The Punisher Kills the American Literary Canon

House of the Seven Gables

Francis Stonham is young daguerrotypist staying at the Pyncheon family’s ancestral mansion. While researching the Pyncheon family history, he is haunted by the ghost of Alice, who was driven mad by young Matthew Maule, who was retaliating for the murder of his grandfather on suspicion of witchcraft. Disgusted with the terror wrought by the two families in their dispute over the land on which the house rests, Stoneham crushes Jaffrey's trachea and leaves him twitching helplessly as he demolishes the house with improvised satchel charges.

Moby-Dick

Captain Castle, on a mad quest for revenge against the white whale that took his leg, hires a crew of whalers under false pretenses. Realizing the danger Castle’s obsession has placed them in, the crew attempts a mutiny. In the ensuing melee, Castle kills Ishmael and Queequeg with a cavalry saber, hurls Starbuck to his death in the unforgiving sea, and drives the remaining crew toward his quarry. The white whale rams the Pequod from beneath, utterly destroying it; ignoring the panicked cries of his crew, Castle hurls himself into the beast’s gullet, where he detonates the suicide vest he invented for the occasion.

House of Mirth

Frannie Bart is a woman of high social standing in New York who rejects several advantageous marriage proposals, holding out for a marriage that is both economically and emotionally fulfilling. When a scandal destroys her reputation, she suffers an escalating series of humiliations, as she’s forced to learn new ways to survive. To that end, she steals a set of love letters from erstwhile suitor Lawrence Selden, and uses them to blackmail the Dorsets and the Trenors, framing Simon Rosedale in the process. Luring them all into Rosedale’s expansive conservatory during a well-attended gala, she opens fire with a Gatling gun, killing the aristocracy of New York at a stroke.

The Great Gatsby

Frank Castle works at a gas station out by the valley of the ashes. When his wife dies in a car wreck caused by some precious New England socialites, he drowns Gatsby in his pool, garrottes Daisy with her own jewelry, crushes Jordan's skull with a golf club, and chases Tom into the valley, where he is caught in a bear trap and left to die under the watchful eyes of T.J.Eckleburg. Nick attempts to flee to his ancestral Midwest, but is killed by an explosive hidden in his valise.

The Sun Also Rises

Depressed and broke, alcoholic veteran Frank Barnes drinks his way through Europe, beside promiscuous divorcee Brett Ashley. Frustrated by a war injury that has left him impotent, and annoyed that Brett keeps sleeping with his friends, Frank drinks himself blind and unleashes a herd of bulls onto the streets of Pamplona. Thousands are killed.

As I Lay Dying

With the death of matriarch Addie Bundren, her children attempt to honor her wishes by burying her in Jefferson. The journey is a long and tumultuous one, and the family is repeatedly waylaid by flooding, injuries, and unintended pregnancies. Meanwhile, Addie’s corpse is rotting in its coffin, and attracting a great deal of attention. Frustrated with his family’s inability to communicate clearly with one another, Addie’s son Frank locks the whole family, coffin and all, in a barn, which he then sets ablaze.

White Noise

Frank Castle kills many, many people in a college town. Everyone is too preoccupied with the inevitability of their own deaths to notice.

Because Fuck Videogames

As has become abundantly clear in the past year, I don't really have the time or inclination to play games that aren't either a) ten years old or b) Bravely Default, so reviews are a rare feature here on Undisciplined. To correct this vital oversight, I've opted to do some brief reviews of games I know absolutely nothing about, beyond what I've heard from knowledgeable journos and game devs on the Twitter.

Kentucky Route Zero: This game is just so literary, you'll shit. It's like reading Moby-Dick in the original American. Presumably it involves Kentucky, and some sort of road. I like road trip narratives, whether they're about young women finding themselves and the true power of friendship, or dudes killing increasingly unimaginative monsters while listening to 70s and 80s metal. Kentucky Route Zero probably isn't like either of those, but regardless, it's literary. So literary. 10/10

Transistor: Some sort of cyberpunk RPG thing. Like Shadowrun, maybe? Sure, why not. Or Netrunner! The kids are playing Netrunner now, right? It looks pretty, and apparently it handles gender better than most games, but it's hard to imagine how much core gameplay you can wring out of electrical engineering. Nonetheless, it gives me hope that new stuff is being done somewhere other than the adventure genre. 10/10

Watch Dogs: Seriously, fuck Watch Dogs. 10/10

Three Things That Suck About Being a Feminist Dude

(Hey, kids. I wrote this a while back, planning to send it to one of those fancy modern websites. It didn't really fit their thing, and rather than trying to recut it for the vague promise of publication somewhere else, I figured I'd put it up here. Mostly as a chance to play with format a bit.)

