Mouse Guard/Analysis

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


On Political Issues in the Fall 1152 Series.

The first series, where a revolutionary attempts to remove a de-facto central power of The Alliance, believing that it is exploited by the corrupt surrounding townships and it's equally corrupt merchants, without being granted any executive, legislative, judicial, or military power in return, thus downgrading it to a mere powerless figurehead in a neo-liberal society alliance of many scattered, divided and isolationist settlements that would couldn't care less than to unite to protect each other together.

The shocking thing is: He is right. As ironically proven by his own actions of corrupting the council of one of those settlements into setting up a rebel force unhindered, with the mouse guard neither having the right nor the power to intervene, and are technically forced to watch as the opposition that will attempt to remove them from power is making ready.

Not only do each of said councils of the individual cities have more power than the guard, but also does the guard apparently fail to remind those city states of their dependence to the guards' guides, trackers, survival experts, diplomats, soldiers, and forecasters, without whom survival of the individual towns may be endangered.

The revolutionary's plan is to take the mouse guard, and then conquer all the mouse settlements, creating The Empire, placing himself in power, and lead the country as an absolutist ruler, and to declare war on their predators once all mice stand as one against them, eradicating the threat once and for all, however at cost of many an individual's freedoms. After the coup failed, the mouse guard punished the revolutionary by banning him from the mouse territories to fend on his own against the predators to show him how helpful the guard actually is. However, this pretty much destroys the principle of the revolution (you know, uniting in order to stand against those predators).

    • He may have been right about the problem, but his solution was wrong. He wanted to subjugate all the mice in order to make them support their own defense. Similar motivations, or the pretense of them, have been used by tyrants since time immemorial, and there's no indication his version would turn out any better.
      • It is, however, not only shown that the Guard has little ways to keep the colonies together (and that they had taken themselves too many liberties for a supposedly unified territory), but also that the dangers that the mice faced were (contrary to most other scenarios) indeed real and highly menacing, having the mice literally at the bottom of nature's food chain. The rebel's step may have in fact even gone in to the right direction. Which of course does not mean that he had to attempt to install an absolutist dictatorship, which would have been again clearly too extremist for it's own good.