Caltrops - Garth Ennis's The Punisher





	[quote name="kate leth"][quote name="Mysterio"]But it would be better if the college students were even a tiny bit likable, or if they had at least SOME halfway understandable reason for acting so stupidly, instead of just being straw men[/quote] On giving this more thought, "likeable" is a pretty subjective thing. They come out as being anti-gun. That makes them inherently likeable to certain people. The same applies to "understandable reason for acting so stupidly." This is a good point that it has to be portrayed to the audience. The only thing is that it's how people act in real life, it is fully congruent with the beliefs that millions of people hold. And why do they hold those beliefs? Because they were taught those beliefs. Nothing more. In a way, that information is portrayed in the story, through the simple fact that they were all college students, and continue to live in the university, symbolically never moving beyond the things they were told, mostly because they were able to bunker up and ignore the problem outside. The only option to make this understandable to the reader is probably just to make it more obvious, which I don't want to do, because I feel the story already works as it is, and already runs the risk of being far too obvious. On the idea of the characters being "strawmen," there are plenty of people who behave as living breathing strawman arguments. They are objectively wrong, they hold incorrect stupid beliefs that they worship dogmatically, which in a way is the main theme of this story (padded out with a bunch of shooty action post apocalypse stuff). On one of my other comic projects, the satire one, I actually had someone angrily complain and say that the writing is bad because, and I'm not lying, they said that "satire needs to have subtlety." They actually for real thought that objectively false concept, held the lie in their mind, and never once questioned it. Timing, much like history and objective truth itself, was on my side in this one, as this was only about a week ago. My response was this: <img src="https://41.media.tumblr.com/9ca381633f579f076dce87e0e14ac4de/tumblr_nhvvqseomC1u1zaqfo1_1280.png"> And then I thanked them for being a living breathing strawman that I could easily destroy. Why do they always come to me to die? 8)[/quote]