This is a really interesting review, and it makes me a little sorry that I have to finally tap out - but needs must.

I just want to say thank you to everyone whose comments I've slammed an upvote on over these last few years. There are some incredibly smart, funny, kind, honest, patient and brave folks around here, and it's been a real privilege to read the insights you've shared, the nuanced and provocative discussions, and the personal experiences and trivia that have added layers to an already multilayered canon like Discworld and made the books feel new again.

Also, of course, a special acknowledgement to Mark and the moderating team, without whom this place wouldn't be what it is.

Mark, I am sincerely asking you to take a moment as a cis man and consider whether you want to tell other trans, genderqueer and GNC commenters that Tosheroon's constant erasure and rude dismissal of their opinions - claiming that anyone who disagrees with him is either cis, "desperate", or at best clinging to headcanons while he sees the truth - hurts none of us and affects none of us.

Same here! (By which I mean I both agree with you and agree we're not a monolith. :D) But I especially agree that this was absolutely intended. It's the cap on a theme that's been building throughout the whole story about the arbitrariness of gender markers, gender being a performance, and gender being a set of expectations that an outside observer imposes upon a person. The joke, to my view, relies on a notion of a gender binary and what it means to "pass" in the sense that the joke is pointing out the absurdity of those concepts.

Agreed - I'm not quite sure how that alternative interpretation came about. The text makes it clear that he's playing reticent to get everyone's attention moved away from what Wazzer was talking about. It's also significant who he's saying that line to, since we've already established that he's careful with Wazzer but has an "I'll push you so you'll push back" relationship with Tonker.

V pbzcyrgryl nterr. Ba gur fhesnpr, gur grkg gryyf hf (cnegvphyneyl va gur rneyvre fprar jurer ur'f bccbfrq gb hfvat pnzbhsyntr) gung guvf vf nobhg gur qvfgvapgvba orgjrra fbyqvre naq pvivyvna. Ohg jurgure vg'f "whfg" pnzbhsyntr be fbzrguvat nf traqrerq va gung fbpvrgl nf jrnevat n qerff, gurer'f ab trggvat njnl sebz gur snpg gung Wnpxehz'f pvivyvna yvsr vaibyirq orvat vqragvsvrq nf n jbzna naq Wnpxehz'f fbyqvrevat yvsr unf vaibyirq orvat vqragvsvrq nf n zna, naq...jryy, vg qrsvavgryl uvg zr evtug va gur pbzcyvpngrq srryf.

I love the group conversation in this section and how it highlights the characterization that's been accomplished for these secondary characters. I got a real frisson when Wazzer rattled Jackrum, and I appreciated the way Polly's character has been set up so that it's plausible for her to notice all those little undercurrents and take us along with her, wondering just how much Wazzer really knows and what exactly Jackrum is hiding.

More than that, though, I love how Jackrum's objection to the narrative flow of the washerwoman trope quietly presents a question that still makes me stop and think. It's a double subversion. As other folks have mentioned, his opposition to the plan is stated clearly in the text: it's not about wearing a dress, it's about going into 'battle' in anything but his uniform, using lies as weapons. We've repeatedly seen, not least with his retirement-dodging, that being a soldier is who he is. In a country that's pretty much always been at war, it's core to his identity. He just doesn't hold with spying or camouflage. He feels that there are rules, and in his head at least, those rules are in a large part about keeping the most vulnerable safe and putting the strongest forward, and by god he plans to die with his coat on.

There's an innate absurdity to having rules for war - of making a game of putting uniformed people on a battlefield under the banner of Might Makes Right. But those rules are also meant to keep the roles of soldier and civilian separate, and to diminish the harm to the latter. Once you start disguising yourself and taking things off the battlefield, who's safe? Who can you trust? How do you know which side is which? This blurring of identity becomes deliberate through the outside PoV of Vimes and William, and we've seen from the start that the rules Jackrum has been working under did its civilians no favours either. Resources were poured into the army, leaving the populace starving - and losing has meant displacement and death.

I think it's very easy to write a book where a character serves as a mouthpiece to announce that there's no such thing as a good war. In the Discworld, it would probably be just as easy to set up a million to one chance and reassure the reader that the scrappy underdogs whose identities we approve of always come through in the end. But it's a lot harder to set up a knot like this where you show your work and let the audience see that there's just no right answer, and that every choice in war has the very real possibility of making things worse - which is why it's so important that the women's motivations be what they are, taking things back down to the human level. Anyway, it's good stuff.

Seconded.

- someone who is neither cis nor "desperate"

I hear you. Personally, I recognize that the focus of Mark's project is being unprepared and unspoiled. By the scope he himself has set through his framing and the work he's put forward in the past, this is not the place I come to looking for astute literary observation or even dependable reading comprehension. Mark may have a love of reading, but for the purposes of this project he's put himself forward as the kind of person stymied by encountering an intrusive narrator for the first time as an adult man. It's a fair choice for a persona, and it suits a project that's about not knowing things. Mark has made it clear in the past couple of years in particular that he plans to predominantly write about his very first thoughts when encountering something, mixed with personal essays based on connections between the text and something he experienced in his own life, but not necessarily delve any deeper - and again, that's a fair choice.

However, Mark also has a keen interest in social justice, and where his approach can fail for me is seeing that social justice lens only applied to the aforementioned first thoughts and personal essays - to 101-level issues in books aimed at children and teenagers, and to issues that affect Mark personally. But whereas a basic middle-school level book report isn't harmed by being a quick overview paired with some personal reflection, social justice is a lens that either includes or excludes. I might have just been frustrated when he misread who the villain was in Guards! Guards!, but to see a book that deals deftly and deeply with misogyny, gender identity, class, and institutional violence not given the consideration of critical thought or even full attention of someone in Mark's position has been deeply disappointing.

To update, I rescind this comment because Mark has since commented here to explain further and I'm not confused any more - so a thank-you to Mark for that!

For context, I'm Anishinaabe (for full context, that's half if you're doing blood quantum, which is not how I roll), so boy howdy do I ever get what seeing your people portrayed as animals is like. Dangerous animals, stupid animals, ~mystical~ animals - we get it all. You do not want to know how many conversations I've had about this in the last week alone due to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award issue.

Personally, this section pinged none of that for me, whether in intention or execution. As someone who identified as a woman for a good portion of my life, and not incidentally as someone from a people with a clan system based on animal metaphors, I was grinning and doing an internal fist-pump at Jackrum's speech. That's not to disregard Mark's reaction at all, but just to present my own. To me, these words were not at all about diminishing the characters' humanity, but about acknowledging it by attributing to them the strengths that a misogynist religion and society had tried to take away from them - calling into question the so-called natural order that puts man above woman.

I'd be surprised if women in Borogravia shaved at all, given the time and culture that's been evoked, as well as the general rationing and scarcity. Frankly, it doesn't seem in line with Mark's values at all to seize on one of our world's arbitrary beauty standards (that has a history of contentiousness in feminism that I'm sure he's aware of) and hold it up as the default. I was a little puzzled by that part of the review.