If you’re a first-worlder in the 21st century, feminism is kind of a no-brainer. It’s not really up to you; over the last couple hundred years, a number of radical, heretical claims have become well-accepted enough that people now think of them as natural, intutitive, and self-evident. Still, the word raises a few hackles, here and there. Those who choose to use it anyway tend to either develop some apologetic patter about not being “that kind of feminist,” to pre-empt the accompanying stereotypes that inevitably follow, or lean into it, accepting that it’s worth dealing with a little extra hostility. We've all heard 'em; feminists are ugly, humorless, sexless, or (in rare cases) Joss Whedon. For guys, the territory is more confusing, the stakes lower, the stereotypes still being focus-grouped. Nonetheless, like a piece of debris stuck in the gonads of an oyster, it can be pretty irritating. Case in point:

1) “You’re just trying to get laid.”

This is both the most common and the most emphatic critique: the argument from insincerity: you’re hoping to ingratiate yourself to women, therefore you don’t really believe what you’re saying, therefore it isn’t worth believing. If it’s true that your primary or exclusive motivation in learning and doing more in the service of social justice is the possibility that it’ll help you get your dick wet, I have some bad news for you. While it’s not going to hurt, it’s very unlikely that your showing up to a meeting will make the difference between not-fuck and fuck. The most potent criticism to be offered of such a plan is that it’s the sexual equivalent of countering Scorpion's spear with a Kano ball.

Niccolo Machiavelli popularized the rhetorical device of “critique, segue, Mortal Kombat reference” in The Prince.

And yet, they seem to take issue with the goal, and not the tactics: “You should just admit it,” says the message board guy. “Then we’d respect you instead of spitting on you.” (This is quoted from memory of an actual Message Board Guy. I am assuming he had been spitting metaphorically, but you never know on Fark.) At some point in this discussion, it became a shameful thing for a straight guy to pursue the possibility of sex with women. Perhaps they think trying to be likeable is cheating, and that the only real way to play--the only noble way to play--is to fuck women who actively despise you.

Double points for nailing a girl who's actually tried to kill you. 5x bonus if you ejaculate during Star Power.

Because if wanting to fuck women were an acceptable pursuit, it’s hard to see why becoming the kind of person women want to fuck wouldn’t be the most obvious and laudable method. It’s not dishonesty that’s being criticized here, but the lack of dishonesty. This is what “game” is about: the artificial imposition of difficulty. Besides, what don’t you do to get laid? Is there anything you like about yourself--any quality you’re proud to possess, and skill that took great effort to acquire--that’s definitively not going to make you more attractive by improving the way people think of you? It turns out that most of the things you’d do to get laid are also worth doing for sundry other reasons, and very few of the things that aren’t worth doing for other reasons are worth doing for a few minutes of sweaty genital antics either. Interesting people are more fuckable than boring ones. Visible people are more fuckable than invisible ones.

YOUR CHARACTER IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD.

And people who can converse knowledgeably about things that interest you--like, say, human rights issues that affect you personally--are more fuckable than people who are just waiting for you to shut up.

2) The vocabulary

The title of this piece bears some scrutiny. The first draft used the term “feminist dude,” which is not something I hear very often, but it has the advantage of not being “male feminist,” which I fucking hate. My antipathy toward the adjectival “male” stems from the popularity of the nominal “male,” which sounds really awkward outside of a nature documentary. Unless you’re Katniss Everdeen and you need an appropriately depersonalized word to describe a tall combatant with long legs and the kind of chest and shoulder muscles you want for melee combat--because it literally hasn’t occurred to you that men’s bodies could be useful, desirable, or fun for any other reason--the adjectival “male” is a strange choice.

For any new readers: if you didn't like The Hunger Games, we're probably not going to be friends.

It’s most commonly employed when discussing other species, and in most places “man” or “men” are better choices than “male” or “males.” (The converse--the use of “females” where “women” would make more sense--seems to employed almost entirely by men’s rights activists and the Ferengi.)

