Omnibus Canon Essay
Motherfucking INFODUMP. I’ve tried writing essays on Last Exile as a series and Mullin’s particular background and place within it a couple different times now, but never once finished because there’s just been too damn much information to cover. I couldn’t explain the little Mullin-specific bits without also covering a whole lot more. But that’s what I’m gonna do now.
So if you’ve ever wondered anything about Mullin or Last Exile’s fictional geopolitics, technology, military strategy, and above all MASSIVE SPOILERS (for a series that debuted in 2003, at least), then have I got an essay for you.
So... Mullin. What’s his deal?
Mullin Stuff
Mullin is a soldier who fights with a musket-a musketeer. (The popular image of musketeers as swordsmen is an incomplete one; Alexandre Dumas’ famous trio were part of a French Royal bodyguard unit comprised of swordsmen who also used muskets-hence their name. The movies tend to leave that part out.) A musket is an archaic type of firearm that fires one bullet at a time, inaccurately, at short range, and is complex to reload. Think of what they used in the Revolutionary War-or better yet, the Napoleonic Wars or War of 1812, because his uniform is more of the style of that time, the early 19th Century.
This is important because it means Mullin is an anachronism. He’s out of date, not just for our time but also the setting of Last Exile, which is like a steampunk Golden Age of Aviation-the early 20th Century. They’ve got flying battleships and fighter aircraft and machine guns, and he’s a type of soldier with a type of weapon that’s 100 years out of date, fighting on what’s effectively the front line… (Why? I’ll get to that later.)
Mullin wears survival medals pinned to his uniform coat, over his heart; they’re important to him because they represent all the battles he’s fought in so far-19, to date. They’re made of brass, with the three large ones representing 5 battles each, and then below those are four smaller ones representing 1 battle each. (At the bottom of that row is an improvised medal, a bottlecap pinned to a ribbon, that one of the main characters gave him after he helped her out during a barroom brawl.) He keeps them with him at all times, even out of uniform, because they comprise a physical record of his entire military service and they just might be his ticket out of the war.
It’s noteworthy that they’re called survival medals, and also that Mullin has 19 of them to his credit. He says during the series (and we see evidence to back this up) that musketeers like him have only a 30% survival rate for each battle-which is a ludicrously bad ratio. Having 70% of your soldiers dead after every battle is no way to fight a war… But they do it anyway. (Why? I’ll get to that later, too.) What it means with regard to Mullin is that he’s very good at a very bad job-although hapless at pretty much everything else, to have beaten those kind of odds 19 different times means he’s an extremely good (and extremely lucky) musketeer.
The number of battles he’s been in is also significant because a musketeer who survives 20 battles will be promoted out of the firing line, out of immediate danger, and reassigned wherever he likes, to whatever ship he likes. Think of Catch-22, where the American bomber crews would be sent home after flying so many missions… Only for the requisite number of missions to keep being increased on them so they can never go home. The Anatoray Fleet in Last Exile promises the same sort of Catch-22 situation, but without changing the number of battles-no musketeer is likely to survive through 20 battles. Mullin, though, is on the cusp-he “only” needs to beat the odds one more time to earn his promotion and become the master of his own destiny.
Which makes Mullin’s choices during the series that much more poignant and, in my mind, heroic and impressive. See, at the start of the series we’re introduced to Mullin in the middle of his 19th battle as a musketeer on the Anatoray flagship. After it’s over, he gets his medal and leaves the flagship in search of a new assignment (since he technically mutinied and held fellow crewmembers at gunpoint to protect the heroes when they came to the ship to deliver a message to the fleet commander, and were ordered to be shot by the ship’s executive officer (the fleet commander, being a nice guy, allowed him to seek reassignment rather than, you know, court-martialing him, and even gave him a letter of recommendation)). But instead of joining another Anatoray battleship, Mullin effectively goes AWOL and joins the heroes aboard the Silvana, a legendary airship that, although secretly funded by and on a mission for the Anatoray government, is publically considered a pirate ship. Aboard the Silvana Mullin works as a (lousy) mechanic, but gradually proves himself as dedicated (if nothing else) and earns a modicum of respect from the heroes and the crew…
But then Last Exile makes a storyline shift, and suddenly the war Mullin was fighting as a musketeer builds to a final, decisive battle against a new enemy, and Mullin has a choice to make. The Silvana will play an essential part in the endgame, so Mullin can either stay there as a mediocre grease monkey… Or he can reenlist with the Anatoray Fleet and join a vital and extremely dangerous mission as a musketeer. That would be his 20th battle, meaning that if he survives, Mullin could go wherever he wanted-which would be back to the Silvana, his new home… But he probably wouldn’t survive, and he’s already there anyway.
