Meeting Katie: Why I Love the Battletech Fictional Universe

    So, a few days ago, I wrote a piece about my first exposure to Battletech. Everyone knows I’m a Battletech junkie. The franchise is a huge part of my life and I love the sandbox that it gives me to play in. As a brand, the Battletech universe has been growing more diverse and wonderful as the years have gone on. These are things I felt very assured of. But today, I had that viewpoint framed, highlighted, slammed into focus and illuminated in spotlights.

        I’ve been inching through the latest issue (#3) of Shrapnel, Battletech’s new magazine that shares stories, in-universe articles, scenarios, item tidbits and more. There’s a lot of great content in there, some of it serialized, most of it stand-alone and this most recent issue dropped as a bit of a surprise to me. It’s the holidays, and I’ve had a lot going on, so it’s been a nice well that I could dip into a little bit at a time for a quick fix of new BattleTech material. So here I was on Monday night, done with work for the day, finished with dinner, having sat down for a few frustrating matches of MWO to claim my holiday loot, and finally switching on the Patriots game to hope against all odds that maybe the horror of the 2020 season for the New England Patriots had come to an end.

Well, Cam Newton and the Patriots certainly didn’t disappoint, they were getting pretty badly shellacked. Sophie was at her laptop, headphones on over her cyberlox, bopping away while writing some tedious piece of paperwork for the lab. So I picked up my phone, tapped open the Kindle App, and opened up Shrapnel, which I was almost done with. There was just one story left, "The Secret Fox" by Bryan Young. It was set in 3143, and while I love the new material, something about the Dark Ages still puts them slightly behind the other Battletech eras in my mind. But Bryan Young is one of the best of the newer author’s in the stable right now, so I went in with reasonably high expectations that I would like this one.

    I started reading the story, set in the almost-periphery of the Lyran Commonwealth. It told the tale of a young woman named Katie who had dreams of becoming a MechWarrior while stuck out on the ass-end of the Inner Sphere. There was talk of AgroMechs, and for a split second, I had visions of the early MWDA novels come to life again. But I kept reading because I wanted to find out what the deal was with Katie. What was her story? What was her tiny piece of the massive Battletech puzzle? So I read on. And in almost no time, I found myself enthralled with this character. She was a girl with big dreams that seemed to be so far out of reach that they could never come true, but she still lived on those dreams with a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eye. The universe might tell her that she couldn’t have what she wanted, but she smiled and kept on dreaming about it in that way that said she still believed in her heart that her dream could come true. By the time a few more pages had turned, I found myself riding over her shoulder, watching her daydreaming and hoping against hope that this girl would have her dreams come true. In the matter of a few short pages, I had gone from tentatively hoping that an interesting story was about to unfold to clutching my phone tightly, willing this girl along in her journey. And she hadn’t even found a real mech yet. 

    I won’t spoil the story for you, but suffice it to say that as the story unfolded, I found myself cheering her on, feeling her sense of accomplishment, and hoping against odds that she was going to make amazing things happen. And she did. By the time I was finished, I was so connected and so in love with this character in a way that I have seldom, if ever, before found myself. She was so sweet and so dynamic, and just so plain real that I couldn’t get over it. I read a lot of fiction, and I rarely, if ever, get to a point of real connectedness with a character. Sure, I recognize them as good characters, see their strengths, root them on, but seldom do I genuinely feel for them in a way that makes them super relatable. I was getting emotional over a piece of writing. It has happened only a few times in my life as a reader. And boy did it happen here.

    And it happened because she was so real. She had so many little nuances and traits that I could relate to. I didn’t have to reimagine the character to something I could connect with, I could just genuinely connect with her as she was. And it dawned on me that this is exactly why we need diversity of characters and viewpoints in our stories. I get that MilSciFi tends to skew a certain way because of its audience in general. But there are so many different readers out there, and the more of us that can see characters in a universe that we can genuinely connect with, the greater the community becomes, and the more invested more people become in that community.

