The Matrimares (action thriller book)
Mar. 6th, 2015 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twilightponyThis book was a slow poison. It looked really good from the first line on the inside of the cover -- a young mare with a hades-may-care attitude gets recruited by a smartly trimmed older mare into a secret world of espionage and daring rescues! So I got comfortable and began to read it.
The action starts right away. Four Matrimare chargers burst into a mule fortress and corner the boss mule. The boss mule triggers a rock slide to get away but gets crushed under a boulder along with one of the chargers. The chapter ends with the elder of the three Matrimare chargers giving a medallion to the family of their fallen comrade, a medal with an inscription. The sire is bereft with grief and will have nothing to do with the medallion; so the fallen spy's foal, Aggy, gets the medallion instead.
Next chapter, Aggy is all grown up and her sire is a lout. She still has that medallion and wears it all the time. She hangs out in a rough neighborhood, gets in trouble with Princess Celestia's guard and ends up about to be tossed into the dungeon. She reads out the inscription on the medallion, finds herself released from custody, no questions asked. Soon after she's enrolled in a series of tests to become a Matrimare.
This book has Rubecka A. Hinnylane flaws written all over it. (Hinnylane wrote Luna is a Harsh Mistress, Strange Mare in a Strange Land, and my old favorite, The Star Beast. Hinnylane's stallion characters, while showing some muster and smarts, are nearly all written as playthings and lesser herdmates for the mares. Hinnylane was from another time and oh how times have changed.)
The elite group of seven vying with the young mare (Aggy) to join the Matrimare herd includes both mares and stallions. The stallions are sympathetic characters and side with the small Aggy when the other mares give her a hard time. That's not too surprising as mares do tend to jostle for dominance in a new herd. So far so good.
The first test has the candidate's cottage dropped into a river in the middle of the night. Aggy breaks a window and all escape except one stallion who drowns. This is a rough course. I wonder how nopony got cut escaping through the broken window.
Meanwhile a charismatic mare named Reneigh Veilteller is giving away fabulous scarves to everypony in Equestria, for free. The scarves are boobytrapped with a want-it-need-it spell that she can trigger simultaneously all across Equestria by using the Alicorn Amulet and drinking an activating potion. She wants to destroy pony civilization and rebuild a pluralistic multi-species society on its ashes.
The story swirls towards the drain as Aggy's favorite stallion keeps needing guidance to get over his greatest weakness -- a fear of falling. This is not noticeable Hinnylane-esque at first, but starts to get annoying through repetition. Aggy fails the final test, but gets recruited to save the day anyway when her mentor is killed by Reneigh and she discovers that the matriarch of the Matrimares is under Reneigh's spell.
In Reneigh's fortress, Aggy meets an imprisoned prince who had refused to join Reneigh, but on the outside chance of getting freed, immediately offers to scandalously debase himself for Aggy's favor. That was shocking.
Aggy defeats Reneigh's stallion henchpony, breaks the amulet (I'm still not sure how) and takes up the prince on his offer to be her plaything. She returns home a new charger, all the mare of the world, to free her sire from the criminal mares that were pushing him around.
Bad book. Do not read.
The action starts right away. Four Matrimare chargers burst into a mule fortress and corner the boss mule. The boss mule triggers a rock slide to get away but gets crushed under a boulder along with one of the chargers. The chapter ends with the elder of the three Matrimare chargers giving a medallion to the family of their fallen comrade, a medal with an inscription. The sire is bereft with grief and will have nothing to do with the medallion; so the fallen spy's foal, Aggy, gets the medallion instead.
Next chapter, Aggy is all grown up and her sire is a lout. She still has that medallion and wears it all the time. She hangs out in a rough neighborhood, gets in trouble with Princess Celestia's guard and ends up about to be tossed into the dungeon. She reads out the inscription on the medallion, finds herself released from custody, no questions asked. Soon after she's enrolled in a series of tests to become a Matrimare.
This book has Rubecka A. Hinnylane flaws written all over it. (Hinnylane wrote Luna is a Harsh Mistress, Strange Mare in a Strange Land, and my old favorite, The Star Beast. Hinnylane's stallion characters, while showing some muster and smarts, are nearly all written as playthings and lesser herdmates for the mares. Hinnylane was from another time and oh how times have changed.)