Mullin chooses to reenlist as a musketeer, though, because it’s the one thing he’s good at-and he can make a bigger difference and be more of a help to his friends by putting himself in mortal danger and volunteering for the special mission. And that is a large part of why I think he’s awesome-because when the opportunity came to help his friends at great risk to his own life, rather than stay in comparative safety in a non-combat role on the finest battleship in the world, Mullin steps up to do the job he doesn’t have to do, and he steps up big.
General World-Building Stuff
So a couple times above I mentioned I’d get to certain topics later, like why Mullin is a fighting anachronism and why the battles in Last Exile are fought so stupidly… Plus minor details like who’s fighting who, and why. Here is where the BIG TIME SPOILERS start, so… You’ve been warned.
And here’s the biggest spoiler of all-Prester, the planet on which Last Exile takes place, is actually an artificial, hourglass-shaped construct, (probably) built as a colony for humans from Earth… but no one in the show knows that. The conflict in the series stems from the fact that the weather control systems that keep Prester habitable are gradually breaking down, rendering large parts of the planet inhospitable if not outright uninhabitable, all because the people who’re supposed to keep them running aren’t doing their jobs-whether they don’t remember to or simply don’t care to isn’t clear, but it’s probably the latter.
There are three main factions in the series-the two warring nations of Anatoray and Disith (each inhabiting one bulb of the hourglass), plus the Guild, an allegedly impartially and vastly technologically superior organization that should be ensuring everything on Prester runs smoothly… but they’re not-simply put, the Guild leadership is the real bad guy of the series, and wresting control from the Guild becomes the heroes’ ultimate goal. Anatoray and Disith start out fighting each other over land-because of the Guild’s neglect, the climatic upheaval is worsening, with Disith’s territory increasingly trapped in a growing Ice Age, and Anatoray comparatively better off but beset by a crippling drought-until they realize the Guild is their common enemy and join forces to break the Guild’s dominance.
This is no easy feat, both because of the mutual mistrust after years of brutally indecisive war (more on that slightly later) and because of the Guild’s superior technology. While Anatoray and Disith are both trapped in a steampunk early 20th Century, the Guild has futuristic space-age supertech to rely on. Worse, the Guild effectively controls almost every aspect of life on Prester through its near-stranglehold on transportation technology.
In Last Exile, flight is the dominant form of transit-airships are the order of the day. Flight is possible because of a kind of mineral unobtanium called claudia, which when refined can be turned into a fuel that produces lift, allowing heavier-than-air vehicles to fly and maneuver without needing wings. The problem is that, with the exception of small transports and even smaller personal aircraft called vanships, the Guild has a monopoly on claudia technology. For anything bigger-like commercial transports and especially battleships-the Guild lends out claudia units, basically self-contained engine rooms that can be fitted into an airship’s superstructure like an engine fits into a car chassis. The thing is, these claudia units are staffed by Guild technicians sealed off from the rest of the airship… And they can independently detach from the ship-meaning if Anatoray or Disith takes any action the Guild disapproves of, the Guild can recall the claudia units from their airships, causing those ships to crash out of the sky and killing everyone aboard (or below). This allows the Guild to dictate policy on Prester… up to and including how wars are fought.
The Guild realized that keeping Anatoray and Disith in a stalemate is better for them than the two nations allying with each other, or even than one nation being decisively victorious. For that reason, the Guild allowed Disith to try and invade Anatoray, and has actively worked to keep the two sides fighting without a clear winner. To that end, the Guild forces the two nations to use outdated military tactics-which is where Mullin and the other musketeers come in.
See, while both sides have heavy artillery on their battleships that could allow for their vessels to slug it out, the Guild 1) (probably) doesn’t want their people in the claudia units getting shot at, and 2) knows that that would eventually lead to a clear winner in the war. The purpose of modern warfare is not to kill the most people, but to eliminate your enemy’s ability to make war against you-which is why (ideally) wars are won by destroying military materiel and means of production, and not by outright slaughter (which is both inhumane and a lot tougher). Knowing this, the Guild makes the two sides fight in a way that only results in outright slaughter, with neither side gaining a genuine strategic advantage.
Which is why in Last Exile, the war is currently fought by having fleets of huge airships pass broadside to each other in a line, while companies of musketeers stand on deck and trade fusillades with each other. The side with the most dead people loses.
This is what Mullin has been doing for a living. 19 times.
