Thread by @sovykurosei

Happy New Year.

I want to kick it off by doing a Let's Read of Trigger Warning by William W. Johnstone. It's a book about a caricature of a university under siege by... Antifa? I don't know, but the protagonist, Jake Rivers, a man's mans, saves the university. Sort of.

This Let's Read is not only for the enjoyment of those reading but a critique of the source material and the conservative worldview. If there is anything I'd like to see it is for people following along to write and publish their stories.

This book will show we need your help.

Let's dive in.

The story opens with our protagonist Jake Rivers studying in a university dorm on the second floor when he hears a scream outside. He sees a woman being chased by a man in the campus plaza so he decides to investigate.

On the way out...

...we pick up our first authorial lens and peer through it.

Jake views his surroundings as being incredibly hostile due to no fault of his own. He has done nothing wrong to earn the scorn of everybody at Caricature University.

He is the everyday, reasonable normal man and it is the world that is crazy.

Except if this happened on anywhere other than Caricature University you'd be asking what would you need to do to become persona non grata and would that person still feel like they did nothing wrong?

Jake steps outside and finds the two people he saw earlier arguing. Jake says it's just a lover's quarrel and starts walking back to his room.

Then the man slaps the woman.

You'd think Jake would step in but he first checked out the guy's man bun and then his own hair.

After comparing hair Jake tells slappy Craig to back off. Turns out Annie here broke up with Craig and Craig didn't like that and wouldn't let go of Annie. Jake tells Craig to let go and we get a real doozy dropped on us.

...WHAT!? No normal person would say that. This is so divorced from reality that it's still collecting alimony 60 years later. Is the author's source on college life just from conservative talk radio?

We are only on page 4 of 379. It just gets dialed up from here on out.

Craig decided to take a swing at Jake but missed. Craig claims to know Krav Maga but Jake does the ol' 1-2 and knocks Craig out. Annie then attacks Jake. Jake lives in the Chivalrous Gentlemen universe where women are really ineffective at hurting men so he walks away from Annie.

Craig starts to come to so Annie rushes to Craig and... I did not expect this. The Antifa Inquisition.

End of chapter 1.

Throughout the chapter the author interjects little snippets showing what life is like on campus. Or what life is like on campus as heard on conservative talk radio. I'm not going to mention each one but along with weird man bun hair comparison Jake was studying "weighty tomes"

describing how evil America and capitalism is and then how Kelton College's football team (It's actually not Caricature University, lol) has not won a single game in 3 years.

The author has an axe to grind and in a lot of ways they are just like Jake. They view themselves as the sane man in a mad, mad world but what do you do when their perception is so horribly skewed?

Hope you enjoyed the first chapter!

Chapter 2.

We last left off where Jake got surrounded by an Antifa gang who just magically materialized out of nowhere. They called Jake a fascist and attacked him. Jake retaliated but not without dropping some Truth Bombs about who the real villains here.

"STUPID KIDS BELIEVING IN THEIR TEACHERS AND THAT DAMN LIBERAL MEDIA AND WASHINGTON FAT CATS!"

The mask doesn't just slip but rather launches itself across the room and we are only on page 8.

I'm at a loss for words because this is so unhinged.

This book was released in 2018 before the election so saying more than half of Washington either means we are in an alternate universe or the author is throwing some Republicans in that count as well.

I'll let you guess which one.

Back to the fight and boy does it escalate.

Like what did Jake actually do to piss off everybody at Caricature University?

Jake is the Chivalrous Gentleman and therefore immune to woman type attacks and just tosses the woman off to the side (careful not to break her neck!)

A crowd starts to form around the fight and they were cheering on Antifa. Jake tries to plead with the crowd that he was just defending himself but they just called him a toxic, racist Nazi.

THE WORLD HAS GONE MAD.

Jake has a flashback to ISIS and newsreels of the Third Reich and the USSR and/or Mao's China, which he calls the latter the worse evil ever.

"No, Antifa are the real CommunazISIS!" author-avatar Jake Rivers concludes.

Even more suddenly than Antifa showing up is the cops. You'd think the author would be at least a little sympathetic to them but nope, they show up and start zapping Jake!

Jake goes down and we cut to the campus police department.

Like how on Earth do you get everybody on campus to hate you? You literally have a goon squad out on patrol to kick you ass, nobody in your dorm wants to talk to you and even the campus police has full aggro on you.

The author tried to make Jake sympathetic by having the entire world hating on Jake but this is a two way street. Just by seeing how the world treats Jake we can infer how Jake treats the world. For every action there is a reaction, like Newton's third law but for literature.

Normally this isn't a problem. Authors usually have their characters act as react "on screen" or if that is intentionally withheld it is to aid the plot like build suspense.

Here? Not the case.

Since it's not really explained why everyone hates Jake (I guess spoilers? Haha) the only thing left is to infer how he treats the world off screen.