The Ferengi, to their credit, seem to be entirely aware that they're assholes.

At the moment, there isn’t really a consensus on whether men ought to be referred to as feminists at all, or rather the more qualified (albeit more descriptive) “feminist allies,” or simply “allies.” The whole thing can get pretty confusing, and if you don’t believe me, you’ve never spent hours locked in an unwinnable game of Axis and Feminists.

Since drafting this article, incidentally, I'm told that "feminist dude(s)" has also been co-opted by assholes, although not the same assholes who earlier co-opted "male feminist(s)" "Guys who get it" has been suggested, but it's meaningless as a self-descriptor. I cannot, by definition, know whether or not I "get" something outside my own experience; if I didn't get it, I wouldn't know. It is, as they say, an unknown unknown.

So the title kind of sucks, and I might have just argued against the validity of my own writing on the subject. Clearly there’s some awkwardness right out of the gate. When you're writing about this stuff, you’re not always sure, in advance, what’s going to be insightful and what’s just going to piss people off. There’s no way to “solve,” this. It’s not about you.

This is a more jarring thought than it seems. If you’re a guy with internet access and time to waste reading my blog--especially if you also happen to be white, straight, and economically stable--you probably don’t realize the extent to which language and culture are bent to your experience. Yes, there’s a huge chunk of the culture devoted to the unique interests of women; it’s just that its primary purpose is to make sure you want to fuck them, and make sure they want you to want to fuck them. You don’t have to think about it, or even know about it to benefit from it. This phenomenon is known as privilege, and it’s one of those terms ends up being a rallying flag for misogynists. It’s a straw man’s wet dream.

Editor's note: do not google "straw man's wet dream."

Still, even well-meaning people bristle at being accused of ignorance or false consciousness. The joke, of course, is that it’s basically just a reification of the idea that you don’t intuitively understand other people’s perspectives. “You aren’t not-you” isn’t revolutionary; it’s a fucking tautology.

While “privilege” will get you derision, “rape culture” will get you pitchforks and torches. (This is hyperbole. It will actually get you derision, defensiveness, hostility, and, once in a while, rape threats.) As with privilege, it’s a lot more intuitive than it sounds, and as with everything else, it wouldn’t be substantially improved with different vocabulary. These concepts are difficult to see, for sure. For you. Because you don’t have to think about them very often.

3) You won’t like what you learn.

When you do think about them, it can get pretty dark pretty fast. Eventually, you have to turn your Mighty Critical Gaze on yourself, and then you’re kicking at the other side of the problem from #1. Being a better person might make you more interesting, give you an in with a new social circle, or get you laid, but if you’re being a better person for those reasons exclusively, or even primarily, it’s going to end badly. Spend some time reading about white knights and predator theory, and put two and two together: earning someone’s trust is an valuable, laudable thing, and makes the best parts of the human experience possible. It’s also, for most people, a prerequisite for abusing and exploiting people and getting away with it. You learn that unexamined assumptions and self-deception have made your own motives are often murkier than you’d like, and you can’t inherently trust that your heart is in the right place because it’s yours. So, you’re going to learn stuff that isn’t pleasant. And it’s stuff that some people in your life--nice, well-meaning folk by most standards--aren’t going to know about, or care about, or spend much time thinking about. You’re not going to like it very much.

Yeah, there aren't really any jokes in this section.

You’ll find that the lives of women you care about are a bit darker than you’d thought. Fears you’d thought of as transient, when you thought of them at all, turn out to be around all the time. You’ll find that what you’d thought of as idiosyncracies have solid roots in anxiety, embarrassment, and quite often, trauma. As they learn to trust you more, you’ll realize how nervous they’d acted before, when you thought they’d trusted you. You’ll learn about your mistakes. You’ll learn that you’ve marginalized people without realizing it, been demeaning when you thought you were being wry. It’s a difficult feeling, because moral authority is a real thing, and guilt is ultimately a subtype of fear. Especially because you really didn’t think of yourself as being that way. Nobody wants to be the kind of person whose ass they’d want to kick. As for dealing with it, you have some options. You can decide that it couldn’t be true if it makes you feel bad, and blame those dastardly feminists for making up these elaborate hoaxes so you’d let your guard down, allowing witches to steal your penis. You can concoct elaborate conspiracy theories to explain why women run the entire Western world, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Or, you can let go.

