werkpaard

When Coyle sees Phyllis and starts talking about how “letting a woman control your life” leads to “perversion and despair, chaos,” he sounds genuinely disturbed. His voice gets airy, like he’s dissociating, like this isn’t a cautionary tale but a memory of his. He outright compares Phyllis to his mother, in between bouts of sexualizing her, likening Phyllis to a thundercloud, the thing he associates with sexual power. That petulant sniff he does when he’s calling her his “sweet mother” is the kicker; he knows he’s supposed to love this woman, he’s proud of her, he draws confidence from her, (“mama coyle raised no nancies,”) but he’s still upset. Leland looks at Gooseberry - who was a television star working with children while secretly being a serial killer, who operated in public but kept her worst crimes behind closed doors, who used her influence to get children to abuse drugs and commit parricide - and says that that’s what his mother was like. Phyllis takes him back to a part of his life that is equal parts pain, fear and arousal, she triggers something that sits at the root of his entire conception of women. They had Coyle call her a hysterical bitch three whole times for a reason, she gets under his skin.

It is extremely common for media depictions of mother-son incest to portray the son as the instigator, a reflection of the cultural impulse towards victim blaming. But Coyle casually shakes off the residual stigma of what happened to him by reminding us that being overly intimate with your mom is normal. Lots of people kiss their mother on the mouth. He’s not willing to criticize the patriarchal family structure his mother operated within, he’s staked too much on it, so instead, he zeroes in on the way she specifically misbehaved inside of it, chalks his own suffering up to an accidental misapplication of power into the wrong hands. You gotta wonder if Leland blames his father, on some level, for not controlling his mother properly, for not dominating the household like he was supposed to. That’s probably why he considers his violent attentions to be a favor he’s doing his victims; he associates punishment inseparably with love.

The post mentioned that these tattoos are meant to resemble white supremacist tattoos. I don’t think red barrels intended the snake and dagger tattoo to allude to white supremacy because I think they wouldn’t have included the dagger. Snakes have been used historically to signal white supremacy, however I don’t really see the resemblance of the snake on the warden to white supremacist snakes.

The spiderweb tattoo historically does hold racist connotations if it’s on the elbow (which it’s not on The Warden) but the tattoo represents at a larger scale being caught up in the web of the system. Knowing that Sinyala transfers U.S. prisoners to their facilities to experiment on this is probably meant to signal The Warden as being a former prisoner.

I do think it’s interesting to characterize The Warden as a white supremacist because it’s similar to how real life white supremacist are bootlickers that worship the systems that be. (The system being Coyle in this analogy)

Either way it made me think about what the character of The Warden represents and how he relates to Coyle.

I think he’s an example of giving part of yourself to society in exchange for something seemingly beneficial but ultimately harmful. The Warden pledges himself completely to Coyle who will hurt and abuse him, albeit less than if he didn’t.

In a patriarchal society men are valued more than women however this does not mean men do not also suffer from patriarchal expectations. Men are not allowed to be victims. Men are not allowed to be sensitive, to show more emotion than rage or indifference. Men cannot be gay because (in American society) being gay makes you inherently feminine and there is nothing worse in a patriarchy than to be womanly or feminine.

Coyle is very misogynistic, he revels in the power he has over women. However he will never heal from the sexual abuse he suffered as a child from his mother because in a patriarchal society men cannot be victims, especially not of women. Coyle cannot express any kind of venerability because that would mean he’s weak and effeminate. It all begs the question, does the power he holds over women justify everything he must sacrifice?

Often time racist hate groups target lonely young men, I think this is why Coyle joined the KKK, for a sense of community and belonging after his time in the military.

Going back to white supremacy, judging someone based on their race is an inherently unjust thing to do. The idea of segregation as something “separate but equal” is laughable because it is inherently unequal to be separated. Coyle as a character is extremely fixated on justice and what is right and wrong yet he regurgitates fear mongering because he fears the unknown and that manifests as aggression. I think Coyle knows to some extent that minorities are not all the negative stereotypes that they are characterized as, but he chooses to be willfully ignorant because it’s difficult to accept that the world can be unfair, so maybe they did something to deserve it. I think he also fears that if oppressed people had the power that he did they would abuse it just like he does.

The Warden pledges himself completely to Coyle who will hurt and abuse him, albeit less than if he didn’t. Coyle pledges himself to a patriarchal white supremecist society because it gives him power and control as a white man, and he is more protected than he would be if he didn’t, however he will never have true inner peace and happiness because of it, he will never be comfortable with who he is, he will always live in fear.