    I have always felt like I had a home in the Battletech universe, that there was a character out there that I could connect with and make real. It’s why I write my fanfiction, and it's why I play the game and roleplay characters in the universe. It’s a fun place for me to play around and explore ideas and themes and concepts in a way that vanilla reality never could offer. But now, having read this story, having met the character of Katie, it’s as though all of that has been reinforced and validated in a way that really touched me emotionally. It’s not often that I get that emotional response, and reading this story it was brought so far to the front. This story is why I love Battletech, because it’s a universe where Katies can have their stories told and people like me can find a real sense of a universe that accepts so much of what I am.

    More fiction should do this. This is what makes fiction a work of art, when it touches you the way that a piece of music or a beautiful painting does. This is what turns words on a page into literature, into something that is more than text, that is so very human. And this is where Battletech is going. I am beyond happy and excited about that. I really hope that some of you are too.

    If you haven’t gone out and bought Issue #3 of Shrapnel, do it. Read this piece. I know Katie won’t be as real for everyone as she was for me, but this is what good fiction done right is all about.

You can buy it on the Catalyst Game Labs Store or on Amazon for your Kindle.

 Musings on Female Hotness

So, I stumbled upon a Twitter post the other day in which a woman was pointing out the fact that so much of what we tend to view as a “hot” woman is wrapped up in concepts of age and youth. Why can't women over 25 be hot? she mused. The thread rightfully emerged as an empowering declaration for those of us who are over 25 and very much in tune with our hotness. Okay, that sounds a little haughty, but bear with me. It was a good thing, I promise.

My first reaction was “well of course women over 25 can be hot”, but when I began to unpack why that isn’t always the default reality in our culture, it made me think about a few things, and that’s why I’m here to spew my thoughts into print.

I started with the realization that so much of my self identity, comfort with myself, and the ability to think of myself in a positive way as attractive is wrapped up in my sexual orientation. The shift to viewing myself in a positive way is very much linked to my viewing myself from the perspective of being a woman and being ok with that. So much of the negative baggage that we, as women, put on ourselves in terms of physical attractiveness and beauty is caught up in the notions and sensibilities of the perceived straight male gaze. Society views everything by default through the lens of a straight male that we take on many of these viewpoints in our lives as a matter of course.

To illustrate my point, let me venture into the realm of erotica. There is no better example of the divergent viewpoints than looking at the difference between lesbian porn and lesbian erotica/romance. Take a cursory look into the world of lesbian porn, and you will see it is overwhelmingly tailored to the perceived straight male audience. The characters are mostly shallow, typically attractive in the culturally normal western stereotypical way, and above all...young. The mean point for lesbian porn is a couple of teens or twenty-somethings going at it in “scandalous” ways. The mean for lesbian erotica is certainly just as “scandalous” in terms of settings and plot, but the mean age skews WAY older. You don’t find novels or short stories about curious young lesbians much in erotica at all. The characters you find in lesbian romance and erotica are almost always older and more powerful, established in life with a career and all of that. The ideal of what is attractive is so much broader and involved than the purely physical that the physical characteristics of the characters are almost completely unimportant. The lust and desire come so much more from who the person is, not just their physical characteristics. You don’t get that in porn, because the perceived audience is so much different. Yes, I get that there are inherent differences between visual and print media, but those don’t wholly account for the differences that we see.

So what’s my point? I’m not sure I know. But I think the world would be a better place for all of us if we all were just a little more cognizant of our inner lesbian. :)

Faith Finds Battletech

   It dawned on me the other day that I've never really shared how I got into Battletech and what it was that drew me to the franchise to a point where twenty or more years later I am still just as enamored with the universe, if not more, than I was when I started.

    Let me start by saying that I'm just reaching that stage of life where things in my past, particularly in my childhood, aren't the crisp and precise recollections they once where, and are now slightly more fuzzy memories centered around the core of the events. So I no longer remember the exact day I discovered Battletech, or the building where I picked up the book, but the core memory is still intact and just as powerful at it's heart as it was then.

