Previously, Jake went to a gun range and saw a dude who was so good at guns that he daydreamed about getting a job in guns instead of biology. Also the villains held a meeting to discuss how their random attacks on Jake to “test him and find out how much of a badass he really is” (which was their really real plan, apparently) have led them to conclude that Jake is too dangerous to keep randomly attacking but they also don’t need to kill him before their big plan because it’ll probably be fine (which is also their really real plan, apparently).
Trigger Warning: Chapter 16
Oh, right, also someone just called Jake a Nazi.
“What was that?” he asked as casually as if he hadn’t understood the hateful words.
Just so we’re all on the same page here, the “hateful words” here are “nazi”. Which is wild because nazi is 1) not typically on the discriminated against end of any binary, and 2) just one word.
He was about Jake’s age, maybe a little younger, wearing a black T-shirt with #resist and #fascism printed across the chest. There was also the word HISTORY with an arrow underneath it.
lol what the fuck does this mean? This is like a fucking subscription box of sample-size #discourse buzzwords. Resist and fascism are separate hashtags, so resistance and fascism are both good, maybe, except also history is involved, in some unspecified direction? Every new thing that gets added onto this shirt makes it less clear. OR MAYBE IT’S SUPPOSED TO NOT MEAN ANYTHING WHOA MAKES U THINK
As you’ve probably guessed by now, they both have an incredibly obnoxious and unrealistic argument that flows like a conversation between one person who’s never had a human conversation before and another person who’s heard of human conversation through YouTube comments.
Jake shook his head and said, “You’ve got me mixed up with somebody else. I’m not a Nazi.”
“No? Who’d you vote for in the last election?”
“That’s none of your business. They call it a secret ballot for a reason. People used to be able to vote for whoever they thought was the best candidate without being harassed for it.”
Yeah, you tell him how things used to be, guy in his twenties.
In a stunning moment of something approaching character growth, Jake realizes that there’s no point trying to win a fight on someone else’s terms.
The man who had confronted him appeared to be right about one thing: everybody on campus knew who Jake was. And none of them liked him, either. […] So he turned around and walked away.
Although it’s still Trigger Warning, so we’re probably only ever approaching growth, not actually getting there.
It was a good thing he didn’t give a crap whether they liked him, he thought.
Pretty bold claim from an entire book about being mad at the libs.
“Hey! I wasn’t done talking to you.”
“But I’m done talking to you, snowflake,” Jake said without turning around. […]
“That’s hate speech!” the guy said. “He attacked me with his words! I don’t feel safe.”
Gosh, book, good point! This guy looks like a ridiculous whiner about being called a snowflake. It’s not as if a truly hateful pejorative was thrown at him, like (checks notes) nazi.
“You heard him insult me!” the guy yelped. “You’re all recording this, aren’t you?”
Smartphones, Jake thought. A wonderful invention, but the bane of modern life in many ways.
Again, you’re in your twenties.
Jake continues his ongoing conflict of wanting to punch people but realizing that doesn’t make him look like a good guy. Because our protagonist’s struggle in this really real book is actually, seriously “damn, I guess I shouldn’t just punch people who are mean to me, even though I totally can”:
He didn’t figure it would take any more than one punch. In fact, that punch might well break his jaw. That would shut the annoying little bastard up, anyway.
What a good, relatable character.
Jake tries to be the bigger person and just leave the conflict rather than escalate it, and Mr. So Much For The Tolerant Left rushes forward to punch him anyway. For some reason. Jake effortlessly blocks the punch and we’re all very impressed.
His reaction was almost too fast for the eye to follow.
Jake holds the man’s fist in place and squeezes. Multiple paragraphs over the next few pages (and chapter, even) are dedicated to Jake noticing how much pain the guy is in, which you’d think sort of defeats the point of how Jake is a peaceable man or how he’s sorta kinda maybe slowly realizing he doesn’t want to fight “on the enemy’s terms”. But I guess not, then?
Jake makes an announcement that he was attacked from behind without provocation and that his actions were in self-defense and that “any video you might see that makes this incident look or sound otherwise has been doctored”. As he leaves the scene, a black man calls to him to wait up, and offers to send him a copy of the unedited footage because he “believe[s] in fairness and sticking up for the underdog, whether I agree with his politics or not”. Naturally, Jake thanks him by immediately making a big deal out of the fact that he’s black.
“Pierce,” the man introduced himself.
“Really?” Jake said, then wished he hadn’t.
The guy just laughed, though, and said, “Don’t get racist on me when I’m trying to do you a favor, man.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Jake said. “It’s just that Pierce seems like kind of a trust-fund name, you know.”