This is both utterly senseless and utterly pointless, because it achieves nothing but death-at the end of the battle, both sides have “only” lost manpower. Their ships are still flying and can still potentially do a lot of damage with their artillery… Meaning that even if the Disith invaders win, they can’t go anywhere because the Anatoray gunners would shoot them if they tried to land, and that even if the Anatoray defenders win, they can’t actually force the Disith ships to leave. But it’s the only way the Guild allows the two sides to fight, so they treat the battles as part of a chivalrous tradition, relying on honor to compel the losers to cede the field. This reduces the musketeers’ sacrifices to honor duels by proxy-completely meaningless exercises in misguided nobility and ridiculous amounts of bloodshed. And meanwhile, the civilians are still suffering from the environmental problems, compelling both sides to fight more, meaning more poor young lads like Mullin will be dying for nothing.
Part of Mullin’s quiet despair in Camp comes from having realized, on some level, that not only is he only good at fighting, he’s only good at fighting in a way that doesn’t resolve anything-meaning that he’s repeatedly killed men, lost friends and comrades, and risked his life for absolutely no good reason. Worse, everything he’s done has only perpetuated the stalemate and reinforced the Guild’s position of control.
Which is another reason why I think he chooses to reenlist as a musketeer for that one last mission at the end of the series-because that mission is one that will actually make a difference: the Unit Capture Operation.
When Anatoray and Disith finally realize their actual and mutual enemy is the Guild, they hammer out an alliance and a plan to take control over their military fleets by storming the airships’ claudia units, killing the Guild personnel inside, and then taking their ships to fight the Guild directly. This is exceptionally dangerous for everyone-if the attackers fail, the Guild technicians will detach the claudia units and cause all the ships to crash-but especially the attackers, who will be charging into a confined space armed only with single shot muskets against enemies armed with submachine guns. Unfortunately, the alliance has to go to war with the ground troops it has, not the ground troops it wants-meaning it’s a job for the musketeers. Especially an exceptionally good (if reluctant) musketeer like Mullin. But if they succeed, and if they can break the Guild’s control with their newly emancipated navy, it means the dawn of a new world for everybody.
Literally, in fact-but that’s part of the story that has less to do with Mullin… I.e., the actual main part of the story that the heroes deal with, to which Mullin is only a supporting character. And who cares about that, really? Mullin’s story and the background for it is awesome enough, right?
… right?
I just wrote 2,410 words about it, so it damn well better be.
So if you’ve ever wondered anything about Mullin or Last Exile’s fictional geopolitics, technology, military strategy, and above all MASSIVE SPOILERS (for a series that debuted in 2003, at least), then have I got an essay for you.
So... Mullin. What’s his deal?
Mullin Stuff
Mullin is a soldier who fights with a musket-a musketeer. (The popular image of musketeers as swordsmen is an incomplete one; Alexandre Dumas’ famous trio were part of a French Royal bodyguard unit comprised of swordsmen who also used muskets-hence their name. The movies tend to leave that part out.) A musket is an archaic type of firearm that fires one bullet at a time, inaccurately, at short range, and is complex to reload. Think of what they used in the Revolutionary War-or better yet, the Napoleonic Wars or War of 1812, because his uniform is more of the style of that time, the early 19th Century.
This is important because it means Mullin is an anachronism. He’s out of date, not just for our time but also the setting of Last Exile, which is like a steampunk Golden Age of Aviation-the early 20th Century. They’ve got flying battleships and fighter aircraft and machine guns, and he’s a type of soldier with a type of weapon that’s 100 years out of date, fighting on what’s effectively the front line… (Why? I’ll get to that later.)
Mullin wears survival medals pinned to his uniform coat, over his heart; they’re important to him because they represent all the battles he’s fought in so far-19, to date. They’re made of brass, with the three large ones representing 5 battles each, and then below those are four smaller ones representing 1 battle each. (At the bottom of that row is an improvised medal, a bottlecap pinned to a ribbon, that one of the main characters gave him after he helped her out during a barroom brawl.) He keeps them with him at all times, even out of uniform, because they comprise a physical record of his entire military service and they just might be his ticket out of the war.
It’s noteworthy that they’re called survival medals, and also that Mullin has 19 of them to his credit. He says during the series (and we see evidence to back this up) that musketeers like him have only a 30% survival rate for each battle-which is a ludicrously bad ratio. Having 70% of your soldiers dead after every battle is no way to fight a war… But they do it anyway. (Why? I’ll get to that later, too.) What it means with regard to Mullin is that he’s very good at a very bad job-although hapless at pretty much everything else, to have beaten those kind of odds 19 different times means he’s an extremely good (and extremely lucky) musketeer.
