This be a spolier. Be ye warned, and keep ye away who has not read the book.
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Monstrous Regiment. It has it's redeeming qualities. It looked like a very good book, during the first third of it. It had good particulars, the little things that Pratchett is very good at.

The main thing which turned me off Monstrous Regiment was the cheesy joke which ran along with the main plot, and I feel that it tarnished much of my appreciation of the book. After another member of the group was revealed to be a woman, I could already see that the entire group would be, in fact, women.

My hopes with Maladict were unfortunately shattered. I don't know what was worse, really, Maladict, or a third of the high command.

In any case, the plot began to deteriorate after the first third of the book. The little things were still there, but less so. The big picture was a mess. It was like being on a train, seeing it rushing to a point where the rails are broken, and hoping all along that they will magically mend themselves before you reach them.

Anyone else feels this way? Would anyone like to defend the book?

Pterry took it way to far. While I understand that in such situttions women did take up arms, having almost every character be a woman as too much. It became less interesting each time it was revealed. It became the standard rather than a twist. I think it would of been better if Jackrum (who we suspected of beening a woman) was a man.

Yes, I still think Jackrum should have been a man.

As it was, it was stretching the bounds of stupidness a bit.

Yes, that's exactly how I felt. Jackrum being a woman was, I feel, the last nail in the coffin. Also, that lawyer fellow whose name I can't rember, the one who protected the regiment in the military trial. Making him a her almost made me froth.

Too much. That one joke did wonders in ruining a book that could have been better.

After that bit was spoiled to me before reading it, I had expected MR to be a lot sillier, though. All in all, it was, despite the sillyness of a joke stretched the farest possible way, one of his darker novels. The single characters, all taken one by one, all worked for me - all had convincing reasons, except for Maladicta maybe...
(Sorry all for repeating myself a little here by the way. )

In the frame set as it was, I somehow had no problems with Jackrum turning out to be a woman, or a third of the military elite, at that. Interestingly (for myself), the mental image of Jackrum didn't change the least.
And as said, it was, in a way, only consequent. Consequently over the top, but well - there are so many, serious as well as silly, attempts to the Gender-switch-story, maybe Pterry pushed it until it became absurd because he didn't want this DW novel to be another one.
Stretching an idea popular in literature until its extreme is -or at least used to be- part of Discworld (as well as is then giving it yet [i:ba587cb3d2]another [/i:ba587cb3d2]twist and take it serious again, once you've long crossed and left behind the sillyness-line...).

Can anyone still follow me...?

I also found it had a nice touch that of all, Jade and Igorina were the "girliest girls". ("...mentally ordering a big pretzel when looking at her...") And the whole concept of the way you live and the cultural practice you exercise changing your identity and not necessarily the other way round...

Maladicta.

I was hoping Maladict wasn't a woman. I was praying that Maladict wasn't a woman. All this free will stuff is too overrated, I think.

What "free stuff", Roman?

I too hoped that Maladict (and to some extent, Jackrum) would be allowed to stay male. I was also somewhat let down by Alice(- the girl who was possessed by Duchess' spirit) slipping into a coma at the end of the novel - a tidy, yet cheap way of dealing with a character, in my opinion.

I can't defend the book (it made me depressed for days) but I can defend Pterry :p . I got the feeling that he was REALLY angry and upset with the world when he wrote MR. Maybe because of the Iraq/Afghanistan war, maybe for some other reason. If it's the former, then maybe at the time all he could picture in his mind was the dark and horrible aspects of war ("I had to kill that boy to get you his water canteen - I had to watch his eyes while he died!"), while failing to come up with any solution. Then, a whiles later, the solution (sort of) occured to him, and thus we have Thud.

I read the whole book after a while thinking, 'Yeah yeah, I get it, they're all women, so what?' Which, for me, spoiled what could have been a good story. One of my favourite bits though, where I forgot about the short-comings for a minute, was when they rigged up the explosive device with the flower.

you mean flour?

Yes flour, of course.

On the matter of all of them turning out female, first read THIS LINk - or at least enough to understand the reference.

