Trigger Warning Chapter 30: A Female Character Shows Up

Hello! Some quick housekeeping up front: as a reminder after last week’s holiday and the previous weeks’ delays, this is our new update day for the blog! That said, we’ll, uh, be taking off the rest of December for the holidays and back in the new year, with weekly blog posts as we start rolling out video and podcast content. Is Trigger Warning the most interrupted book we’ve covered? Probably! We’re such goddamn snowflakes, huh?

Previously, the hostage situation is happening at last! Our main character and goddamn American hero Jake Rivers has spent the last few chapters quietly sizing up the situation while other characters have gotten a chance to shine. Like that one professor who identifies as black out of white guilt getting a whole-ass chapter evading the kidnappers and wishing his colonialist ancestors were there to help him out. You know, real plot-essential developments like that.

Trigger Warning: Chapter 30

Jake gets two whole pages at the beginning of this chapter to remind us he’s still in this book do some quick mental math to figure out how many terrorists there are. I’m not kidding; it’s pretty much like a word problem from your grade school math class snuck into a book somehow:

Jake had managed to sneak enough looks around over the past half hour to have a pretty good idea how many gunmen there were on the lower level and where they were located. […] There were three men down here in addition to the leader, Jake decided […] This was where most of the students currently in the building would have been when the gunmen took over. There probably hadn’t been many people at all on the third and fourth floors. Two, or at most three, terrorists would have been necessary to control those floors. And then, if the leader was smart, he would have all the hostages brought down here and gathered in one place.

How many terrorists are in the building based on Jake’s very convincing and probably accurate reasoning? Show your work.

The rest of the chapter is back to Chief Frank McRainey’s perspective. If you forgot who he is (like me), he’s the guy who got injured fighting one of the terrorists to the death but refuses to go to the hospital because the people need him. My issue isn’t that I doubt his familiarity with the campus is useful, but rather that basically everyone in this book – “rational” or “snowflake” or “both sides” or whatever fucking ideology this book groups them in – is the same arrogant dipshit who just knows better than everyone else.

“I’m Special Agent Walt Graham,” the man said as he gripped McRainey’s hand. […]
“Are you running this operation for the FBI?”
“I am,” Graham said with a brisk nod. “I’ve dealt with a few of these messes before.”
“Not like this one, I’ll bet,” McRainey said.

Why? Why would he bet that? What unique understanding does McRainey have of the life of this FBI agent he just met where he assumes he’s never encountered something quite like this situation that is his job to do? Everyone in this book – protagonists and antagonists alike – just knows more than everyone else, and acts like it, and we are here to take delight and wisdom from their saga? Who needs sides when you have: men? (And it’s always men in this book. Don’t fucking @ me.)

Speaking of not all men:

McRainey and Graham had taken only a couple of steps, though, when a dark-colored sedan joined the other vehicles parked in the street and a woman in a midnight-blue dress got out.

Quick, guess which new character is the bad one.

The woman turned to McRainey […] “I’m Theresa Vega from Homeland Security. “And you are … ?”
“Frank McRainey, chief of the campus police,” he introduced himself. He saw the abrupt lack of interest in Theresa Vega’s eyes and knew that she had dismissed him out of hand as being unimportant in this crisis.

Can you guess yet

“Agent Graham,” she said as she strode up to the two men.
“Agent Vega,” Graham said.
From the sound of their voices, neither had much liking for the other, despite the obvious fact that they were acquainted.

Thank you for clarifying that the two people who know each other’s names are acquainted, book.

“Maybe you should be in the hospital getting checked out,” Vega suggested.
“That’ll wait. I’m responsible for the safety of this campus and everyone on it.”
“Well, you haven’t done a very good job of it so far, have you? How many fatalities so far? At least five confirmed, including the man you killed?”

Can you guess yet???

It feels a little pointless to suggest that people in this book, Trigger Warning, are being mean, but what the FUCK? It just doesn’t make sense why this person would be this mean here? Almost as little sense as why she’d count the terrorist in the fatalities that have happened on his watch? It hardly seems fair that she’s counting one of the guys doing the killings in with the people they’ve killed. Someone get Jake Rivers in here to tell these people how to do math!

The FBI explains what they know about Foster’s “radical” activities, in this book’s typical fashion of what constitutes “radical” (he “posted a lot of Hashtag Resist and pro-Antifa stuff on social media”, which is kind of like suggesting your aunt is very religious for sharing a “Thank God it’s Friday” Minions meme on Facebook), but explain that he wasn’t on their radar for anything serious. They discuss their strategy a bit. Agent Vega insists that Foster is bluffing about the bombs right before they hear an explosion not far away. I guess now the hostage situation is at full bla- I’m sorry I’ll come back next year I’ll see myself out

Answer: Jake determined “that meant ten or twelve of the bastards [were] here in the library”. YEAH, YOU THOUGHT I WASN’T GOING TO MAKE YOU CHECK YOUR WORK?

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