You can stop worrying that a subset of people will think you’re part of a different subset of people that behaves badly, and just focus on not behaving badly. You don’t personally need to be the standard-bearer for Justice, Logic, and Objectivity; you can even admit that you might not recognize them when you see them, because there’s shit you haven’t thought of. You can just listen. Once you make a habit of it, it’s immensely freeing. In that light, even minor annoyances I’ve here described in an overlong fashion are negligible. The only thing that sucks about being a feminist, for anyone, is misogyny. The rest is gravy.

Pictured: feminism.

4) Internet comments.

Seriously. Fuck you, internet commenters.

Quidditch: Even Dumber than Hockey

So, in an attempt to catch up with what the cool kids were reading a decade ago, I got around to reading the Harry Potter books recently. I'd read the first iteration, Harry Potter and the Magic Rock, years earlier, and like many of you--assuming you're like 30 Rock's Twofer--I was perplexed by the vagaries of Quidditch. This is apparently a thing now, but at the time, my friends seemed happy enough to gloss over the incomprehensibility of the sport. A former lesbian of mine once explained it to me, but I wasn't convinced. She was a hockey fan, and it's hard to take those people seriously.

For the uninitiated, the Chasers try to hurl the Quaffle (pronounced "basil") through any of the opponents' three goal hoops, for 10 points per goal. The Bludgers attack the Chasers, and the Beaters use bats to beat them off. Finally, the Seeker must catch the Golden Snitch, which grants 150 points and ends the game. Crucially, this is the only way a game can be ended.

So, unless one team is behind by more than 150 points, the Seeker is the only relevant player, and the Snitch the only relevant goal object.  In theory, you could try to delay the opposing Seeker from ending the game to give your team time to catch up, but since the scores are rarely so disparate, it doesn't really matter.

At the time of my first reading, I chalked it up to a poorly thought-out sport and left it at that. It takes real sports quite a while to get the rules situated in such a way as to avoid boredom or chaos, and fictional sports lack the de facto beta testing we have here in the really real world. But, somewhere around Goblet of Fire, in which Viktor Krum defeats his own team by catching the Snitch as part of a complex, long-term plan to bang Hermione Granger senseless, it started to make sense.

I shall digress briefly here to note that, at Hogwarts, the scores are carried over and applied to the House totals, so there's an incentive to both maximize wins and minimize losses. There is no slaughter rule in Quidditch, so every goal counts, even though most of them don't. What this suggests to me, first and foremost, is that if Quidditch is as important to Hogwarts culture as it seems to be, they really ought to have some kind of post-season. The pros have the World Cup--which, like the American World Series, excludes the rather extensive Muggle world, who could kick the Chudley Cannons' asses with drone aircraft--so it's unclear why the scoring system would make any sense for them.

The answer is provided by the dual Weasleys: betting. Quidditch essentially has two independent scoring systems that rarely overlap. The first, managed by the Seekers, determines who wins the game. The second, managed by the rest of the team, manages the point spread.

As a contest of agon, or a spectator sport, it sucks. But for gambling, Quidditch is probably the greatest sport ever devised. Six out of seven players are exclusively focused on manipulating the point spread.

Which, in turns, points toward a different mystery. Ere Harry's arrival, Slytherin has been dominating Quidditch for some time. After his arrival, Gryffindor becomes undefeatable. One would think that this would chafe at the two other houses, who are already annoyed that the attributes associated with their houses are best exemplified by two of the Gryffindor kids. Well, it's hard to imagine the Hufflepuffs mind. They're probably just so pleased to have made the other team happy that they celebrate defeat with the same enthusiastic group hug with which they meet victory. But Ravenclaws are the smart chicks, right? Symbolized by the wise and agile eagle, whose deadly precision is augmented by having a raven claw, in addition to their own?

The answer is as brilliant as it is subtle: the Ravenclaws don't care. Winning would just draw attention to themselves, and that's the last thing you'd want when you're running a numbers game. I expect they require their third-years to spend their summers studying combinatorics and game theory in secret. And what's the long-term plan for the money? Where do the Ravenclaws' loyalties ultimately lie?