    What I do know for sure is that the Faith who discovered Battletech all those years ago is a comically different little girl from the person I am today. I discovered Battletech sometime around late middle school or early high school, I'm not precisely sure as to which. But the Faith that discovered this amazing universe was quite the firebrand at the time. I was at that stage where I was just discovering that there were schools of thought and patterns of ideas out there that seemed to be in reasonable agreement with all these fierce and strong viewpoints I was discovering that I held. I was discovering what it meant to be a feminist, and at the same time, I was struggling mightily with the torrent of emotions that floods a girl's world at that time of life, while at the same time, discovering that truth and rationality seemed important to me, even if it wasn't always easy to put those things into practice in my ever expanding world. I was a just-blossoming feminist and a fledgling skeptic, while still trying very much to have fun as a teen. I would hang out at the mall with my friends and laugh at silly things and pay attention to boys (I still very much had not begun to even start to come to grips with my sexuality at that point), and then I would come home and plop into bed to read a scathing feminist critique of this or that piece of literature, or pour over a science magazine reading about some new discovery and thinking how amazing it was that science was uncovering these things.

    And of course there was writing. I loved reading and writing from a young age, but in my formative years I really latched onto them as a way to explore the world around me and to grapple with all these competing ideas that were fighting for traction inside my young mind. This was the point in my life where I was becoming a literary snob. I would read works as much to tear them apart for their ideas as for their enjoyment. What I found was that I loved action and adventure, but I hated that the kind of action and adventure I seemed to like only seemed to happen to boys. Sure, there were plenty of girls in these stories, but they were always the sidekick, the helper, the mom, the prize at the end of the journey, etc. To add to that, I hated magic. As a young skeptic, I was convinced that fantasy, magic, and anything of the sort were just silly frivolities. I wanted adventure that, while not perhaps being realistic, was rooted in reality. I wanted new and cool and unique, but I didn't want magic or the force or fairies.

    And so this little girl found herself at some kind of large book exchange. I don't remember the specifics of it, I just remember going into a large building or gymnasium of some kind filled with books with the express purpose of finding one that I wanted to read and write a book report about what I found interesting about it. I think it was over the summer, and I'm pretty sure it was some kind of school project. Regardless, I dug through all kinds of books and cast them aside. They looked to be too centered on magic or too much of a fairy tale, or carried some other mark that disqualified them in my young mind. 

    And then I picked up Decision at Thunder Rift, by William H. Keith Jr. It was the original edition cover, with a Locust striding through an alley while a young blonde soldier hid from it, but not in a completely awestruck manner. I remember thinking it might be worth a shot. I loved the idea of giant robots or fighter planes, because they seemed to be a great gender equalizer. Girls could pilot a jet fighter or a big robot just as well as boys could, so that was cool. The problem, of course, was that most of this kind of mecha fiction was linked to anime, and I had very early on discovered that anime was filled with far too many gender stereotypes and tropes for my liking. But this one seemed to be outside of that realm just enough. There were no oddly proportioned robots, no doe-eyed girls in skirts shorter than my field hockey uniform blinking at the strangely triangular hero boy.

    So I gave it a shot. I picked it up and took it home as my choice for this project, and started reading. Now, as you can guess, it wasn't long before I was flinging the book across my bedroom and railing against the patriarchy. Who was this silly Lori Calmar woman, and why was she a weak-kneed trope of a figure. Why was she fluttering around like a fairy tale princess, pinning her existence on the up and down whims of a man who was practically her abuser?! I hated the book utterly. But as I stewed and fumed, something grabbed me. I hated the story, but I didn't necessarily hate the world. Sure, I had more problems with the story than I could count, but that was only because of how the writer told the story. There was nothing inherently sexist about the world. In fact, it seemed for all intents and purposes that the fictional world itself was just about as perfectly egalitarian as I could hope for. I began creating stories of cocky, stick-it-in-your-face MechWarrior women in this battlemech world, and they fit perfectly. They thrived in it. It was the perfect sandbox.

    From there, I was hooked. I got my dad to take me to some bookstores to ask questions, which led me to comic book stores, which led me to a gaming store, where I found this treasure trove in a back corner that had not only novels, but this thing called a Technical Readout and an early edition of the MechWarrior RPG. From then on, I was hooked forever. I sat at home modifying mechs with scrap paper for the heroines in the stories I wrote down on paper and played through in my mind. It wasn't long before I had legitimately gotten settled down with some actual tabletop rules, and those times that I couldn't twist my siblings arms into playing with me, I fought my own solitaire games with grand stories of the MechWarriors in my head.