Pterry has taken the basic quote, twisted the context, and then cut a significant part of the quote - maybe this time he was being too clever and assuming more knowledge than some readers have - I know the context of the quote because I had a couple of small parts in the play "Vivat Vivat Regina" which covers the history of that period, including that quote - I understood the reference immediately, saw what he was doing by truncating it, and therefore knew from the start that every real member of the unit was going to be female - the political officer masquerading as a corporal didn't count, and Blouse as the lately appointed officer didn't count.

Given that the joke as I saw it was that Blouse having been posted to the unit was so convinced that he could fool anyone when he was impersonating a woman, but was actually the only unsuccessful cross-dresser in the entire book, having Maladicta and/or Jackrum turn out to be male would have killed the entire joke for me.

I liked it, so I'll make an attempt at defending it. But first, to get this out of the way, we all have our opinions, and there's no reason everyone has to like each book.

Of course they were all girls. I'm not quite as bright as the rest of you, because I didn't actually guess that Jackrum was a girl. I was pleasantly surprised by that twist, and thought it worked well with the character. As for the rest of the squad, once we found out that more than one was a girl, it only made sense that the rest would be. It's a comedy. Not real life. It's a joke, which wouldn't have worked if only some of them were girls.

Maladict(a) would have made a better male vampire. Definitely. But in the context of the book, she had to be a she, to fit in with the rest of the gang.

I didn't see this book as "dark" (if I knew how, I would officially quote Mowgli), despite the war references. Thud, for me, was a lot darker, possibly because I could feel the humor in MR and knew it would turn out all right. It's definitely an anti-war book, and very timely. I loved the concept that the people of Borogravia didn't even know why they were at war any more (right up there with the equally common delusion that they were winning the war).

But besides war, it's also about self-awareness, and not letting other people define you. Most people are willing to accept the roles that they're set, but here's a group of girls that weren't going to settle for the status quo. And I may be reading a theme into it that wasn't intended by the author, but the feminist side of me rather enjoyed the girls taking on the establishment. Granted, with a little help from Vimes and company.

I'm not saying I want to go out disguised as a man (perish the thought), but I've been in situations where I know I'd get more respect if I had short hair and a pair of socks. So with that in mind, Monstrous Regiment is a small step towards changing the world. Polly doesn't want to accept being a girl, so she goes out disguised as a boy, but in the end, she's going to make her own way, on her own terms, armed with a cutlass and a skirt.

We all like different things, so I may not change anyone's opinion, but I'm going to take a stand and disagree with the majority. (And you're not going to change my opinion either.)

Hi SunshineDaydream!

Erm... this might sound anal, but Polly didn't dress up as a man because she "wouldnt' accept being a girl". From what I understand, she had no problems with being a girl (well, eventually she discovered a few advantages to having short hair and socks, but that came later). The reason for her transformation was to find her brother - and to do that, she had to join the army i.e. become a man - she wasn't doing it out of protest or rebellion.

Answer:

Free will as in allowing the book to be written as it was. In any case, my prayers were quite futile, as the book was already written, and you could say that I was praying, in fact, for reality to change for my benifit.

Never works, that.



As for the flour-based explosive, I liked that bit. It was the only truly good bit in that particular part of the book, in my opinion.

Indeed. I feel that this is where Terry just didn't have anything to do with the character, and took the easy way out. Sad, definitely not an improvement for the book, and very true.

Oh, I can live with the dark way the book is written in. Night Watch was dark, and it was an exceptional piece of literature, worthy of several awards.

MR was just... meh. It wasn't interesting, had several glaring mistakes which simply shouldn't have been done, and that was that really.

Sadly, most of the readers just didn't get it, if that was indeed as it was intended. Terry's more... 'hidden' jokes, were always done in a way that wouldn't be a hinderance to the book as a whole. This time, that just wasn't the case.

Exactly. Only later did she find that she took quite well to army life, when someone smart in said life was needed.

I was going to jump in and defend what is quite possibly my favorite Pratchett book, but SunshineDaydream said it much better... As for her refusal to "accept being a girl," say rather that she "doesn't want to accept a girl's place in Borogravia." It's because women can't hold property that she goes looking for her brother; she doesn't want The Duchess to fall out of her family's hands if she can help it.