WE’RE BACK, BABY. We finished E.L. James’s The Mister, so it’s time to wildly shift gears from a boring sex trafficking romance to a conservative fever dream. Until we pause for our annual Goosebumps reading next month, because we take pride in coherent tone over here at Bad Books, Good Times.
It’s decidedly been a minute since we last read Trigger Warning, and you might (understandably) not have committed its story, characters, and themes to memory. Don’t worry, even Trigger Warning isn’t 100% clear on what its themes are. But it’s probably a good time to recap anyway, as shit actually starts to pop off this chapter. This isn’t a spoiler, the back of the book promises that “A violent gang of marauders invade the main hall, taking students as hostages for big ransom money [and] to fight back, [God Damn American Hero Jake Rivers] needs to enlist his fellow classmates to school these special snowflakes in the not-so-liberal art of war”, so, uh, this is what we’ve been looking forward to?
Trigger Warning: Chapters 1–17 (the short version)
Jake Rivers enrolls in a liberal arts college where his rich granddaddy encouraged him to go find himself. Much to his dismay, the college is full of kids with rich parents trying to find themselves. But these ones are bad. I’m just summarizing the story; I made no promises about making it make sense.
Jake recently left the army because it wasn’t what he expected (this has yet to be fleshed out – this is the closest thing we have as a potential reveal at some point), and now he hates college because it’s just too gosh darn liberal. Also because – I’m going to say this a lot, but and this is really the plot – he’s constantly being attacked by roving bands of antifa members, the social justice warrior student body, and yet a third group whose identity and movements are unknown but Jake is convinced are hired by the liberal elite. Every single fight begins with Jake being attacked and fighting back in self-defense, which Jake will tell you more often than the bottom of the book will tell you what page number it is. Every single fight ends with Jake calling out his attackers and telling them that they think he’s the closed-minded one but perhaps it is THE LEFT who are the fascists here, because this book’s entire argument against social justice is “I’m rubber, you’re glue”.
So, the college administration wants Jake to drop out. A very attractive female criminal justice professor wants to jump Jake’s bones (she’s been won over by his free-thinking, unapologetically cisnormative allure, you see). Some random black student thinks Jake is onto something with this whole rational logic thing (ergo how can Jake be racist game set match, libs). And the campus police aren’t on good terms with Jake either, which genuinely doesn’t make sense to me, even by this book’s standards.
MEANWHILE, the actual bad guys – led by Matthias Forster – are a far-left group who’ve decided “the only way to stop those fascists from taking over the country and ruining it is to fight back against them with […] the same sort of oppression they deal out to us”. Don’t think about it too hard; it’s not like this book did. They’re the aforementioned secret third group that’s been attacking Jake, evidently as part of a scouting mission to figure out if his being there will mess up their plans, to which they’ve concluded: he’s kicked our asses every single time, but it’s probably gonna be fine.
Again, my job here isn’t to make the story make sense.
Trigger Warning: Chapters 1-17 (the very short version)
A rich, conservative, white man goes to college in a fantasy world where systemic issues don’t exist, political conflict is just intellectual disagreement without stakes because structural social power isn’t a real thing, and so liberals are just people who tell people they’re wrong all the time. Feel bad for how persecuted he is.
Trigger Warning: Chapters 1-17 (the shortest version of all)
Jake Rivers wants everyone to get along so much he will punch you in the goddamn face.
Hamlet: the shortest version of all
Okay, I think we’re ready to dive back in now! That was a lot, but Trigger Warning has thankfully given us a relatively easy transition back in: two whole chapters where Jake doesn’t even show up.
Trigger Warning: Chapter 18
We meet Charlie Hodges, the head groundskeeper at Kelton College, as he arrives to work and finds that the new guy, Rick Overman, is already there. Hodges notes that Overman is “a wiry young guy who was new [but] had proven to be a friendly, efficient, hard worker. Hodges liked him.”
“Ready for a big day?” [Hodges said.] “Every day’s a big day if you approach it right, isn’t it?”
Overman nodded slowly and said, “That’s a very good way of looking at life, sir. I’m going to believe that this will be a very big day.”
He probably won’t like him when he’s dead.
Overman’s muscles bunched and twisted and Hodges heard a sharp crack that resonated through his brain.
He had just enough time to realize it was the sound of his neck breaking before he knew nothing at all.
Surprise! Rick Overman is actually Matthias Foster! Don’t worry if this deception went right over your head. The book will make sure you got it.
The other three members of the groundskeeping crew had arrived. […]
“Hey, Overman,” Thompson greeted him, using the false name Foster had adopted for this job.
Foster tricks the others into going into the garage, where he holds them at gunpoint. His cronies arrive, they kill off the crew, and they take their uniforms. (looks around, long sigh) So much for the tolerant left.
Trigger Warning: Chapter 19
It’s a chapter about Jake’s black, liberal-yet-open-minded, black friend, Pierce Conners, who just posted the unedited video of Jake’s latest fight showing he didn’t provoke the fight, tried to deescalate it, and only acted in self-defense! He had that one conversation with Jake about how he thought posting the video was the right thing to do, and Jake responded with disbelief that a black man could be named Pierce. Did I mention he’s black?
