I'll start. So, recently I have been thinking a lot about PM, so I decided to read The Postman, the book which was the inspiration for the movie which was (I think?) the main inspiration for PM's character.

In the book The Postman, a recurring phrase is "Who will take responsibility?" This phrase is brought up multiple times as a way to glue the pulp-style narrative structure of the book together. I call it pulp, because it matches up with the "continued adventures" style of adventure/sci-fi short stories and novels popular in the mid-1900s. I, Robot is another example of this type of book, with a framing device connecting multiple short stories about the same concept. For The Postman, that concept was "a survivor of the apocalypse gets out of trouble by pretending to be the American Postal Service."

The ironic part of the novel is that, in seeking to evade responsibility/consequences for screwing something up (basically he got in trouble with a gang) he winds up leaning into the role of a postman and creating an actual, somewhat functioning postal system in his corner of the Cascade Mountains and running into various other settlements that survived in different ways. This bridging sense of community helps him find the people who are taking responsibility (an old Black woman running a pastoral farm property, an engineer who pretends to be a supercomputer, etc.) which frames a hopeful view of the future post-apocalypse.

The similarities to The Postman are very clear in how PM behaves in the comic, though I'm unsure how much of it was intentional reference to the book or just a general echoing of the concepts of hopeful reconstruction that The Postman has in all versions. I know out of all the Exiles, PM proves to be the most powerful because of her sense of duty.

I personally believe that this is what makes her rise up as a heroic and indominable figure in the story. We see multiple times that PM refuses to break her promise as a mail carrier and open a dilapidated letter to a defunct address on a desert apocalypse. She also follows AR to get a package that she must deliver in person (Page 3383), enters enemy territory despite clearly being terrified (page 3448), and actually tells the White Queen everything that happened to her, leading up to WQ rewarding her honesty by planning a way to let PM keep all her promises and finally deliver the package from Jade to John (page 3520 onward). She defends herself with violence for the first time in pursuit of her duty, and even though she's pissed off at how much she had to go through to get that goddamn box into John's hands, she does it anyway because this ain't about her and her own feelings, it's about the mail.

I find PM very admirable and inspiring for that reason. When faced with danger, fear, sorrow, and even rage that can overwhelm her, she doesn't falter or hesitate. She knows what she must do, and she does it, even if she's never had to do it before or gone through so much in pursuit of it. If she decides to kill the mass murderer who destroyed her tiny, hopeful and growing village for literally no reason, she will never stop. If she decides to retrieve and deliver a package, that package is getting mcfucking delivered whether anyone wants it to or not. She's a terrifying enemy and an excellently written paragon character whose religion happens to be the postal service.

I love her so much.