So, rather than spam the thread, I've decided to reply to everyone's comments in order in one place. =]

>And perhaps the alumnae of the club will, as time goes by, get
>themselves onto the faculty and the board of governors and turn
>the whole school into that kind of lifeline. Keeping up the
>appearance of molding rebellious teenagers into compliance, though,
>in order to keep attracting the students who need this particular
>kind of help.

Yeah, that's pretty much the goal for the ex-students, Alice in particular. Playing the long game, setting the trap, and springing it only when there's no possibility of escape. They're also counterbalancing that by using the Armoursport Club as a haven from the casual cruelty of the teaching staff.

Not everyone agrees with the premise or the plan, and they're kind of right; Cleggers as it is would better serve the galaxy as a smoking crater, as would every vile institution like it. In an ideal universe there wouldn't be any. But these are moneyed, privileged people sending their children to these hellholes; even if you wiped them all out, they'd just build other ones. The plan is therefore to build out Cleggers as essentially a brand for parents "in the know", so to speak, with them buying out and taking over and merging with other vile finishing schools to enact the same changes there.

It's a compelling story in its own right. For an EPU work, especially a lighter-toned one like DSMP, it probably works better as, like. Backstory or something.

>Feels like a Thirsty Sword Lesbians setting. Thirsty Tank Lesbians?

As a Thirsty Sword Lesbian who is also a Thirsty Tanks Lesbian, I do feel seen with this comment. But it is still a school, and TSL games in my experience have been preposterously horny, which I don't think would fit the environment at all. Now, a collegiate Armoursports program, with a bunch of queer women and trans women and enbies and such, that there's a good Thirsty Lesbians setting. =]

>I hear the matches between then and St Trinian's are downright
>INSANE...

The St. Trinian's Armoursport club very rarely attends matches, since their tanks are a) in violation of IAF/FISB rules and b) being used by the hockey team for their own dark and violent purposes.

>It's clear that big parts of this came from someplace deeply personal,
>and I respect that in a way that my off-the-cuff, on-the-fly first
>response did not convey. That's a major reason why we do this kind of
>stuff, after all, is to express these things in creative ways, and
>this is very creative. The premise of a team that's not out there for
>money or glory or even honor in the conventional sense, but just for
>the sheer joy of it is very compelling.

That was what I was trying to get across, yeah. It's a riff on the idea of "amateurism" in the Victorian sense; doing a sport purely for The Love Of The Game, so to speak. I initially had in my head that the first interactions between the DSM Armor Club and the Cleggers Team would be very comedic, with the setup being "This is going to be a demure Teddibly Teddibly British boarding school, they're going to be pushovers" and the punchline being "One of our tanks just got rocket-punched by bridgelaying equipment and I think Sasuke just saw the face of God". It's only after the match that the teams really interact with each other, and it's then that the Armor Club figures out that there's something really wrong with the opposition team's actual school environment.

>That said, a lot of the school's practices as described are
>straight-up war crimes, of a caliber that would get a
>prison shut down if anyone on the outside heard about them,
>much less a high school in the 25th-century "first galaxy".

This is a commentary on British public schools in general. Abuse runs rampant in them, be it pupils or staff committing it. My primary school was private (from Year 3-6) and it was a traumatizing hellscape. There's also, especially in schools like Cleggers, a culture of silence bred into the students. It takes so long for abuse survivors to speak up and speak out even when their abuser was a single private citizen; an institution of authority and means and privilege makes speaking up orders of magnitude more intimidating.

The other part is that there's a certain kind of British parent (some call them "traditional", I call them "demonstrably unsafe to be around children") who genuinely believes that forced freezing showers, bad food, beatings, and solitary confinement in dedicated punishment chambers is not only acceptable, but beneficial to a child's development. They say things like "It never did me any harm", "It builds character", "Better than having them be knife-wielding feral hooligans". I'm sure there are US equivalents, both in homeschooling and in private education.

>it also messes with my head in a way I just wasn't
>prepared to deal with this week.

For which I apologise. It wasn't my intent to cause anything like that at all, and I'm sorry for doing so. Thank you for taking the time to spell out why as well, I appreciate it very much.

>TL;DR: It's very personal, and very powerful, and it doesn't fit very
>comfortably in the corner of my head where DSMP lives.

Yeah. I mentioned it briefly earlier in this super-long post, but I've given it a lot of thought and I think this kind of story as it stands would work best in a DSMP context as backstory rather than something actively ongoing. Like, the horrible abusive school environment makes a lot of sense as taking place in the late Exile period, with the Old Girls Network taking over Cleghorn Stanley and making it a safe harbour for independent teenage girls with attitude during the 2390s and 2400s.

The school would therefore be a genuinely Nice Place by the time DSMP is set. The Armoursports Club retains its pre-eminence among the school sports teams, but it's now a Campus Pride society in all but name as well as home to a brigade of joyously ultraviolent teenage tank weirdos. Ironically, they'd still promote the living history angle, with demonstrations on tank maintenance and the role of women in WW2-era Britain at local village fetes and things. They spin it to the parents as merely a quirky but longstanding tradition, no different to any other school team with the exception of needing specialist equipment, which is basically the same as equestrianism. The students are informed well in advance of parents arriving so the school can have an appropriate aura of formalised gloom, but once they're gone the teachers apologise and get everyone ice cream and such.

I'm not asking for anyone to include a Cleggers team in DSMP, even as a passing footnote. I'm just... seeing how I'd do it, given the feedback from both Gryph and the other forumites. The story as I first wrote it is dark, with spots of hope like stars. Tinkering with it to more closely fit the DSMP tone was an excellent writing exercise in itself. The school's been stuck in my head for a long time now, though, and I had to get it out on paper (so to speak) before it started turning into an unremitting slogfest of bleak, grim hopelessness, like a rain-soaked camping holiday in a disused Welsh slate quarry.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback and comments. I really do appreciate your taking the time to engage with my weirdness. And if nothing else, at least now Gryphon knows about rocket-propelled bridging equipment. =]

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Italian tanks in North Africa really did have espresso machines as a standard fitting. It probably almost made up for how shit everything else about them was. Then again, this was the military whose solution to rations not containing fresh meat was to paradrop sheep out of low-flying aircraft, so Christ knows what the hell any of them were ever thinking.