The chapter opens with Pierce running late to a study group meeting, then immediately flashes back to an argument he had with his girlfriend about posting the video because it didn’t make Jake look bad, and then cuts to another flashback aside about a paper he wrote last semester. No wonder he’s running so late to his study group. It’s so hard to travel in media res.
Anyway, remember how Trigger Warning is exhausting to read?
The previous semester, Pierce had written a paper on voter fraud, and he knew from his research into the subject that in virtually all of the provable cases, the fraud had favored the candidate representing the Democratic Party. People on the left liked to argue that the Republicans engaged in voter suppression, which was also a form of fraud, but Pierce hadn’t found any actual evidence of that. On the contrary, the only instances of voter suppression and intimidation he’d been able to find were cases where Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other progressive groups had prevented conservatives from voting, sometimes by violence. As someone who had always considered himself very leftward-leaning, politically, but who was also devoted to the concepts of fairness and equal rights, those discoveries had been rather troubling for Pierce.
So, like I said way back at the beginning of this book, I see no point writing a critique that fact checks and picks apart this book’s arguments, because 1) it’s not funny, and 2) there’s nothing stimulating about engaging in an argument against the political version of “well, my uncle works at Nintendo, so I swear this is true”. What I instead want to point out here – in addition to how it sounds like Pierce is absolute dogshit at doing research – is that for all of Trigger Warning‘s hog-wild fantasies about the world we live in, this might be the book’s saddest one yet: a fantasy about people changing their minds.
Let’s consider this idea by looking at something else (that’s not jokes, sorry) for a minute. In her recent piece, “The Video Games That Made People Question Their Beliefs“, Gita Jackson finds research that, well, this kind of just doesn’t happen like Trigger Warning supposes it might.
Studies from the American Psychological Association show that outside influence is likely to reinforce people’s already existent views. Even more interesting: Due to elements like confirmation bias, the same piece of media can reinforce diametrically opposing views in different people.
Her piece also includes anecdotal evidence, as the title suggests, from a sample set of people who wrote in with experiences with the video games that made them challenge their beliefs. These range from a player from a conservative, Christian background who “wrote to say that Gone Home ‘made [him] not hate gay people'” by anticipating a character’s suicide in the face of “bigotry like the kind I had been holding that made people in LGBT+ communities consider suicide”, to a player who was influenced by Bioshock: Infinite instead because of its ideological shortcomings, feeling “like any issues of race were being shoved aside for an oft rehashed point about the nature of power” and seeing “a game that was made with what felt to him like very little input from people of color”.
These stories of personal growth were all varied and fascinating, but most had one thing in common: These people all said it’s likely that they were always going to end up having those beliefs. The games they played were just the thing that broke their shelf.
So what does this all mean for Trigger Warning? Sure, it suggests that Pierce’s embryonic political transformation spurred on by Learning The Facts is either a) unrealistic, or b) suggests that Pierce just always had some latent conservative leanings anyway. But also, how much does that matter? Generously, couldn’t we say that if Trigger Warning‘s point is that the inflexibility of people’s beliefs creates all this trouble in the world and it’s worth feeling frustrated about that… is that not a fair point?
“Well, here’s the traitor now,” Fareed greeted Pierce. “What have you done this morning to empower the oppressors of your people and mine?”
[Pierce] didn’t need this grief from his study group after he’d already endured the griping from his girlfriend.
But he ought to give them the benefit of the doubt, he told himself.
Although this is still Trigger Warning, which hasn’t exactly proven that it’s making such a point anything other than disingenuously:
Fareed shook his head. “None of that matters. Nothing can be allowed to distract from the narrative! […] One day all the oppressed people of the world will join together and explode.” He opened his fist emphatically. “Then there will come a reckoning for the sinful Western society and all its ills.” […]
Pierce knew that a lot of black people had fallen for the Muslim line, but he never had.
Dang, Pierce didn’t even have to do some research to get The Facts for that one! He’s just Islamophobic all on his own!
Pierce’s study group is pretty par for the course with Trigger Warning‘s “liberal” student body composed entirely of what I’m sure was a very productive afternoon for Johnstone reading up on the College Liberal entry on KnowYourMeme.com. Let’s meet his other classmates! Because I probably haven’t filled my joke quota for today’s post yet and we’re at the end of the chapter now.
- Jenny Trumbull: a high school cheerleader who’s so into social justice now, she’s a white person with dreadlocks who “identifies as post-racial”. Ooof!
- Clark Mitchell, who has an obvious crush on Jenny, so he doesn’t really have a personality aside from repeating whatever Jenny says
- Margery Dorne, who describes tests as “aggressions”, which is almost hilarious, but not for the reasons Trigger Warning intends it to be
Take your bets now which liberals are going to die as a result of… the liberal uprising against the liberals… I guess… wow, that’s really still the plot, huh?