Pierce cocked an eyebrow. “I happen to have a trust fund, you know.”
He’s black and he has a trust fund? Goddamn, what a complex character.
So, obviously, I’m a white dude and my critique of this scene is gonna be limited by that, so I’m sure there’s a lot here I’m missing out on (or really just not the right person to go into it), but this whole thing has some real model minority shit going on. The book implicitly posits that Pierce transcends his blackness because of his socioeconomic status. And it’s impossible to ignore how the author’s choice of using a black man to help “somebody accused of being a white supremacist” feels strategic and disingenuous. You think Jake’s racist? Well, would a racist have a great new black friend? It fits in with this book’s complete absence of ever discussing systemic issues because, hey, here’s a black man who doesn’t need your precious safe spaces, he follows the rules and respects white people and has his own money!
And I know I’ve gone on a relatively joke-free analysis (sorry plz donate to our Ko-fi) the last two weeks about how this book’s major shortcoming is less its political lens so much as its lack of political content. But it’s really, really, really, reallyreallyreally impossible to ignore how – for a book all about how labels are bad and people should be allowed to think for themselves – Trigger Warning has no real stances on anything but is obsessed with labels. Structural, systemic issues don’t exist in this book.
Because what does Jake actually believe? What positions does he hold? What does Jake think about, I dunno, taxes? What does Jake think about the prison system? What does Jake think about privatization of the education system? What does Jake think about industry deregulation? Hell, we even know that Jake left the army because it wasn’t what he expected it to be, but we’ve yet to actually learn what it was that Jake didn’t agree with. For a character who’s so obsessed with not being told what to think, we know remarkably little about what he actually thinks.
Back in the army, Jake had run into a few guys who considered themselves to be what they called small-l liberals, or classical liberals. Guys who truly believed in free speech and individualism, rather than marching in lockstep and trusting the government to run everything from the top down. They didn’t want to silence anyone who might have different ideas than they did. Their feelings weren’t so fragile that they had to pitch a fit and retreat into a safe space every time anybody challenged one of their beliefs. They welcomed honest debate. Jake could respect guys like that, even when he believed that their policy ideas were all wrong.
BUT WHAT ARE JAKE’S POLICY IDEAS? What honest debate does he ever have? We’ve seen him grumble about the very idea of critiquing capitalism once or twice, but that’s about as detailed as Jake ever gets. Otherwise it’s all incendiary labels in the place of actual meaning:
The Cntrl-Left, Jake thought with a smile, remembering a term someone on the Internet had come up with to mock the lockstep progressives and their obsession with the so-called Alt-Right.
A pretty good way to get back at people obsessed with labeling people they disagree with is to write a whole book about labeling people that you disagree with. That’ll show them!
If you enjoyed today’s post, please consider buying the BBGT writers a cup of coffee? That’d be swell of you!
The real plot twist of this book is finding out that Jake is a robot sent to kill all liberals. It would explain his total lack of character. “Trigger Warning” as a title is just a nod to the phrase that triggers him to bust out machine gun arms.
One of the oddest exchanges is about Pierce’s name. Jake questions it, even though Pierce is a pretty generically trendy name and not really tied to one ethnicity. Thinking it’s unusual for a black man reveals that you think “generic” means “white and rich.”
But then the guy understands why Jake is confused! In reality he’d assume that Jake simply misunderstood the perfectly ordinary name.
I’m morbidly curious to see how Jake would react if he watched Black Lightning. A t.v show about a superhero who is not only black but has the last name Pierce.
Don’t be silly, Jake doesn’t have any thoughts beyond “I’m a peaceable man, why do these people keep forcing me to hurt them”
Realistically, though, Jake doesn’t espouse any actual beliefs because this book presumes a right-wing audience. His views don’t need to be explained because they’re expected to be shared by the reader; he signals that he agrees with them by the nature of his complaints and they fill in the details. It looks hollow to us because we don’t agree with the premise.
that’s a good point, but I’d argue that the book’s hollowness isn’t dependent on the reader. using a wildly different example, Twilight gets flack because Bella is perhaps intentionally an undeveloped character bc it’s easier for the intended audience to picture themselves as her in her romance, but that doesn’t mean the work is more or less hollow depending on who’s reading it. some readers may not mind as much, but t’s a shortcoming either way.
Anyway, that’s how I compared Trigger Warning to Twilight. That came out of nowhere.
Oh I definitely agree that it’s a shortcoming, I guess I was just talking about how it could have happened. [I also thought of the Twilight analogy while writing the original comment but I thought it would be too out there. That’ll teach me.]
Too out there? On THIS blog?