Given the reaction of the world the only thing I can think of is that Jake is the biggest piece of crap to walk the earth.

However this is Caricature University where reason need not apply and so the whole world wants to dunk on Jake because...

*Squints eyes*

...he is just a gosh darn good, honest hard working patriotic American.

Ok.

"DAMMIT JAKE, YOU'RE A LOOSE CANNON, YOU GONE OVER THE LINE THIS TIME! TURN IN YOUR BADGE AND GUN AT ONCE."

The two talk. McRainey is actually a close family friend. McRainey is thankful Jake didn't kill anybody and that he defended himself quite efficiently. Jake won't get charged for now unless those damn Liberal lawyers and activists kick up a fuss. McRainey shows Jake a headline.

"Why I'm just an innocent ol' moderate. Centrist Jake they call me, always on an even keel. Split right down the middle."

This is a pretty insidious argument. What happens is a person can hold extreme views but appeal to others by claiming to be a moderate.

Of course it is pretty easy to be a moderate. Just move the goalposts however far right or left you need to be to appear in the middle and you are good to go. "I'm not asking to legalize genocide, that is unthinkable, but the races should be kept separate and equal."

It can also work the other way. Someone self identified as a moderate might take positions simply because they are moderate positions based on where they feel the goalposts are at.

(At the societal level this is called the Overton Window.)

Continuing the conversation McRainey asks Jake why he is at Kelton College. Which is a good question because why stay where he is №1 on everyone's hitlist? Is he really here just to see if he can piss every living thing off?

Wait, Jake?

Jake!?

JAKE!!!!

End of Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

You have seen the unhinged.

Now prepare for the cringe.

We start off by going back six months to Jake and his grandfather Cordell Gardner shooting clay pigeons.

Grandpa is loaded.

Grandpa asked Jake what he is going to do with his life since he didn't reenlist with the army. Jake joked he could just wait for his inheritance which Cordell didn't find the funny.

Jake took a turn at shooting the clay pigeons and nailed two in one go.

Grandpa was impressed.

"YOU'RE THE CHOSEN ONE, JAKE! YOU EVEN BANGED A BROAD LIKE A GROWN MAN!"

Is there nothing that Jake can do wrong? Well, apparently he got into trouble with the law by street racing.

So I guess that is his glaring flaw, huh. Penchant to driving recklessly.

Jake thanked grandpa for bailing him out from going to jail. Multiple times. The lawyers probably said he had affluenza or something.

The author didn't intend it but this Jake guy sounds like a piece of crap. No wonder everyone hates the guy at university.

The topic of Jake's father and Cordell's son came up. Phillip Gardner was a lawyer that neither really liked. All that was brought up was Phillip did some lines of cocaine.

Phillip doesn't really sound that bad compared to these two.

Jake wanted to leave but Cordell stopped him and asked him again what his plans were. Grandpa suggests going back to school since the whole army thing didn't work out.

Apparently we got ourselves here a real boy genius. Best shooter, driver, lover, learner, leader, soldier and student. Truly God's gift to the world.

There are two problems with this chapter. The first one is Jake is, well, a bit of a Mary Sue.

I only say a bit because the author unwittingly made him a huge dirtbag. Also dumb.

Saying that lets take a rather charitable view of what the author is trying to portray here.

Jake is supposed to be this really smart guy with half a bachelor degree by his last year of high school. Buuut also dumb enough to get caught street racing multiple times. And then decides to join the army instead of, I dunno, maybe not commit crimes? Race on closed tracks?

Taken at face value Jake is a really unbalanced character and this i should be so painfully apparent to the author!

There is this cynical view I have that Jake signed up so he can continue his crime spree on the battlefield where he won't be held to account. Jake didn't sign up for the GI Bill, that is for sure.

But either way what the author is doing here, trying to make him the smartest badass that ever bad smartassed on the planet, backfires and is also completely unnecessary.

Which leads to the second problem. Nothing in the story needs him to be this way. He could have easily been an everyday normal guy who put in his time in the armed forces and then went off to post secondary.

This backstory does nothing for plot!

There is this thing called conservation of detail and one of the corollaries to it is that unusual details draw attention to themselves. The more unusual the more attention.

And Jake has a rather unusual backstory... that doesn't serve the narrative.

Conservation of detail is your friend both as a reader and as a writer. As a reader it means going through fewer details that may not be relevant. As a writer it means fewer things to keep track of which helps prevent inconsistencies.

Getting back on track, grandpa Gardner suggests that Jake go to Kelton College since grandpa moneybags donates to the college and can pull some strings.

Also it's revealed grandpa has a networth of "a few billion."

The Gardner family is part of the 0.0001%.

Good grief.

And that is the sad backstory of Jake and his billionaire sugar daddy.

End of chapter 3.

@threadreaderapp unroll please