The number of battles he’s been in is also significant because a musketeer who survives 20 battles will be promoted out of the firing line, out of immediate danger, and reassigned wherever he likes, to whatever ship he likes. Think of Catch-22, where the American bomber crews would be sent home after flying so many missions… Only for the requisite number of missions to keep being increased on them so they can never go home. The Anatoray Fleet in Last Exile promises the same sort of Catch-22 situation, but without changing the number of battles-no musketeer is likely to survive through 20 battles. Mullin, though, is on the cusp-he “only” needs to beat the odds one more time to earn his promotion and become the master of his own destiny.
Which makes Mullin’s choices during the series that much more poignant and, in my mind, heroic and impressive. See, at the start of the series we’re introduced to Mullin in the middle of his 19th battle as a musketeer on the Anatoray flagship. After it’s over, he gets his medal and leaves the flagship in search of a new assignment (since he technically mutinied and held fellow crewmembers at gunpoint to protect the heroes when they came to the ship to deliver a message to the fleet commander, and were ordered to be shot by the ship’s executive officer (the fleet commander, being a nice guy, allowed him to seek reassignment rather than, you know, court-martialing him, and even gave him a letter of recommendation)). But instead of joining another Anatoray battleship, Mullin effectively goes AWOL and joins the heroes aboard the Silvana, a legendary airship that, although secretly funded by and on a mission for the Anatoray government, is publically considered a pirate ship. Aboard the Silvana Mullin works as a (lousy) mechanic, but gradually proves himself as dedicated (if nothing else) and earns a modicum of respect from the heroes and the crew…
But then Last Exile makes a storyline shift, and suddenly the war Mullin was fighting as a musketeer builds to a final, decisive battle against a new enemy, and Mullin has a choice to make. The Silvana will play an essential part in the endgame, so Mullin can either stay there as a mediocre grease monkey… Or he can reenlist with the Anatoray Fleet and join a vital and extremely dangerous mission as a musketeer. That would be his 20th battle, meaning that if he survives, Mullin could go wherever he wanted-which would be back to the Silvana, his new home… But he probably wouldn’t survive, and he’s already there anyway.
Mullin chooses to reenlist as a musketeer, though, because it’s the one thing he’s good at-and he can make a bigger difference and be more of a help to his friends by putting himself in mortal danger and volunteering for the special mission. And that is a large part of why I think he’s awesome-because when the opportunity came to help his friends at great risk to his own life, rather than stay in comparative safety in a non-combat role on the finest battleship in the world, Mullin steps up to do the job he doesn’t have to do, and he steps up big.
General World-Building Stuff
So a couple times above I mentioned I’d get to certain topics later, like why Mullin is a fighting anachronism and why the battles in Last Exile are fought so stupidly… Plus minor details like who’s fighting who, and why. Here is where the BIG TIME SPOILERS start, so… You’ve been warned.
And here’s the biggest spoiler of all-Prester, the planet on which Last Exile takes place, is actually an artificial, hourglass-shaped construct, (probably) built as a colony for humans from Earth… but no one in the show knows that. The conflict in the series stems from the fact that the weather control systems that keep Prester habitable are gradually breaking down, rendering large parts of the planet inhospitable if not outright uninhabitable, all because the people who’re supposed to keep them running aren’t doing their jobs-whether they don’t remember to or simply don’t care to isn’t clear, but it’s probably the latter.
There are three main factions in the series-the two warring nations of Anatoray and Disith (each inhabiting one bulb of the hourglass), plus the Guild, an allegedly impartially and vastly technologically superior organization that should be ensuring everything on Prester runs smoothly… but they’re not-simply put, the Guild leadership is the real bad guy of the series, and wresting control from the Guild becomes the heroes’ ultimate goal. Anatoray and Disith start out fighting each other over land-because of the Guild’s neglect, the climatic upheaval is worsening, with Disith’s territory increasingly trapped in a growing Ice Age, and Anatoray comparatively better off but beset by a crippling drought-until they realize the Guild is their common enemy and join forces to break the Guild’s dominance.
This is no easy feat, both because of the mutual mistrust after years of brutally indecisive war (more on that slightly later) and because of the Guild’s superior technology. While Anatoray and Disith are both trapped in a steampunk early 20th Century, the Guild has futuristic space-age supertech to rely on. Worse, the Guild effectively controls almost every aspect of life on Prester through its near-stranglehold on transportation technology.