This is the one mystery Rowling's tale does not answer for us. Clearly, the whole Voldemort vs. Potter dust-up is a little too provincial for them. I assume the money is managed by a different source, such as the Rothschilds, or the Illuminati. There has to be some level of Muggle cooperation involved in maintaining the Secrecy pact. It has to take a lot of work to prevent the wizards from realizing that their magical technology is, empirically, quite primitive. Even Harry can't protect Hogwarts from the works of Donna Harraway forever.

Utterances

And now for a completely dated point that I've always felt deserved some attention. During my Exile on Netflix, I caught up on Sarah Connor Chronicles, a middling sci-fi show created for the purpose of hurting Joss Whedon by making Summer Glau unavailable for S1 of Dollhouse.

With no particular summary of the larger plot, lobotomized T-800 unit John Henry, wired into a large mainframe, has killed an employee while diverting power to his own system during a power outage. His keeper, played by the delightful Shirley Manson, has asked our favorite badass FBI agent to consult on creating a moral code for the pleasantly amoral ex-Terminator.

"You want to give it commands," he says. "Start with ten."

As a viewer, I always thought the decalogue was a strange place to go with this. FBI agent is, presumably, a Christian, and Jesus' One Commandment would frankly make a lot more sense here. But instead, he suggests ten. To interpret, I've gone to the KJV, because it seems likely enough to be the source he's thinking of:

1) Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Who is "me"? In this scenario? The corporation? Shirley Manson? It's unclear why a machine would benefit from an allegiance to the God of Israel, or how he'd be able to infer such an obligation.

2) Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, etc.

Humans, frankly, haven't been entirely consistent with this one. I'm not sure what we should be worried John Henry might do. Does anyone else have nightmarish sci-fi plotlines about robots making graven images?

3) Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Humans have interpreted this one quite oddly, but again, I'm very unclear how John Henry COULD break it, or what might happen if he did.

4) Keep the Sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.

If this is interpreted the way Orthodox Judaism did, it could present a real problem when John Henry has to commit suicide on Friday evening.

5) Honor thy father and thy mother.

John Henry has neither of these. He'd probably find the idea confusing.

6) Thou shalt not kill.

This is the only one anyone's actually worried about. Good call to include it.

7) Neither shalt thou commit adultery.

Scratch that, this is also a major concern.

8) Neither shalt thou steal.

I suppose this represents a concern, to the extent that John Henry is more or less impossible to intimidate with violence, and therefore largely immune to human law enforcement efforts. It's just unclear what we might worry about him stealing. He's attached to a building, for fuck's sake.

9) Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour.
No neighbors. Well, maybe Shirley Manson, but come on. Her own kid doesn't trust her.

10) Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour's wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour's.

I'm not sure John Henry can even do this. It requires a fairly complex grasp of human psychology to understand how we can do this.

In conclusion, we have two, maybe three commandments that matter, and a lot of filler. Not a good program there, Mr. Decalogue.

Still, at least we don't have to worry about the robot killing machines cheating on their wives. That's a load off my mind.

Department of Redundancy Department

I just found out that Might and Magic: Heroes Kingdoms has gone live in North America. This is the MMO based on Nival's Heroes of Might & Magic V, which was spun off into Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and the stellar Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes. It is not to be confused with Heroes of Might and Magic Online, a different MMO based on New World Computing's much more prestigious Heroes of Might and Magic I-IV. Also not to be confused with King's Bounty, either the original game that inspired the creation of Heroes of Might & Magic, or the recently released remake. Also also not to be confused with the Western RPG series Might and Magic I-IX.

There. Glad we cleared that up.

It's true. It's science.

Since the birthing of the science-fiction genre from the sticky womb of the romantics--it was a difficult birth, as the mother was in poor health, having received more than a few machinegun slugs from the modernists--we have imagined many futures. Some are the bright, utopian dreams of the Christians and the Marxists; others are the black, dystopian nightmares of the Nietzscheans and the LaRouche Democrats.

But the one thing we all seem to agree on, in every iteration of the future, is that there will be co-ed showers.

One might think upon this, and wonder exactly where our predictive priorities lie.

PS-Tonight's Dollhouse hinges on the fact that one of the male dolls, when showering with Sierra, gets a boner. Leaving the plot itself aside, do you think they mentioned that the role would require ogling a naked Dichen Lachman when the actors were auditioning for the role?