The elite group of seven vying with the young mare (Aggy) to join the Matrimare herd includes both mares and stallions. The stallions are sympathetic characters and side with the small Aggy when the other mares give her a hard time. That's not too surprising as mares do tend to jostle for dominance in a new herd. So far so good.
The first test has the candidate's cottage dropped into a river in the middle of the night. Aggy breaks a window and all escape except one stallion who drowns. This is a rough course. I wonder how nopony got cut escaping through the broken window.
Meanwhile a charismatic mare named Reneigh Veilteller is giving away fabulous scarves to everypony in Equestria, for free. The scarves are boobytrapped with a want-it-need-it spell that she can trigger simultaneously all across Equestria by using the Alicorn Amulet and drinking an activating potion. She wants to destroy pony civilization and rebuild a pluralistic multi-species society on its ashes.
The story swirls towards the drain as Aggy's favorite stallion keeps needing guidance to get over his greatest weakness -- a fear of falling. This is not noticeable Hinnylane-esque at first, but starts to get annoying through repetition. Aggy fails the final test, but gets recruited to save the day anyway when her mentor is killed by Reneigh and she discovers that the matriarch of the Matrimares is under Reneigh's spell.
In Reneigh's fortress, Aggy meets an imprisoned prince who had refused to join Reneigh, but on the outside chance of getting freed, immediately offers to scandalously debase himself for Aggy's favor. That was shocking.
Aggy defeats Reneigh's stallion henchpony, breaks the amulet (I'm still not sure how) and takes up the prince on his offer to be her plaything. She returns home a new charger, all the mare of the world, to free her sire from the criminal mares that were pushing him around.
Bad book. Do not read.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-07 02:03 am (UTC)I'll steer clear of it!
In defense of Hinnylane
Date: 2015-03-15 09:32 pm (UTC)I'm sorry this has to be my greeting.
In my world, we had an author named Robert A. Heinlein who was active around half a century ago, and who wrote such books as "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" (my personal favorite) and "Stranger in a Strange Land." I don't know for sure, but I suspect that most of what I could say about Heinlein applies to Hinnylane as well (with a few simple transformations), and I am compelled to defend them both.
Much like how Hinnylane's stallion characters don't stand up from a modern viewpoint, I can't argue that Heinlein wrote female characters (really, female character, since he tended to write them all pretty much the same) very well. But they were progressive for the time; they had far more agency and power than the passive "damsel in distress" roles they would have had to play in many earlier works. He didn't write them very well, but at least he tried.
And probably the most progressive part was their sexual openness, even if that can somewhat come off as them being playthings for the men when viewed from a modern perspective. I'm not sure I'm not straying beyond the bounds of similarity between our universes at this point, but around that time in my universe and home country, there was a lot of social change going on, including on society's attitudes towards sex. The traditional view was that a man who has multiple sexual partners is accomplished and admirable, whereas a woman with multiple sexual partners was looked down upon for her weak morals (despite the mathematical absurdity of this when our population is split evenly between the sexes). But around that time there was an unusually high proportion of people in the optimal age range to instinctively rebel against the old ways (late teens to early twenties), a growing movement pursuing equality between the sexes, and a new, more effective form of birth control had recently been invented. So the young, progressive generation formed a very different picture of sex, where it was no longer taboo, and it was perfectly reasonable to have it outside of any sort of relationship, solely for fun. They took it a bit too far, and often tried to ignore the fact that sex does instinctively promote pair bonding, but sexual freedom was part of the progressive ideal at the time.
Re: In defense of Hinnylane
Date: 2015-03-17 12:36 am (UTC)I gather that population increase in your society comes easily. In Equestria, breeding is uncommon and fairly well planned. Especially in managing the critters (Fluttershy's specialty). We do have a Hearts and Hooves day to promote closer friendships that lead eventually to foal rearing, but overall, recruitment just exceeds mortality. Ponies are matriarchal by nature, and as such, gender roles and mores in Equestria do not evolve quickly.
Fashions come and go and Hinnylane was quite popular back in her day. When I was younger I mostly overlooked the racier aspects of her speculative societies, but now I'm not too fond her theme of joking about kicking stallions because deep down, they like it.