The Snack That Smiles Back

If anyone wants to read the full paper for my sociology + fashion class final, be my guest, but I found that having to streamline everything into a proper essay flattened some background bits of research (which I consider the fun part).

okay so bruce wayne famously has no sense of humor but what if he just hasn't discovered it yet

bruce, pointing at the screen: HE'S AT THIS HIGH END RESORT TO FIND HIS FUTURE WIFE AND ALL HE WANTS TO DO IS RIDE A ZIPLINE AND DROP TWO FEET INTO A POOL

I have an ex who was very adamant that I should watch Fight Club with him and I flatly refused because I thought I was just a dumb movie about men beating each other up but he insisted that nono it was actually really deep and would totally change my view of society and that just made me want to watch it even less because judging by the type of movie I thought it was I could imagine what kind of worldview it had.

I can’t believe I didn’t reblog this on the anniversary of DashCon.

Now that I’ve had an afternoon to process the Jacob Geller video - Spec Ops: The Line did better with the option to let Martin Walker quietly move on and live with what he did in spite of the unfixable moral & psychological damage than FNV did with all of that self aggrandizing narratively vindicated mighty whitey bullshit about Joshua Graham put together. Because Martin Walker is also an irredeemable bastard, but unlike Graham, the narrative deals with the ethical weight of his crimes by directly intertwining his nightmarish selfishness & cruelty with the reality of his indomitable humanity. This is why Walker has the option to mercy kill Riggs, to spare him an agonizingly painful death even though he doesn’t necessarily “deserve” it. This is also why Konrad, the manifestation of Walker’s conscience, painted a mural of his/their victims in his final moments of existence. Because what Riggs and Walker and men like them individually “deserve” isn’t the point, and never should’ve been. The Walker we see in the final scene with Konrad is the real Walker, and he isn’t heroic, decent, excusable or redeemable, but neither is he a tooth gnashing monster. Instead, he is scared, desperate and confused, crying “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody!” in a manner so brutally infantile that the ocean of blood on his hands ceases to be impossible to comprehend. Of course, this is the true face of the game’s Bad Guy™, this fractured shell who it would be completely pointless to kill, by his own hand at least. Walker is evil, but he’s still a person, and in that context the full extent of his unspeakable guilt becomes possible to interpret and cope with. To reconcile internally, through understanding, if not externally through justice.

this is a solid examination of the idea of deserving as it applies to spec ops! thanks for writing it.