In Last Exile, flight is the dominant form of transit-airships are the order of the day. Flight is possible because of a kind of mineral unobtanium called claudia, which when refined can be turned into a fuel that produces lift, allowing heavier-than-air vehicles to fly and maneuver without needing wings. The problem is that, with the exception of small transports and even smaller personal aircraft called vanships, the Guild has a monopoly on claudia technology. For anything bigger-like commercial transports and especially battleships-the Guild lends out claudia units, basically self-contained engine rooms that can be fitted into an airship’s superstructure like an engine fits into a car chassis. The thing is, these claudia units are staffed by Guild technicians sealed off from the rest of the airship… And they can independently detach from the ship-meaning if Anatoray or Disith takes any action the Guild disapproves of, the Guild can recall the claudia units from their airships, causing those ships to crash out of the sky and killing everyone aboard (or below). This allows the Guild to dictate policy on Prester… up to and including how wars are fought.
The Guild realized that keeping Anatoray and Disith in a stalemate is better for them than the two nations allying with each other, or even than one nation being decisively victorious. For that reason, the Guild allowed Disith to try and invade Anatoray, and has actively worked to keep the two sides fighting without a clear winner. To that end, the Guild forces the two nations to use outdated military tactics-which is where Mullin and the other musketeers come in.
See, while both sides have heavy artillery on their battleships that could allow for their vessels to slug it out, the Guild 1) (probably) doesn’t want their people in the claudia units getting shot at, and 2) knows that that would eventually lead to a clear winner in the war. The purpose of modern warfare is not to kill the most people, but to eliminate your enemy’s ability to make war against you-which is why (ideally) wars are won by destroying military materiel and means of production, and not by outright slaughter (which is both inhumane and a lot tougher). Knowing this, the Guild makes the two sides fight in a way that only results in outright slaughter, with neither side gaining a genuine strategic advantage.
Which is why in Last Exile, the war is currently fought by having fleets of huge airships pass broadside to each other in a line, while companies of musketeers stand on deck and trade fusillades with each other. The side with the most dead people loses.
This is what Mullin has been doing for a living. 19 times.
This is both utterly senseless and utterly pointless, because it achieves nothing but death-at the end of the battle, both sides have “only” lost manpower. Their ships are still flying and can still potentially do a lot of damage with their artillery… Meaning that even if the Disith invaders win, they can’t go anywhere because the Anatoray gunners would shoot them if they tried to land, and that even if the Anatoray defenders win, they can’t actually force the Disith ships to leave. But it’s the only way the Guild allows the two sides to fight, so they treat the battles as part of a chivalrous tradition, relying on honor to compel the losers to cede the field. This reduces the musketeers’ sacrifices to honor duels by proxy-completely meaningless exercises in misguided nobility and ridiculous amounts of bloodshed. And meanwhile, the civilians are still suffering from the environmental problems, compelling both sides to fight more, meaning more poor young lads like Mullin will be dying for nothing.
Part of Mullin’s quiet despair in Camp comes from having realized, on some level, that not only is he only good at fighting, he’s only good at fighting in a way that doesn’t resolve anything-meaning that he’s repeatedly killed men, lost friends and comrades, and risked his life for absolutely no good reason. Worse, everything he’s done has only perpetuated the stalemate and reinforced the Guild’s position of control.
Which is another reason why I think he chooses to reenlist as a musketeer for that one last mission at the end of the series-because that mission is one that will actually make a difference: the Unit Capture Operation.
When Anatoray and Disith finally realize their actual and mutual enemy is the Guild, they hammer out an alliance and a plan to take control over their military fleets by storming the airships’ claudia units, killing the Guild personnel inside, and then taking their ships to fight the Guild directly. This is exceptionally dangerous for everyone-if the attackers fail, the Guild technicians will detach the claudia units and cause all the ships to crash-but especially the attackers, who will be charging into a confined space armed only with single shot muskets against enemies armed with submachine guns. Unfortunately, the alliance has to go to war with the ground troops it has, not the ground troops it wants-meaning it’s a job for the musketeers. Especially an exceptionally good (if reluctant) musketeer like Mullin. But if they succeed, and if they can break the Guild’s control with their newly emancipated navy, it means the dawn of a new world for everybody.
Literally, in fact-but that’s part of the story that has less to do with Mullin… I.e., the actual main part of the story that the heroes deal with, to which Mullin is only a supporting character. And who cares about that, really? Mullin’s story and the background for it is awesome enough, right?
… right?
I just wrote 2,410 words about it, so it damn well better be.