This is all exasperated by drugs and sleep deprivation. I don’t feel bad for Coyle, this is the life he chose and now he’s reaping the same abuse of authority from murkoff that he once inflicted upon his community.

i think people do kinda take the word of unused dialogue that presumably isnt in the game for a reason as gospel (which in a vacuum i wouldn't mind but given there seems to be more analysis of noncanon coyle dialogue than things other characters say out loud with their mouths ingame it has become a pet peeve of mine, but that's also just owed to coyle's popularity in general) but i think when talking about coyle's backstory and early childhood in particular people find the absolute interpretation of "oh, his mom did untoward things to him, as implied by this unused dialogue" more interesting than the ambiguity we have now, but ngl, i really like the ambiguity!

we don't know if he's the victim or perpetrator, just that this... happened. the phrasing, alongside the way the rest of the backstory is written that i'll get to, skews perpetrator, but it's never said as directly as, say, the kress twins talking about their father hurting them. and i actually think this works really really well for coyle as a character

he's someone who thinks very very black and white and deals in absolutes, so it's interesting to see his early childhood more shrouded in mystery. even if he was an abusive little kid, though, those behaviors don't come from nowhere - outlast, especially in trials with the prime assets, emphasizes that monsters are made, not born. it's just that in this precise moment establishing the origin of these behaviors isn't as important as recognizing they've been with him for a long time, in the context of the violence and charisma required to be a prime asset.

but as trials is also often reminding us, most frequently in suburbs trials and especially coyle trials and ESPECIALLY locksock the warden, if it happens behind closed doors, or in darkness, or otherwise in private, and there's no record of it, no one will ever know. we have no way of knowing what happened in coyle's childhood in the same way we have no way of knowing what he did to his wives, or the snitch, or the warden, or his countless other victims. all that really matters, and all we know, is that coyle grew up to be the way he is, and those people are all dead.

what happens behind closed doors is especially a big theme of locksock i've talked about before, but one thing i find especially interesting about it that i don't see people bring up often is that - unlike the kress twins with silence the idol, a very similarly-structured trial where you take away a "gift" the prime asset has been given that they have an emotional attachment to - coyle wants to experience locksock the warden again.

because, sure, the warden fills a void for him. he's very much insecure and projecting as he screams about not being lonely and not loving anybody as he chases you - he does care about the warden in the sense that he doesn't want him taken away and values all he can do for him, being someone he can abuse as much as he wants of course, and someone whose very existence is "behind closed doors". someone who is fundamentally beneath him as a trial victim to a prime asset. but if he loves the warden in the same (twisted) way the kress twins love erik for example, why would he want to do that again? why would he want to put himself through that grief again, if he really is torn up by losing the warden?

i think the answer to this is pretty simple.

to someone like coyle, someone he can abuse as much as he wants, who will always die and take that evidence with them, is a dream come true. he doesn't have to grapple with whatever the implications to himself of sexual activity with another man are if that man's going to die. and he can break the warden(s) as much as he wants because they're never going to mean anything to him, they're replaceable. he even brings this up in the trial itself, while the warden is still alive!

similarly to how he likely doesn't have to think about his ex-wives as people with interiority if he just... takes that away from them. he doesn't even have to be good at it, his wives' deaths are all brutal staged suicides that are very obviously not that, but he has the law on his side so he can make whatever story he wants. out of sight out of mind, no evidence, no witnesses, what a good cop!

i have to also add that coyle, to me at least, isn't really... a character in the way the other prime assets are. or rather he's a character in the same way father loutermilch or jeremy blaire are characters. he's more the face of corruption and abuse, to the police system what loutermilch is to religion and what murkoff as a whole is to institutionalization, he is still really interesting and with a lot to analyze (of course!) but i think him having a very simple point-a-to-point-b backstory with not a lot of internal strife or angst like franco, gooseberry, the kresses, etc is very intentional.

he's an abusive and shitty person who seeks out places he can act that out, the fact he goes from the kkk to the police force is portrayed as a natural escalation. in an incredibly unsubtle way at that LOL. it says way more about the real-life practice it's gesturing to than it does about the fictional man, which i think is the point.

his moments of weakness and patheticness aren't really sympathetic as much as they're pointing out that people like him in real life are sniveling cowards. the fear that coyle feels at, well, everything, isn't the same as the fear gooseberry feels from her father for instance, it's the pointless, evil, self-absorbed fear every racist feels of people of color, every misogynist feels of women, etc.

i sometimes see him compared to the kress twins in terms of the least politically correct prime assets, however i think the differences between them are really apparent both in the literal ways their bigotry manifests and its origins (coyle punches down because he's a privileged piece of shit, the kress twins punch down because they're overcompensating for being born "wrong", both have the same results of evil white scumbags being evil white scumbags but one is presented in a way where you're meant to give more thought to it) and their respective Darkness Motifs™️- the kress twins do all their evil "from the shadows" because they're seen as ugly, disfigured, gross, and so they convince themselves this is where they belong and try to lean into this evil shadowy puppetmaster persona to make it feel more like an active choice, meanwhile coyle is a beloved and charismatic privileged cop who seeks out darkness because it gives him the safest place to do all the things he wants to. he can exist in the light if he wants, in fact he's very good at it.

he wants to have his cake and eat it too, operate in darkness so he can carry out as much private abuse as he wants, but he's too much of a coward to accept the thought of taking what he dishes out. he'll talk about wanting to do all these horrific things to you and then scream and cry about how he's under attack when you throw a bottle at him. he's obsessed with "the possibilities of a pitch black room" but still carries around a light-up weapon. i fucking hate him