Honour and Gender

A huge driving force behind the events of the Ulster cycle is its heroes' relentless, often self-destructive drive to prove themselves against each other. It's a huge part of what makes the stories compelling to me, so I wanted to capture that dynamic. The main principle is who's publicly known to be the best--you can cheat, but only if you're not caught or can spuriously justify it. Being the official Best Warrior isn't just about being the best fighter, you have to be good at playing the social game.

For a prime example of this in the medieval material, I've mentioned the podcast Guth and its episode on Mac Da Tho's Pig before, and the commentary at the end of that episode goes over all the techniques its characters are employing in this game very well. I've also discussed before how I altered my version of that situation by adding an 'uncomfortably different' hero (Morgan isn't exactly Cú Chulainn; part of her difference and discomfort is she's trying to oppose the system while still often being ruled by the avaricious impulses and need to be the best it instilled in her). But I held off on discussing my versions of fully until I had scenes from The Wooing of Eve I could use as examples.

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(NOTE: The following is kind of me making explicit a lot of implicit theming and motivation, so you may prefer not to read it and let the stories speak for themselves. But if you're curious to know more of what's in my mind when I write these characters acting the way they do, read on) 

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When the Hounds make their boasts at Paulos' feast they're following a somewhat ritualistic pattern. As we saw back in the first story, letting the other guy go first lets you frame your boast as a one-up; Ryohei, feeling confident, goes first hoping to lay down an impressive enough resume that nobody can even think to plausibly respond like that. It doesn't work, and we get the full circle of three boasts (a vast array of human cultures love the number three, it's a convenient number, but Welsh and Irish material really loves threes. If you thought the Wooing was obsessed with threes, I hold that's just authentic). This is why Paulos is aghast to see Ryohei standing up again; he's had his proper turn, and now he's breaking the nice neat cycle to have a drunken rant. Still, he thinks he can justify this by calling into question the validity of the contest and therefore the pattern in the first place, but it doesn't stick.

Later, we see Kaya and Ryohei reject judgements against them for all sorts of spurious reasons, but the underlying logic (that Mach eventually outwits) is that since they're not in the presence of their own peers and society, none of this 'counts' on the honour scoreboard. Paulos' entire court getting visual evidence of the judgement finally leaves them with no room to escape. (Incidentally, in the story this whole part is heavily stealing from, Bricriu's Feast, the other heroes upon seeing an equivalent proof of a judgement favouring Cú Chulainn, accuse him of buying the trinket to trick them, and it takes another dozen or so judgements for one to stick, but here I had other things to do, like Kamen Rider episode 3)

Head-taking is also part of this; it's clear proof of who you killed and therefore who you're better than. Morgan in exile occupies a strange uncertain spot on the hierarchy; in one sense still at the top (as she's keen to reassert) by her sheer power and accomplishments, but also sort of at permanent negative infinity honour for being in rebellion (and not even defecting to another king!). So she has less long-term use for trophies, and is more careless with her enemies' heads, crushing them or taking them then throwing them away to make points. But she still takes them, for the same reason she takes shiny gold objects that won't do her much good. She doesn't want things to have them. It's the act of taking.

Returning from that sidetrack, the hierarchy of the three competing heroes in The Wooing of Eve isn't quite as rigid as in Bricriu's Feast. When it comes to actually doing stuff, Kaya tends to rank last, but she outdoes Ryohei in bark, and briefly in bite when fuelled by frenzied willpower. They're all frantic to prove themselves, but she's doubly so. Some gender is happening here.

You'd be forgiven for not being totally clear on this, because of all the lesbian sex I put in it, but the Gordian cycle takes place in a fairly patriarchal world. It's definitely not what most people would think of as "queer-normative", but there is clearly wiggle room, to put it lightly. Essentially, the most important thing in this society is roles. A warrior, and especially a Hound, is almost an exaggerated parody of exhorted martial masculinity. When Decross runs out of sons, sure, it might be an honour conflict to have his daughter inherit, but having nobody inherit would be a worse one; and there might be social pressures on Kaya as a woman, but the social pressures on her as a Hound are way, way stronger, so it's seen as more fitting for her to act like the others, and fight and self-aggrandise and consume copiously and pursue hot girls.

This is in a way convenient for her, because it gives her space to be a lesbian much more publicly than she otherwise would have, but it also gives her an ever-present feeling that she has to be the best at her role she possibly can, so she can continue operating under those expectations rather than gendered ones. There's a similar tension around her desire to marry Eve; of course, a warrior noble should wed a beautiful maiden, that just makes sense. Intellectually, everyone knows that they largely feel that way so that they can have heirs, which this won't produce (marriage isn't necessarily 100% monogamous here, but it certainly isn't going to help in that regard). But even knowing that, it's still how they feel, and this can still go ahead*.

Where does Morgan fit into all of this? As usual, strangely. She's basically taken advantage of the fact that Hounds are pampered and exalted enough that, if they continue bringing prestige and success, they can do whatever they want. I'm a woman now, yes you will be paying for the transition, here's some cows I stole. But it's strange for her peers to think about, even with their slightly flexible role-based lens on gender. A "man becoming a woman", in their eyes, would normally exhibit extremely feminine styling and behaviour, so much so that everyone around her would be forced to agree that she could no longer be called a man. Morgan does not do this. Morgan continues to be Morgan, Hound supreme. As in everything else, she's a scary oddity catching in the wheels of their worldview.

For the record, I don't think she exactly knew where she was going with this either. I imagine that soon after she made the declaration, there was an awkward day where she figured maybe she should try sleeping with men now? And upon being sent thirty hot guys for the night pretty quickly discovered her desires hadn't actually changed at all and hurriedly asked if the girls were still available.

All the above is much more intense at the elite level; things are a bit looser for commoners, who don't have much honour to maintain in the first place. Meanwhile the Amazons, the other big exception, don't seem to have very rigid ideas on who should be attracted to who, being a relatively small informal community on a remote island led by a handful of biomechanical cyborg women. Or maybe they did have highly specific social constructions of political hierarchy and gendered behaviour but the original author of our tale just didn't know very much about it. Or made them up.

That's about it for this one; I think the remaining stuff mostly explains itself more explicitly? e.g. Morgan in the contest's resolution is relatively calm and able to think clearly, but even when her desires aren't ruling her, the need to satisfy the public perception of honour is.

Coming probably soon, another post on the verse snippets in this second story!

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(*Possible TMI: Mostly the question of heirs or the lack thereof is only brought up in relation to Kaya because she's the only noble of the three, and therefore the only one who might be expected to want them. I don't actually know if common Hounds can even have kids, or if the Angels are less careful when messing around with their insides while operating on them. And Morgan has that and whatever Martian wasteland HRT consists of going on. I don't really enjoy thinking about reproductive topics in my writing, but those dastardly aristocrats and their genealogical fixations sometimes make me. Then again, as I'm reliably informed al-Xicara discusses in their earlier commentary on the Wooing, it's also entirely possible that the genealogy of commoners was just thought so unimportant as not to merit a mention, and those characters left childless as a narrative conceit.)