joke-but-part-of-the-point element of them really being quite like the modern West, by making them comparable to the Israelis with poorly stretched, piecemeal conscript units and overpromoted officers.
(I think there's also a pretty clear link between what The Regime does with Bordeaux and the Gaza War, with The Regime basically enclosing a ruined urban strip by the sea and sustaining a Humanitarian crisis around it while using special forces incursions and firepower to try and slaughter anyone left. There's even a bit of other conscripts filming Pilot One's rampage for social media that now feels pretty deliberate.)
(Voss being a four-star general just called "General" is also a Communist Americanism that I think is deliberate; the equivalent in a Soviet/Russian military tradition would be Army General or Marshall, depending on if we count exosuits as infantry or not and whether they're their own service branch or just a strange set of special purpose battalions.)
***
I reiterate again: This thread is a recommendation and promotion, as I am shamelessly biased already by having had interesting conversations on the topics involved with the writer of the work in question. I encourage anyone here, particularly those who were interested in my Draka Let's Read, alternate history fiction in general, or trans girls writing weird transgressive horror to check it out and come in with your own opinions or analysis. I think that even with the relatively straightforward first Act I've read so far that this is working in a unique blend of genres and ideas, and I'm eager to read more and talk about it.
...Which I couldn't do right away because I wanted to take the time to write this report, of sorts.
A review for Act II will soon follow. Act III's... well, that depends on when Tammy publishes it publicly, I suppose.
