Very high quality discussion going on ITT, very enjoyable.
I am not using the Culling to justify Malvina’s leadership, and indeed couldn’t do so, because I don’t consider the Culling to be a positive thing. To the contrary, I see the Culling as a deeply unhealthy reaction to Nicholas (unintentionally?) humiliating CJF by joining Clan Wolf.
The way I see it, CJF as a faction has an arc in a similar way to how an individual character has an arc and it can be understood analogically in psychological terms. In its formative period, CJF faced a crisis that deeply threatened its sense of identity. Rather than process this crisis transformatively, CJF brutally repressed the resulting trauma. The product was a coping mechanism of repressing anxiety by scrupulous adherence to and identification with a strict interpretation of Clan culture.
As far as coping mechanisms go, this worked pretty well in the context of Clan history prior to and during the early stages of the Invasion. But as it became clear that the presumptively inferior Spheroids could exploit the formal aspects of Clan culture, exceptions began to be made. Oh of course these would be justified by doubling down on the inferiority of the Spheroids, who could be said not to merit honorable treatment. But the truth was simple: the customs of Clan culture were in danger of being subordinated to the practical objective of simply winning, which would be the inarguable validation of the Clans to not only the subjugated Spheroids but also and more importantly to the Clans themselves.
Now, this dynamic struck directly at the heart of CJF’s coping mechanism. The rationalization for suspending rigid observance of Clan culture started to become just as important as Clan culture or, more precisely, incorporated into it. For some Clans, this would not pose an insurmountable contradiction: they would simply change, and even do so consciously. But for CJF change felt like deviance, unfaithfulness, disloyalty. Whether CJF won more than it lost over the years is not the issue. Rather the issue is, every battle became that much harder because there was not only the literal enemy to fight but also the enemy within, the temptation to reform, adapt, change. CJF needed its repression coping mechanism more than ever.
Nonetheless, change is inevitable. Almost a century of fighting in the Inner Sphere necessarily changed all the Invading Clans to the point of turning their backs on Clan Space and their Abjuration. In the face of it all, repression became less a means to cope and more a straightforward neurosis, ripe for further development into outright psychosis. For CJF, what could be a better metaphor for losing touch with reality than abandoning Clan culture? This, of course, is characteristic of Malvina’s Mongol Doctrine. But is the Mongol Doctrine really a kind of psychotic break or is it the sudden explosion of all that repressed temptation to consciously change to better adapt to the grim realities of endless, ever more devastating warfare in the Inner Sphere?
Whether Malvina is psychologically predetermined to just cut a path of destruction to Terra in vain or whether she wants to reign over an empire of bitter enemies from a battle-blackened Terran throne is an open question. But either way the unsustainability of her approach is not solely her issue but rather the wider issue of the unsustainability of CJF’s identity as a faction, going all the way back to its early days. I suspect this is the deeper reason why many CJF fans hate her so much.
